Notebook

Lately I’ve been trying to loosen up and make a mess: fast collages, illegible notes in the middle of the night, and the inky smudges of a left-hander. There is no logic yet, but the scenery tilts toward the religious.

I want to believe in God but don’t know how. Some say it’s just a matter of making a decision, even inventing your own higher power if needed. But I require proof. A burning bush. A voice that shakes the heavens. Imagine that: demanding God prove itself to me rather than the other way around.

Meanwhile, the nation is preparing for an eclipse tomorrow. They’re playing countdown clocks on the news, and astronomers and astrologers are getting equal attention. Words like gamma, perigee, and orbital plane blur with talk about realigning our spiritual nodes and dramatic upheavals in our karmic journeys. Arkansas and Maine have declared states of emergency because of the traffic, and in rural Illinois, a Super 8 motel is charging $949 for the night. So many energies are colliding around this grand and rare event, possibly the last event, to pull everyone into a moment of shared reality before we go our separate ways.

Then again, if I look carefully and squint a little, maybe the bush is always burning.

The television mumbled in the background, and we followed along as the eclipse passed through Mazatlan, Dallas, Little Rock, and Indianapolis. When our turn came, we stood on a ridge by the river and watched the moon chip away at the sun. A lone helicopter crossed the sky. The temperature dropped. The light turned silvery and dim with crisp strange shadows. Dogs barked. Birds stopped chirping.

Darkness fell quickly from the north, bringing a staggering kind of stillness. For ninety seconds, the eclipse was total, and I stood beneath it feeling a giddy sense of slippage, a perceptual freefall that edged toward the frightening. The television had not prepared me for this.

Although I was grateful for the brief fellowship when everyone across a troubled hemisphere was momentarily joined by the sun and moon, broadcasting their experiences in real-time, I tried to imagine what it must have felt like to encounter such a chaotic sky in ancient times, bewildered and alone. As daylight returned, I understood why the first rituals were performed to ensure the sun would rise each morning, and I wondered what the last ritual might be.

There is beauty in repetition, the steady accretion that comes with committing to one thing day after day. Yuji Agematsu collected bits of debris in his cigarette packs on his daily walks, and they became a gloriously deranged calendar. What can I commit to doing each day? A couple hundred words and a photograph or a collage? Maybe there’s some sense to be made—or good nonsense to be found—in the debris of my old notebooks.

The time changed yesterday and nefarious forces are afoot, delivering personal setbacks, professional disappointments, and hard forks in the road. Also, a favorite character on a TV show died (if you're watching Tokyo Vice, then you know) and my speakers refuse to connect to my device. In times like these, I’m grateful for my little altar, where I practice my meditations each morning and night (except Saturdays). “All of humanity’s problems stem from man’s inability to sit quietly in a room alone,” wrote Pascal back in 1654. And it remains a struggle. I fidget and sigh and glance greedily at the clock. But they say there’s no such thing as good meditation or bad meditation; there's only meditation. The same might apply to running, but I’m not sure if it can be said for writing and design.

Inventory of my altar:

1) a patch of fake IKEAN grass because synthetic nature tickles some pleasure center I can’t quite describe (although I’ve tried). I find it very reassuring.

2) a small brass Buddha that came from god only knows. I found it rattling around a cardboard box seven years ago when moving from New Orleans.

3) a Charity Island “round stone” that delighted my grandfather, who enjoyed telling long geological stories while we stood in the cold by Saginaw Bay.

4) a chess piece my father carved after one went missing in Wisconsin because chess was serious business for us while we waited for a lung.

5) a Garry Winogrand photo that captures the joyful lunatic energy I’d like to bring to the new thing I’m writing.

6) a Glade lemon + bergamot mist diffuser that smells like a fancy hotel lobby. Available for $12 at Target.

7) a handy visual timer purchased after reading Jack Cheng’s newsletter. (I spent ages dithering between Fern Green and Pale Shale before choosing the green because it matches my fake grass.)

I share this because I'm fascinated by the totems and rituals of others. At my Thursday night philosophy book club, there’s a gentle old Catholic who likes to say, “God can’t give us happiness, so he gives us habit.”

