An artist in his studio, completing his last work of art. His gaze is towards the viewer, his life’s work decorates the walls.

Why the shroud on the chair in the corner? Why the canvas on the ground turned backwards? Why the bottles on the windowsill, or the colors on the palette, all red, white, and black?

John and I saw this painting at the Bruce Museum in Connecticut yesterday, and it entranced me. How clever, to paint yourself painting yourself—isn’t all the audience would see, regardless? Not Julius Exner the man, but Julius Exner the artist?

He is both important and not important, dressed to impress, but sitting calmly, not really trying to. He looks sort of sad, and he looks straight at you. He wants to connect with you. Yet, he is almost not even the focal point of this image. His work takes up more space than he does (and, strangely, a plant and a sunny window draw the eye most of all).

It struck me that this is the perfect visual depiction of how artists tend to connect with the world, and connect with themselves.

Writers, what do you think of when you think of ‘you’?

When I imagine my ‘identity,’ I see my work, not my face. When I envision my future, or my legacy, I envision books on shelves, not experiences and memories.

It struck me that this fascination might not be that healthy. There’s a certain distance one feels from the Exner when looking at this painting.

Contrast this with Rembrandt’s (many) self-portraits. Here’s one:

It’s more personal. More honest. I feel like I’ve met this man. Sure, it’s a Rembrandt, so this isn’t exactly fair (sorry, Exner, I stacked you against some stiff competition). But it’s worth examining the difference. Exner communicates with you through his background; Rembrandt speaks through the lines on his face. Exner looks towards you, but Rembrandt’s sad eyes look at you.

I’m not saying Exner’s is worse. In fact, his may have even impacted me more. However, the reason for this is that he didn’t so much paint a picture of himself as an idea of himself, which is staggeringly universal.

Is that the only version of himself that he feels comfortable putting on display?

Or is it the only version of himself that he knows?

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John and I have a tradition 7 years running. Every fall, in the spirit of Halloween, we take a lantern tour of the Sleepy Hollow Cemetery.

It’s fun. The cemetery is gorgeous (even though you can see it way better during the day), and it’s cool to walk around with a lantern, hearing stories about the fabulously wealthy gilded-age entrepreneurs buried there.

It’s a good tour. You get to see William Rockefeller’s gigantic solid-marble mausoleum as big as a modestly-sized house, his nemesis-turned employee (I forgot his name and really don’t feel like looking it up), buried in another extremely ornate mausoleum directly opposite him. The grave of Washington Irving. Some really nicely-carved headstones and statues whose names and stories I will never remember but who have achieved a strange brand of immortality via the piece of granite that was carved in their honor.

Anyway. John and I can recite the ‘main attractions’ of the tour by now, but each guide brings their own knowledge and stops in their own favorite places and blah blah blah, and this time, at Washington Irving’s grave (which is, as you might imagine, always a stop on the tour), she mentioned something I’d never realized before: the tree above the grave site, which he loved, and used to sit underneath when he was alive, and which is now his final resting place.

The tour guide pointed out how interesting it was that we were looking at the same tree that Washington Irving sat underneath, and how it “made time feel a bit funny.”

And it really did. Irving lived from 1783 to 1859. He was looking at that tree two hundred years ago. Seems like forever—monuments built that long ago were discolored and crumbling, or covered in lichen and moss.

(As an aside, we learned for the first time on this tour that the reason why gravestones from the early 1800s look old and creepy while ones produced just a few decades later still look pretty good has to do with the material they’re made of—granite, which replaced marble as the predominant headstone material sometime around the end of the nineteenth century fares much better than marble).

However, while man-made structures get weathered after two hundred years and human lives are obviously doomed to expire well before reaching that mark, that tree was fine. It was imposing, majestic. I hope it will outlive all of us.

The whole thing made me think—firstly, about how the seven years we had been doing this was really nothing, in the grand scheme of things, and how it felt short, when I thought about it, but also very long at the same time. I thought about memory—how strange it is that Andrew Carnegie and Samuel Gompers (who was omitted from this most recent tour, to our surprise), and the random people whose names we will not remember but whose mausoleums we’ve studied have somehow become annual staples in our lives, remembered by complete strangers probably all wrong, for something that did not even exist when they were alive.

