Five thousand years ago we began outsourcing prayer and devotion to statues that would worship on our behalf. Human nature hasn’t really changed, and I can’t decide if this is reassuring or terrifying.
Today the president shared a fake video of his opponent playing “Fuck the Police” from his telephone. This seems like a sentence that should be recorded for whoever finds the remains of our civilization.
I saw a deer today while jogging, and I’m trying hard to hang on to this innocent encounter. The deer didn’t seem alarmed by my presence. It just watched me while munching some foliage. I felt the urge to lecture it, to tell it that it should be very afraid of humans because look at what we’ve done to the world. Instead, I took its picture and carried on. Because that’s what we do these days.
Tried to write a better blurb about myself that explains who I am and what I do. Thought I’d bang it out in a few minutes but trying to describe myself in a coherent and marketable manner is like throwing all of my dreams and regrets into an existential blender. For an hour, I stared at “James A. Reeves is.” Maybe this is enough.
Like painting legs on a snake. My in-laws taught me this Chinese idiom, a scold against unnecessary embellishment for making things too complicated.
Sometimes I fall asleep thinking about the ancient atomists, lulled by the image of a world composed of particles endlessly falling like a curtain of rain.
Heavy rain last night, and it seeped into my dreams. I had another dream about running through a flooded parking structure, looking for everyone I’ve lost. Maybe these dreams of water were connected to the calls from people I know on the West Coast. They’re calling and saying they’re having trouble breathing because of the ash in the air. The wildfires keep burning. The governor of Oregon called it a “mass fatality event.” Meanwhile, five named storms churn in the Atlantic, breaking seasonal records. A hurricane named Sally is bearing down on New Orleans, and it’s hardly making a dent in the national news.
This has been a year of references to plague novels and the dystopian skies of science fiction. These stories and movies no longer feel like fantasies; they feel like some kind of mental preparation.
After five weeks in Ohio, the bright lights and sheer acreage of its suburban supermarkets still enthrall me. The aisles are so wide you can drive a car. My cart skates across buffed linoleum while I scan, judge, and reject. There’s a cocooned and safe sensation here, a narcotic effect in coasting along and not buying anything, just enjoying the great deals to be had. My breath catches in the existential and super-saturated detergent aisle: All. Era. Gain. Cheer. Bold. I’m dazzled by yards of eggs.
Today I scrolled past housewares, automotive, office supplies, and toward the book section where a father solemnly placed a book in his daughter’s hands. “I’m buying this for you today,” he said. “It’ll tell you everything you need to know about the world.” It was a copy of The Art of War. She couldn’t have been more than ten years old.
September 11. Nineteen years ago but it still feels like it was just the other day. Its cascades have reshaped the world, from a hallucinatory war on terror to shoes and belts at the airport. Flag pins, surveillance, drone strikes, and half a million dead in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Pakistan. Last I checked, there were still camouflaged soldiers with submachine guns at Penn Station and Grand Central. These things don’t seem to get undone. I can’t imagine the cascades this year’s pandemic will bring.
I spent a lot of time driving around the country after September 11, talking to strangers and trying to get my head around things. Somewhere in Wyoming, I saw a mural of burning towers on a train trestle in the middle of blank countryside. Not a soul in sight. That’s when I understood we were heading someplace dark.
When I told people I was from New York, they wanted to talk about that day. Was I there? Was I scared it would happen again? Those bastards need to pay, they’d say. I’d mumble something vague, hoping to change the subject. “Let the tigers come with their claws,” I’d say. I picked this up from The Little Prince, and it sounded heavy enough to stop the questions. But I still remember a night in Memphis when a boozy woman in a pink pantsuit kept going: “We’ll be a target, just you watch. We got some major attractions like Graceland here and in a year or two they’re gonna attack us. You wait and see.” There was no fear in her voice, only screwy pride. She got angry when I tried to reassure her. She wanted me to agree that, yes, her city would be terrorized. And I think I understand this: we want to be at the center of things.
The first leaves are falling, and I’m eager for early dusk and deeper nights. Last night I dreamt of hammerhead sharks. I was swimming away from a burning airplane and they swarmed around me, biting away pieces of my back and arms until I woke up. I don’t know what this means, but C. says it’s because I’m afraid of hammers, which is true. I have to close my eyes whenever there’s a bludgeoning on television.
Carl Jung believed his dreams in 1913 about an Arctic frost that blanketed Europe were a barometer of the energies that led to the first world war. I wonder if we’re all having more destructive dreams in 2020.
This afternoon I jotted down the phrase “negligent utopian energy.” I’m not sure what this means, but I like the way it natters at the mind. While running this evening, I saw three deer grazing in an empty soccer field, which felt like dreamlife glitching into reality. If I want to believe in symbols and signs, today gave me plenty to decipher.
California’s wildfires have dimmed the sun, transforming San Francisco’s skies into a Blade Runner scene, a never-ending twilight. They’re calling it a once-in-a-generation event. Record-breaking heat, drought, and fires generating their own weather systems. There have been too many once-in-a-lifetime events this year. I’d always thought the future was just around the corner, but it’s already here.
Meanwhile, a new book says our president knew a pandemic was coming yet minimized the risks anyway. There are recordings of him saying things like “this is deadly stuff” but “I wanted to always play it down.” In a different world, this would be a bombshell, cause for outrage. But it won’t make a dent.
But cynicism is easy. The challenge is maintaining a sense of dignity, maybe even hope in these undignified times.
The first Christian monks believed dirt was proof of faith. They walked around caked in mud with lice in their hair, which they called the “pearls of god.” This factoid has been rattling around my head for months. Maybe because it shows how our worldview can transform the abhorrent into the virtuous. Which of our beliefs today will seem superstitious and bizarre centuries from now?
Labor Day. Tornado sirens rang for an hour here in southeastern Ohio. The sky dimmed, the temperature crashed, and leaves boiled in the trees. No tornado came, but thunder rumbled all evening, bringing to mind the full-bodied pleasure of bass. Why is the sound of thunder so soothing? Maybe it’s rooted in nostalgia, first childhood impressions of the mysterious and sublime. Or simply the sensation of being safe inside.
The first chilly night. I stayed in the woods, switched off my devices, and reckoned with the fat neverending stack of index cards I’ve collected for the book I’ve been writing for five years. Scraps of local detail. Fragments of dialogue. Weird factoids about monks, radio static, and the interstate system. And impossible questions like what would it take for me to believe in god?
There’s that principle that we burn up all available time to complete a task—and this gets scary when measured in years. I also fall into the trap of thinking whatever I’m working on must be a bulletproof summation of a life, which leads to something like Theseus’s ship. But it’s just a story. There will be others. This morning I gave myself a deadline of sundown to decide what goes into this book and what gets killed, and I jotted it all into an outline. Tonight I lit a bonfire, and those index cards made excellent kindling.