The muscle memory of New York is durable. Hopped on the G train and spent the weekend in my old neighborhood, where I expected to get misty-eyed while a montage of memories played in my head. But as I stood before my old building on India Street, I simply thought yep, I lived there fifteen years ago, and it was a nice time, and now it has passed. My neutral reaction disappointed me. Maybe I’ve seen too many movies.

Later that night, the lights went out and a bottomless drone filled the shell of a former glass factory in the industrial zone between Brooklyn and Queens. Then Godspeed You! Black Emperor took the stage. One of my all-time favorite bands, and I had no idea what they looked like. I expected elaborate beards, aggressive tattoos, and maybe cloaks. But they looked normal and sane, like your kid’s cool history teacher. Then came the Biblical guitars, joined by 16mm film loops of flowers and vacant buildings and wildfires and crowds mowed down by firehoses and choking on tear gas. Unlike any other band, their music captures modern dread with hope burning along the edges.

A few hours earlier at the Museum of Modern Art, I visited one of my favorite Francis Bacon paintings, another traveler into glorious nightmares. A few days before that, I came across the phrase mysterium tremendum et fascinans, which belongs to Rudolf Otto’s concept of the numinous, “a non-rational, non-sensory experience or feeling whose primary and immediate object is outside the self . . . whereby the human being finds himself utterly abashed.” The mysterium tremendum repels and reduces us to a sense of “humility, submission, and creatureliness,” while the mysterium fascinansattracts us and generates spiritual joy (and thus feels less interesting, at least for the stories I want to tell). But taken together, mysterium tremendum et fascinans effectively describes the appeal of artists like Godspeed You! Black Emperor and Francis Bacon.

As I left New York City, the driver played Bon Jovi’s “Living on a Prayer” several times and never said a word. I milled around the airport, again trying to make peace with my sweaty palms and wobbly legs. I consoled myself by an elaborate fountain, where I ate a burrito and started the first pages of Tony and Susan, the poorly named novel that inspired Tom Ford's Nocturnal Animals, one of the most frightening and beautiful films I've seen. This line resonated: “It was the habit of his mind to know the worst case, the ultimate. His life was a scenario of disasters that never took place.” Somewhere over Pennsylvania, my fear of heights evened out, and I listened to Godspeed while I admired the lights of civilizations below, glimmering in a sea of absolute black.

My fear of flying kicked in the moment I entered the queue for security. Tingling limbs. Kaleidoscopic vision. The gloopy sensation of walking through a nightmare. The plan was to fly to NYC to see Godspeed You! Black Emperor and catch up with some old friends. I had not flown by myself in a decade, and by the time I approached the jetway, I was sweat-soaked and sick. My brain was a fire alarm telling me not to get on the plane. Reimburse so-and-so for the ticket. Enjoy a quiet weekend at home. Not a big deal. I turned back, shouldering past confused passengers. Then I boomeranged around a trash can and hurried onto the jetway.

My brain is ridden with omens and ghosts and catastrophic visions, which I'm beginning to understand is the squealing of a misfiring organism determined to protect itself, throwing up every possible reason to flee. An inauspicious flight number. The sound of the door closing. The metal roar of the engines. Turbulence. Just the thought of these things is enough to send my nerves into Stone Age terror: shallow breath, constricted vision, a mad urge to climb the walls. But there's no reasoning with a glitch. A broken machine cannot repair itself. Thought cannot fix thought. This was my magnificent revelation at 35,000 feet, which I now realize is the point of everything from Zen to stoicism to the power of now. But I need to learn my lessons the hard way.

I felt like a hero as the plane descended over Queens. If you squint through the window, you can see the Unisphere from the 1964 World's Fair, which was dedicated to "man's achievements on a shrinking globe in an expanding universe." In 2009, grass was growing in the area representing Antarctica. A year later, the piece for Sri Lanka blew away in a tornado. Maybe there's a metaphor here. (Either way, the Wikipedia page for it is delightful.)

An Alberta clipper shocked the metro area last night with six inches of snow. I crept along at twelve miles per hour in whiteout conditions, scrolling past spun-out cars as I headed to the superstore because I needed some peanut butter cookies and a case of Topo Chico to get the weekend started.

Fact: the Topo Chico that comes in clear glass bottles tastes slightly better than the tinted green bottles.

