Quitting for a good reason

I've said I was quitting a million times, including twice recently. I wouldn't keep doing this fake-out, except I think when I disappear, it merits an answer. I don't mean to be the dramatic guy on your social media who makes a big deal out of leaving. All I want is to leave a marker to explain why I left in case anyone is curious.

Here are two reasons I'm stopping this blog and doubt I'll come back:

1) This doesn't really scratch the itch I want it to scratch. Since I quit my job last year, I've been reading more and more in philosophy of religion and other fields related to the big "Does God exist?" question. I'm getting pulled more and more toward that, and I find it a lot more intellectually satisfying and interesting than reading literary fiction. 

2) I originally shifted from writing whiny pieces about how getting fiction published is hard to trying my best to read fiction carefully and closely partly because I wanted to model what I thought good reading was, and partly because I wanted to become a better writer. I did become a better writer, but I don't think literary fiction wants me. Maybe I'm not good enough. Maybe I didn't work hard enough. Maybe it's both. Or maybe people just don't like me. Whatever the reason, I've gone as far as I can or will go. I can't write better than the last six stories I tried to get published in the more highly regarded journals, and it hasn't been good enough. I can't will myself to write stories anymore, because I have so little belief they'll ever get published, at least by any journals anyone will ever read. And no, I don't want to write just for myself, or because I have to, or whatever other dumb shit writers tell themselves on literary social media circles. I tried and I failed. There's something else I'm more interested in anyway, so I might as well move on. At the very least, maybe it's time to show some self-respect and stop trying to get invited to the party nobody wants me at. 

I'll probably reemerge after I've done enough digging into the God stuff, as a blogger or podcaster on the "Does God exist?" question. But it'll be on a different forum from this one. 

Something there is that doesn't love a pressure-treated privacy fence: "Time of the Preacher" by Bret Anthony Johnston (Best American Short Stories 2025)

When people who haven't been trained in literary analysis read the criticism of those who have, I imagine they often think the "pros" are just making it up and reading too much into the story. Lay people are probably prone to object, often with good reason, that "it doesn't say that anywhere in the story." 

I say "with good reason" because skepticism about unusual claims is typically a good thing. When Freud and his acolytes claimed to be able to interpret dreams, skepticism was well-founded. A lot of literary criticism probably feels similar to a lay person to the flim-flam interpretation of dreams. Both are claiming that an image can work on two levels: a literal or conscious level as well as a connotative or unconscious one. 

The difference to me is that with literary interpretation, treating an image or a word or a figure of speech like it might have a second layer of meaning is warranted, because words really do have connotations. We all experience this. It's why using words associated with monkeys or apes in close proximity to a black person is likely to draw anger. It's why conservatives get worked up about the treatment of the American flag or the National Anthem, although the former is just a piece of cloth and the latter just a song. Dragons, tigers, rainbows, spark plugs, Donald Trump's hair--all of them evoke both literal and figurative associations for us. The figurative ones might be hard to pin down, and they certainly won't be exactly the same in every person, but they objectively exist, and there will be an approximate nearness of meaning for most people. Or maybe rather than saying these things "objectively" exist, I should say they "phenomenologically" exist, which is to say that objectively, people nearly universally have a subjective experience. It comes to almost the same thing for interpretation. 

Two levels of political meaning in "Time of the Preacher"

In analyzing "Time of the Preacher" by Bret Anthony Johnston, I'm going to claim that there is a lot of political meaning in the story. This is true on two levels. One is that the main character, Holland, has pretty clear political opinions. This claim won't be hard to prove, because the story is full of evidence for Holland's political beliefs. The second claim is that the story itself holds certain political ideas, and this claim, I'll wager, will be met with greater skepticism, more objections of, "Where does it say that in the story?" 

Note that when I'm saying "the story" holds political ideals, I'm not saying Bret Anthony Johnston holds those ideas or that he meant to put them in the story. That may be, but when someone writes fiction, they're handling materials that are instable. All of those images and incidents and words, each of which has an uncertain connotative meaning, can end up creating meaning that the author did not intend. That's why most literary critics don't talk about what the author intended; they talk about what the text suggests. 