The thought that didn’t occur to me, but that probably should have, was that we were in a cemetery. A beautiful place. We were surrounded by corpses, but they were buried under the ground. Around us were trees and grass and a beautiful night sky, and beautiful art, and people passionate enough about this place to keep it clean and maintained and give tours and spread knowledge. If that doesn’t encapsulate the duality of life, I don’t know what does.

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A few weeks ago, John listened in on a talk for his MFA program which centered around artificial intelligence in writing. One of his professors said something interesting which John summarized and told me, and soon, I’m going to summarize it and tell you.

Like a game of ‘telephone,’ this is how knowledge travels. Each person remembers and repeats what they believe to be important from the original point. Perhaps they add something, or misremember part of what was said in a way that reflects their own worldview more than the original speaker’s. Then, the next listener repeats the same process, grasping what they are primed to pick up on, and repeating what they deemed important enough to retain.

In this way, despite efforts to credit sources or retain authorship of our most prized points, ideas do not really ‘belong’ to anyone. As they spread, they become more of an average of every mind that has ever encountered them. Perhaps it may not even be too much of a stretch to say that an idea is only as good as the collection of minds which will encounter it.

The reason for this is that we don’t live in a bubble. The ideas which connect humanity are like interconnected tree roots of a forest, sharing knowledge and sustenance and turning all of humanity into more of a unit than a separate entity.

Of course, we have something of a destructive streak. The modern, human-influenced world displaces trees, plants them in the middle of parking garages amidst wood chips and concrete. Poor, lonely things—and we’ve become even lonelier, because in our pursuits of wealth or knowledge or comfort or whatever it is that we actually seek when we’re not just running on autopilot, most of us have gotten lonelier than people were years ago.

Some of this is that it’s easier to be a lonely person today. You don’t go as stir crazy locked in an apartment if you have television and the internet. You can still see people, hear their voices. You can even see them update their thoughts in ‘real-time.’ You can talk to them—on social media—and this is so close to physical connection that one only realizes the bit that is missing later on, when it manifests as a hard-to-identify dissatisfaction or sadness.

This is the world we live in. Families disperse in search of their own path. In new places, it’s harder to put down roots—growth takes generations—so children are not as connected as their parents or grandparents were. The odd family that stays put, doesn’t succumb to this wanderlust, watches everyone leave around them. The ‘neighborhood’ is dying—at least in New York City.

Local legends and traditions die with them. Local accents, like those that can be immediately attributed to “New Yawk” or “Bahston,” lose some of their distinctness. Everyone starts to sound like their television—and to think like it, too.

Now, I’m going to share with you my approximation of John’s approximation of what his professor said during that Zoom meeting:

In a way, AI is functioning as a sort of oral tradition. Folktales and traditions have historically worked as a sort of approximation, an ‘average’ of everyone who has ever passed them down. Similarly, AI takes into account a wide breadth of human knowledge, and distills it into its average, its most central point.

I don’t know how to react to this—whether to call it beautiful or sad. Humanity has isolated itself so, our machines do our connecting for us. The individual is more of an island than ever.

Conversely, humanity has achieved the ultimate connection—we have created a technology which can codify and transmit knowledge for us. AI is our mirror, whether or not we like the fragmented, isolated society that looks back on us when we look upon it.

Language reflects the human instinct to collectivize. “We” invented AI. Well, not really. A handful of engineers did, and a somewhat larger handful of people now know how it works and can replicate the process. But ‘we’ didn’t do it.

Only maybe we did. Maybe, on some larger cosmic scale that most would reject and no one could even pretend to understand, we are connected, and the development of these machines are a corrective measure to address a state of affairs that is so painful and so lonely, it can only be temporary.

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I stumbled on a Carl Jung quote on Substack Notes the other day.

According to Goodreads, the post is from The Spirit of Man in Art and Literature. Sorry I can’t credit whoever posted this. I was just lurking; I didn’t like or comment. Now, I have no idea who you are.

Edit: Even though the Note is still lost to time, the reader found this article, which might be the one.

Anyway, it’s an interesting quote, and I was being a little bit of a drama queen when I stumbled on it, so it really resonated with me in a moody, teenage-angst sort of way (“I’m just so awesome. That’s why nothing’s going right for me.” “Yeah, that’s right, no one’s SUPPOSED to understand me.”)

