The Infrastructure of Loneliness

If loneliness were to fall from the sky, it would land as a suburban boulevard. It would spread its veins as freeways, and grow tumors called parking lots. We ask ourselves, “Why are we so lonely?” – then seal ourselves up in giant machines on our venture into society, during which human interaction is either costly or fatal.

I am a lonely person, but how can that be? I am loved and I love. I am valued and I value. But I and they, we once spread our wings and pursued that dream of independence and that illusion of self-determination, those Sirens of the American Dream. When our wings got tired, we landed – in New York, in Utah, in Oregon, and so on – as scattered as the ashes of our visions. Rest assured: there’s a family group chat, a phone call here and there, a text. But what sad substitute is that for a presence: a smile and a touch, to exist in the same space – “I am in your life, and you are in mine”? We are none too different from cats and dogs, and neither understand a phone call.

The Sirens called and we answered. Would we have it any other way?

Every so often I hear pretty people in suits talk about a loneliness epidemic, focusing on men. Somehow the discourse leaves me feeling even more invisible. Advocates proclaim that men are neglected, and naysayers claim that male loneliness is a consequence of bad behavior. I do not pretend to speak for men, and I would do so poorly, but here I am: a subject of their curiosity, looking outside my window at the miles of asphalt we so audaciously call a society. I would scream at the suits, but they cannot hear me. Nobody can across the six lanes of traffic.

Why are you so sad?
My people are not here.
Find your new people.
Okay. Where are they?

An empty suburban sidewalk on a holiday afternoon.

Years ago, my ex-wife and I were in Zagreb; it was 10:30 at night, and we were enjoying beer on a terrace in Jelačić Square. I looked into the square with astonishment; before me existed a society. Young couples were pushing babies in strollers. Old men sat on benches, conversing. Unsupervised boys kicked soccer balls. There was so much life there, and everywhere, and it all seemed so beautiful to be a part of this humanity for a moment.

Fast forward: a dinner in Downtown Sacramento, desperately finding an open restaurant at 8:30, not a pedestrian to be seen – just dark storefronts, the destitute melding into facades, and pieces of trash dancing in the wind. 

Recently, I went on a date. It was perhaps a Friday evening, or a Saturday afternoon. We went to a chic cafe with a French name, styled as a bistro with a patio. It was in a strip mall. I gazed out the window past the empty tables to the parking lot. Beyond the lot was a boulevard, and past its seven lanes, another larger parking lot before a Costco somewhere on the horizon. Asphalt as far as the eye can see, the greatest desert money can buy! That whole time, I’m not sure I saw a human beyond my window, besides ones hermetically sealed in machines, of course. She knew I felt sad. There was no second date.

• 

  Jelačić Square: restaurants, pharmacies, hotels, transit, shops, museums, apartments…

• 

  Outside the French-named bistro: cars. To be fair, also a mattress store and a burger place.

• 

  Jelačić Square from a little higher up.

• 

  The strip mall from a little higher up. Just more parking and huge big box stores.

A tsunami of pavement floods forth and surrounds us. We sit in our homes as on rooftop islands awaiting rescue. While others may look to the vastness of the ocean and feel freedom, I feel claustrophobic. The pavement, like the ocean, traps us. The sheer distance it creates makes walking unreasonable. The bleakness of its aesthetic makes it unpleasant. Why would we want to go outside? The outdoors is owned by cars. Not even the sidewalks get used, save by the desperate or those exercising.

Of course, we are a deliberate people. We seek out green space. We schedule coffee dates. Sure, the outside is an inconvenient transitory state to get from the island of home to the island of work or leisure, but is that so bad? One should be so lucky as to choose interactions.

But to the Lonely, who spread their wings and scattered like ashes, what great comfort might it be to step outside and feel like part of a society – to see the elderly converse on benches and youths kick soccer balls outside a terrace where couples drink, past which people saunter home from work?

A Society: a group of strangers who bump into each other.

I’m not sure what the term is for what we live in, but it’s not “a society.” It’s an isolated hellscape crisscrossed by rivers of pavement. Our innate desire for human closeness is pushed apart by lanes and lots, beyond a scale with which we can manage.

• 

  My apartment complex.

• 

  If you were to take my apartment complex and put it over Granada, Spain, it would cover with its footprint a cathedral, some shops, a park, a hotel, a plaza, and also some apartment complexes.

A car enthusiast may say that this is a preferred state of affairs: independence of transit allows for unrestrained freedom. Plenty of parking is needed so we can go to shops. Lanes should be added so we can get to work faster. Efficiency! Progress! Economy! Besides, personal transit allows for privacy. Don’t you want privacy? After all, if you walked, or, God forbid, took public transit, you would have to interact with …them. The Others.

But I am the Others. You are the Others. Can’t you see this is killing us? We paved over our humanity and sold it to ourselves as liberty. And pavement necessitates itself – the more there is, the less walkable it is, the more people need to drive, the more pavement is needed to accommodate it: the flood waters rise. This is our way of life, and we’ve grown accustomed to it, but at what cost? We’ve become paranoid. It’s in our national character. We’ve grown uncomfortable with incidental interaction. The Stranger is contemptible and should be avoided. But I am the Stranger. You are the Stranger. We need each other. We’re in this together.

Together – the condition of occupying the same space and breathing the same air.
“Together” assumes that my eyes see your eyes and my ears hear your voice.
Your eyes are across the Great Asphalt Sea. Your voice evaporates in the distance, muffled by machines.
No, there can be no Together here.

In the absence of Together, what may fester but alienation, suspicion, and contempt? What strange seeds may sprout to fill a cavity left vacant by the rot of genuine community? 

They ask: why are we lonely? Well, look around. Loneliness is embedded in our infrastructure. It’s not even a matter of choice; we’ve built a world in which choice is a pipe dream. We’ve made alternatives so unreasonable as to cease to meaningfully exist. When I break, I may choose to fling my door open and, arms outstretched, run to the boulevard: “I am a part of you, World!” but only the whir of passing cars may answer. Or just the cold silence of concrete.

A Crisis of Justification

Usually my posts involve personal anecdotes that help me better understand the world, not political opinion pieces. But I, like the rest of America, have been thinking a lot about where we are as a country, especially since the election, and I can do my best to provide an analysis based on an understanding of history. So here we go (I hope you like geopolitical history essays written by a music teacher) –

A country needs a justification to exist.

For most of modern history, this has been simple: a country is so because a sovereign rules it. The control of a monarch over land vis-a-vis military might was all the justification needed, regardless of who was in that land, what language they spoke, and which religion they practiced. Borders shifted and maps were drawn according to the whims of monarchs and the feats of their armies. Royal marriages were enough to make entire countries disappear off the map. A country goes the way of the royal inheritance.

i.e. France is France because it is owned by the King of France.

(Of course, there are exceptions, like Switzerland, which seemed to exist largely to spite the Habsburgs, and continues to exist largely to spite everyone else.)

With the rise of nationalism, justification became linked to language. People found cultural bonds amongst other people who spoke the same language, read the same literature, and shared the same culture. The power of the monarch declined and the power of nation increased.

i.e. France is France because it is where people speak French.

This created huge problems for existing countries losing their justification, and maps were redrawn. Using 19th Century Central Europe as a model: in the span of something like twelve years, Germany unified, Italy unified, Romania unified, and Serbia gained independence. Suddenly Germans, Italians, Romanians, and Serbs in Austria-Hungary, united only by the rule of an emperor in a country justified by it happening to already exist, are looking towards their corresponding nation-states wondering why they aren’t a part of them, and whether they should be. Austrian Poles, Croats, and Hungarians start remembering a glorious independent history (revised for maximum patriotism, of course), and Czechs, Slovaks, and Ukrainians start dreaming of their own sovereignty. Suddenly, the world explodes in 1914, and Austria-Hungary goes splat: a country dead, because it lost all justification to live.