Meaning level one: Holland's political beliefs

It's pretty easy to prove that Holland leans conservative. The story is told from a third-person limited point of view, which means all of the thoughts about characters in the story are coming from Holland's mind. In the very first sentence of the story, we get Holland's impression of the people he is building a fence for. He finds them to be a "tiresome academic couple." Academic many not always mean "liberal," but it usually does, and it's clear that Holland, at least, thinks they are. Moreover, while still in the same neighborhood of the "tiresome academics," a man walking two small dogs asks Holland if he can build a skateboard ramp. Holland tells him no and then thinks one word to himself: "Liberals." Now, if Holland had simply thought this one person was a liberal, he would have thought "fucking liberal" or something like that. Instead, he thought in the plural, meaning Holland was lumping this one person in with others he thinks to be similar, and expressing a negative opinion about them as a group. I guess liberals walk little, annoying, pussy dogs and ask for stupid construction projects, in Holland's mind. 

If this wasn't direct enough, then his interactions with his ex-wife Mandy definitely are. Mandy calls him a libertarian, a group of people in some ways more liberal than conservatives (they generally are pro-legal-abortion), but also more conservative in some ways (they want to get rid of nearly all taxation). In the context of the COVID-19 pandemic, which this story is set during, libertarians were bed fellows with Republicans/conservatives, because both wanted to limit the amount of government-mandated restrictions on personal activity. Holland, like many conservatives, wasn't a big fan of wearing a mask, and did so only perfunctorily to placate his liberal clients. When Holland and his wife had argued most recently, it had been about taxes and the mid-terms. When Mandy left Holland, she apparently left Holland's politics as much as him, because now she's married to a guy with the type of job Holland associates with rich liberals, and she also drives a Tesla, while he drives a who-gives-a-fuck-about-emissions pickup with a smoke stack. (Remember when Teslas were something liberals drove?) 

The pandemic wasn't the beginning of every act and possession becoming encoded for one's political beliefs, but it did become more pronounced at this time. The type of car one drove could tell something about your political beliefs. Whether you wore a mask said something about your beliefs. At work, a liberal co-worker friend of mine once got upset because a co-worker had a sign at his desk for Black Rifle Coffee. Only in a country where nearly any purchase can be coded for political beliefs would a coffee advertisement be an indirect way to put up a "Trump 2024" sign at your desk within a workspace where political signs were not allowed. "Time of the Preacher" makes use of these codes that we all recognize to tell us something about the characters. 

What the story says about conservatives and liberals

So it's pretty non-controversial that Holland is politically conservative. That doesn't mean that the story is, though. In fact, writing a story about a conservative can be a pretty effective way to critique conservative political beliefs. Is that what's happening here? I'm almost instinctively conditioned to expect as much, since this is an anthology of literary fiction, and the politics of literary fiction are pretty solidly liberal. 

However, I think the story's more complicated than that. During all three of Trump's campaigns, there was a tendency to equate blue collar workers with Trump supporters, and to claim that liberals were often well-off beneficiaries of a liberal status quo. The actual math behind this is not that clear-cut. A Pew Research poll in early 2024, before the election, suggested that 58% of low-income families supported Democrats. However, in the 2024 election, Trump split voters making less than $50K a year and won voters between $50,000 and $100,000. It's also a little bit tricky to equate "low income" with "blue collar," since many blue collar workers now make over $100,000 a year. But at any rate, Trump has certainly tried to associate himself with blue collar work, and there has been a shift in the direction of Trump among these voters, even if total blue collar support for Trump in particular and conservatives in general hasn't quite become totally overwhelming. At the very least, while I'm driving around Ohio, I'm not at all surprised to find a pickup truck with decals on it for an electrician or a plumber, and the truck has Trump stickers. 