Of course, that’s the kind of nonsense you’re supposed to throw out with your ripped skinny jeans and marked-up Converses, but it’s surprisingly common among self-proclaimed creatives. The ‘tortured,’ moody artist is a trope. Like rock music? How many musicians wrote their life’s work in between benders, or died tragically from some kind of overdose right after finally getting the success that they wanted? Artists have the emotional intelligence of children, and part of it I’m sure is that you need strong emotions to create art which evokes strong emotion, and another part is that if you don’t have a little bit of stubborn, childish resolve in you, you just can’t stick with it long enough to actually achieve recognition in a creative field.

Art is completely incompatible with a ‘normal’ life. You can’t have a demanding job, relationships, and dedicate several hours a day to writing novels that might never sell. It’s entirely impractical; it goes against common sense. But artists take risks. They burn careers to the ground if they don’t serve them. They look like oddballs from the outside, and it’s because if they don’t prioritize their craft above everything else, it will get smothered.

There’s not a lot of external validation in such a lifestyle, and usually, there’s not much comfort, either, which is probably what Jung meant by the quote: that in order to make room for art in your life, you need to sacrifice something else, whether that’s love, money, or the appearance of sanity.

Is it a worthy trade-off?

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The first time I encountered death, I was ten years old.

My aunt had cancer. She was sixty years old, which seemed very old to me at the time but which I now know is not. She lived in Syracuse, New York and I lived in Queens, but I would write to her. She’d send me letters and cards and gifts in the mail.

Her death changed me. For the first time in my life, I’d actually experienced how someone could be there, be real, be a part of your life, however small, and then be gone. Just not exist anymore, or at least, not in a way that you can see them.

The viewing of her body was jarring. It was the first time I’d ever seen one, and her family had chosen to do it humbly. She was dressed in a nightgown, minimal makeup. Sometimes at wakes corpses are dressed to the nines, makeup caked on, to the point where they have this uncanny-valley quality to them that kind of dissociates you from what you’re looking at. She was a corpse. Much like the entire experience of her loss, the truth was laid bare in front of me. I think it was fitting.

I cried an embarrassing amount at her funeral. I dedicated stories to her afterwards. Had bad dreams. I missed my aunt—missed writing to her, speaking on the phone, going to her house in Syracuse with the spare room full of Holly Hobbie decorations, but more than that, I was shaken to the absolute core that she could be gone.

It was the first time I had mourned, and it marked the end of my childhood. I imagine this is the same for many people.

Only children don’t mourn. Little humans live in a blissful state where their summers feel like years and school years feel like lifetimes, and their friends are always their friends and everything that they have seems like all they’ll ever have and all they’ll ever need.

There are tragedies, of course. Kids who lose parents young. For most, though, ignorance of mourning is the childish innocence that we miss when we feel nostalgic: the one where we were completely at peace, when everything seemed like forever and nothing seemed to be missing.

It’s not always death that changes this. It could be a divorce, a move, a graduation. Every nostalgia is a kind of mourning—looking back and realizing that one’s life is different than it used to be, and the knowledge that comes with it that the life you’re living now, for better or for worse, will also one day be a memory.

The thing with mourning is that it consumes us for a time, and then we kind of erase it from our minds. We shove it to the back of our minds and go back to the headspace we need to function in which we naively assume that everything will last. I think that’s why people hate change so much—it shatters this illusion.

This is the part of a piece of writing where I’d like to make some sweeping generalization, some ‘moral of the story.’ But there really isn’t one.

It’s just a thought, which, like most things, ends abruptly.

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I write this settling into an all-nighter.

You know the feeling—maybe. Minutes pass and become hours. The annoyingly-bright light from your alarm clock taunts you. Sleep seems as impossible as comfort. As morning approaches, a brutal wake-up following one single hour of sleep becomes less and less appealing.

It’s been a while since I’ve let myself get to this state. I’ve become much too responsible. Late, sleepless nights of rumination and restlessness are incompatible with ‘adult’ life. For one, I’m usually much too tired. I’m also not eighteen anymore, and sacrificing sleep will interfere with my performance the next day, which is not something responsible people can afford.