The nations could celebrate, but of course this also caused problems. The justification of a country by its dominant nation creates a problem for those who exist in that country apart from that nation. Whether that nation is defined by language, religion, culture, or a shared historical memory, the security of the country now depends on the purity of that nation, lest it too lose its justification and die. Genocide is the logical conclusion of unchecked nationalism, if that is indeed your country’s primary justification. The histories of nation-building and nation-cleansing share an ignominious connection.

However, alongside countries justified by monarch and countries justified by nation arose another phenomenon of justification: philosophy.

This brings me to the United States and, conversely, the Soviet Union.

The United States is unique in that its founding justification was not a language, a religion, or a king, but rather Enlightenment Era principles of liberty and self-governance. Of course, there is a debate to be had about how far the United States went to that end. But in the myth to establish the justification for existence, a country needs only to believe. And in a federated constitutional government of the people, protecting the inalienable rights of those people, they did believe (sort of, and eventually), and our history shows a general trend towards that goal.

The Soviet Union, similarly, was founded not on language, but rather on economic and social theories of a revolutionary age. The great narrative of Soviet self-justification was the steadfast and unwavering belief that they were the spearhead of an inevitable global revolution towards a classless utopia. Now, as we know, the implementation of such a project was deeply flawed, and the narrative was cynically accepted by a coerced and unwilling population, many of whom would prefer to self-justify as independent nations. But nonetheless, the believers and proselytizers were powerful. The justification stuck, if by nothing more than brute force (until it all came toppling down when not even the true believers could rationalize its continued existence).

Then World War II happened: the most horrible manmade event in the history of civilization, whose greatest moral failings lay at the feet of countries justified by nation, and whose triumphant heroes championed countryhood by philosophy.

So with nationalism disgraced; what is a nation-state to do? In a post-World War II landscape, what holds a country in Europe together? Perhaps fear of yet another war? Perhaps the fatigue of great change? Maybe after all the border-shifting and forced relocations creating nice, tidy, homogeneous populations, nationalism still had something to do with Europe’s postwar stability. But what happens when those populations start to diversify, and the trauma of war becomes a distant memory? The fear is gone. Soviet coercion is gone. The memory of burning cities and massacred civilians dies with our grandparents. The questions arise: what is Hungary anyway? What was Hungary? How do we define Hungary? They’ll find answers in the only place they can: the past.

(I use Hungary as a troubling example of a prominent country drifting towards chauvinistic nativism. If Hungary looks at itself after a few generations of Post-Communist self-governance, and the only thing that distinguishes them from the rest of the world is that they are Hungarians who speak Hungarian, of course they’re going to be opposed to immigration. This is why the Great-Replacement Theory finds such a powerful audience in otherwise progressive European states: if we allow immigrants, at what point does our justification for existence shift to something that excludes me, or become nothing at all?)

(One can also look to the collapse of Yugoslavia in the 1990’s, once held together by a philosophical justification that then grew thin and rang hollow before it succumbed to the justifications of nationalism, and subsequently administered genocide.)

But what about the United States? It’s not a nation-state. It’s the great melting pot of the world, whose philosophical justifications still ring true! …right?

The idea of the United States as a bulwark of Liberty was strong enough to keep its narrative of justification going for hundreds of years (never mind the Civil War), at first because it was alone as the major Enlightened Republic in a great sea of autocracies, and later because it fancied itself as the great savior of the world, exporting its form of government (and expanding its economic influence and military control) lest the world fall prey to the Nazis or Soviets or whomever they’re ideologically opposed to in the moment. Manifest Destiny was at first about land, but it has always really been about power and influence, justified by our narrative of freedom and liberty for all the world’s people.

And guess what, we won! A McDonald’s on every corner! Investors in every capital! The world is largely run by constitutional republics, many of which are more functional than our own, with higher rates of happiness and well-being for their citizens, and greater advancements in technological innovation.

So now what? Manifest Destiny is over. What are we? What is our justification? We’re not the only free country. We’re not the bastion of enlightenment principles. We’re no longer fighting the Soviets or the Native Americans or whomever else is getting in the way of our Destiny. Our enemies are nebulous concepts like “terrorism” or “poverty.” Our battles with places like China are economic in nature, rather than ideologically justified. We’ve cynically accepted authoritarian regimes and ideological adversaries as long as they are economically or geopolitically advantageous to us. The truths that we tell ourselves to justify us (that we are the world’s greatest champion of liberty, freedom, and innovation) are ringing empty.

So in the absence of our justifying narrative, with our Destiny fulfilled (or dismissed), we have to create something to keep us alive. But what? This question I believe is the basis of why our political reality is so troubling. We can point to things like an unaccountable partisan media, social media echo chambers, diverging influences between rural and urban populations, etc. But I believe we are susceptible to the influence of this media landscape because deep in the heart of the country’s psyche, we are in a crisis of justification. We are wondering why we continue to exist, and we want answers. Any answers – including wrong ones, ones based in misinformation and falsehoods, and ones supported by historical negationism.

(I also believe this is happening in Russia, once finding its justification in the legitimacy of the Tsar and Orthodoxy, then deciding to blow that up in favor of Soviet Communism, and then after that delusion collapsed, experienced a nihilistic void of meaning, leading them to find answers in an authoritarian megalomaniac promising a return to some sort of mythical glory.)

If we are to distill the political Right and Left down to their basic generic principles (in a very flawed way), we could say that the Right looks to the past for guidance and the Left looks to the future for guidance. This idea can be reinforced by looking at historical patterns. In general, the Right yearns for traditional values and the maintenance of economic, social, and political structures from the past, whether it be Catholicism and the King (in the example of France circa the 1791) or Nativism and Limited Government (in the example of the USA circa 2009). Contrarily, the Left yearns for breaking traditional values and a shift in economic, social, and political structures, whether it be No Taxation Without Representation (in the example of the USA circa 1776) or All Power to the Dictatorship of the Proletariat (in the example of the USSR circa 1918).

The past has the advantage of being a known, unwavering entity. The past can never change, and the further we get from it, the more it settles into a comfortable nostalgia. We feel secure in the past. The future, however, is unknown and therefore unstable. In a crisis of justification, the past provides for us something stable that seems to guarantee our continued survival, and to go back to the past seems more alluring to an insecure people than to push towards an unknown and unrecognizable future in which our country might turn out to be dead.

I think this is a context in which we can better understand our current social, cultural, and political situation. The Right can invoke the past, whether a true past or a mythical past, to provide a sense of security for an increasingly insecure population. The Left proposes policies that they think will create a better country, but fails to navigate through a crisis of justification.

But what justifications do we find in the past? The same ones that have existed for centuries: Nation, Language, Religion, Traditional Norms and Values. And because we are a nation that still tells itself that it believes in its justification by philosophy (that we are an Enlightened land of Liberty), the symbols and slogans of that philosophy are appropriated to legitimize the justifications by nation: e.g. “We the People” implies that some of us are not the people. Who is it that aren’t the people? Or, “The Constitution is under attack,” when the candidate who condones my nationalist justifications loses an election.