In Holland's world, many of the stereotypes that Trump supporters have made hay with are existent, and pretty clearly so. Holland is a conservative blue collar worker doing work in liberal communities for wealthy liberal clients. Liberals look down on him for being blue collar. (Mandy makes fun of his smell and says he should bottle it, perhaps because she thinks liberal women secretly want to be with manly men like Holland. In any event, she's treating him in this respect like he's an "other" for working hard outdoors.) In spite of how liberals perceive him, Holland is brave and manly and resourceful and liberals are effete and cowardly, hiding behind masks and walls. Mandy has to call Holland to look for a snake because her software-designing husband "appreciates snakes even less than (Mandy does)."  

The story also challenges the notion that liberals are kinder than conservatives. When Mandy (is it too much of a reach to read "Mandatory" into her name, in the context of the pandemic?) needs help finding a snake, she calls ex-husband Holland, although she hasn't bothered to check in on him at any time during the pandemic. Mandy apparently comes from some amount of money, since she's taken over properties from her parents, but rather than call an exterminator and pay to have the snake removed, she calls on Holland. Maybe to seduce him one last time, maybe to cheap out, maybe because she trusts Holland more than someone she doesn't know. She certainly puts out a couple of signals that she might be open to seducing him, including mentioning it as a possible motivation. But whatever her real motivation, the point is that Holland comes. He is tolerant of Mandy's mental health issues (another conservative stereotype of liberals, particularly liberal women, is that they're all in therapy, all gobbling down psychotropic drugs, and all unhappy). He really tries to find the snake, at personal risk. Hell, Holland is even kind to animals, building a house for abandoned chickens. 

This doesn't mean, though, that the story is giving a full-throated endorsement to conservative talking points. For one thing, Holland, for all his bravery, calls himself a coward at one point, because he's too afraid to have an honest and emotional conversation with Mandy. Secondly, there is apparently a critical watershed moment going on in the world, and although Mandy recognizes it, Holland doesn't. 

Holland listens to Willie Nelson. Is this a signifier of a conservative, a liberal, or someone who rejects labels altogether? Stick around to find out. 

Two allusions

Figuring out what the story is actually saying about Holland as a person and about his politics can be helped by looking at two very subtle allusions the story makes. One is the name of Holland's fence company: "Good Fences." This is a reference to Robert Frost's poem "Mending Wall." The poem is about two rural neighbors who repair the stone fence between their property every year. The narrator is a little confused about why they even bother doing it, when the fence just keeps toppling down, and it's not really keeping anything out. But the neighbor twice repeats the phrase, "Good fences make good neighbors." 

This phrase has come to be known for the way people cite it in earnest, when the original poem is questioning its validity. That is, people now say, "Good fences make good neighbors" as a pretext for building a privacy fence so they don't have to see their neighbors (in other words, to become bad neighbors). But "Mending Wall" is poking fun at the neighbor's fideism in the efficacy of fences. Good fences don't actually make good neighbors, it is saying. In fact, nature itself seems to be trying to rip down walls between people. 

Holland is, in some ways, the inverse of the saying, because he is a good neighbor who makes good fences. Nonetheless, those fences are making people into worse neighbors. And the worsening quality of neighbors is part of the whole threat that Mandy feels but can't quite express. 

The second allusion is in the story's final paragraph: 

..In the truck bed, the old recliner jostled, swayed. There, deep under the seat's cushion, the snake--a copperhead, hungry, still gray at five months old--lay coiled and alert. The world was reverberating from every dark direction, a chaos that frightened and confused her, so she curled tighter, made herself smaller. She stared with unblinking eyes into nothingness. She flicked her tongue, trying to decipher the numberless threats in the cold air.

This is something of a nod to W.B. Yeats' poem "The Second Coming," which foresees either a sphinx reborn or the coming of the beast from the Revelation of St. John:

 ...a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi

Troubles my sight: somewhere in sands of the desert   

A shape with lion body and the head of a man,   

A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,   

Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it   

Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.   

The darkness drops again; but now I know   

That twenty centuries of stony sleep

Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,   

And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,   

Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?

Mandy senses that something epochal is happening, some fundamental change in the tides of history, but she can't quite put her finger on it. Three times she tries, and every time, she links it to the uncanny sense she has that it's a bad omen that her tenant, a preacher, has skipped out on her. "The world's on fire, and preachers are skipping out under cover of darkness" is one of them. Another is this: "I just keep thinking this is the end of the world. A snake in a house previously occupied by one of God's servants doesn't help." And finally: "If you can't count on a preacher to stick it out, who's left?"

