Notebook

The sun went down at 7:01pm, and the moon is full. When I stepped outside this morning, I saw my breath—the first frost of the season. Next month C. and I will drive into the desert to find a new place to live. In the meantime, I am savoring the heavier skies and reds and yellows. The burning leaves and earlier nights. Still working my way through The Bright Ages, Matthew Gabriele and David M. Perry’s retelling of medieval European history.

There’s a story from the eleventh century about a French baron who would kidnap the locals and hold them in his castle for ransom. A soldier named Gebert rescued them, but they were soon recaptured and tortured. The baron punished Gebert by removing his eyes from their sockets.

“Gebert despaired of his fate . . . and decided to starve himself to death. But on the eighth day, he had a vision. A ten-year-old girl appeared to him, clothed in gold, suffused with light, and beautiful beyond description. She regarded him closely, then stuck her hands into his sockets and seemed to reimplant his eyes. Gebert awoke with a start to thank the girl, but no one was there. His vision began to return slowly.”

This was one of the many miracles ascribed to Saint Foy, a third-century girl who was burned alive after refusing to sacrifice an animal to Roman gods. Gabriele and Perry connect this story to a broader uptick in miraculous saints throughout the eleventh century, a time of destabilized power centers and decaying traditions that divided Western Europe “into fragmenting segments fraught with low-grade but constant strife.” For many, the solution was to invent new gods and new miracles.

Yesterday in twenty-first-century America, I idled behind a jeep with an InfoWars license plate. We’ve been creating fucked up religions lately to deal with uncertainty, casting each other as heretics and heathens. Hopefully, one day we will invent kinder gods and new miracles. Or at least better stories.

I stood in line at the Gas ‘n Go behind a man with a pistol tucked into the elastic waistband of his sweatpants, yelling that the cashier only gave him three Powerball tickets when he should’ve gotten four. I bowed my head and thought about patience and chance. The manager intervened, and everyone narrowly avoided getting shot. Near pump number nine, a woman in the passenger seat of a pickup wiped away some tears. She caught me looking, and I turned away and fiddled with the radio. A chipper advertisement encouraged me to order nutrients harvested from jellyfish.

This year Kevin Richard Martin has been racing Bohren & Der Club of Gore to the bottom of the doom pits with two grainy, low-lit releases: Nightcrawler and Downtown. Both albums are steeped in seedy slow-motion drums, subterrestrial bass, and smudges of brass while something sinister whirs in the background. Perfect autumn music. Downtown was released today, and it’s Bandcamp Friday.

We traded memories through the night, starting with branches of personal history and working backward until we reached the primeval muck that fuels a life. Propped on an elbow, she described a recurring nightmare in which she wore a curly blonde wig that chewed through her head until she woke up in tears. In return, I offered my boyhood fear of mannequins, how my father had to cover my eyes whenever we went into a department store.

She recounted the day her friend across the street moved away after the boy’s father committed suicide, and for several years she did not know what this meant, only that it was a terrible crime. When she finally understood what it meant to kill yourself, she began to avoid balconies and driving down two-lane roads.

Draping herself in a chair by the window, she bit off the filter of a cigarette before lighting up. When she was six years old, her father moved their family halfway across the country because he believed their old house was haunted. “He thought it was a Civil War ghost,” she said. “But I didn’t start believing in ghosts until a few weeks ago.”

Years later, I would discover her stories had bled into mine. While making a sandwich or gassing up the car, my mind would wander to the night my mother held me when I was seven years old, stroking my hair and saying it wasn’t my fault our dog was killed by a delivery truck because I left the gate open. Then I remembered we never had a gate or a dog, and my mother would never say such a thing if we did.

Sometimes I am still jolted awake by a dream about a flesh-eating wig.

This is the fourteenth episode of Interstate Scenes, a fictional collection of homeless paragraphs, remixed and upcycled bits from the past, and bloopers from the stories I’m writing.

Obscenely red skies over the Middle West this evening. The real heroes of this blessed land are the short-order cooks at Chinese takeout joints who manipulate fire, oil, and steel like gods. It’s the first of October, and I give praise for the arrival of proper autumn at last. Deeper nights. Sharper weather. There’s room in the air to think.

Saw Barbarian at the multiplex, and it’s a brilliantly effective horror movie. At one point, I shrieked like a child. More importantly, it was fun, succeeding because we’ve become so blunted by the deadening rhythm of thrillers that its refusal to play along keeps us edgy. Barbarian understands what kind of movie it is, preferring the absurd over the ponderous or, god forbid, exploring themes. And it delivers a brilliant approach to haunted real estate.

Currently reading The Bright Ages: A New History of Medieval Europe, which recasts the Middle Ages as a knotty, polyglot time with all kinds of gods—and points towards better possible futures.

