That steady march of time is both reassuring and frustrating, I'd say. Years do, indeed, end and sometimes it's a good riddance. The past two years--since March 2020--have been a pretty low-point for me. There are global reasons for that, which most everyone knows and understands, as well as personal reasons. (If you weren't aware of my wife's battle with cancer, you can read my thoughts on it here.) The ending of 2021 has not been any easier, as familial strife has riven the peace.
Not only that, but my personal goal of writing at least half a million words annually continued its meteoric descent into the ground. With my recent obsession of painting miniatures, making (and playing) board games, and occasionally reading something that I'm supposed to, I have purposefully pulled myself away from writing. For a while there, I would sit in the loft of my kids' parkour gym and write for an hour in one of my notebooks while they learned how to do cartwheels and freak out about doing backflips. Lately, however, the errands and responsibilities of being a chauffer dad eroded those chances. Then there's been sickness in the family that prevented us from going to practice, so that hour of writing time evaporated. Of course, I could have found more times to write. I just…didn't care. I don't know that I'll ever 100% stop writing, but I'm definitely burning out on the desire. It's hard to say this "aloud", since all I've ever wanted to do, for as long as I can remember, is to write books. Like years, dreams eventually end. We have to wake up and face the realities of the day. And so I guess I'm finally waking up to this reality: I don't have it in me to be a writer. My skin's too thin, resolve's too weak, my desire's too tepid…whatever it might be, I guess this is my way of tapping out. I'm hoping that by trying to convince myself that I no longer have a goal of being a writer, of somehow providing for my family's needs via the written word, I will be able to rekindle an interest in writing. This is something that I tried to teach my students when I was a creative writing teacher: You have to understand what your goal really is as a writer. Is it to write? Is it to world build? Is it to edit and tidy up and fix broken parts? Is it to invent something new? Is it to share stories with friends and families and maybe some randos on the internet? Is it to simply say, "I wrote a book"? Is it to get a book out somehow, regardless of how? Is it to have your book sitting on the shelf, surrounded by your alphabetical peers? There are lots of different ways of being a writer, and all of them are equally valid. For me, I wanted that last one: I wanted to be a traditionally published author. That was my goal, that was my plan. And, like it has done for so many millions of others--billions of others, perhaps--COVID has taken that from me. Not only are my chances of finding an agent and getting the book sold diminishing daily (not even counting the fact that I haven't sent out a query in over a year), but the market is getting more crowded while readers are thinner on the ground than ever before. (According to a 2019 finding, almost an entire quarter of the adult population of the United States doesn't even read one book annually.) And while there's plenty of nuance to sus out about that issue, the main point is that the competition for books is harsher than it's ever been. And of all the words I can use to describe myself, "competitive" isn't one of them. I'm not interested in besting others. So there isn't a really strong drive to try to get myself into a position where I could achieve what I'm after. It's been really rough on me as I've been fiddling with this problem. I tried NaNoWriMo this past year and gave up halfway through the month. The vivid colors of writing have faded, as it were, and I couldn't find the emotional and mental energy I needed to put my butt in the chair and fingers on the keyboard for it anymore. Part of that was my own lack of passion. The last time I was really excited by one of my own stories was 2018. That's almost four years in the past now; that's a long time to not be truly motivated by a desire to tell stories. You can't draw from a well that's dry, after all. I've stumbled along for the past few years, hoping that it was just a rough patch or a phase or some other issue. Then COVID hit and my life crumbled at the edges; then the breast cancer arrived and fractured my life at the core. Raising a teenager, trying to convince myself that I still love teaching, battling my own depression, watching my wife struggle in ways that I can't help with…it all took its toll on my creative acuity and the once-sharp blade of storytelling desire dulled. I don't know what could possibly whet it, either. I feel a touch of remorse at this, as if I'm letting someone down by saying, "I'm done." Does it undo all of what I've taught students over the years? Am I now a hypocrite for thinking that I don't want to keep pushing? That I'm tired? I don't know the answers to those questions; as Pi says in Life of Pi, "Why can't reason give greater answers? Why can we throw a question further than we can pull in an answer? Why such a vast net if there's so little fish to catch?" I can't answer so many of the questions that I've asked myself that it's more than a little maddening. Since COVID struck, I've had to turn to all of my coping mechanisms so often that they've become my living mechanisms. I don't have a way to find balance since everything I'm doing seems to be utilizing every trick I use just to keep moving forward. As a result, the loss of my writing muse rankles even more. I didn't realize that I could only write if things were stable. I thought that it was a deeper part of myself, rather than a fair-weather friend. Yet here we are. I've unofficially left my writing group--a group that stuck together, in one form or another, for over a decade. Another casualty to the coronavirus. I see their posts on Facebook and I can't do more than read what they're talking about. I don't chime in, I don't assert myself. I don't know what to do about any of it. I don't know how to navigate the difficult world that we now live in, one with political fault-lines embedded in the precautions we take, the decisions we make. Do I say to my group, "Hey, I'd love to get together again, but only if y'all are vaccinated!" If I do, whom does that alienate? Why do I even have to wonder about that? These sorts of tumults are another symptom of my writing sickness: I can't get out of my head long enough to become immersed elsewhere. Too much of my brain is clamoring with chaos and there's just no room for that creative space. That isn't to say that I'm not being creative. Most of my word output this month has been as I've written up the rules for a board game. I'm over 10,000 words into the rulebook (which, for obvious reasons, is not what the final draft of the rules would look like) and still enjoying that process. I paint, drum, guitar, and play games. I still do things that I appreciate and scratch a particular itch. It's just…I don't know if I'm ever going to do that with my words again. Sitting in my home office, listening to the intermittent chirps of hidden birds and the occasional growl of passing traffic, it's clear that this Sunday morning is vastly different than last Sunday morning. My little sister, Michelle, finally found the right guy a few years back. Last March, in a hasty ceremony done right before the world locked down, she married him. Last week, in a beautiful ceremony done before a small collection of close friends and family, she married him right. That's the broad stroke of it; here are the details… Michelle is the baby of the family, my only sister, and a wonderful human being. She grew up with all of us here in Utah, but now lives in Portland. Originally, she was going to marry her fiancé, Jeremy, on my birthday back in April of 2020. As we all know, having a wedding during the early days of the pandemic were a no-no, so she had to postpone the celebration for over a year. The plus side to this was that, by waiting until June of 2021, all of her family was able to get the vaccine and travel in (presumed, comparative) safety. I'm really glad that it worked out the way it did, because if she'd tried to do it in, say, October, I don't know if I'd have been able to attend. Anyway, the trip was short and sweet: Gayle and I flew out to Oregon with my immediate family (my older brother and his girlfriend, my younger brother and his wife, and my parents) on Saturday. We ate a delicious lunch at a barbeque place, which was a bit strange for me and Gayle: We haven't dined in any restaurant in over a year. Fortunately, Portland was still taking the pandemic seriously, so the restaurant was not crowded, there were plenty of