We can see this appropriation in how rhetoric is connected to policy. For instance, calls for a stricter border and mass deportation are designed to protect a justification by nation, veiled under the language of “they don’t pay taxes” (1776 tells us we are a nation of consenting taxpayers) or “keep criminals out” (we need to protect our families, that is to say our culture). Nativism has always been about protecting a justification by nation. As another example, requiring the Ten Commandments or Bibles in school is about asserting a cultural hegemony that feels under threat, that looks back into a past of religious unity, veiled under the language of morality or a connection to our legal code. Pro-America history curriculum is designed to provide for a belief in the lasting validity of our Manifest Destiny and tie it into a racial, cultural, or religious legacy. Boys want to be a part of a world where men once reigned supreme. Even trivial culture-war issues like making fun of vegans and electric cars, buying big trucks, or insisting that men pee standing up can be tied to a fear of a diminishing cultural preponderance that would then make our justification by nation, vis-a-vis its values and customs, at risk. After all, what is America if not constantly eating cows and driving large cars??

So what is the alternative to a nationalistic justification in a disillusioned society? I… don’t know. But I think it’s important to remember that the founding narrative of the United States: that we are a land of liberty in which free citizens may pursue happiness under the protection of the law, is not yet a fulfilled destiny, nor does its mission need to ring hollow as if we only cynically accept it as mere rhetoric. This country was founded as an alternative to the Old World – a place where an individual was not beholden without consent to a flag or monarch or state apparatus or religious institution, where deference towards social hierarchy or nobility need not be paid. How that can be translated into actionable policy with identifiable symbols resulting in an appealing and unifying message, I have yet to see. But in order to navigate us through this crisis of justification without falling for those forbidden fruits of nationalism and autocracy, it must, lest we fall prey to those fruits, or lose all justification and cease to exist.

Grief

On November 2nd, the doctors told my father he had days to live. At once, my siblings and I, spread far and wide, converged upon our childhood home like pilgrims to a spiritual birthplace, and we watched our father die.

There were many of us there: my mother, my two sisters, my sister-in-law, my brother, my two brothers-in-law, my three nieces, my mother’s mother, two dogs, two cats, countless family friends, community members, neighbors, relatives, old frat brothers, former coworkers, apple trees, lingering tomato plants, blades of grass, clouds, rain, sunshine, a gibbous moon, light, darkness, and myself.

For five days, we laughed and cried. We ate and drank. We watched sports and ran errands. Our dad was with us, laughing and eating too, and carrying on as best he could. Over five days, he would laugh a little less and eat a little less, and carrying on became harder and harder. On the fifth day of our vigil, he could carry on no longer, and passed away in the mid-afternoon, surrounded by his immediate family holding hands and saying goodbye.

For some reason, leading up to his passing, I kept telling myself it was selfish to grieve. This wasn’t my death. This was his. I get to continue on. I get to taste chocolate and see leaves turn yellow and fall to the ground. I get to laugh and cry and hold hands and see smiles and wipe tears. I get to run and feel the air fill my lungs and feel my heart beat faster when I’m excited and slower when I’m at peace. I get to see the mystery of tomorrow answered when it becomes today.

He won’t get to do that anymore. And so, my first grief was for him.

And though I thought that to grieve is selfish, I accepted grieving for him, because he was not done living, and a soul who perishes with unfinished living is a tragic thing indeed.

But the dead need not concern themselves with life. That is the business of the bereaved.

And so, my second grief was for us: his family and friends, who now get to continue living without his presence, for without him, the world is a little dimmer, and a little less wise. And for us, a little lonelier.

And though I thought that to grieve is selfish, I accepted grieving for us, because we must continue to live without our father and husband and friend and teacher, and being deprived of him is a tragic thing indeed.

And yet, I also experienced a third grief: a grief for me. An unacceptable grief. My selfish grief. My grief of shame.

Allow me to share:

Days before he died, I scratched out in a notebook:

I’m afraid.
I’m a coward.
I can’t handle this.
I am weak.

You see, I wanted so deeply to be there for my father and my family when he passed. I wanted so very deeply for him to be surrounded by his loved ones. I wanted so very deeply to be there for my sisters and my brother and my mother. But I was terrified that my cowardice would take over, and that I would, at that most essential moment, flee. I was almost sure I would flee my family when they would need me the most.

And so I was grieving my cowardice.

I can’t even watch people die on television. How can I expect myself to watch my father die in real life? What wretched weakness will betrayed itself in that pivotal moment when I should stand strong for him and for us?

Strength. What does strength mean in that moment? Does strength mean standing there, staring death in the face, and telling your brother, “It’s okay”? Does strength mean sustaining the composure needed to be able to wipe away others’ tears?

Here’s how it happened:

The moment came on the afternoon of November 7th, and despite expecting it for five days, it was unexpected. My mom said “now,” from his room, and the siblings and I looked up confused. Then she yelled, “NOW!” and we understood. We all rushed to my father’s side, and heard his final breaths. We held onto each other as we wished him goodbye. I couldn’t see his face. It almost seemed like a dress rehearsal. It wasn’t real. We had been waiting for this for five days; why would it happen now of all moments?

I saw myself there, as if I wasn’t there at all, but rather watching myself from outside of me, and I was confused that I had not fled, considering I was so certain I would. Was I doing my duty? Was I there for my family? It seemed that, yes, I was, but something was too easy. I wasn’t upset enough. Maybe it’s because I wasn’t there at all, but here, watching myself be there from outside of myself.

But then, a moment after he passed, I walked over to my brother to hug him, and I turned and looked at my father’s face — the face my brother had been watching as life left it.

He was dead.

I snapped back into myself, and the dam burst.

All the emotion I had been holding, the three griefs, the fear, the cowardice, they all came rushing back, and my strength, whatever strength I thought I had, vanished. I couldn’t handle it. I couldn’t handle any of it, and I did exactly what I thought I would do:

I fled.

I ran into my parents’ bedroom, and I wailed hysterically, sobbing uncontrollably on the floor. I had never known I was capable of such a powerful emotion. It was the strongest feeling I had ever felt. The moment is a raw fog. People came in to comfort me, to make sure I was okay. Eventually I held myself up by the bedpost and regained my composure.

And then… it was over. I was fine.

Later that evening, my family commented on my hysteria, even jokingly. For some reason, I was embarrassed.

But then, when I left the following day, my mom hugged me, and she said, “Thank you for your grief.”

And then I understood: I was never meant to be strong for my family. I was meant to be weak. My role in this was never going to include wiping the tears of my sisters. My role was to sob uncontrollably on the floor, for it was through my violent release of grief that my family was better able to access their own, to experience what they needed to experience. Maybe it was that I should be weak so that my family could be strong and comfort me. Maybe through my grief could we access the profound magnitude of the moment. Maybe my grief helped bring us closer together. I’m not sure what it was or how it needed to be, but now in hindsight, it couldn’t have been any other way.

It has been several weeks now. I am doing well. I often think about how wonderful it has been to cry — how beautiful it is that we get to experience such a vast, dynamic emotional world. Sometimes I think it’s easy to fall into a numb ennui about our existence — our lives are streamlined from birth to death, designed by formulae, our interests and passions commodified for our convenience, our inner lives analyzed and written into self-help books. It’s really easy to live life somewhere in the mundane middle on the scale of emotional experiences. That I have had this grief means that I have had the fortune of joy. That I sob means that I have valued something or someone. It means that my life can engage with the sublime. It means that I can finally understand what it’s like to experience the loss of a loved one, so that I may be there for others who will. Because we all will, as it seems it should be in this world.

Grief has taught me a lot this year:

Don’t grow too attached to the future.
Respect the past; its sum is your present.
Weakness can be essential. Do not mistake it for cowardice.
It’s okay to be sad. Maybe even preferred.
Fear is yearning for strength.
Grief is love.

Sure, you can disagree with these platitudes, but these lessons aren’t yours, they’re mine; they’re the ones I need to learn. I need to learn that I must be free to live passionately, to live true to my heart, lest I be too careful, lest I make the mistake of never really living at all, lest I clutch foolishly to a plan that was never mine. I should be so lucky as to grieve so again someday.