As the world becomes increasingly incomprehensible, I’m learning to find pleasure in the ultramundane and routine. My preferred table at the library. The Thursday night philosophy book club I’ve joined. In the evenings, C. and I watch Tokyo Vice, my new favorite show. It’s a slow drift with neon pouring down car windows and violent men with righteous hair, punctuated by delightful moments such as Ken Watanabe watching Full House with his family. And god, it makes me miss smoking. (This piece in Vulture is a good companion if you’re one of the five or six other people who watch it.) After I perform my nightly ablutions, I like to fall asleep to old documentaries about Rome. I fantasize about Rome and Tokyo, but right now, I’m happy where I am, existing in pleasantly neutral conditions that give my mind room to roam on the page.

My friend O. sent me a WikiHow tutorial called “How to Disappear Completely.” (He stumbled across it while searching for something else; he’s doing okay.) I can’t stop thinking about this article: the clinical tone without any trace of an author, the untalented illustrations in shades of pastel, the hard turn from “running away usually isn’t necessary” to “withdraw cash gradually from any bank accounts you have.” Beneath a lightbulb icon, there’s a tip to “make sure you have enough food and water with you.” This tutorial has been read over two million times and has three-and-a-half stars. I give it five stars as a creative writing exercise that lives in the genre of horror: an aggressively benign presentation that launches the imagination into frightening terrain.

At the superstore, a little girl said, “Most of the things on my street are dead.” I think she was talking about the trees in the winter, but what an excellent sentence to start a horror story or fuel an awful dream.

Kevin Richard Martin – To Disappear

Black | Intercranial, 2023 | Bandcamp

Kevin Richard Martin’s subterranean eulogy for Amy Winehouse. Boomkat described it as “the elegiac appeal of Bohren und der Club of Gore at a midnight crossroads with Rhythm & Sound,” which might be the Platonic equation for all the music I enjoy. This is a perfect late-winter soundtrack.

C. and I left the desert sooner than expected because an ideal apartment opened up down the hall from her parents. At first, I did not want to leave Vegas. Not so soon. Then I thought about how I would move heaven and earth to live down the hall from my parents if they were still here. A different timeline, perhaps. I like my in-laws. They taught me to play mahjong. And it's a rare gift to live down the hall from them. When I lived with my father while we waited for a lung, I quickly discovered it wasn't the weekend dinners or games of chess that mattered—it was the day-to-day business of schlepping groceries and being nearby when he tipped over.

Truth be told, I like our spot in Ohio, even though this fact gnaws at my soul in the hour of the wolf. It's more diverse and strange than I expected, the food is fantastic, we live by a river, and there's a magnificent new library eight minutes away. We only lived in Vegas for a year, but by then, I knew my fantasy of the desert did not square with my reality. I imagined spending my days roaming the white spaces on the map, perhaps growing a long beard and summoning visions like the ancients. Instead, I spent a lot of time at Target. Despite hanging maps of the Mojave on the wall, I could not capture the hungry eye that comes with road-tripping, and there's an interesting phenomenon at work here: the psychology of the resident versus the interloper. 

Living in Ohio reminds me of Tarkovsky's Stalker, which I haven't seen in years, but I remember it as a fable about the need for a mythic place. Three men search for a room that can fulfill your deepest desire. When they reach it, they are too frightened to enter. Because what meaning would life hold if you were utterly satisfied? They fear terrible men might abuse the room, yet they cannot bring themselves to destroy it. The promise of fulfillment it offers is necessary in the world. The room's presence is enough.

Maybe I need the desert to remain a fantasy. Perhaps an annual pilgrimage will do.

Sunny skies and the temperature is sixty degrees because winter is just a blip now, the bulk of it consigned to childhood memory. I’m dragging out the last pages of The North Water, Ian McGuire’s novel about a catastrophic Arctic whaling expedition. I’m reading slowly, not because it’s a slog but because I do not want it to end. I want winter to last a little longer.

McGuire is a hell of a writer. A lean 250 pages, this story rips along in a dignified yet ferocious present tense that details “fetid blasts of butchery” while smudging the lines between man and beast. McGuire has created an exquisite villain in the form of Henry Drax, a harpooner whose intuitive violence begins to make existential sense. “You can’t kill us all,” the captain tells him, to which he replies, “I ‘spect I can kill enough of you though.” And later: “I do as I must. Int a great deal of cogitation involved.”