spaces between tables, and the servers all wore masks. That helped calm my covid-nerves, albeit only a little. (The issue here is pretty complicated, so I'm not going to go into why I felt--and still feel--that way.) After eating, we piled into the two not-at-all-what-we-ordered rental vehicles (my dad had to drive an eye-wateringly blue pickup truck, while my brother drove a clown-car compact called a Chevy Spark), dropped off our things at a hotel, and then met up with the purpose of our trip. We got to see Michelle and Jeremy's beautiful home--one that had been built about a century ago--and enjoy the rich verdure of Portland. We left Utah when it was broiling in the mid-nineties; we never peaked over seventy degrees while in Oregon, which meant that the evening was cool and pleasant. We met Jeremy's family--brother, sister-in-law, and parents--and enjoyed a pizza dinner with my aunt from New York, too. Lyra, Michelle's enormous bundle of dog energy, frolicked joyfully in the park. We spent an enjoyable evening at Michelle's house, playing games, eating smores, and choking on smoke from the firepit in their backyard. It did strike me as odd that I was indoors, masks off, and acting as if all was right in the world while knowing that things weren't as picturesque as they felt. Fortunately, my oldest son--the one with a severe heart condition that put him at high risk with covid--had just received his second dose of the vaccine the day before. Though he wasn't there with us, it made me feel better to know that he would soon be safe enough to engage in activities like these again. Sunday morning arrived, and with it the many differences between that day and this. We left our Comfort Inn and headed to the New Deal Café where we had a delicious and filling breakfast. We ate outside while the typically temperamental Portland weather teased and threatened us with rain. Fortunately, the wet held off while we ate. The next stop was Powell's Bookstore in the heart of Portland. Those who know me well know that a bookstore of Powell's size and stature is more exciting and enjoyable for me than going to a theme park. Because of covid restrictions, we had to queue outside for a few minutes until we were allowed into the store. It was a magical place, I'm not going to lie. I immediately set out to find their literature criticism section where I looked at all of their Shakespeare-related offerings. They had one entire section dedicated to his plays and another to criticisms, history, and contemporary thought on the Bard. Incredible. I also wandered through the comics, roleplaying games, science fiction, fantasy, horror, and history sections, drinking in the ambiance and reveling in the sheer quantity of book nerdery going on about me. I ended up buying some books that I will get next Sunday, as they are the Father's Day presents my children will give me. I also bought a couple of books that I gave to the newlyweds (who were also alreadyweds, but whatever) and an annotated collection of H.P. Lovecraft's works. Once they pulled me (an hour earlier than anticipated, I might add) from Powell's, we hit the road again, striking out toward the vineyard where the wedding would be held later that day. The drive was pleasant--I read from my book and enjoyed the scenery--and, soon enough, we had arrived at Youngberg Hill. We settled into our rooms, with Gayle immediately snuggling into a nap, and then passed the afternoon with gentle conversation. My aunt and older brother did a wine tasting while looking out over the beautiful countryside; my younger brother and dad and I enjoyed the company. As five o'clock prowled closer, we all got ready. Gayle put on the wig composed of her own hair and the resplendent blue dress she had made for the occasion. I wore a tie. Because the bride and groom are Jewish and having a Jewish wedding, I also put on one of the provided kippah (which I always called a yarmulke) which I wore throughout the night. About ten minutes before the beginning of the ceremony, the Oregonian weather kicked in. The rain came down in fits and starts at first, so we went ahead and gathered on the folding chairs outside. The rabbi who officiated performed a beautiful ceremony…only for the rain to really come down just as the two were declared officially married. As one, we scrambled to bring the ceremony inside the nearby pavilion, where the two recited vows to each other, I read a poem by Khalil Gibran--per Michelle's request--and we all relished the beauty of what was happening. Once the glass was broken beneath Jeremy's foot, the couple went out for some beautiful pictures. The rain had--predictably--stopped during the ceremony, but the upshot was, a beautiful rainbow grew out of the gray skies, allowing for some really remarkable wedding photos. After the pictures were done, we went into the pavilion again to enjoy the meal, the speeches about the lovely couple, and socializing with others. I'm not a particularly extroverted person. In fact, I don't really like parties or social gatherings, especially with people that I don't know. I'm much like Mr. Darcy in that way… Still, it was, for the most part, a wonderful dining experience, getting to know Jeremy's family and friends a bit. Once the meal was out of the way, a dance was had, and then the party really started. Michelle and her friends liquored up very well, frolicked for a good few hours, and then at last said good night. It was an exhausting but fulfilling day, and I only got choked up, like, twice. It was a memorable, wonderful experience. We spent the night in the Youngberg Hill's mansion, enjoyed a delicious breakfast there, and then set off for the airport. The flight home was even less eventful than the flight there. I read more of my book, dozed, and enjoyed the ginger ale (the only reason to fly). Home from the trip, we stopped at Gayle's parents' house, where the boys were being tended. We spent the evening with them, trying (and failing) to get our seven-year-old's tooth out of his face. We then went home to an empty house. The next morning--far earlier than I would normally want--we had an appointment for Gayle's radiation therapy. She also got a hormone-suppression shot, which was painful for her. That Tuesday afternoon, we went up to Salt Lake City, dressed up in Gayle's costumes as Mr. and Mrs. Darcy for afternoon tea at the Grand American Hotel. (This was a long-anticipated experience, one that I had set up for Gayle's big Christmas present.) I've never been to the Grand American, and so I made the mistake of prowling through the parking garage, trying to find the best place to park. I ended up putting us on the farthest-from-our-destination spot possible. Still, we arrived with enough time to get to the Lobby Lounge and begin a ninety minute experience. I can still almost taste that delicious tea…wow. It was really good. Plus the food was delightful. We took some pictures there at the hotel, then went to the Red Butte Gardens nearby, where we continued to cosplay as Regency-era aristocracy. We bumped into some tourists from Philadelphia who wanted our pictures. It was fun to make people smile with Gayle's costumes again. It's…been a while since we could do that.
Originally, we were going to stay the night at Anniversary Inn, but a mix-up in reservations put us back on the road home. We went to the fine-dining restaurant attached to Evermore Park, Vanders Keep, and had another fantastic meal. It really was delicious, and the ambiance was a lot of fun. If you're interested in that sort of thing, I'd really recommend Vanders Keep restaurant. It's a bit more expensive than I normally do, but it's worth going at least once. In our case, I imagine that it'll become part of Gayle's birthday celebrations for as long as the restaurant exists. Anyway, all of this is to say that today is a quiet Sunday at home, made remarkable only by the fact that it's the last time that we're planning on having sacrament meeting in our own domicile. Next Sunday will be (we're assuming) the first time that we return to a church meeting since March 2020. I have a lot of complicated feelings that I'll try to process over the next week as that approaches, but right now, I'm simply trying to appreciate just how different this week is from last week. Thinking about Michelle's smiles and how happy we were out in Oregon still fills me with a fuzzy sense of completeness and happiness. I'm not one who believes that we can only understand things through opposites, but I do think that contrasts can be illuminating. And I can't think of a way to pass the day that's more different from now than what we had then. It was a different kind of Sunday, but one that I hope will live in my memories for a long time to come. It's time for another bit of writing about my bits of writing.