Smile

My inclination was to throw a snowball, but for some reason the spirit moved me, and I started building a snowman instead. Oh how quickly turn the tides of whimsy!

It wasn’t a large snowman. The aforementioned snowball was repurposed as the snowman’s lower body, and the rest was built to scale: the snowman’s midsection could fit in the palm of my hand, and the snowman’s head was the size of a marble. In hindsight, as the snowman’s creator, I should have built the snowman with a robust chest and a strong cranium, but I am not perfect, and neither was he. This would come back to haunt us.

The first sign of trouble came when my companion tried to attach his arms. He was a gentle snowman, meek, yet endowed by his creator with a certain stubbornness — a steadfast ownership of his own fragility. (Perhaps it was the quality of snow.) Sticks seemed too blunt for arms. Pine needles seemed too flimsy. She would attach an arm, and upon attaching the second arm, the first arm would fall off. Our snowman, still faceless, would surely have wailed if provided a mouth. I laughed about my companion for her clumsy torture. (No one said creation was easy. Neither is existence, apparently. Snowmen don’t choose to be born. He could’ve been a snowball; maybe it would have been better that way. Ours would have certainly preferred it.)

When one arm was fully attached and the other technically, we decided it was time for him to have a face with which to see the world. With surgical precision, I took two tiny rocks (specks of dirt really), and I pushed them into his head for eyeballs. One eye fell out, easily reattached.

All that was left was his smile.

I broke off a small twig or piece of needle, formed it into an arc, and placed it on his face. It fell off.

I tried again. It fell off again.

Well okay, Snowman, you’re going to smile whether you like it or not.

I took off his tiny marble head, clutched it between my thumb and forefinger, and proceeded to push the smile firmly into his face.

Suddenly, the crunch of snow gave out: his head crushed between my fingers, eyes exploding off his face, flattened to a disk, particles of ice and water shooting off in all directions. I released my thumb in horror: all that was left on his eyeless, flat head, was a smile, firmly and permanently planted on his lifeless face.

I killed him. All I wanted to do was make him smile, and I crushed his head. Now he is only smile, and nothing else.

The guilt consumed me: horror turned to hysteria, hysteria to euphoria, euphoria to regret. Tears turned to laughter turned back to tears. Joy and sorrow: it’s all the same eventually.

I tried my best, Snowman, I really did. (Do I exaggerate my feelings? I wish it were so!)

Why couldn’t you have just smiled? None of this would have happened had you just smiled. I tried so hard, Snowman. I tried so hard to make you smile, and I crushed you.

I know I can’t blame him. He didn’t choose this. He didn’t choose to smile. It was forced upon him (as it’s often forced upon us, I suppose). I should accept that. I should accept him for his smilelessness, and love him anyway, without forcing it upon him with my totalitarian will.

…had I not crushed his head, I mean. Such is the folly of regret.

Anyway, this happened hardly a week ago. As far as I know, his headless body is still there, sitting on a two thousand year-old fallen sequoia, a brief guest in that tree’s immense history here on Earth. He might even still have an arm left, though I doubt it.

…though the thought does make me smile…

Understanding

While I was hiking alone at Lassen several years ago, I stumbled upon a grassy clearing at the base of a mountain ridge, and in the middle was a tree, perhaps a juniper. I couldn’t help but approach this tree. Touching it, I thought: this is my shrine. I stepped back and sat on the soft, silty ground, and after some time, I stood up, dusted myself off, and left. As I left, I looked back at the grassy clearing, and thought: this is my sanctuary. I cannot explain why this place had such a power over me in that moment. I dream of going back to it, and embracing the tree once again. I dream of taking the people I love and care about there to the clearing, and telling them: this is my sanctuary. I imagine they’ll look at me like a crazy person.

Although, at this point, I’m not even sure where it is. If I had taken a picture of it, I would show you. But I didn’t. It looks like a grassy clearing with a tree. You can imagine it.

For decades, I’ve studied beauty in music. I’ve tried to wrap my head around harmony, melody, and orchestration, and make sense of formulas that decide what beauty is and what it isn’t. I’ve composed things I think are beautiful, and I will rationalize: “Well, there is this tension and this resolution, and the patterns of tension and resolution, by either fulfilling or subverting expectations, create beauty and meaning.” But I’ll still stare at my own work, and wonder: why?

Why does it work? Why does it fail?

Why is it that when I listen to the opening passage of Tchaikovsky’s Romeo and Juliet, I get chills? Sometimes I wonder if it’s the most beautiful thing I’ve ever heard. It’s thirty seconds of chords, played by clarinets and bassoons, and it sends me to an indescribable place. Whenever I want to think about how little I understand music, I think about the beginning of Romeo and Juliet, and I realize I know nothing. I can’t explain it. I can’t explain why it awes me so much. Could Tchaikovsky explain it? Or was he as mystified by his music as I am?

Do the tones bring back idyllic childhood memories or something? I don’t think so. That would be too easy.

This last summer, I went backpacking in the mountains out in the Great Basin – an island of life and majesty surrounded by plateaus and desert valleys. When we came upon a meadow of corn lily growing on the forest edge, in a slope of streams below the mountain ridges, I sat beneath a tree and tried to understand it. I wanted to wrap my head around what was going on – not what it was – but what I felt about it, and why.

Why was this meadow beautiful?

Meadows are buggy, marshy, awful places. You can’t eat a meadow. You don’t survive in a meadow. Why do we like them?

And the more I tried to wrap my head around it, the more frustrated I became.

Why do we like snow-capped mountains and desert vistas?

Why do we like the red leaves of Autumn?

Why do we like flowers?

Why do we gawk at the stars in the sky?

Why do we look out over the vast, endless ocean, awestruck and dumbfounded?

What is so sublime about an alpine lake?

I don’t get it. I can’t get it. And the fact that I can’t get it drives me insane.

There I sat under a tree at the edge of a meadow losing my mind over not understanding why I found a meadow beautiful. My psychotic breakdown was imminent. The meadow was making me angry, teasing me, mocking me with all its corn lily-laden grandeur. I hated how much I loved the meadow. I pride myself on understanding things, or at least understanding that understanding is possible. I find comfort in the idea that everything can be understood. Wait, is that a comforting idea? Or is it a horrible one? My life’s work has always been one of seeking understanding. Once I understand the world, I will have triumphed.

But this meadow, making a mockery of my intellect – if I can’t understand a meadow, what worth am I? What can I, who doesn’t understand a meadow, possibly have to offer society?

And then finally, as my frustration peaked, as I beat the forest floor with my fists and sifted through the dirt with my fingers, I told myself, “Maybe you don’t have to understand.”

It was the greatest burden ever lifted.

I don’t need to understand.

I don’t have to understand the meadow!

I don’t have to understand flowers, or autumn leaves, or Tchaikovsky, or junipers!

I don’t have to ask why the starry sky is beautiful. I can accept: it just is.

And yet, that relinquishing of responsibility, or self-value, or ego – it’s so damned hard. It’s so damned painful. Many of you probably even find this struggle absurd. Maybe you gave up on understanding long ago, you lucky bastards.

Why do I cling so strongly to a need for understanding? Is it a selfish desire? Is it so I can hope to reproduce beauty? For music, perhaps yes, but for nature? I can’t forge mountains. I can’t cap peaks with snow. I can’t control the wildflowers or the changing seasons. Why is it so important to me?

Why is understanding so important to me?

I guess… I guess I just won’t understand.

And maybe that’s okay.

Maybe my self-worth isn’t connected to understanding.

And maybe… maybe that’s how the world will stay magical for me.