Yeats' poem seems to think that something terrible is about to happen to world civilization as a result of the breakup of Christian consensus. Mandy apparently thinks something similar. Snakes, of course, play a fundamental role in Judeo-Christian mythology, with the serpent being what talked Eve into eating the fruit that ended paradise. At the end of "Time of the Preacher," the snake is a symbol of some profound evil waiting to unleash its venom on the world. That evil isn't the pandemic itself. The snake is afraid of all the noise coming from the truck. The noise is like all the bedlam of the pandemic. It's after the bedlam has died down that the snake is going to grow bold and come out to strike. 

Perhaps the real terror, the real snake waiting to strike at the heart of civilization and cause chaos, isn't the disease. It's the increasing alienation of people from one another. The liberal/conservative divide is an obvious example. We know just from seeing the car someone is driving whether they're in our camp. We can't imagine marrying or even being in close communion with someone who has different political opinions from us. Just before they leave one another from the preacher's home, Holland thinks of trying to run to Mandy to console her when she's crying, overwhelmed by the feeling the world is falling apart. He refrains, though, because he knows she'll just "fumble for her mask and retreat across the yard." 

We have a conservative who is still willing to brave the dangers of the pandemic and keep down one kind of wall, his mask. But he's not brave enough to risk approaching a liberal who hides behind her mask. The story seems to accept some criticisms of liberals, like that their insistence on safety ("safe spaces," after all, is a liberal creation) is helping to increase alienation rather than reduce it. But conservatives in the story are happy to help them build those walls, and they're also too chickenshit to go over the wall to connect. They'd prefer to write off the people behind masks and walls as "liberals" without even trying to connect. They're cowards, too.

Holland and Mandy both have a perspective to contribute to one another, but ultimately, they fail because each has their own particular kind of walls they put up. What results is a failed union, similar to our failing political one. 

A third allusion I'm not really touching

Holland listens to Willie Nelson and Waylon Jennings. Willie once put out an album called "Red Headed Stranger," which featured a song called "Time of the Preacher." Actually, the album has three different songs by this name. It's apparently a "concept" album, which I think usually means that the stories are linked and tell one running story. I listened to the album and can't really tell what running story is there. Nor can I tell what the "time of the preacher" is. The song basically is about a guy at the end of the pioneer age of America (1901) whose woman leaves him and he goes crazy. In two places, the song states either that the "lesson has begun" or that the "lesson has ended." So maybe the singer is the preacher. Or the "time of the preacher" is a time of historical change, when the voice of a preacher holds a warning for society. (To complicate all this, there is a movie based on the album that came out eleven years later, and it identifies an actual preacher named Julian Shay as the man who was jilted by his wife. I'm going to ignore the movie.) 

Willie Nelson is himself an interesting signifier politically. (Forgive me for my mistakes here. My mother loves Willie, but I'm far from an expert. I'm relying on Google to help me with this.) His "outlaw country" image made a lot of anti-establishment people embrace him. He was always into what might be called "progressive" causes, like his pro-environment stance, but many of his fans didn't really notice until recently, when he endorsed Democratic candidates. He's now beloved by the left, although the right hasn't completely abandoned him. Holland is still listening to him. Maybe Willie is a libertarian in the best sense, in that what he really wants is to be his own authentic self. Maybe Willie, and libertarians generally, are a potential bridge between left and right. 

Willie may or may not be the preacher of his song, but he is sort of acting as a preacher in the story, a voice still capable of connecting left to right. In a country where even your consumer choices are constrained by your politics, these voices are becoming rare. By identifying strengths and absurdities of both left and right, the story is also acting prophetically. The time of the preacher is partly about Mandy's understanding that the preacher's disappearance is a sign of the end, but it's also about how the story itself has arrived to offer a way out. The final lines of the story are the only ones that break from third-person limited (Holland has no way of knowing what's in the chair). So this seems to be the intervention of the voice of the preacher, telling us, prophetically, what is about to happen and why. 