I've talked a lot about my penchant for recording how many words I write per day/month/year. It's a way for me to see if I'm really doing anything in my chosen craft, and it has been really helpful in showing me where I focus. In fact, one of the reasons that I have fewer posts on this website is because I saw that I was spending a huge amount of my writing time focusing on my non-fiction and I wanted to change that. Today, I started looking at my word count for the year. It isn't where I want it to be: At the end of April, I had written about 150,000 words. These were split between my book about Metal Gear Solid, worldbuilding the place where my TTRPG is set, rules for my TTRPG, and picking at a bizarre retelling/remake of the Little Red Riding Hood story. There are other, miscellaneous additions, but that makes up the bulk of it. The thing that stood out to me, though, was how April 2021 compares to other Aprils. In other words, where do I stand as far as my word count after four months during the past four years? It breaks down like this:
Clearly, I'm doing about as well as I was at the same point during our first month of quarantine. Considering how much has happened to me and my family in the past half year, I think it makes sense that I'm still writing as if the world is on fire. Because it is. So, I'm not publicly flogging myself for having not written more in 2020. I was spending my school days in front of the computer, draining myself into cyberspace. Writing did not come easily then. By the time I became accustomed to the oddness of my school year, my wife was diagnosed with cancer. I even tried to do NaNoWriMo…then I contracted COVID. (I also got three or four rejections on my submissions for War Golem, if we're really adding to the pile, here.) In other words, I wasn't in a particularly creative headspace for a good portion of last year. And it doesn't really surprise me to see that 2021 is following suit. No, what really surprised me the most was the next bit of information that I gleaned. On my spreadsheet, I have a tally of all of my completed novella-length or longer projects. Because I've been doing NaNoWriMo since 2015, I've been finishing a couple of books a year pretty consistently. I mean, I even finished two novellas in 2020, despite everything else that was going on. But when I looked back at 2019--which was not my most productive year--I was surprised to see that it was 2019 where I finished the highest number of projects. How many? Seven. Seven books, totaling almost 300,000 words. Three were part of my novella-world project. Another was finishing up a NaNoWriMo from 2018 that I hadn't completed during the month. The next was a short story that morphed into a novella, one that I had been working on occasionally for a year or so. Novellas aside, I had two novels that I finished, both of them Shakespeare-adjacent: One was my Da Vinci Code but with Shakespeare book, Raleigh House. The other was my NaNoWriMo for 2019, Elsinore Ranch, which is a retelling of Hamlet. It makes me wonder what I did in 2019 that I've clearly forgotten how to do in the two years since. I know that a big portion of it is that my video game obsessions aren't easing up. For some reason, indulging my addictions doesn't satiate them. And I know that my life will not be "normal" again anytime soon--perhaps ever. It's hard to say. Will I ever get back to that level of prolificacy? Will I ever be so excited about my stories that I'd rather write them more than anything else? I mean, it isn't that I wasn't writing at all. It was just that nothing really sang to me. And I know that writers have to write, regardless of if their muse is crooning inspiration to them or not. But I'm not a professional writer. I don't know if I ever will be. I don't have a contract or a deadline to meet. I don't have to hit a quota. Yet I'm not happy that my numbers are trending downwards. I want to improve my output, my editing, my craft. I don't want 2019 to be my bumper crop for finished projects. So I guess I gotta figure out how to get what I'm after, huh? Christmas of 2020 was…rough. Not only were we self-imposed pariahs, separated from almost all family and friends as the (seemingly) only ones still taking the pandemic seriously, but the looming treatment of Gayle's breast cancer cast a pall over a very subdued holiday. One thing, however, that has come from that time was I've picked up a new hobby, thanks to the gift Gayle gave her boys of mini-fig paints. I've been playing D&D off and on for about three years now. My boys have all created characters that they use in our adventures, and thanks to a generous neighbor and my school's 3-D printer, we've even created 3-D prints of them to use when the mood hits us right. As good as these prints are (which, considering the constraints of the technology, are pretty good, I think), they're still monochromatic versions. Despite that, I thought it might be a good father/son bonding experience for us to learn how to paint those same miniatures. I was this close to buying a starter painting set at the last FanX convention we went to, but distance and crowds prevented me from following up. Ever observant, my wife decided to pick up some paints for us as a Christmas gift, thus allowing us to paint together as a family. We kind of have. My younger two boys have sat down with me on a couple of occasions as we've taken some molded miniatures that Gayle gave us and tried our hands at painting them. (My oldest is not really interested in artistic endeavors of any sort, so he has yet to sit down and participate with us.) I watched some YouTube videos, listened to my wife's artistic advice, and then set to work. We primed the models (using a spray-paint primer, in order to prime a lot of them all at once) and painted them in the stock colors that came with the original set. The first one I did was of an elven archer. I was surprised at how well it turned out, considering my inexperience. It was also fun to sit with my boys and quietly work on something together. My middle son has shown the greatest interest, having painted a couple of dragons, a skeleton, and a couple of others. (Ironically, despite the fact that we started this hobby in order to paint the miniatures of our characters, we've yet to try to paint the 3-D printed minis.)
Where I really became interested was when I got the Bloodborne Board Game, a hefty investment of Christmas cash that arrived back in February or March. I learned about the game after its Kickstarter campaign had ended, so I was forced to buy through an alternative website that incorporated the main game and three additional add-on packs of different types. It was a lot of money (more than I spent on the video game, that's for sure), and I didn't want it to go to waste. Fortunately, the game is really enjoyable--I've played it for dozens of hours so far--and I want to keep my interest in it as high as possible. To that end, I've continued my painting hobby. See, having all of these new miniatures (probably over 100 of them, if I were to sit down and actually count them) means that I have plenty to keep me busy for the next couple of years or so. Each monster of the game comes with two or four miniatures, meaning that I can experiment with different color sets, motifs, and techniques. If I do one that feels incorrect, it's okay: I don't have to reset on that one as I can just paint another one in a better way. It's also helpful in keeping me from secluding myself in my office when the rest of the family is downstairs playing video games, sewing, or otherwise interacting. I sit in the corner of the kitchen table next to a stack of drawers filled with paints, brushes, pallets, and figurines, quietly painting my models. I use an old orange juice bottle with a bit of 3M double-sided adhesive to keep the models attached. A Tupperware container provides the perfect place to put a wet paper towel and a square of parchment paper in order to make a wet-pallet that keeps the mixed paints from drying out before I can use them all. Because Gayle is an artist, she has a huge collection of acrylic paints that I'm now learning how to use. Her generosity is always impressive, if you ask me. There are a couple of downsides: I'm not sure if it's because they're cheap or what, but I think I'm wearing out the brushes. I make small mistakes sometimes because the brush-heads act in ways I'm not expecting, or fail to keep a strong point when I need them to. I also sometimes get irritated by having to paint the same thing four times (eight, if I prime them by hand). I know, I know--I just said that it's good that I have so many options. And that is true, for reasons I mentioned above. It's also true that it can be tedious to go over the same details again and again. This doesn't happen all of the time--I have so many figurines to paint that I really can just bounce from one to another whenever I want--but as far as the game is concerned, I want to play with the pieces that I've painted. When I've only painted one or two, then I feel the urge to paint the remaining ones, but struggle against the aforementioned irritation of being involved with the same one again and again. It isn't a massive con, or anything, just one of the quirks of the situation. Paint choices are also limited, in a sense. I mean, I can paint them whatever I want--obviously--but the game's source material is rather grim, bleak, and dark. There are lots of blacks, browns, and blood-red, yes. However, bright colors that really pop, or provide interesting contrasts don't really fit into the game's design. (I cheated a bit when it came to painting the item chests, as it gave me a chance to make some that were gold or silver and much more eye-catching.) So, I've had to settle with going in slightly different directions as far as the coloring goes. Despite these slight difficulties, I am really enjoying this new hobby. It has taken away from my writing and reading (though I just finished listening to The Fellowship of the Ring while painting in my corner, so it's good for audiobooks), but it's also immensely cathartic. I mean, there's a lot in my life that requires a lot of my emotional energy. Writing is one of the most demanding things that I do outside of my job. Sometimes--most times--I'm drained when I get home from work. The last thing I want to do is spend time slapping a keyboard. Add to that a continuing doubt about ever writing something worth being published, the (perhaps) connection to increasing my medication dosage to deal with my depression, and the overall stress of the continuing cancer treatments while in a pandemic from which my oldest is still at risk, and it makes sense that I want to do something that doesn't have any higher stakes than "Can I make this look cool?" Anyway, I'm pretty proud of what I've done. There's a whole thread on Twitter that you can look through everything I've painted so far, as well as a few more here below. Well, it was nice while it lasted.