Sensations

I stood outside in the backyard last evening and felt the tacky, cooling August air stick to my skin. If I had closed my eyes, you could have told me it was a warm afternoon in April. The air felt the same: damp and confused.

If my town of Redding is known for one thing, it is our summertime: an oppressive, unforgiving heat that blasts relentlessly into our valley from May to October, as if the rays of the Sun flow like streams down the mountainsides to pool at our feet, rising with the summer, until we drown in its flood.

…but it’s a dry heat, so they say.

Despite its terrible weather – dark, wet, gloomy winters and long sweltering summers – I’ve always enjoyed that Redding doesn’t have mosquitos. …that is, with the exception of one month, otherwise so sublimely perfect, when patchy white clouds contrast against a deep sapphire sky, when the air is still cool, but the sun kisses your face as if having missed your company for so long, when the grass is as green as the fresh new leaves on the trees, and the wildflowers sway, synchronized in a gentle breeze: April.

So when a cooling evening in August catches my skin as April, I close my eyes and think: how lovely is the Springtime, and then, well, I can’t enjoy this too long, the mosquitos will be out.

…ah yes, that sensation of mosquitos! So specific in my mind to the certain days of April, it brings with it baggage, associations, the package deal of sensations past! I can see it now: standing outside on the back patio of my old house, my [ex]-wife watching TV in the living room, our rambunctious tricolor Aussie spazzing about the yard, our cat perched on its tower at the window behind me, gazing out, overlooking the creek and the savannah behind it. That refreshingly tacky April air… and its mosquitos, sure to arrive any minute.

(Now, in reality, I’m living with my friend in his house. I’m soon to be divorced, if not already. With my family in our home, with my friend in his house, my skin feels the air all the same.)

Though an August evening, I close my eyes and feel an April afternoon, and when I open them, I half expect to be there, transplanted back in time and through space to a familiar setting: I’m with my family again, nothing happened. I woke up. It was all just a dream. It’s April, doesn’t it feel lovely? Except for the mosquitos. Come play with our dog, have a beer, let’s turn on the TV and settle in, as we always do.

But that’s not my life anymore. I’m on a divergent timeline, the one where I get divorced. Somewhere out there, that timeline, that fictional one, it still marches on, but it’s not mine. It’s theoretical, unattainable, existing only in my imagination, and maybe the dog’s. Maybe hers.

Moments like these: sensations that pull me away and lift me to another time and place, they make me feel like this isn’t real. This is just a vacation from my life, from my family. At some point I’m going to turn to my friend in his house and say, “Well, it’s been swell, but I have to get going. I’ll see you later!” and I’ll drive off back to my house and walk through the door and greet my dog and greet my wife and look for the cat.

But that house is sold. I live here now, in the Divergence.

I’m fairly well-adjusted these days. The pain of divorce is largely behind me. I’m looking forward to moving on and living a new life. But when will I stop feeling like this life is a vacation from the other one? When will this be my real life? How long does that take?

My notional family exists on a timeline separate from this one, but running parallel to it. Two of me wake up and go to work in the morning: the me of what is and the me of what is not. Someday, I hope to meet someone and start a new family, but I’m afraid that, as I go forward, I’ll have two families: the one that is happening, and the one that stopped happening, and they will run side by side in my brain, tearing at my confidence in reality, while sharing nothing between them but the sensation that there might be mosquitos.

Fart Ninja

When my wife left me in early December, we had already picked out a Christmas tree, but had yet to decorate it. It sat naked in our house for days as I sat paralyzed in shock, unsure whether it was better to embrace the sentiment of Christmas and decorate it through sadness and melancholy, or let the dead hunk of a fir sit lifeless and bare as a monument to my quickly collapsing household. Naturally, decorating it would bring in some sort of [pathetic] Christmas cheer, but I wanted to hold out for her to come back and reconcile so we could decorate it together.

Well, she came back to tell me she wanted a divorce, so I started decorating without her.

At first, it was out of denial – a refusal to admit what was going on – an assertion of normalcy into what was extremely abnormal to me. Then it became an expression of obstinance in the face of a determined woman: “You see? I’m still in this!” And then, it became an offer of sentiment. Maybe if she came back and saw a decorated tree, she would remember what it meant to be in our marriage and in our family. Welcome back, isn’t it a nice tree? I decorated it for you.

In the following days, we would both be in and out of our house, but not there at the same time by design. She was living elsewhere and wanted to move back in, and I was living there and offering to move out for some reason, and so we found it once again to be our mutual space – separately. And what followed was, to me at the time, a little bit of holiday magic between two estranged spouses. I would come home and notice she decorated the tree a little, and then I’d add a little bit more. Then she’d come home and notice I decorated the tree and add a little bit more on. And over the course of a couple of days, the two of us, in a sense, decorated the Christmas tree together.

But something was off. The tree needed presents.

What does one buy a wife who wants a divorce?

She had already given me my Christmas present prior to leaving, so I wasn’t expecting her to respond to my presents with presents. But I hadn’t gotten her anything yet, and really wanted to. After all, she was still my wife. Though I knew, circumstantially, it couldn’t be anything sentimental (not for someone intent on leaving you), and it couldn’t be expensive. Practical seemed weird: “Merry Christmas, ex-wife, have a blender.” Maybe something funny? Maybe something goofy? Something small… something…

…and as I walked through the aisle at the drug store looking for cat food, I heard a loud fart.

I turned in shock. No one was there.

I walked back, and heard a loud fart again. And then a voice whispering: “fart ninja!”

I turned to see a motion-activated toy, sure enough called “Fart Ninja.” Every time it detects motion, it makes a farting noise. It had that odd combination of whimsy, annoyance, comedy, and cheapness. You could keep it, you could throw it away, but it could sit there, wrapped under a tree, waiting for Christmas morning to let out its maiden fart for its new owner. And that might be its only purpose. She might find it funny. She might find it insulting. Who knows?

So what do you get your estranged wife who left you before Christmas? A fart ninja.

Well, I don’t know what she thought of it when she unwrapped it, but when she moved out of the house a month and a half later, she didn’t take it with her.

…which was fine. There were a lot of things she left, so I grouped them all together and asked her to come by and retrieve them, which she did.

…except for the fart ninja. She left that again.

…which was fine, because I looked in the drawers and cupboards and kept noticing things she had left, so I put them all in a box and the next time she came over I prompted her to go through the box and take what was hers.

…and again, she left the fart ninja.

Fast-forward months: our house went on the market. All of my personal possessions had to go in the garage so as to make the house presentable for potential buyers. Eventually the house sold, and I had to move.

This house: the house of our marriage. The setting of our future life together, forever. Where we would play with our dog and, for some reason, walk our cat. Where we would sit on the backyard patio sipping beer as the sun lowered for the evening and the redwood trees swayed with the summer wind. Where our children would run barefoot in the grass and explore rocks and bushes and broaden their imaginations and swim and have friends over and forge memories that will bring them nostalgia deep into their adulthoods. Where our dog would grow old and choose to sit by our side to the end of his days. Where we would invite our brothers and sisters and nieces and nephews to come join us for the holidays, and we too would grow old as the redwoods grow taller and the wildflowers blossom, shrivel, and blossom again into the sunset of the rest of our lives.

This was the house of our future, now packed in boxes, scattered across a garage, evacuated into a truck, and shipped off into storage. A lifetime, two lifetimes, an infinite cycle of lifetimes, all sheltered by this mythical sanctuary called a house, now dead, having never lived.