Performance is an interesting word. Its primary definition means essentially acting, putting on a show. However, in the lives of stale, rarely-sleepless people, it’s most often synonymous with the idea of ‘doing a good job.’ You have it all together. You show up—on time—dressed nice—wearing a smile, fake or otherwise—whether it be to work or some personal obligation or whatever, and you accomplish everything that is expected of you. People want you around. They say nice things about you. They respect you. You are a high performer. You put on a good performance.

It’s so easy for the mask to slip.

Well, not really. The ramifications of such slippage are scary, so the first step is to hold out, grasp at moments of happiness which can easily become illusions of contentment, use alcohol or food or drugs or delusions or whatever to keep that mask plastered on. It’s common—perhaps even desirable—to live a lifetime like this.

However, when the time comes when it’s impossible to hold on anymore, the actual process of ending the performance is startlingly quick.

It can come from physical exhaustion. Chores aren’t going to disappear just because you don’t feel up to completing them—see what happens if you stop.

It can come from mental exhaustion. First come the little, stupid mistakes. Bigger ones follow.

It can come from social exhaustion. Abandoning one single pleasantry can turn an amicable acquaintance into an enemy. Think of all the damage that can be done in a month.

It can, for instance, be accomplished in a weekend of allowing oneself too much rest (perhaps as a reaction to the aforementioned exhaustion), thus irreparably wrecking an already-precarious sleep schedule.

It’s common to mourn one’s childhood. It’s strange, because being a kid is kind of shitty. Your brain barely works. You’re not taken seriously. You have to ask permission to do everything. However, you have a different kind of freedom which adults would kill for: the absence of all of this invisible maintenance that it takes just to survive.

Some people really can’t hack it. They end up in jails, on street corners, in psych wards.

Then, there are the ordinary underachievers. They can’t really keep up—not to the level they’d like, anyway. Maybe they go through jobs or go through boyfriends, or max out their credit cards or move back in with their parents at thirty-five. But, they just kind of fly under the radar. Their lives fall apart in unspectacular ways (‘spectacular’ in this case meaning ‘creating a spectacle, i.e. “putting on a show”—are you sensing a theme?).

I think, to some extent, we all live on this spectrum of failure. It’s impossible to get everything you want, after all. Think of it like Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs, only instead it’s a Hierarchy of Sacrifice.

At the bottom of this pyramid of suffering is your job, or your trust fund, or your sugar daddy, or whatever else you rely on to keep a roof over your head and semi-consistent food supply in your gullet. If you let this slip, you’re fucked.

Above this is relationships. People start going pretty crazy without those. Stay too lonely for too long and you start hearing voices. Your brain fills in the blanks with delusions.

I don’t know what comes next. Creature comforts? Fill in the blanks yourself. All I know is that somewhere towards the pinnacle, the very top of the pyramid of everyday sacrifice, is your hopes and dreams—the identity that you had before you started mending it to blend in with the rest of the world. In order to keep your job and your relationships and your stuff, it’s very easy to lose yourself.

Once this happens you enter a sort of haze, and everything else kind of starts to follow. (And now this mental framework/hierarchy/whatever is starting to contradict itself. Oh, well.)

I don’t know when I lost my faith—in myself, in the universe’s ability to make things work out for me. I don’t know when I lost my happiness. I don’t even know how long this has been happening. It kind of just hit me at once (isn’t that how these things go?) that I don’t recognize myself anymore. Not in a cliche “I looked in the mirror and didn’t recognize my face” kind of way. I don’t recognize my thoughts anymore.

The person that laid awake in bed tonight was not the one that created this Substack, who maintained it, grew it. I was the person that abandoned it.

When did I get so timid? So paralyzed?

I stopped writing Breaking Big Brother right when I was getting to the good part. Couldn’t deal with the expectations, I guess.
I wrote Plastic Gods years ago yet somehow can’t bring myself to look at it long enough to post it.

It’s a pattern. I’ve ‘ghosted’ so much in my life—projects, people—and now I’m just kind of here, living with whatever’s left, drifting, paying lip service to a dream while believing in it less and less.

When I give it up completely, I’ll be a normal person. Maybe I’ll start by becoming another teacher who liked to write when she was young. If I can’t keep that up, maybe I’ll turn into another bartender with a master’s degree, then another AA member who used to be a bartender. Nothing remarkable about that story.