But the location is the primary draw, with its snow-choked fjords, ice like cracked marble, and temperatures so cold your teeth explode. Polar horror is one of my favorite genres: the temporal dislocation of permanent night, the cosmic vertigo of being at the very top—or bottom—of the world, and claustrophobic outposts populated by characters with sketchy pasts who are running from their sins or searching for salvation. Then comes the inevitable moment when they must depend upon the heat of other bodies to survive, and once they leave the distressed ship or bunker, there’s a lot of room to go crazy.

And all that snow covering god only knows.

The North Water joins Dan Simmons’s The Terror among my favorite polar horror stories. And there’s a fine television version of The North Water with Colin Farrell as evil incarnate. Viewing-wise, there’s also the bonkers Fortitude, the slow burn of Trapped, and the first seasons of The Terror and The Head. A verdict is still pending re: True Detective: Night Country.

Any recommendations for other polar horror tales would be much appreciated, especially now that a snowy winter feels more and more like a strange memory.

Ben Chatwin – Snow Crash

The Hum | Village Green, 2020 | Bandcamp

I’m on an airplane to Boston to look at some art. I’m still a terrible flyer. The first thirty minutes of every flight are spent in the thrall of a big-budget panic attack, my body pulling out all the stops. Pink-purple dots crowd my vision. My arms go numb and useless. My heart rate is jacked to an industrial techno bpm. This lasts from the moment the door closes and I realize I’m trapped until the plane has spent fifteen minutes at cruising altitude without falling out of the sky. When I look out the window, it’s a torment. I shouldn’t be up this high. But eventually, the screaming sense of I want to get down I want to get down subsides, and I accept my new reality. My vision clears. The tingles fade. My heart drags back to normal, and the scenery becomes a Burkean sublime: beauty twinned with reverent awe, a scale I cannot comprehend—the pink tops of clouds, the drift of tiny civilizations below.

I loathe these brutal nerves of mine. It’s like some alien organism has installed itself in my amygdala, utterly detached from truth or reason. Why does the brain torture itself? Perhaps these bouts of panic are a Jungian arrow pointing to an unsettled problem. Maybe my aura needs alignment. But my hunch is that it’s genetic and hardwired. My mother suffered terribly from agoraphobia. Lately I’ve been thinking about how she avoided the highway, even as a passenger, because this is happening to me too. It started last year in Vegas, and now I do not drive on the highway, although I still happily tear down surface streets and county roads, which makes no objective sense.

Quietly losing my mind in a window seat at 35,000 feet is fine. I can gut it out, even get to know it. But I should not explore my panic while seeing spots at 85 miles per hour between a semi-truck and some jackass flashing their high beams. To panic while driving on the interstate, of all things! I wrote a book about driving. I built a small personality around it. Looks like I’m finally going to have an adventure with therapy because this cannot stand. Now the call is coming from inside the house.

Columbus is the eighth cloudiest city in the country, and after spending a year in a very bright desert, I’m savoring the gloom. I’m still turning up at the library to write fiction every morning, and I’ve been pondering why I’m good at doing a particular task every day or not at all. If I aim for three or four times per week, I’ll push it around until it dissolves.

I’m starting a new book while I wait for my first novel about a loud god to cool off and collect feedback from a gracious reader. Then I’ll spend the spring and summer revising it a final time before I harass agents in the fall.

This new novel started while dredging up the half-finished short stories I’d squirreled away in various clouds and drives. The ones I expected to be worth finishing were ponderous and concerned with “themes.” Then I found a ludicrous three-page thing I wrote fifteen years ago about a cage fight at a nursing home. It was terrible. But a line from it kept nagging me: They returned to the old ways and shaved their heads, grew their fingernails long, and slicked themselves down with baby oil. I wanted to know the conditions that could bring such a world into being. Perhaps a reader would too.

So here I am, five thousand words into something I can’t distinguish from worthwhile or ridiculous, but I’m having big fun writing again. This is important because I’m certainly not doing it for money.

Starting a New Big Thing has taken the weight off the Old Big Thing and made writing feel much less precious and fraught. How many times have I encountered this advice in writing how-tos? Put your draft in a drawer for a few months, they say, then start something new. But I have a knack for taking the longest, most taxing route to common knowledge before finally climbing out of the muck and saying ah, right, there’s wisdom in that.