And as I packed my boxes, moving them throughout the garage, with my aging parents, bless their hearts, my dad battling cancer and my mom battling joint pain, expressing their parental love for their helpless adult son, puttering through this tattering life, through immeasurable labor far above and beyond their responsibilities as parents, every single time I’d pass this one basket in the garage…

…bthpbthpthtbpth… …fart ninja!

This here, the box of pictures: our wedding day, where I first said, “I love you,” a framed love letter, us on a hike.

…bthpthbppth… ptbh…

This box here: the tools I used to toil the yard, so that it may look nice for you, for our guests, for our family, for our future.

…bthphth!… bpththpthbth…. fart ninja!

Here is my box of dreams vanished, hopes now hopeless, a future deferred, happiness now cast with the grim light of bitterness, an identity unidentifiable, the lie that was Forever.

…pth….pth….pth… bpth…

“Thank you, Mom and Dad, for being there for me, for standing behind me and at my side, for through all this, I have needed you both more than you two will ever know. May I be as strong and steadfast for my future children as you have been for me, for without you, I will collapse and crumble, and with you, I stand and walk and breathe and live and will survive. I love you both so much.”

…bthpbthpthtbpth… …fart ninja!

Sometimes I feel that this world is designed to prevent us from truly experiencing sadness. Maybe that’s a good thing. Maybe that’s a terrible thing. Humanity brings to us the opportunity to enjoy a vast range of emotional experiences: profound euphoria, heart-wrenching pain, manic wonder, inspiring mystery. But we fear the extremes, and rightly so. They’re terrifying. Joy is terrifying. Sorrow is terrifying. Why bother with terror when you can insulate yourself from the extremes with phones or media or junk food or television or music or drugs or alcohol or porn or cute animals or games…? It’s just so much easier than deciding to embrace grief, and allowing it to strengthen your humanity. But then what’s the point of life if not to experience all it has to offer? God forbid we cry without some toy farting in our face. What sort of tragic farce is this?!

…bthphth!… bpththpthbth…. fart ninja!

Bless you, fart ninja, you angel from heaven you, keeping me grounded in reality, saving me from the precipice of emotional vulnerability.

…bpth…

Everything is going to be okay.

…bpthbth… fart ninja!

Hee hee.

The Superlative Beer

I am in my mid-thirties.

While this may imply many assumptions about me, including but not restricted to homeownership (no), avocados (yes), my taste in artisanal things that don’t need to be artisanal (naturally), and how I treat my pets (like gods among mortals), what I want to address here is specifically how I prefer my media.

And that would be in list form.

You see, us Millennials did not come of age with the newspaper and the periodical. They existed for our parents, and while as ambitious teens we might have fancied ourselves as avid readers of classy publications, any pretenses were quickly swept aside by five minutes on BuzzFeed.

“Russia Invades Ukraine” – Boring.
“Top 10 Ways Russia Invades Ukraine, #7 will BLOW YOUR MIND” – Yes please.

I mean, I already know that Russia invaded Ukraine. But wait, you mean to tell me there are top ten ways? What does that even mean? What are these ways? Did I know everything about the conflict after all? Is tank on there? Do countries still use tanks? And how did you rank these ways? What is #1? Is this “top” as in “most effective”? And how will #7 blow my mind? There are so many questions that only clicking on this link and reading this list will answer!

And so you see, we are conditioned to not only want lists, but to expect that all things can and should be listed in some sort of order lest we fail to make sense of hierarchy in the world around us.

And that brings me to beer.

When I turned twenty-one (and not a day earlier!), I wanted to find the best beer. There were the blue-chip imports, tried and true heavyweights like Stella and Guinness, but this was also an age where craft breweries were beginning to explode, and my expectation was that craft beer would lead me to the best beer.

Of course, in my early twenties, I didn’t know anything about beer. My college friends, who were a fancy bunch, preferred Fat Tire and Blue Moon, which we insisted were superior to the likes of Natty and Milwaukee’s Best. Personally, I drifted towards hefeweizens and Belgian styles, because I was still practically a child who wanted my beer to taste like cloves and zest.

Though, before a best beer could be determined, you had to make a list. So I began with what I knew:

1. Leinenkugel’s Sunset Wheat
2. Pyramid Apricot Ale (probably)
3. Blue Moon (orange slice mandatory)
4. Guinness, because c’mon man, I have culture!
5. …Red Stripe?
6. Lost Coast Downtown Brown! Yeah Baby!

I quickly ran into an obvious problem: before you make a list, you have to determine criteria for who can be on that list. For instance, can you judge IPAs and Pilsners on the same list, when one seeks a clean, crisp malt flavor and the other seeks a floral, pungent bitterness? Is it cheating if your Imperial Stout is infused with chocolate and blueberries when compared to an Imperial Stout that is infused with austerity?

Touché, beer. Touché. Alterations must be made to the methodology.

Hefs and Wheat

1. Leinenkugel’s
2. Blue Moon
3. Pyramid Hef

Stouts and Porters

1. Guinness
2. Tatonka Stout
3. Anderson Valley Oatmeal Stout

Lagers

1. North Coast Scrimshaw
2. Red Stripe
3. …Heineken?

And so on and so forth.

As I grew a little older and a lot more experienced, I started to get into IPAs. I despised them when I first started drinking beer, but there was a moment when a switch flipped in my brain. It was on a tour of Deschutes Brewing Co. in Bend, Oregon when the tour guide allowed us to thrust our hands into a barrel of hop and smell them. So I did, and suddenly, that putrid bitterness in my beer brain turned into a pleasant floral aroma.

So I started making my IPA list, something like:

IPAs

1. Lagunitas Hop Stoopid
2. Deschutes IPA
3. … maybe Stone IPA?
4. Lagunitas IPA
5. Sierra Nevada Torpedo?
6. Do I even know IPAs at this point, having liked them for two days?

At some point later, someone once said, “Hey, bro, have you had Pliny the Younger? It’s the best beer in the world.” And since they said it with authority, I believed them. So I waited in line for two hours in Santa Rosa during the month of its release, and drank a glass of Pliny (the Younger).

It was pretty good. Maybe it should go on the list. Or should I separate singles from doubles?

IPA

1. Deschutes Fresh Squeezed
2. Stone IPA
3. Lagunitas IPA
4. Bear Republic Racer 5

Double IPA

1. Pliny the Elder
2. Hop Stoopid
3. Dust Bowl Therapist

Triple IPA

1. Pliny the Younger
Wait, what even is a triple IPA?

But hey, now that I’m at Russian River, how about I try Consecration, Supplication, Beatification, Fornication, Recreation, and whatever else they have. And so I had to begin a new list: Sours.

Sours

1. Consecration
2. Supplication
3. Masturbation
4. Flagellation

Then I lived in Texas, and in Texas I was introduced to Jester King. Like Russian River, Jester King did sours, but their sours weren’t aged in wine barrels, they were aged in barns with horse hooves and pig giblets. And they were great! But then my list had to expand into lists:

No-Nonsense Sours

1. Consecration
2. That weird Jester King one
3. Supplication

Funky Farmhouse Saisons

1. That weird Jester King one
2. That other weird Jester King one

Barrel-Aged Fancy Sours

1. Bourbon Aged Sour Stout
2. Tequila Barrel Surprise
3. This one tastes like chocolate for some reason

Serious business.

And then I went back up to Bend to visit Deschutes, but someone in the know said, “No, don’t drink Deschutes, there are better breweries here. Have you had Boneyard? What about Crux Fermentation Project?” And so I had Boneyard and Crux, and they were really good. Changes had to be made.