I had a goal of writing every day of 2021--an impossible goal, I knew, but one that did a fair bit of motivating for me even during the first hellish weeks of this new year. The thinking behind the goal was to relieve some of my self-imposed pressure to write a certain amount every day/week/month or whatever (though I've still a goal of drafting 30,000 words minimum each month, if possible). I figured that by simply expecting that I write something not work related, I would be able to keep moving along as a writer, slowly accreting the skills that I need to somehow sell my work. I was generous with my expectations: A couple of hundred words in my reading journal would suffice. Not a particularly lofty goal, to be honest. And it isn't as though I had to strain to do that for most of January. I began writing my own TTRPG during the end of my D&D Winterim, and (as often happens with me) I got caught in a flurry of creativity. I spent hours formulating rules, generating a character sheet, and even drafting an introductory module that acts as the prologue to the type of story I'd want this game to tell. That led to almost 20,000 words of work so far, all done in the space of a three weeks, give or take. What's more, I took a Friday off and headed to the great untamed wilderness known as downtown Provo to have some writing time at an Air BnB. I spent the weekend getting food delivered to my door (we are still in a pandemic, after all) and writing what struck my fancy. I generated a total of just over 20,000 words on those three days. Most of them are in my mashup of Red Riding Hood and Bloodborne, but a handful of them landed in the lore section of my TTRPG, too. It was a very pleasant experience, one that was designed to help my mental health as much as my word count. After all, Gayle is not even halfway through her chemotherapy and each time she has to go in it's a fresh ordeal for me. Despite the familiarity with the process of what's going on, the toll it takes on me is greater with each visit. So the trip last weekend did help recharge me a bit, if only because it allowed me to focus on writing without having other worries encroaching. (Gayle stayed with her mother for some of the time, so I could rest easy, knowing that she was being looked after. She was also feeling a lot better by then, so she even came and spent the night with me on Friday.) Despite all of that, this past week was grueling in all of the nondescript, unimportant ways that life weathers us. I can't point to any specific issue--there isn't, like, a phone call from an upset parent or a distressing bill come in the mail--that really made the week a misery. Certainly part of it comes from my dysthymia kicking in. I'm pretty good about keeping my Patronus pills filled and using the medication daily. It helps most of the time. However, "most of the time" is not "all of the time" and this past week has been pretty bad, emotionally speaking, for me. And that brings us up to my failed goal. I wanted to jot a couple of thoughts about The Hobbit into my reading journal to get my day's writing goal accomplished, but I hit a (potentially very expensive) snag: I couldn't find my Moleskine Pen+. This is the pen that I use with my special Moleskine notebooks that transcribes what I write and puts it into a TXT file so that I can digitally archive (and search through) the things that I write. It's one of those unnecessary-but-still-fun-and-cool bits of tech that tends to catch my attention. I had sent off my first Pen+ to get it repaired, which meant that I was without it for a couple of months. A new one arrived just before Christmas, allowing me to again write the way I wanted to. And when I went looking for it in my computer bag, it was nowhere to be found. This has not helped at all. Because of my mental illness, I have a tendency to fixate on things that go wrong in my life. They all add to a greater narrative of my own inadequacies, my failings for making the false assumption that things go right, and a type of "Well, of course that happened" feeling. This isn't healthy, I know, and I try to not let these sorts of things get me down. But, at the same time…they definitely get me down. Since what I wanted to write last night couldn't happen (how can I write in my special notebook without my special pen?), I simply let my goal go. I didn't write anything, not even a paragraph or two of lore for my TTRPG--perhaps the easiest thing that I could jot down. I blame my depression for that. This ennui continues to linger, though, and I keep cycling over my frustration at not doing what I should have done with my pen. It was an expensive purchase, and I really don't want to spend any money on another one. (Besides, if I do, that'll mean the original shows up, right? Isn't that what always happens?) Yet I'm deeply frustrated that I lost it. I have a system for keeping track of how I use the pen, but I have been lax in doing so with it lately. Now I reap the rewards. This sort of woe-is-me obviously isn't healthy, and it probably comes off as annoying. If you feel that way…um…why are you still reading? That seems strange that you're in control of that and yet you're still here. More than that, though, is a recognition that such trivial things can affect me. What I really think is going on is that there are so many things far beyond my control: The pandemic, chemotherapy, the endless stress of teaching and forcing myself to care when I least want to. The list goes on. Losing a pen is not particularly high on the list, but it was one of the things that I could have controlled. I didn't, and now I'm living with that regret. It's a spiral of frustration. Yes, it's only a pen. However, it's symbolic of a lot more to me than just a writing utensil. Hence why losing it meant--symbolically--that I had lost my ability/desire to write yesterday. And that's how a goal gets undone: Depression + life stress + something insignificant = failure. There's no right way to write.
Or rather, provided one is writing, that is the correct way, inasmuch as there can be a correct way. Hmm. If one must write, that is how one writes. Okay, look, pithy aphorisms aren't as easy to craft as Shakespeare makes it seem, so we'll settle with the more prosaic observation that, as long as words get written down, that's how the writing works. Yeah? Yeah. With 2021 fully upon us, trailing the stench clouds of 2020 behind it, I figured I should do my annual "plan for writing during the upcoming year" essay as a chance to lay out some of my hopes as far as my writing goes. I don't remember (nor do I want to look up) my previous year's goals. They most likely didn't happen, since I only managed to finish a novella or two and that was all, to say nothing of the tens of thousand fewer words I failed to write over the course of a twelvemonth. I still keep borderline-obsessive track of the words I jot down in all but my school capacity (like, I don't word count assignments or emails or whatnot), with a spreadsheet that gets more and more complicated with each successive year, so I have a fairly accurate view of how well I'm doing on the word-count front. Good ol' 2020 saw me crank out 482,881 words (as opposed to 2019's 528,743) a difference of over 45,000 words. That's almost an entire NaNoWriMo project's worth of writing. Since I completely failed at NaNoWriMo 2020, that makes sense. So I'm not saying that I did a bad job of writing in a general sense. I know that a lot of writers would love to produce that much content in a year. And while that's not all fiction writing, a fair chunk of it is. And while I lament that I didn't spend more time honing my craft, I can be somewhat proud of having managed to generate close to half a million words in the midst of a global pandemic, massive civil unrest, and frequent personal trials. What I want to do with 2021--as far as writing goes, of course--is to continue on the strengths of the last year. To that end, I decided to modify my goals. While I usually want to put in a certain amount of time into fiction--increasing the short stories that I sometimes create, or getting another bit of worldbuilding into my notes--I also derive pleasure from the act of writing itself. I love to type. I love to write by hand in my far-too-expensive-but-what-are-you-gonna-do notebooks. I love to brainstorm in my beaten-up-because-they-cost-a-quarter-jeez-Moleskine-could-you-maybe-drop-the-price-a-bit-you're-killing-me notebooks. It's great to have a diversity of ways that I go through the physical actions of writing. And, because 2020 taught me better than Steinbeck's title or Robert Burns' poem ever could, "the best laid schemes o' Mice and Men / Gang aft agley", I selected a daily requirement to write. No minimum requirement. No genre expectation. No expectation save that I grace the page with a squiggle or two. On one level, this feels like a capitulation, a throwing up of my hands in the face of the crushing reality of what I have to deal with and submitting to the unbending tide of responsibilities. On another level, though, it has--thus far, at least--been a gentle enough goal to maintain the pleasure of completing it and a steady enough pressure to ensure its continuation. Thus far, I have written every day. Some of it has been therapeutic and emotionally driven, such as the stuff that I write when discussing my wife's battle with breast cancer. Sometimes it's creating a new TTRPG (I'll essay on that another day). Often it's jotting down a page in my reading journal. (This one is particularly useful, as it means that I need to keep reading so that I have something to write about--double trouble!) Because of all the stress that's been my life recently, I've arranged for a couple days off to do a private writing retreat at an AirBnB. It's a difficult decision--COVID is still real and I live in a high risk area. I did go through a bout with the sickness, as well as getting the first round of the Moderna vaccine, so I feel a bit more comfortable making the trip. I also really need some writing time, not because I have a lot of writing that I feel pressing to get out of me (that sort of thing, the fire of a story that will only be quenched by writing it, hasn't happened to me in many a-year), but because I am pretty close to a breaking point, mentally speaking. Almost all of my wells for well-being have been dipping dry and the strain of knowing that it will continue until long past the seasons' change isn't helping in the least. Since Gayle is on her "good week" with her treatment, she and I both feel confident that she'll be all right without me around for a couple of days. (I'm not far away, in case of emergency, plus her mom is willing to be on-call, as it were.) I'm hoping that this will do a little bit of recharging my spirits and that I'll have a bit more fortitude in confronting the rest of what's troubling me. And if it doesn't? Well, you'll know. I'll probably write an essay about it. I hate phones.