The scariest realization I’ve ever had was the fact that ‘failure’ is rarely dramatic (here we go with the show-biz puns again). Usually, it’s anticlimactic.

I don’t know where I’m going with this. I’m tired, alright?

Basically, what I’m saying is that I’m returning to Substack. I’ve had enough wallowing for one lifetime.

That’s not a 4AM-on-my-sixteenth-hour-of-being-awake decision. It’s been a long time coming (and, of course, a long time procrastinated). Maybe I needed an absolutely brutal push to get started.

Enough of this now. Thanks for reading.

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Is there an art in not writing? Maybe for some writers it’s a welcome reprieve, a time they can take a step back and get a look around. Perhaps it’s an end to the constant stresses and stomachaches they face. Like when they’re trying to get an essay published, or if they’re trying to finish a chapter that was meant to inspire but had done nothing but caused the writer writing it absolute agony. Maybe during the time spend not writing they get to finally enjoy life for a little while.

Melissa and I haven’t been on Substack in a long time. Honestly, we haven’t written much at all. Unlike whatever writers fit the bill in the paragraph above, we do not find not-writing relaxing. To me, it’s the worst feeling in the world, worse than Chinese water torture. When I get a feeling of dread that slowly dawns and starts to embed itself deeper and deeper into my bones, I know exactly where it originated. If I don’t write, I feel like shit. I have felt like shit for the past few weeks, suffering from one of the worst bouts of writer’s block since I started writing again.

I want to write a new article for Substack. I want to write the script for a TV show. I want to work on the opening of a new novel. Not that what I want matters. I can’t bring myself to write anything. Ideas are flowing in, but nothing is regurgitating out.

The art of not writing could be useful to some. It could be an escape. It can be used as time to recharge so that when they go back, they’re better than ever. I wish that worked for me. Unfortunately, I’m much happier writing, even if it’s some shitty thing like this that no one wants to read. But that’s okay, let’s call it an exercise. Maybe publishing this is just what the doctor ordered. Maybe, just maybe, it will help me get back on track. Or maybe I’m just delusional. Yeah… that makes more sense.

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What motivates people?

Hopes and dreams that have only a chance of becoming realized? Faith in a higher power whose only proof of existence occurs in little snippets of anecdotes that seem inconsequential when spoken aloud?

What happens when someone loses these things? After all, it seems like the most logical thing to do.

The only thing that we can know for certain about these things is that we have gotten them wrong. Our life will not end up exactly the way we’ve imagined. The truths that we cannot see will not exist in the muddy forms that we envision them in our heads.

It’s so easy to fall into despair. To skid to a near-stop. To look to cheap pleasures for fulfillment because those flimsy little dreams that had been keeping us going just aren’t cutting it anymore. People live their lives in this state, slowly draining themselves day after day. These shells of people look just like everyone else. They’re only quietly broken.

Does it matter? That’s a scary question to start asking. It doesn’t matter if you’re an optimist or a pessimist, an idealist or a nihilist. We all take up space on this Earth. We all move forward in time.

Many who can’t live for themselves anymore live for someone else. Families are another motivator to ‘be good,’ to live as our best self instead of our worst, once those intrinsic motivators are gone.

What’s interesting is that we want for our loved ones the things that we can’t always muster in ourselves—health, happiness, success. Is this proof that those ideals are true? Is love really the proof that we need that living a ‘good’ life matters?

People turn their back on this, too, of course. Turn completely to despair. Crime, drugs, danger—this is a state that not everyone comes back from.

Is this the proof—that once people lose their guardian angels, become blind to their dim light which guides them, they lose their lives soon after?

If that’s proof, it’s pretty flimsy. Plenty of virtuous people die young. Plenty of depraved addicts live a long time.

It seems like this whole thing is just leading in circles. Why continue? Why delay the inevitable? Does it really matter? Our only evidence that it does is the vague idea that it’s right to, something we probably learned from someone who loved us, someone who wanted for us all the perfection they could not achieve in themselves.

Can we trust our instincts? Is the fact that a line of thinking feels bad a sure indicator that it’s not worth pursuing? Is willful blindness to certain thoughts actually strength instead of weakness?

The worst habit of modernity is the grandiose level of trust that we place in our own intellect. Somewhere along the way, some philosopher made an error, and it sparked generations of nihilists. The error was the idea that humans have the power to intuit the meaning of life from observation and reason—the idea that if we start from scratch, using only the scientific method and the world around us and the thoughts we can conjure in our own heads, all the knowledge in the world can be available to us.

It’s not true. We can’t see the spark which gives this place life. It’s bigger than us. If we assume that it is possible for us to know all there is to know, then when we inevitably can’t see it, we end up believing in nothing.

It’s as absurd a belief as anything else. If there were nothing, where did all this stuff come from? Life goes on whether or not we understand it, and it’s better when we resign to the fact that we can’t understand it.

The only way out is humility—something ‘modern man’ isn’t very comfortable with. Despite wanting to know everything, the only way to truly stay sane without falling into delusion (for cynical delusions are still delusions) is to make peace with the fact that there are certain things that we can’t know for sure.

Whether or not you like their symbolism, it seems the Christians were right all along. At its core, life is a test of faith.

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I really like using the I Ching. This ancient Chinese book of divination is said to have been written around 1000 BC, and there’s not a bit of it that feels dated. Can you think of a more appropriate measure of truth?

The principle of the book is as follows: you roll three coins six times, or do something with yarrow stalks (I’ve never tried that method), and then you receive a “hexagram”: a combination of six lines which corresponds with a passage in the book that tells you exactly what you need to hear at that given moment.

Carl Jung wrote a foreword for the book where he talked about the metaphysics behind this. Basically, the whole thing rests upon synchronicity—each moment is destined to give you the hexagram that you need because the energy of that moment necessitates it. I’m butchering this—if you’re interested in this idea, read Jung’s foreword.

However, regardless of whether or not you buy into the idea that the universe really will deliver on the book’s promise of presenting you with the right hexagram at just the right time, the book gives some sound advice.

The I Ching is associated with the Yin Yang symbol, and for good reason. The whole philosophy of the book rests upon the principle that in everything lies its opposite. The book is called The Book of Changes, and in each passage its reader is reminded that everything changes. When success is prophesied, the book warns that it will not be permanent, and the book reminds its reader to steel themselves against this knowledge. When times of failure are imminent, the book tells its reader to bide their time quietly and without arrogance, for the tides will turn again.

In short, one may best accurately describe the underlying principle of The Book of Changes as: whatever your situation is today, rest assured that it will be the opposite tomorrow.

Well, almost. There are tricks in there for maximizing your good fortune and minimizing bad. The user of the I Ching is not a passive observer of his fate but a surfer riding the waves. Each hexagram details the fate of “the superior man”: one who acts rightly. Though we rely on the universe to deal us a good hand, it is up to us to respond properly to make the best of it.

This is an optimistic thought. We will always be dealt a good hand at some point—that is the law of change. When approached this way, failures may be explained away by unfavorable conditions, and consistent rightful action makes success inevitable.

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My grandmother believed in angels. She was Catholic, and I think most Catholics (at least those who actually know what their religion says) believe in angels, but if I remember correctly, she talked about them more than most people.

I might be completely making this up. Maybe it’s just a mirage of my childlike memories of her mixed with the fact that people say that when someone dies their loved ones “gain an angel.” My mother will tell me when she reads this. Regardless, for the purposes of this post, she believed in angels, and I think I know why.

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You can never really know someone. This is one of those things that people say but don’t really mean—those empty words that you hear in sayings and platitudes that just register in your brain as empty noise. But it’s true. You can never really know someone, and no one can ever really know you.

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My grandfather died yesterday. There are a few things that I wanted to write about today in reaction to this. The first is the fact that I’m not as sad as I “should” be. I was devastated at first. I grieved two months ago when he went into the hospital. I grieved when he came home to die, knowing that he’d never get out of bed again.

After a few weeks of more of the same, the grief would come in slow, brief spurts. A pang here or there when he would say that he was suffering, another when I learned that even talking became a struggle. I watched the proudest man I knew lose everything—even the ability to open his eyes—and after a while, I could hardly conjure up an emotion at all.

When I heard that he’d died yesterday when I got out of work, I was relieved. It solved a few problems. His bank account was dwindling fast; the money would’ve run out eventually, and what then? Plus, of course, he was suffering. How many months of torture does a person have to endure before it finally ends?