See also: Karen Carlson's take on this story, which focuses more on the relationship between Mandy and Holland. 

A journal isn't an after-action report: "Gray, Cotton, White Lace Edges" by Isabelle Fang (Best American Short Stories 2025)

As I write this in early February 2026, I'm not quite sure how I got to where I am. A year ago, I was a senior North Korea expert at the National Security Agency. Although I never made any career decisions with the intent to make a lot of money, I was somehow making a larger salary than I ever dreamed was possible. Now, I'm nearly a year into my post-government career search. I recently dropped out of law school after a very short stint for the second time in my life. I'm DoorDashing while try to figure it out. So that's GS-15 senior analyst to DoorDashing in a year. 

It's already hard for me to retrace the steps that have led me here. I know I quit because I couldn't imagine working in a Hegseth-led Department of Defense, and I stand by that decision, whatever happens from here. (How could I work for a man who postures about being tough so much but who can't even do as many pullups as I can?) But since that one decision I know was right, it's been a cascading series of decisions that seemed sound at the time, like they might help me put my life back together, but which didn't pan out. This includes turning down some jobs because I thought I had a chance at a better one, and now I'm wondering what things would be like if I had just taken the bird in the hand. 

Of course, if I'm really thinking about origins of things, I'd have to go back a lot further, back to joining the Marine Corps thirty-five years ago, or getting married twenty-five years ago, or even before that, to my unfortunate seven-year misadventure in evangelical Christianity, or even back to my relationship with my parents who have always supported me but whom I feel like I often disappoint. 

I've often thought in my life that it's unfair that the me I was at any point in time was condemned to live with the prior decisions of a person who had my name but to whom I felt only a tenuous connection. This was especially true in the Marine Corps, when I had to finish out a full six-year enlistment because some idiot who wasn't me anymore signed my name to a piece of paper. I'm sure prisoners serving out a sentence feel something very similar. It's so hard to trace my own chain of decisions back in time through a tangled web, it feels like "I' just popped into existence yesterday, and I don't really have a causal connection to past versions of myself.

Journaling as a link between past and present selves

May from "Gray, Cotton, White Lace Edges" is similarly befuddled at how past versions of herself have put her where she is today. One earlier version of May decided, seemingly on a whim, to take up a boy at a college party on his offer to give her a hundred dollars for the panties she was wearing. This soon led to her selling her used panties online to guys who are into that stuff. Although she's a more mature version of herself now, she still has one customer, Bill. 

She's hung onto Bill because he's the "easiest relationship in May's life." He's also, as May will later put it, "the longest working relationship she's ever had." Although their relationship began under circumstances under which it can never be more than it is--how could she ever enter into a long-term romantic relationship, for example, with a man who was okay buying panties from a woman as young as May was when she started (19)?

Nonetheless, there are aspects of the relationship that are good for May's psyche. The best thing about it is that when May sends her underwear to Bill, she writes down what she was doing when she was wearing them. When she first started doing this, the notes were elaborate, and once she even embellished by saying she masturbated in them. Bill caught the lie, and told her she didn't have to say things that weren't true, that he really just wanted to know what she'd been doing. Over time, the notes became simpler. For example: "Got new boss coffee (splash of oat, 1/2 Splenda packet)." 

She had always suspected she'd be "a better person if she journaled," but she couldn't keep with it unless there was someone to keep her accountable, the way some people are about going to the gym. Bill was that someone. Over time, the "fake journal" aspect of logging her thoughts while wearing underwear became real: "He was a place to house all her confessions, like a real journal." 

There are other journal-like recordings of daily events going on in the story. May works for the crew of a reality show, and the show has gone on location to film the meeting of John and Ally. Ally is John's 19-year-old Filipina mail order bride. (Okay, not quite a mail order bride, but it seems like the relationship is pretty similar.) In some ways, she's similar to what May was like when she was younger: willing to use the Asian woman fetish/young woman fetish of some men to make a buck, although Ally has taken it to a whole other level, using John's credit card to pay her rent and for her braces. 