Not, like, any specific one. Or even the concept, really. I think it's great how much phones connect people. But I hate them. More accurately, I hate having to talk on them. I don't want to call in a pizza order if I can help it; I don't want to call customer service to work out an issue. I just don't want to be on the phone. (I don't mind talking to friends and family on the phone, however. Go figure.) But why? Tracing my developing personality--and, maybe, finding an answer to the question in the process--can be difficult. How much of what I see in myself is directly grown from what I've done in the past, and how much of it is a result of innate tendencies? I feel like I've grown more introverted over the past couple of decades--was it my mission for the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints that made me feel like I had used up all my extroversion? (This one definitely makes sense to me, but perhaps that's just sublimation.) Still, there is one thing that I deeply misunderstood and has continued to affect me ever since it happened in 2001 that may be a clue to my animosity toward Alexander Graham Bell's invention. I worked at the Convergys, a telemarketing/telesupport firm close to where I grew up. I had just graduated from high school and needed a job to get money for the aforementioned mission. The Convergys hired me as an inbound operator. Our client was American Express and it was my job to "activate" the callers' credit cards. Really my purpose was to lie to them ("while your credit card activates…" when the card was already activated) and then try to upsell additional (and unnecessary) features on the credit card. The more features I sold to them, the larger my paycheck would be. I'm not much of a salesman, despite my understanding of words. I figure this is mostly because if I truly believe in what I'm selling (or, in the case of the mission, preaching), then I get myself tied into the sale and feel personally rejected, and if I don't care at all about what I'm selling, then I don't care if someone else wants to buy the product or not. This was certainly true of the Convergys job. I worked there throughout the summer of 2001. Shortly after the terrorist attacks on 11 September, with the strain of starting college, preparing for my mission, and deeply hating the menial, pointlessness of my job, I started looking for a way out. What ended up being the worst thing for me (mentally speaking) was when a customer called in, sick of the endless phone-trees and being placed on hold, and threatened to cut up his card. I told him that the card was now activated and that he could use it immediately, then ended the call. Nevertheless, my 18-year-old brain misheard what he said. I thought he'd threatened me with violence if his card wasn't activated immediately. He hadn't. He definitely only said that he'd cut up the card, not the teenage phone operator on the other line. But my fight/flight response was triggered and a surge of adrenaline tsunamied through my system. I'm not a fighter--like, at all--so the mental connection between that spurt of fear-induced adrenaline forged between me and two things: American Express (a company I don't much care about or give thoughts to) and telephones. I won't say that this is the original "trauma" that led to my telephonic antipathy, but it's certainly a component to it. Nevertheless, becoming an adult has meant that I've had to use the telephone more frequently than I would like. Sometimes I do have to set up appointments or sort out a problem via phone. It's not pleasant and I often try to come up with alternative ways of handling the issue sans that technology. (The fact that I don't want to talk to employees at stores if I can help it definitely limits these alternatives.) So the fact that I've called Gayle's oncologist office two or three times during the first two weeks of chemotherapy is an indication of something to me: When it comes to helping my family, I can overcome my distaste. I was on the phone as soon as my help wasn't enough to help her through the migraines that knocked her down the first day and when the antinausea medication was only making things worse. I hate using the phone, but more than that, I hate seeing my wife curled up in pain and feeling powerless at the sight. Here's what I've learned: Sometimes the only way you can fight for the ones you love is by doing what you don't want to do. I can't go through chemotherapy for Gayle, but I can be her liaison to the oncologist's office. Her fight is against an uninvited return of cancer; mine is a mangled memory that has affected me for many years. There's no parity between these things--one of the hard parts about watching a loved one go through health problems--and I'm not trying to assert that there is. Still, if fighting over the phone is the only way I can help Gayle, I'll do it. New year, old habits. I've been in the habit of tracking things I do for a number of years. Whether it's words written or books readen, I try to keep a running list. This is to give me a sense of movement in an otherwise very similar existence: The cyclical nature of my job is reassuring in its familiarity, but it can be disorienting if I'm not careful.
To that end, I jot down the titles of everything I complete during a year. For esoteric reasons I don't fully understand, I categorize my entertainment input in two: Books, and Everything Else (except music). In 2020, I read/watched/played 119 comics/movies/video games. The number is not necessarily accurate. I will put things like "Christmas cartoons", which was probably a good two hours or so of The Amazing World of Gumball, Captain Underpants, or Teen Titans GO! Yet I lumped them all together, rather than counting each one separately. I didn't count Avatar: The Last Airbender, which was watched by my boys in the van during our commute time. I will put something like Deluxe Invader ZIM #2, which is actually a dozen comics in one. Also, it's only completed things. That's easy for something like movies (I watched all of the Jurassic Park films with my kids this summer), but I ended up stopping my rewatch of Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles season 2 with, like, two episodes to go. So it didn't make the list. Even The Haunting of Bly Manor, which I have three or four episodes left, didn't get added on, even though each episode is nearly an hour long--meaning that two episodes combined is more than some movies' runtime. And while 119 titles is quite a bit (especially considering how many hours I obsessed over Bloodborne these past few weeks--and, let me just say, that completing that game was a personal accomplishment), what really strikes me is that I only had 37 books or plays read in 2020. I'll admit that there were some…interruptions to how I normally live my life. I did find it harder to concentrate on the written word during the pandemic, and I even fudged my numbers a little by including books that I wrote and finished during 2020 (two novellas actually, my lowest output in years). Some of the books are the annual retreads: Pride and Prejudice, Things Fall Apart, and All Quiet on the Western Front always crop up in the first half of the year. Hamlet…well, I don't actually reread Hamlet each year. I do watch the film with my students though, so… My point is that despite my best intentions, I don't do a lot of reading. Author Joe Hill said that you can get a rough sense of how many pages you read per day by seeing how many books you finish in a year. At 37 titles, I read only 37 pages a day, on average. Part of me feels insulted by this. The rest of me realizes that's probably more true than I'd like to think. It's also tricky, because I only count what I've completed during the year, regardless of how long it took me to get there. I started The Iliad a couple of different times throughout my career, but I only finished it this summer. (That was a complete read, though; I restarted and finished it in 2020.) I finished London: The Biography after it sitting on my nightstand for three years. So it's really an incomplete list. I put all of that down because it's on my mind and I think it provides a bit of context for what I'm about to describe. I finished Stephen King's The Gunslinger: The Dark Tower I today after trying to read it for…I dunno, twelve years? Something like that. An old work buddy gave me his copy of The Gunslinger (and the frustratingly titled The Drawing of the Three, which is the second book in the series…why does it have the number 3 in the title, then?) and I've picked it up a handful of times since then, only to put it back down. After becoming more accustomed to King's writing style, I decided to give The Gunslinger another go. This is in part because I bumped into a former student who was picking up one of the later Dark Tower books and said that, once you get to the third entry, it is really good. That's a bit of a slog, if you ask me. Still, I decided to try it. After all, I reread The Eye of the World and The Great Hunt by Robert Jordan in the hopes that, by the time I eventually get to the third book I'll actually really like it. A man can dream. And I think that's what my problem is with The Gunslinger: It feels like a weird dream. There's a place for that, of course. Alice in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass are excellent examples of dream fiction (both of which I read this year, as a small aside). A lot of Neil Gaiman's work fits into that mold, too--a place where imagination is the fuel of the story. The thing is, I'm not a huge fan of the genre. Or, perhaps more evenly, a little goes a long way for me. And when it comes to King, I've come to expect a different kind of story. Part of the reason It is one of my favorite novels of all time is because the world is grounded, making the fantastical seem more plausible. King does this in other works, too: 11/22/63 and Pet Sematary stand out to me in that way. (The Stand, which I picked up again when the pandemic struck--wonder why--kind of blurs the line a bit more than I prefer.) But when it comes to The Gunslinger, well… The problem I have with dream fiction is that the stakes feel artificial. Since nothing can be taken as real, sacrifice and death, pain and worry all become meaningless. The impermanence of the situation leads me to apathy. In the case of The Gunslinger, I had a hard time believing that Roland was in a real world with real people. He may shoot his way through much of the book, knock boots with a tavern wench, and traverse a seemingly-endless underground tunnel, but is any of it "real" to him? Chapter Five is essentially a