Which was the thought I had first? I’m not sure. Grief is selfish at its core. I’m not grieving the loss of my grandfather’s life; I’m grieving the loss of my grandfather in my life. That’s why it hit me harder when his life worsened than when it ended. Once we stopped hanging out when I got home from work, chatting about the phone calls he’d gotten that day and the mildly interesting thing that happened to me at work, for all intents and purposes, he was gone. What did it matter if his body was still in the other room?

It was the same with my grandmother. Her real “death” occurred so long after her health and her mind deteriorated that it was hard to even feel sad. Instead of reckoning with grief, the loss of the person we loved is followed by shock and stress and—

In some sick way that no one really wants to admit is true, humans overextend their welcome nowadays. In a “natural” world, he wouldn’t have been revived from that first horrible day. Of course, his life would have probably ended long before it did. It’s a Faustian bargain. For better or for worse, the modern world has made its choice.

Now that it’s over, I’ve been distracting myself. Cracking jokes. Oscillating between pretending it’s not happening and busying myself with distractions and beating myself up for all the days that I decided to stay home and spare myself the pain of seeing him laying there.

Those are the stages of grief, right? Clearly, I’m stuck in the first two.

Still, there’s a slimy feeling involved in only being able to cry when no one is watching. In watching the sadness of the people around me—even my own mom—and watching myself respond like a stranger, even when I know that it’s not what she needs from me.

Even worse, I’m battling with myself about whether or not to use the stupid euphemisms. Did he “die” or did he “pass away”? Reading too much George Orwell has made the latter an overly-pretentious pet peeve of mine, but what else do you say when you have to explain your absence at work? Sanitizing it is necessary.

It’s funny how life lines up. Yesterday, I described what a euphemism was to my seventh graders using that exact example. My explanation was, “Using language that isn’t as strong makes it easier for people to talk about hard things.”

Does it actually make it easier to say? Does it actually make it easier to hear? It seems more like a formality, a signal of conformity, a verbal acknowledgement that yes, I know that what I’m saying is horrible, and no, I’m not comfortable with having to deliver the news.

I don’t really know how to finish this, so I guess I’ll end it just like my grandfather’s life—drag it out long after the last bit of substance has been squeezed out, and then cut it off abruptly, when it’s been just long enough that no one expects it.

I won’t be doing much writing for the rest of the week. I’ll be back on Monday.

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Some days, I’m starting from zero.

Sometimes, the time crunch is so—crunchy? that I have no choice but to figure something out and continue. In that sense, deadlines are a godsend.

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Is there such a thing as a “bad person”?
If so, how do you become one?

Does an objective reality exist?
How about an objective morality?
Are some things objectively bad (e.g. murder, deception) and some things left up to interpretation (e.g. promiscuity, ambition).
But then what about lying to spare someone’s feelings?
Does a good consequence excuse a bad intent?

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A few days ago, when I was sitting on the train, I saw someone carrying a tote bag with this slogan written on it:

May the bridges I burn light the way.

“That’s a beautiful quote,” I thought to myself.

My next thought was what absolutely terrible advice it was giving.

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I’m not really prone to nightmares, but if I do have a nightmare, it usually involves being chased. It’s been that way since I was a kid. In dreams, I’ve been chased through dark alleys and public parks, on sunny afternoons and rainy evenings.

I’m always chased by someone new—there’s no familiar boogeyman that’s always out to get me. In one dream I remember from childhood, I was chased by a bald Britney Spears in and out of garages in the neighborhood where I grew up. I’d probably been watching a lot of television at that time.

In one dream which had a huge impact on me, I was running from police through a dark, enclosed, labyrinthine staircase. Sometimes I would be able to run upstairs, sometimes I would be able to run downstairs, and sometimes, at the end of a flight of stairs, I would reach a closed door. This door would be locked half the time and unlocked half the time. The doors didn’t lead to anything new—only more of the same staircase.

After reaching a few doors, I started to realize that I was in control. If I approached a door expecting it to be locked, it would be locked. If I expected it to be unlocked, it would be unlocked.

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I know I've been talking a lot about positivity and letting things go and not giving attention to that which doesn’t serve you, but today, I want to complain.

Shocker.