I have zero interest in football, which can make it challenging to move through American life. I dread getting cornered in an elevator or stuck in line with some chipper guy asking if I saw the game. Saying no, I don’t follow football feels like a failing and a pretension that leaves me doubting my manhood. So a novel about middle-aged men who gather each year to reenact a violent NFL moment from 1985 was not high on my reading list.

But Chris Bachelder’s The Throwback Special relies upon football only as a stalking horse to guide us through the interior muck of failure and pretension. The action unfolds in hotel rooms and hallways, where the hum of the ice machine veers from reassuring to sinister. The story is delivered in a deadpan, ethnographic tone that flirts with the surreal: “The bright, enormous clock bathed the entire lobby in time.” Continental breakfasts and highway medians become totems of American desire and pilgrimage, our last shared rituals and churches. A man admires the trash strewn along a service drive: “By night it looked ceremonial, festive, as if it had once stood for something holy but now just stood prettily for itself.”

Line for line, this book has some of the best writing I’ve read in years, dignified and comic without slapping you on the back, and I’m harassing everyone I know to read it. This sentence captures its overall spirit: “Chad had ceased being a discrete unit of biological meaning. It felt okay.”

(Matt Bell’s newsletter encouraged me to read it, and here’s a nice interview with Bachelder.)

Service plazas are thrilling architecture, modern works of art where I can eat slick food next to twelve lanes of humming traffic, lording over a glittering river of steel and glass. Last night, I sat at a polycarbonate table gnawing at a cold cheeseburger, watching my fellow travelers stalk the food court, hunting and gathering, snapping and mumbling while they bumped into chairs, walls, and one another, their faces tanned blue by the screens in their palms.

Munching a cold french fry, I counted the logos flying around my head. Because sometimes it makes me feel rather grand, all these entities competing for my attention: the billboards and commercials, the avatars and pop-ups and shriekers. Please look at me, they cry. Pay attention to me.

A girl asked her mother whether the Bible was fiction or non-fiction. A man in flip-flops yelled “shoot me an email” six times to nobody in particular while he pumped quarters into a candy machine. Five elderly women solemnly examined the offerings at Panda Express, their white hair like a system of low-flying clouds. A monk in a saffron robe paced in front of a cash register, waiting for his tacos. The fluorescent lights granted no shadows or gradation, no mercy. 

A voice ricocheted from the massage chairs: “Don’t push me!” The air felt too tight, stretched thin by the transactional beep and churn, the horror of strangers. My heart began beating in my jaw, my teeth grinding like the time I accidentally gunned the engine while in neutral: the smoke and overheated gears, something close to breaking.

This is the twelfth episode of Interstate Scenes, a fictional collection of homeless paragraphs, remixed and upcycled bits from the past, and bloopers from the stories I’m writing.

It wasn’t until midway through revising the novel I’m writing that I realized I was writing a ghost story. It’s an interesting moment when you give up control of something you’re making and instead become its servant, helping it become what it needs to become. The trick, I think, is to stay out of its way.

I spent the summer reading some touchstones of horror: Ira Levin’s Rosemary’s Baby, Koji Suzuki’s The Ring, Michel Faber’s Under the Skin, Doris Lessing’s The Fifth Child, and most recently, The Haunting of Hill House by Shirley Jackson.

Hill House, famously “not sane,” bothers the soul because Jackson describes the perception of horror, not the horror itself:

"[The house] had an unbelievably faulty design which left it chillingly wrong in all its dimensions, so that the walls seemed always in one direction a fraction longer than the eye could endure, and in another direction a fraction less than the barest possible tolerable length."

We’re left to imagine what these walls might look like. Later, a woman turns and sees something, then screams to her companion, “Don’t look back—don’t look—run!” Another character struggles with her bedroom door but is “unable to open it against the volume of noise outside.” The fear is vivid; the causes remain unknown.

Early in the story, a professor ruminates about our need for explanations. “People are always so anxious to get things out into the open,” he says, “where they can put a name to them, even a meaningless name, so long as it has something of a scientific ring.” Jackson trusts that our imaginations are far more wicked than anything she might describe, and she creates the conditions for these imaginings to fester into something genuinely horrifying because they cannot be named.

Ghost-wise, I’m not sure where to go after Jackson. Any recommendations for novels that deal with hauntings would be much appreciated.

The sun goes down at 8:05 tonight, there’s a waxing crescent moon, and the blessed cool edge of autumn is in the air. Today I learned that Cheez-Its were invented in Ohio. There’s magic here. There’s also magic in a fresh notebook.