twenty-five page conversation, which turns out to have somehow taken ten years and maybe the skeleton is the corpse of the man in black he's been chasing… King himself admits that the book is a cowboy Western take on The Lord of the Rings, which in and of itself both sounds amazing and totally bizarre. The execution of the book--for me, at least--was tedious and meandering. The rich characterization that King does so well in his other books felt lacking here. Forgive a digression here: For almost all authors (Austen and Shakespeare feel like exceptions to this, though I'm sure there are others), the way that we get to care about characters is through exposure to them. Why does it mean so much to see Hagrid carry Harry Potter out of the Dark Forest? Because we've spent so much time with both characters. Why does It clock in at over 1,400 pages yet leave you wanting more? Because we've spent a lot of time with those characters and we have come to care about them. Why do shows like Doctor Who and Supernatural have such loyal fanbases? Because they've spent time in those worlds. The best short story can't connect with the reader as securely as the tenth book in a series for the simple reason that we readers haven't gone through the adventure with them. Now, there are seven books in the Dark Tower series, so there's definitely a chance to get to know Roland. In fact, I can't really fault this first book for not being more since there's a long journey ahead and this, the slenderest volume of the series, isn't going to give me a lot of time with the gunslinger. However, the time I spent with him felt inconsequential. I think this comes from a couple of things. One, Jake comes into the story with his own confusion and inability to remain connected to the world that he came from. At this juncture, Jake feels like a narrative add-in, a character dropped into the story because the idea struck the writer and so he put him in. Then, unsurprisingly, killed him off. I didn't get a strong sense of the gunslinger and the boy becoming close or gaining a lot by being together. Sure, Roland explains how he earned the right to become a gunslinger because Jake was there, but the narrator could have given us that section of the backstory by having Roland reflect on his own past. Jake felt extraneous and randomly included. I don't know if that is a criticism that stands up with the rest of the series, of course. But it is how I felt for this individual book. One thing, however, that I really did like, was what I mentioned earlier: The last chapter of the book--what should be the climax and resolution, a full-fledged battle, according to most fantasy tropes--is a twenty-five page conversation. The book begins "The man in black fled across the desert, and the gunslinger followed." That sets up the goal, which is attained by the end of the book: Roland the gunslinger catches up with the man in black. But, rather than duking it out, the two sit down around a magically created fire and talk. Thanks mostly to the video game Bloodborne, I've been thinking about eldritch horror a lot more recently. (I had a spat with it about thirteen years back; I even have a couple of Lovecraft anthologies on my shelf.*) And though that game does an excellent job of dealing with the cosmic horror themes, I don't think I've seen anyone describe the terror of that genre as well as the man in black does to Roland. Chapter Five does a lot of things, and while I rather doubt that this Western/fantasy/grimdark tale was meant to also include eldritch fear, the existential dread conjured by the man in black pushes the story into that genre, too. Here's a passage: 'Size defeats us. For the fish, the lake in which he lives is the universe. What does the fish think when he is jerked up by the mouth through the silver limits of existence and into a new universe where the air drowns him and the light is blue madness? Where huge bipeds with no gills stuff it into a suffocating box and cover it with wet weeds to die?' (287-288) Can you imagine what it would be like to be that fish? To be dragged out of the world you know and then, suffocating in an unfamiliar ocean of air, die as you watched beings oblivious to--or worse, the causation of--your plight pass you over? That is an almost unimaginable terror…an eldritch one. Eldritch horror is facing the insignificance of humanity in the face of powers larger and darker than ever before dreamed. In "The Call of Cthulhu", Lovecraft writes, The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to corelate all its contents. We live on a placid island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of infinity, and it was not meant that we should voyage far. The sciences, each straining in its own direction, have hitherto harmed us little; but some day the piecing together of dissociated knowledge will open up such terrifying vistas of reality, and of our frightful position therein, that we shall either go mad from the revelation or flee from the deadly light into the peace and safety of a new dark age. (The Best of H.P. Lovecraft: Black Seas of Infinity, 1) For the man in black, we humans are the fish in a small pond of existence. The idea of so much being out beyond us, past human ken and comprehension, is humbling to the point of disheartening. We do so much in our small scale and view ourselves rulers of the world, yet what can we do in the face of our own mistakes and the turns that consequences inevitably bring back home to us? Like a virus can take a human life (a reality that we've seen iterated thousands of times these past few months--a reality that many millions more outright deny), so too can the comparatively tiny actions of humans accumulate into trophic cascades that may end up ruining the only home we have. We don't even have to go into cosmic horrors to see the effect that size has on us. A single individual's actions can no more change the climate than a twig in the Mississippi will dam it. But you get enough twigs… The idea that there are things bigger than us is maddening. For Roland, it's about interacting and becoming part of light--a metaphysical escape from the eventual nihilism this kind of thinking often leads to. For us, we rest more comfortably in our "placid island of ignorance" than trying to confront the larger (or much, much smaller) worlds that surround us. In Bloodborne, the world the player inhabits is surrounded by enormous eldritch beings called Amygdala. They hang from gothic spires and observe the player from afar. However, until the player gains "insight" (a currency in the game, but also a metaphor), these creatures are invisible. After gaining enough insight, the player is able to perceive what had been there all along. What the man in black is pointing out is that there is so much more in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in our philosophies, just like Hamlet told us four hundred years ago. From what I can tell, we have two ways of approaching this: To embrace the reality that there is so much more than we can every possibly learn or understand, or to cave inwards, cocooning ourselves against all uncomfortable aspects of reality. And it's a choice that we have to make again and again. So, should you read The Gunslinger? I don't know. For me, I didn't really like the vast majority of it. Nevertheless, I'm curious to see where it goes. I would say that if a seven-volume epic is too intimidating, don't start. Now that I've begun the journey, I may just have to see it all the way to its cyclical end… ___ * I know about Lovecraft's disgusting racism. I'm not a fan of the guy, and his writing is…well, it certainly exists and can be read. His impact on the horror genre is inescapable, even if I think, as a human, he was a sleaze. The Sundays of 2020
There are so many things rattling around my head right now, few of them positive or happy. This is not unusual, as Sundays have historically tended to be the days that my depression is keenest. That being confessed, the past nine months have seen that historical trend skewed. It isn't much of a surprise to me to realize that the pressures of being in an extroverted (we prefer the term missionary-minded) church as an introvert were wearing me down. In Church BC, I would be fine in the first hour--Sacrament meeting, after all, requires very little in terms of personal interactions--then find solace in drawing notes about the Sunday School lesson. I sat next to my wife, whose presence calms my anxieties and explicates my eccentricities to others, so though Sunday School required more interaction, it was mediated by Gayle. Once the third hour showed up and I was off to the gender-segregated Elders' Quorum, thinks became even more uncomfortable. It's hard for me to really parse how I felt in many (by no means all) of the EQ lessons. I do know that part of what made me uncomfortable--and still does in other circumstances with other people--were the invisible lines of power that adults have to navigate. Some don't care about them, don't worry about them, or intuitively weave through them, but I'm not someone like that. In my classroom, there are very clear lines of autonomy, authority, and expectation. If something bothers me in my classroom, I can address it. In more grown-up situations like Church meetings and family gatherings, those clear lines efface. I don't know if it's appropriate to call out someone for a particularly egregious bit of stupidity, and when I do, I worry that I will have ruined a relationship or caused offense. (Example: I'm pretty quiet when my brothers-in-law gas about politics, but it was only when one of them declared the Second Amendment gave him the right to shoot someone on his property that I had to speak up. He retreated when I said that, but I know that it raised questions in his mind about what I think with regards to the Bill of Rights.) The stress of being in that kind of situation is really draining. It should come as no surprise that, when the Primary presidency stopped by the Elders' Quorum to find last-minute substitutes, I would almost always volunteer. I could be a warm body and quietly urge six-year-olds to sing along with Primary songs. Those are power dynamics I can understand. Church attendance--a major portion of a Mormon's Sunday--was one of the reasons that the first day of each week was one in which my depression was larger. Add to that the feelings of inadequacy that I gleaned (rightly or not) from my own lack of piety, faith, and commitment as opposed to what was on display at the local chapel, and you've a ripe recipe for feelings of self-loathing and -insufficiency. The gospel of Jesus Christ is very positive and affirming, very confident in the individual to become better, through the merits of Christ. The Church is very good at (purposefully or not) generating a type of pious competition. And while everyone's experience varies (and I should say that my current ward doesn't have this problem quite as much as previous places I've attended), what I've outlined here pretty well reflects how I feel about the end result of three hours of worship. In the past eighteen months or so--maybe longer? It's hard to tell with COVID fog in the mix--the Church shifted to a two hour schedule, with more focus on learning the gospel at home. I appreciated the change--for what should be obvious reason--though not all of the problems I had with Sundays disappeared. Once the pandemic struck and in-person worship cancelled, I felt significantly better about Sundays than I had in a long time. This doesn't strike me as some sort of cosmic indication about how I should treat Church services--if it's ever safe to worship in person again, I'll be attending once more--as it also tracks with the other areas of my life where additional stresses show up, and how those anxieties receded once the expectation of non-participation became the norm. In other words, not having to be around other people meant that I wasn't as stressed as I had been during the Before Times™. By worshipping at home exclusively, there have been some positive moments. My wife and I are in control of the situation and conversation, and my boys are (I hope) gaining a more intimate understanding of the doctrines we abide by. The down side to this, of course, is that trying to keep a seven-, ten-, and thirteen-year-old interested in the topic without it becoming too diluted for the older one or too complicated for the younger one has been a hit-and-miss proposition. Sometimes things go well. Sometimes they don't. The yearning here is hard to define: I don't really want to go back to the weekly slog of feeling inadequate and acting as though I'm excited to be at church. Yet I know that it's important to create friendships and connections with my neighbors (I know hardly anyone in the neighborhood), something that has been neglected throughout 2020. Maybe this upcoming year will see some sort of breakthrough in my own spiritual journey. Maybe. The Cancer of 2020 This week marks another surgery for Gayle. She needs to get her chemotherapy port "installed", which will require another out-patient surgery, another dose of general anesthesia, another afternoon in a waiting room where I watch the sunlight slide across the carpet to an early sunset. I'm yearning here for a quick recovery and that the process not take as long as last time. I'm sure it won't. The fact that we're at this particular part in our journey against Gayle's breast cancer is hard for me to come to grips with. There are so many things that have made me despise this year, but Gayle's cancer is by far the largest. We've done a fair job of using the holidays as distractions, keeping the need to focus on our annual celebrations as excuse to avoid thinking about the necessary steps. We did that with Thanksgiving; we did it again with Christmas. Once the holidays were over, however, reality came knocking like a debt collector on our door and now we have no choice but to face what's in front of us. Here's what is currently most on my mind about the cancer issue: Like so many people, I've been holding on to the hope the arrival of the vaccine would provide. The light at the end of the metaphorical tunnel is glimmering and could even possibly be sunlight. The conclusion of this pandemic's nightmare feels tantalizingly close. Real life and normality are returning…but not for us. After going through this hellacious year with the entire world suffering with us (to an extent) gave, if nothing else, a sense of solidarity and mutually shared and -endured hardships. But not for us. The hardest trial we have to face right now is stretching before us all the way into the early days of summer. I won't be able to attend my school's graduation without knowing that there's another chemo appointment either just passed or on the horizon. I'm looking down the barrel of another half year of difficulty and stress. It's possible that many people's goodwill toward us was heightened by the pandemic (and I'm grateful for that; the amount of help that people have extended to our family will always be a highlight of a dark year), when we were all having a hard time. But when the vaccine has finally added up to pulling the numbers down, we will still be in survival mode. We will still be taking each day as its own challenge, focused on trying to accomplish the most we can with what we have. We will remain in the crucible while so many others will be able to move into the next stage of rebuilding. It's hard to not feel a bit of acrimony over that. And while I acknowledge the great blessing and privilege I have that this is our grand trial (rather than, say, the manifold miseries that this world could otherwise offer), that doesn't diminish the fact that this is one of the hardest things I will ever have to do…and I'm not even the one who is going through with it. Up until 2020, the worst year of my life was 2007--my oldest's two emergency heart surgeries were some of the hardest things I've ever been through--and this year is the year that keeps on giving. I yearn for this nightmare to be over, to leave us alone, to move on…I yearn to move on myself, but the tendrils of 2020 are perfidious and plentiful, stretching into the future to corrupt us in ways both visible (the divisions of the country will not be miraculously healed because of a change in political parties) and invisible. I'm done with the problems of 2020; the problems, however, aren't done with me. The Sacrifice of 2020 Though it may seem contradictory to what I was saying in the Cancer of 2020, there has been something that has weighing on me for the past five-or-so months. I write this hesitantly, knowing that some who read this may feel called out and/or attacked by what I have to say. I'm speaking in broad terms and generalities, for the most part, though there are no broad terms that don't encompass some individuals. There isn't a way to sugar coat my feelings here, which are raw and angry. If you're not interested in seeing that, feel free to skip ahead to the next topic. Or stop reading, I guess, that's okay, too. At the beginning of the pandemic, back when we were unsure about what to do and what, exactly, would be required of us, there was a sense of communal response, mutual responsibility, and joint reaction to the immense trial in front of us. We were throwing down tracks as the train barreled behind us, responding to contradictory impulses as best we could. Education, economy, and governmental authority all started straining in ways that we didn't know how to handle. School was dismissed and moved online, with poor results happening for the majority of students. Business had to close down for a bit, and when they reopened, lukewarm support from states forced other businesses to stand up for public health, leading to the sorts of viral videos of entitled white folks screaming at Costco employees because of the business' requirement for a mask to enter the premises. The governor's vacillation and unclear explanations about what public health needs were added to the confusion. This is a story we all know. As the summer waned and the pending school year loomed, it became clear to me that the people of my state were never actually interested in the lives of others. The way we drive in Utah is, apparently, the way we view the world: Incidental to us and there for our exclusive use. We, and only we, matter. Everyone else can, well, die a preventable death. The data are pretty clear: Every time there was a call for the community to sacrifice for the betterment of the entire state, it was ignored. Mask mandates in schools were a hot button issue for a while, if you recall, because some people viewed the possibility of a teacher getting sick because of COVID-19 exposure a price they were willing to pay. The speed with which teachers went from being praised during the spring and derided (and, let's be brutally honest here, threatened with death) during the fall truly was breathtaking. We teachers were asked to put it all on the line while every Chad and Karen out there got to lather up their indignation at the idea of wearing a mask to the store. And skipping a holiday? Upset traditions? Oh, well, that was not a sacrifice they were willing to make. This hits me very deeply. I got sick with COVID-19, brought it home, infected three other members of my family, and could have been responsible for the death of my oldest son, because Utah was willing to do piss-all to get the virus under control. Utah has been doing horribly with the COVID response, with cases constantly escalating, ICU beds beyond safe occupancy, and an ever-increasing death count that--considering the sparsity of our population--is mind-numbing. Utah failed me entirely. I was told that if I did the right things--washed hands, cleaned down surfaces, kept my distance, wore a mask--I would be "safe" at my school. I wasn't. I was lied to. Like many (I don't even know if I can say most), I sacrificed a huge amount this summer. Every time I stepped out of my house, I knew I was putting myself and my family at risk. So I minimized those. We skipped every family gathering--from my sister's wedding to my nephew's baptism to each birthday and holiday. Oh, sure, we visited in the backyard with masks on from a safe distance on Mother's Day, but we didn't have a Mother's Day dinner together. We didn't go when I could see my siblings or my kids their cousins. We went, just us, for a quick visit in the backyard. And every time I did something like that, I felt guilty for not being more careful, for not taking "one for the team" and letting go of what I wanted so that the state could be healthy again. But it was a waste. I contracted COVID from a student--one who had been sick the week before but his parents wanted him at school so that they could go to work--and it very nearly led to a coffin and a tombstone. For over three hundred thousand Americans, it actually did lead to the cemetery. Yet the sacrifices of the rest of our country is too much? Those deaths are a price they have to pay in order to disrupt others' lives the least amount possible? Each time I see a video of people being together, or hear about other people's kids going off to play with their friends, I'm reminded that my children have not been in their friends' houses