John, it turns out, has had one young bride from Southeast Asia before. That bride left him with five kids, whom he then raised, so he's not totally without empathy. Nonetheless, the reader feels much more sympathy for Ally, who is obviously making a terrible mistake with her life. The story doesn't treat male fixation on young women like it's an entirely unredeemable fault, but it is a fault. 

It was John's idea to invite the reality show to film him and Ally. Reality shows, with their to-the-side confessionals, have a journal-like element to them. The show will, one day, be available to both John and Ally as a reminder of the decisions they made that led them to wherever they will be in the days to come after the story is over. 

Not only one of the most famous journal keepers ever, but I have a suspicion he was also the kind of old man who would have been into collecting used underwear from young women. 

The efficacy of reminders of times past

Can we learn something from journaling about the mistakes we make that will help us to stop making them? John doesn't seem to be learning much; to the dismay of his friend, he seems to be running headlong into the same mistake he made before. May believes she's a wiser woman now than she was at Ally's age, although she still shows an adolescent penchant for being late and still is stunted emotionally by the grudge she bears against her father, yet another creepy old man in the story who liked his women young.

But maybe the point of journaling--or, as May does, keeping a memory box--isn't so we can go back later and put together a Power Point presentation of how to do better. Benjamin Franklin may have done that, but it's not the only purpose a journal can serve. We don't have to think that the goal in looking back at our pasts is to create the kind of "after action report" businesses seem to love to make, the ones that are either too obvious or too unhelpful to be of much use. 

Rather, maybe the value in looking back on our past selves is simply to feel a connection to those earlier versions of us. The end of the story isn't May making resolutions to mend her ways and follow the straight and narrow path. Instead, she's lying in bed. "At the bottom of May's mind, a nineteen-year-old girl. If May got close enough, she could maybe feel the meat on her arms." That is, she's coming into contact with her younger self, enough to feel like she can touch herself (unlike the fake touching herself she told Bill about). 

I said that the story isn't as tough on old men going after young women as it could be. That last line is one example, because it's a callback to when May saw John gripping Ally by the arms when they met. If John's relationship with Ally were only creepy and gross, instead of just mostly creepy and gross, May wouldn't have reflected it in her final thoughts.

A second way that the story isn't too tough on old men is that the person who gives May her final epiphany is Bill, the man who's been buying her underwear all these years. Bill seems to be the only person in the story who has reflected on his past and made a conscious decision to change. He's fallen in love and gotten married, and he knows this means he can't keep up his panty habit. He does two things for May that are actually very thoughtful. One is to buy her dinner at the same restaurant where her father once ruined a birthday for her, in what ended up being the final straw for her and her relationship with her dad. By doing so, he helped May to reclaim the part of herself that was lost to her damaging relationship with her father. The second kind thing he does is to return all of her panties and notes to her, thereby giving her a complete journal of all the years since she started sending him her underwear. It's this pile of laundry that enables May to finally connect with herself. 

The main theme of the story seems to be something like, "In order to be whole, you must maintain some kind of meaningful connection to your younger selves." I'm honestly undecided on whether that's true, whether it's therapy speak, or whether it's just the kind of theme that sounds good in a literary short story, because literary short stories often deal with themes concerning how memory builds our sense of self. Part of me is skeptical and thinks I could probably be fine waking up every day and not thinking much at all about how I got to where I am now and cursing the past versions of myself who put me here. Part of me thinks that by doing this, I might be damaging my current self-esteem, because if I can hate my past selves this much, then certainly future me is also going to hate the me I am now, which means the me I am now must also be trash. 

I'm a little more certain I agree with a secondary theme, which is that maybe we can be a little bit easy on some of the people who've been part of our bad decisions in the past. Yeah, maybe old men shouldn't be so quick to capitalize on the bad decisions of young women, but if an older, wiser woman is going to feel whole, it's going to mean having to come to some terms with the fact that those people with whom one made bad decisions were themselves making their own bad decisions, and also that by being part of our past choices, they've helped make us who we are now. That seems to be the source of some of the story's partial grace it gives to creepy old men.