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Few people deny the reality of psychosomatic illness. When it comes to its limitless power to make things worse, devil (in this case the mind) gets its due.

However, while most people will accept the fact that you can think yourself into a hospital bed, they’re much less likely to accept the fact that you can think yourself out of one. Placebos are just that—placebos. Fake cures. Not permanent, not real.

What is this tendency towards negativity?

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It’s been kind of a weird week, so it’s going to be kind of a weird post.

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When I was an undergraduate in college, I had a sociology professor who was obsessed with Jackson Pollock. She dedicated about three lectures to him. We watched his documentary. If I’m not mistaken, I think we wrote a paper on the guy. It was interesting, for a little bit. However, all I could think of was that she was seeing something I wasn’t seeing. She saw something different in each of his paintings, and all I saw were scribbles.

I am not saying that Jackson Pollock is a “bad artist.” What I will say is that claiming that he is a better artist than, say, Da Vinci or Rembrandt requires subscribing to a type of relativist thinking whereby nothing has any intrinsic value, through which meaning slowly gets destroyed. If the definition of ‘good art’ doesn’t rest on any key features such as precision or skill, then all that’s left to determine whether a piece is ‘good’ or ‘bad’ is how it makes its viewers feel.

I teach sixth graders. I love the age group because they are in their last year of childhood. They are growing up. They understand most things that adults can. Yet, in a lot of ways, they are still babies. They get excited about computer games and laugh at fart jokes. And if you give them a basket of markers and tell them to draw on a piece of paper for a half hour, most of them haven’t developed that adult inhibition that stops them from having fun.

I witnessed this yesterday. They had just taken a mind-numbing three hour long multiple choice test, so at the end of the day, we just let them draw.

It was easy to spot the artists. While the rest of the class was drawing stick figures and amorphous dogs, the artists in the room drew realistic still-life images and skillful, personality-filled cartoons.

These impressive drawings were met with ‘oohs’ and ‘ahhs.’ Their drawings were passed around the room. Although there might have been some disagreement about whose drawings are the best, the kids were all in consensus as to who the ‘good artists’ were.

You can always determine the truth from observing children.

However, the difference between kids and adults is that, after seeing their peers’ great art, the rest of the kids did not stop drawing. They resumed drawing their sloppy houses and smiley faces that looked suspiciously, ahem, phallic. With the exception of one kid (interestingly, the one who would typically be described as the most ‘mature’ of the group), they all created art whether it was good or not (and most of it, they would admit, was not).

It’s childhood. If you repeat the same experiment in eighth grade, you’ll get the same proportion of talent, but from everyone else, you’ll get triple the amount of dick drawings (except they won’t even have the courtesy to disguise them), and twenty or so blank or crumbled papers and students with long faces grumbling that they ‘can’t draw.’

It’s something that changes around adolescence. Why do only children let themselves create bad art? Is it societal, or is it intrinsic? Do our brains develop to a level where we no longer have fun expressing ourselves in unimpressive stick-figure form?

I think one of the reasons that people are attracted to Pollock’s work is because it liberates them. He’s an artist that they can relate to, because he makes uninibited art for grown-ups.

An adult claiming that one of Jackson Pollock’s paintings exhibits the same artistic skill as a Michelangelo is claiming something false. Art is subjective, and some viewers may prefer Pollock to Michelangelo, but there is an objective skill difference—even eleven-year-olds know that.

However, why do we care? Adults get themselves into this bind where they delude themselves into changing the definitions of ‘good’ and ‘bad’ simply because they don’t want to be caught making bad art, or even enjoying bad art. Why even prescribe the label?

It’s not peculiar to the visual arts. Books stop being called ‘art’ and start being called ‘slop’ or ‘commercial’ when they are too fun, and are not polished enough.

I’ve been puzzling over why I had more fun reading books when I was a kid, and I think it’s because I didn’t care whether the books I read were objectively ‘good’—I just enjoyed them.

We need to move past the postmodern mess. We don’t need to change definitions to allow ourselves to have fun. There’s ‘good art’ and ‘bad art,’ and between the extremes of a Michelangelo and a children’s stick figure, there is a spectrum in the middle full of stuff that you may or may not enjoy.

Stop judging. Draw a stick figure. Life’s too short to worry about nonsense.

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