IPAs

1. That Crux West Coast IPA (cascade and centennial hops)
2. That other Crux West Coast IPA (mosaic hops)
3. The third Crux Hazy IPA (dry-hopped single origin)
4. The Deschutes Wheat Stout IPL… wait, which list is this?
5. Boneyard IPA (no, not that one, the better one)
6. Oh shit, I forgot about Fresh Squeezed.
7. Do Lagunitas or Stone even belong here anymore?
8. What is eight? Is that a number? Am I a number?

And then I met my wife, who was more of a beer expert than I could ever hope to be, and she said, “Have you been to Modern Times?” and I said no. What about “Cascade?” and I said no.

So we went to Modern Times. And Cascade. And The Bruey. And Belching Beaver, and Santa Clara Valley (RIP), and Drake’s, and Wildcard (RIP), and Fall River, and Woody’s, and Dust Bowl, and Urban Roots, and Berryessa, and Hen House, and Good Life, and just in case, we retried Deschutes and Sierra Nevada and Stone and Russian River, and we buy some Dogfish Head and Firestone Walker, but what about Alvarado Street, or Sudwerk, or Fieldwork, or Device, or Full Circle, or Tioga-Sequoia, or New Glory…

…and… and…

…and somewhere in a random town in Nowhere, California, a brewery just recently opened beckons to us from across the street. “Come, weary pilsgrims! Try our dry-hopped Double India Pale Doppelbock. We call it Hoppelbockbock, but that’s more of a working title. You can only find it here!” And, as we wipe the sweat of summer off our brow, we enter.

“With whom do we have the honor of speaking?” I say.
“Only a humble alepostle, but of a brewmaster whose greatness is unmatched.”
“Do you distribute?”
“No, and our crowler machine is broken.”
The bartender pours us ten ounces into a tulip glass. I inhale the fragrance, and as I take a sip, a single tear falls from my eye.

It’s the best beer I’ve ever had.
I don’t know what to think anymore. I don’t know who I am anymore. I am broken.

“I hoppel you’ll be bock for more!”

Days later: “Hey, what was that brewery we went to?”
“The one with the matte cans with skulls?”
“No, the other one.”
“I dunno, I forgot. Damned good beer though.”

Structure has collapsed into rubble.
My lists are jumbled messes resembling a conspiracy theorists brainstorm wall of lunacy.
I am no closer to finding the Top Ten Pilsners than I am to solving the Israel-Palestine conflict.
An Islay Scotch Ale sits in my wine fridge. I fear it.
The liquor store selection mocks me with an endless variety of things I’ve never heard of, cans and bottles with humor and wit, multiplying faster than I can reasonably consume.

All that analysis: floral overtones, smoothness, hop/malt balance, it all gets suffocated by the sheer amount of excellence in an insatiable craft. And like the Super Bowl Halftime Show, it only gets bigger, and louder, and more elaborate, and there is no stopping it.

How do I fathom a world in which I can’t manage a hierarchy? How can I make sense of this? How can I make sense of anything?

I look at the jumbled lists of my life, these pillars of identity and meaning cracking and buckling:

Favorite Symphonies

1. Dvorak 7
2. Shostakovich 4
3. Doesn’t it depend on my mood though?
4. Mahler 6

Best States

1. California, of course
2. But Oregon is nice too
3. I mean, Colorado has the Rockies
4. Honestly I enjoyed living in Texas

Favorite Color

1. Blue
2. But red is nicer in the sky
3. And green is pleasant in a field
4. And purple is bold and takes no prisoners
5. Does this matter?
6. Does any of this matter?

Top Causes of World War I

1. Emergent Nationalism
2. Entangled Alliances
3. The assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand
4. But was war inevitable without the assassination?

Best Ways to Cook Fish

1. Baked at 375 for 15 minutes
1. But skillet with oil is good too.
1. Breaded and deep-fried?
4. In a microwave.

Best Ways to Cook Archduke Franz Ferdinand
1. Baked at 375 for 15 minutes
1. But skillet with oil is good too.
1. Breaded and deep-fried?
4. In a microwave.

And in that paralysis of an impossible analysis, looking over the lists of my life, I am defeated. Hierarchy has no meaning. Beer has destroyed my ability to make sense of the world around me. If I can’t place things in some sort of order, how do I understand them? How do I evaluate them? How do I conquer them with the precision of my criteria? If I can’t analyze them and compare them with each other, what can I do?

…just… just enjoy them?

---

Life is hard.
I’ve lost faith in my ability to think clearly.
My head spins with the past, present, and future. And sometimes with nothing at all.
I am tired.
I go to a friend’s house. He opens a beer for me.
“Spaten?” I ask.
“Yeah. German import. Nothing fancy.”
“My mom used to drink Spaten when I was growing up.” I take a sip.
“How’s it taste?”
“…Wonderful.”

Sandcastle

Hello, world.  It has been a while.

I come to you with a confession, a need, a proclamation.

A confession: For me, blogging had always been about desire – a desire to be seen, to be heard, to be understood.  It was a way to shout into the void from my lonely being and see if I could make some sort of connection with a vast array of strangers who, in my desperate yearning, could affirm that, yes: I am.

And then one day, I met someone, we got married, and I no longer needed a blog.  There beside me stood a woman who saw me, who heard me, who understood me, and so that desire was sated.  My blog became obsolete, remaining as a monument to a past.

But then, she left, and with her, she took my sated yearning, leaving me empty.

And I wanted to scream.  So I did.
And I wanted to cry.  So I did.
And I wanted to reach out and pull her back and hold her and feel her warmth and fill that yearning and right the wrongs and see her and hear her and understand her.

But I couldn’t.

A need: Of course life isn’t perfect.  In these last years during our marriage, in my moments of yearning, I’ve often taken to social media to shout into the echochamber of friends and loved ones when I feel the need to express myself to the world beyond my wife.  Even now although we are apart, that is still her world too, and while we may express ourselves back and forth with each other in private, I cannot shout about her into her void filled with our audience.  So I return to my blog – a place of relative privacy and anonymity, removed from her sphere of influence, with a faded readership, filled with only my most curious friends and otherwise complete strangers.  …and maybe her, but I do not write this for her to read it, nor for anyone she knows to read it.  If that happens, so be it.

A proclamation: I am not here to talk about what happened.  Let me make that clear.  That is none of your business.

I am here to talk about my wedding ring.

I don’t wear jewelry.  When I first said my vows and put on my ring, it felt alien and uncomfortable.  I remember not being able to put my fingers together or clench my hand like I used to.  I was annoyed that I couldn’t drink water out of my cupped hands without leaking.  It got in the way of doing a comfortable pull-up.  But I figured: that was the point.  The ring is there to remind you of your solemn obligation: to be loyal to someone you’ve pledged your life to.  If you couldn’t feel it, you could ignore it.  At times, in reaction to grievances or exasperation with my wife, I would roll it back and forth between my forefinger and thumb and think: here lies on my finger a symbol of undying devotion.  Devotion is a privilege.  Being constantly aware of the ring was being constantly aware of that duty and privilege.

Then, at some point, the wedding ring changed for me.  It stopped feeling alien.  It no longer caused discomfort.  It was no longer just a reminder of my duties, but rather something much more magical.  It was a reminder that someone out there was my advocate, my partner, my most important other.  If I ever felt lonely, I could feel my ring on my finger, look at it, and remember that a particular someone is there for me.  As long as I wore it, I knew I was loved.

It felt great.

I kept it on for almost two months after we separated.  The first day I kept it off was two days ago, just to see how it felt.

It felt naked, and it felt lonely.

I keep it in my pocket just to remind myself that she’s there somewhere.  Our future may be apart, but our past is together, and nothing can change that.

A proclamation: I am here to talk about boat.

Yes: boat.