The first thing I do with a new notebook is write something stupid and messy on the first page. This helps cure any notion that it might be precious. For years I believed the right notebook would solve all my problems. I explored blank pages, dots, and grids. I fooled with modular systems. I invested in artisanal, shade-grown leather journals. In the end, I’ve settled on these Muji notebooks. They’re five bucks a pop, the pages are nicely coated, and they lie flat, which seems to aid my left-handedness. And they can take a beating. They heroically suffer rain and sploshed coffee. They get jammed in my back pocket, I fall asleep on them, and sometimes I use them to kill bugs. Pen-wise, I remain committed to black 0.4mm Zebra Sarasa pens.

I’ve been relying more on these tools lately, drafting my stories with pen and paper before punching them into a machine. I think differently when I’m not locked into a staring contest with a screen. Maybe because my writing doesn’t look like the final product yet, I’m more willing to make mistakes.

(Inspired by Warren Ellis’s recent note about notebooks.)

Maybe I was primed for horror because I woke before dawn on a Sunday morning and could not find my way back to sleep. I hate the sunrise. It brings to mind all-nighters and benders from my past, the grit and clench of bad drugs and insomnia. When I think about all those blissed-out swamis, granola-eaters, and alpha go-getters who believe dawn is the most beautiful part of the day, I wonder if something is wrong with me. So as the sky turned an uneasy pink, I picked up Doris Lessing‘s The Fifth Child and discovered a story about living beyond the bounds of time, consensus, and normalcy.

The novel’s crisis is simple; its implications are not. A young couple is determined to fill their home with children and find “happiness, in the old style.” But their fifth child frightens them. I’ll leave it at that. Read it. It’s a fast 125 pages, and we should have more novellas. There are no chapters or sections, which makes the story relentless.

Lessing’s writing is lean and frighteningly precise, fusing the sweep of a fable with a cinematographer’s mastery of space. She carries us through the family’s home across decades, roving through rooms I came to know well until, without my realizing it, she’d left me stranded in a moral grey zone where I found myself rooting for a terrible outcome. I had become part of a horror that telescopes from the personal to the social to the existential. We remain in the house until the mother takes a ghastly trip that feels like a permanent stain on some part of myself I cannot name. At that moment, I was grateful the morning sun was shining through my window.

(Thank you, David Leo Rice, for the recommendation.)

Clear skies in the Middle West. The sun goes down at 8:25pm, and the moon is in its last quarter. This morning I fed a robot a few sentences from the novel I’m writing, and it generated some startlingly accurate pictures. It also generated a complex headrush of emotions.

On a visceral level, it was unsettling to suddenly glimpse a fictional world I’d spent years imagining—and struggling to build with words. This uneasiness mingled with an undeniable wow factor, and I briefly imagined using this technology to create stunning mood boards and bleeding-edge pitch decks. But most of all, I felt a little dirty, as if sneaking a peek at someone else’s private dream.

There are knotty ethical issues to untangle, such as Charlie Warzel‘s observation that these systems are “trained on the creative work of countless artists, and so there’s a legitimate argument to be made that it is essentially laundering human creativity in some way for a commercial product.” And while this doesn’t sound much different from the advertising industry since the beginning of time, it’s another reminder that we’ll only have a worthwhile internet once we’re paid for our data.

But I’m more interested in how quickly I grew bored with this technology. I spent ten minutes conjuring fanciful scenes that my mind’s eye thought it would never see. Then I drifted back to editing my manuscript and organizing my mp3 collection. If you had told me twenty years ago that I could instantly illustrate anything that popped into my head, I would have burst with excitement at such a far-out future. Now that it’s here, I meet it with a shrug. I don’t know if this speaks more to my age, my character, or the world we’ve created.

Meanwhile, China is firing rods into the sky to make it rain.

Arpanet – Wireframe Images

Wireless Internet | Record Makers, 2002 | Bandcamp

The electrified humidity is finally evaporating, the sun goes down at 8:36pm, and there’s a full moon tonight. Tonight I’m contemplating this apocalyptic quote from the photographer Robert Adams: “After people live awhile in a place to which they’ve laid waste, it gets easy to hate a great many things.”

I sneeze whenever I glance at the sun, which I’ve always taken as proof I am a night owl. It’s called a photic sneeze reflex, and it’s a fascinating little ailment. In 350 BCE, Aristotle considered this condition in his wonderfully titled Book of Problems and concluded the sun’s heat makes the nose sweat. In the 17th century, Francis Bacon noticed he did not sneeze if he faced the sun with his eyes closed, so it must have something to do with the eye rather than the nose. I like to think two thousand years passed before someone else pondered this issue.

Finished reading Michel Faber’s Under the Skin and rewatched the movie, which was an excellent example of the memory burning brighter than the thing itself. Now I’m grazing between three or four novels, waiting for my attention to settle. Meanwhile, I’m inching along with edits and revisions to my own story, and I’m determined to send this thing to somebody this year. And somewhere behind me, a boy nags his father, telling him he wants to learn to fight. “Son, I’m only going to teach you to block. You don’t ever need to punch.”