…for of a relationship is born a language of songs, symbols, and utter nonsense that becomes its bonding dialect.  A gesture may mean between a couple something unique, something that carries the weight of depth between two people who have together forged something meaningful out of something superficial or mundane.  A song may call back to a time or place or situation that exists outside of the song itself, but is intrinsically connected to it in the minds of its listeners.  And a word, devoid of any meaning, may rise to the surface of its waters and gain some sort of absurd significance despite any disconnect from its literal reality.

For us, that word was boat.

Listen to the sound: abrupt, curt, rounded like a pucker swallowing a donut hole.  It pops from the lips and is stifled without fanfare — a staccato proclamation that interrupts the seriousness of a still silence, ripples its serenity, and vanishes just as fast.

For you, a boat is a vessel that floats on water.  For us, boat carried no actual meaning.  It carried an understanding that we shared a dialect that was no one else’s.  It said, “Hello, love.  Welcome to our life together.”

…as should have the rest of our language.

A proclamation: I am here to talk about a sandcastle.

…for when I look at our marriage, I look at a sandcastle, built by amateurs at play with no real plan and a vision resting in the vast potential of what we could be together.  Sometimes the sand doesn’t cooperate.  Sometimes something is created accidentally that still looks cool, and becomes part of the design.  No one is ever sure how it will turn out.  There’s no blueprint.  There’s no method.  But it’s being built nonetheless, filled with wonder and imagination.

And then suddenly a wave comes in and goes out, and the sandcastle is gone.

And I stand there, wondering why I didn’t build it further away from the water.

I see the spot where the sandcastle used to be, and there’s nothing left.  Just the memory of enthusiasm I had for building it, and sadness of watching it disappear so quickly.

The future: ambiguous, exciting, mysterious.
The past: concrete, fixed, unchanging.
While you’re building, there are questions without answers, flaws, problems, choices.  But once it washes away, it exists solely fixed in the past.  What it was was all that it was ever going to be. And in that realization of its fixedness in time, the totality of its existence now final and permanent, it all seemed so beautiful, even with choices unchosen and flaws unreconciled. It was, and will always be, the sandcastle we built together.

But building a new sandcastle feels impossible and pointless, and I stand there at the beach, my feet cold, my hands dirty, and my sandcastle gone.

I am here to draw neither a point nor a conclusion, but merely to stand at our sunset and watch the sand wash away into the ocean.

Music and Mystery

Through a series of tentative agreements, passive comments, whimsies, and guilt, I have come to find myself playing second chair oboe for our local community college symphony orchestra.  I am not an oboist.  Or rather, I am no longer an oboist.  I am a music teacher and a composer.  I played oboe when I was in high school.  I’m an oboist the same way your coworker Bill from Accounting is a quarterback.

But I returned to playing oboe for the local band, and since I had been a band nerd, it was a familiar place to fall into, out of practice or otherwise.  Band Oboes have the distinct privilege of being mostly pointless, often doubling Flute 2 or trumpets (for some reason) before suddenly having a surprise solo (cued for in Alto Sax 1).  It’s easy to hide, but it’s also easy to feel worthless, so I was excited to play for an orchestra, where oboe parts having meaning and purpose.

The piece we’re playing is Tchaikovsky’s 5th Symphony.

In case you don’t know Tchaikovsky’s 5th, it starts off with a canvas of strings playing chords beneath a clarinet soli solemnly expressing the inevitability of death.  For me, as Oboe II, it starts off with fifty-seven andante measures of rest, which, if you don’t know, translates to roughly 3.7 years of counting to 4.

This time of rest, captive in my chair, forces me to do nothing but listen to the music going on around me.  I used to do that in my youth.  I would just sit there and listen to the music I loved.  No homework, no chores.  Just music.  I find it harder to do that as an adult.  There are places to be.  Emails to think about responding to.  Dishes.

I find it futile to describe music in words, but allow me to try.  Tchaikovsky’s introduction starts off with an aching hollowness yearning to call out, but failing to have the energy to do so, before fading away in a hopeless resignation.  It is a moment of isolation, wondering how it became so alone, feebly calling into the void and then giving up.  It is austere, bare, and raw.  It is a deep, muted crimson spilled over a vast desert sand and whisked away into the ether leaving nothing but a sad memory.

In other words: it starts with strings playing a slow minor chord progression with slight dynamic variation, and clarinets play a modal melody above it.

(I imagine someone trying to describe the Grand Canyon in such manner, that empty gorge so deep that it may contain the universe and all of its joys and sorrows within its space, from its junipers sprouting out of the soft red rock, layering down to the cactus frozen mid-leap looming above the crystalline river below – a canyon made up of smaller canyons, any one of which would be remarkable in its own right, and yet, when joined together, are dwarfed and devoured by the beast they create.

In other words: erosion in a desert.)

When I was younger, classical music captivated me through its complex and dynamic emotional energy, its intangible narrative voice, and its allusive imagery.  There was something mystical about it, so when I became a teenager, I decided I wanted to study it.  I wanted to crack the code and solve the riddle.  I wanted to know its secrets.  And then I wanted to create it, to wield it as a tool of expression and emotional manipulation.

So I learned things.  I learned how leading tones resolve (unless they don’t).  I learned that dominant function leads to tonic function (unless it doesn’t).  I learned that a fugue answers the subject at the fifth (unless it doesn’t).
Minor is sad (until it isn’t).
Major is happy (unless it’s sad).
Functional harmonies have motion (unless they’re static).
Modal harmonies are static (unless they have motion).
Dissonance is unpleasant (until it’s pleasant).
Consonances are pleasant (until they’re unpleasant).
One and three are strong beats (but you clap on two and four).

And so on and so forth.

If I were to summarize everything I learned in music school into three principles, they would be this:

1. Music’s emotional value is created by using tension and release.
2. Music’s entertainment value is created by setting up expectations, and either fulfilling them or not fulfilling them.
3. (until they aren’t)

There it is.  Music is solved.

So with its mystery dead, I stopped enjoying it as much.

A melancholy yet hopeful chorale can be explained.  The ii7 is borrowed from the parallel minor, half-diminished.  It subverts expectations while increasing tension (melancholy), before resolving (hopeful).  Case closed.

It was once a meadow of wilting flowers in early autumn.  Now it’s a borrowed seventh chord.

Mystique is just ignorance.  Santa is your mom.  The tooth fairy is your dad.  Hogwarts doesn’t exist.  The seven dwarves were downtrodden serfs.  Prince Charming murdered protestants.  God is dead.  Love is sex.  Nationhood is a social construct.  Cake has only ever tasted okay.

And yet, there stands Tchaikovsky’s 5th Symphony, that muted crimson plain vanishing lonely into the wind.  The icy Colorado, distant and frozen beneath the canyon of canyons, solitary and alone.  Austere, bare, and raw.  A feeble proclamation of existence, fading into resignation.

Why does it so captivate me?

I know what it is.  The simple quarter-note rhythms with slight dynamic variation highlight an unremarkable military march motif, played deliberately on chalumeau clarinets.  Its rests create a space of thoughtful silence allowing the listener to ruminate on the minor chords, and minor is sad.  The sparse orchestration evokes a sense of emptiness.

Again, I know what it is.

But why is it what it is?

Where is its magic born?

And why do I allow myself the frustration of not knowing its secrets?

Meadows wilt in the autumn for a lack of sunlight and dropping temperatures.  Flowers are just reproductive plant parts.  They’re just half diminished seventh chords.  But somehow, they still move me when I allow myself to be moved, no matter how actively my brain wages its war against mystery.

It’s hard for a proud, secular man to accept his limitations.  This is the world of knowledge.  Reality is facts.  And yet, I must admit to myself that I am weak.  That I know little.  That there is too much beyond what I can understand.  But also that I should want it that way.