since March. More than an entire year of my kids' childhoods has been stolen from them by this virus. At the outset, I thought that we were "all in this together!" but it's clear by the roving bands of maskless teenagers that I see slouching through the neighborhood, the "sovereign nation" types strutting about the stores without keeping their distance while their mask is below their chins, the lies of parents who Tylenol their kid before sending them off to school with symptoms, and a litany of other stark examples that we are not in this together. We are in this alone. One thing my self-sacrifice taught me quite clearly: It doesn't matter what I do if others don't sacrifice with me. If it were a simple matter of the Dowdle family taking the rules of the pandemic seriously, we wouldn't have COVID in the state. But I have to rely on everyone else to do something for (and I know this is shocking and monstrous to dare dream) someone else. That, it has been made quite transparent to me, is asking too much of the community I live in. My responsibility for keeping my family safe was one that I took very seriously. I'm not saying that I was perfect at the lockdown. I'm human, too, and there were times I caved. Yet each infraction of the rules--we visited Sanpete county during the summer because there were very few cases there, despite knowing that traveling was a risk--made me feel guilty. Nevertheless, I do the most I can as often as I can to try to help put an end to this pandemic. So when I see videos on social media of family gatherings for the holidays, where mixed families have come together to do their annual traditions, with all the fixings, trimmings, and habits unchanged, it hurts me. When I see news clips of college-aged kids going to parties, dancing and singing without masks or social distancing, it hurts me. When I catch a glimpse of a selfie taken during 2020 with two friends who "haven't seen each other in ages!" smiling with their heads close together, it hurts me. Time and again I look out to see the solidarity of action. Instead I see the indifference to human suffering that has made America the world leader in both COVID cases and deaths. We have more than doubled the number of dead that World War I claimed, and it seems as though we're well on our way to have more dead to COVID than we lost in fighting on two fronts during World War II. As other countries demonstrated, it didn't have to be this way. We were told how we could save lives; we just felt that our lives were more important. And you know what hurts the most? Being a part of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints means that, in part, I am supposed to "mourn with those who mourn". Yet so often it's members of the Church that I see who are doing the very things that are causing others to mourn. (The kid who brought COVID to my class? You guessed it: His family that sent him to school sick is LDS.) Yeah. That's the one that really hurts. COVID isn't going away. The coronavirus is potent, potentially mutating, and more of a threat now than it has been before. The vaccine still has question marks about whether or not inoculated people are still capable of transmitting the disease, to say nothing about its safety for non-adult people. My son wants the vaccine, but we don't know when we'll be able to say it's safe for half-hearted folks. The anti-vax and anti-mask movements have much more potency than logic would dictate is possible, and the fact is, we need more people to become vaccinated than have indicated that they would. The need for other people to sacrifice for each other is just as high as ever. But when has that ever meant people will do the right thing? So I yearn for my sacrifices to not feel invalidated by the selfishness of others. I yearn for some sort of solidarity and recognition of the crises we're facing. I yearn for a stopping of the hurt. The End of 2020 The year closes in four days (at the time of this writing). I have written about 480,000 words thus far. I had the chance to teach a Harry Potter class that was magical, generating worthwhile memories for the students involved. I have taught in all sorts of new ways that I had never anticipated, including livestreaming a lesson from my car while stuck in line for my COVID test. I have been rocked by personal tragedies, familial struggles, and societal unrest. I have been reprimanded for speaking up for Black lives and saying that they matter. I have missed more days of work than I have cumulatively missed throughout my entire career. Almost all of my goals ended as failures or were forgotten outright. There is precious little that I will cherish or treasure from this year. While there were moments of gasped-in air, the majority of this year I spent drowning. I yearn for this year to end. As the eleventh month of 2020 begins, I found myself drawn to a map. See, I had this partially formed idea of a story that could be fun to write for NaNoWriMo this year. Unfortunately, I don't know if that's really something I should commit to, what with my wife's recent breast cancer diagnosis. While the treatment looks, at this point, pretty straightforward, I don't know if NaNoWriMo is right (write?) for me this year. If I choose not to participate, it'll be the first time since 2015 that I haven't been a part of the writing challenge. I'm the kind of guy who, when he's experienced a positive thing once, believes he must always experience that positive thing again. This is one of the reasons that I return to It every summer since 2017, why I look forward to October and my teaching of Paradise Lost, and even the fact that I really like commencement ceremonies at the end of the school year. These--and many others--seem to make up the repetitious threads of my life's fabric. Omitting them can be almost painful sometimes.
But if COVID-19 has taught me one thing only, it's that we can let go of the barnacles of tradition. After all, yesterday's Halloween celebration was decidedly less-than-familiar: We barricaded our porch with decorations and pumpkins. My younglings, dressed in cobbled-together costumes, dropped the Halloween candy through a six foot tube from our porch and out the mouth of a pumpkin carved to look like it was puking. A handful of trick-or-treaters showed up; a couple of them laughed at my middle child's costume (dressed as the Orange One from Among Us). I stayed inside where I played zombie video games. By 8:30, the boys were cold, no one had come to the door, and so we settled in to watch Ghostbusters. Pretty tame Halloween, to be honest. This morning, I awoke at what felt the normal time, only to be surprise that it was only 7:30am. It took a bit to realize that the clocks had done their biannual treason and I was again in Mountain Standard Time. I normally don't mind the "fall back" part of clock transition, though this time--Ahaha ha--it did take me by surprise. After filtering into consciousness via social media doomscrolling, I got up and got ready for the day. With the boon of an extra hour, I sat down and started a tentative first chapter of the ghost of a story that's in my mind. May as well try, I figured to myself, since you've the extra time. Two hundred words later, I wasn't about to return to the page. See, I'd set the story in the dimly familiar locale of southern Florida. I served my mission for the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints in Miami back in '02 through '04. I still have a lot of fond memories of those two years--and a lot of bad ones, too, as all important experiences bring with them--and that was the primary motivation for me choosing to have this NaNoWriMo idea take place there. After all, I'd spent a couple of years really traversing the area (albeit behind the wheel of a car) and learning a lot about the Latin community that inhabits it. What better way to add a dash of verisimilitude to my story's stew than with a revisit to my old tracting-grounds? My story involves a middle school student, so my first order of business was to dig around and see what middle- or junior high schools were in my favorite area of Hammocks. Despite knowing, even as a barely-even-twenty-year-old missionary, that I wanted to one day be a teacher, I didn't put a lot of time in learning about the school system of Florida. Sure, I probably asked more questions about school than most missionaries did, but I remember really only learning that they started--and got out of--the school year later than I was used to, and that they didn't like the statewide test. Some things don't change, regardless of where you are. I had some faded memories of noting that there seemed to be more external hallways, as well as a tendency to have multiple floors (which was odd to me: My high school's design is a sprawling single-story affair, though I've come to learn that my experience is hardly the norm). But what else was I missing? I hadn't asked kids what it was like to go to school near the turn of the millennium back when I had the chance. I could maybe ask some of my social media contacts--though I don't know if I'm going to put enough effort into this story to make it worth soaking up someone else's time. At any rate, I started poking around, trying to find schools that I maybe biked past during my final few weeks in the sweltering suburb of The Hammocks. It didn't take long before I found the old Little Caesars Pizza where my roommates and I would frequent--usually once a week--to buy ourselves (each, no less) a Hot-N-Ready pie. Shoving past the fog of years, I used Google Maps' Street View feature to plop myself in the middle of Hammocks Boulevard. Off to one side was the familiar-yet-forgotten archway leading into the Blossoms subdivision. A member family--an older couple, if I remember rightly--lived at the far end of that street (which is pictured at the top of this post). Seeing it gave me a jolt. Not surprising that it was the same place I had passed so many times, but that I had actually found a piece of my memory on my little computer screen. I slid down the digital road for a bit, noting Hammocks Middle School to my right (as I was trying to retrace my decade-and-a-half old bike path home, I immediately headed north). I had never noticed it before; or if I had, I'd forgotten. I tried to find my old apartment; no luck, though I think I may have come close to finding it. (Didn't I use to live just off of SW 154th Ave? If so, what was the lane, if it was indeed on a lane?) The then-familiar turns are now lost, to say nothing of the difference of tapping my way through the streets as opposed to cruising on my bright yellow 15-speed bike, right-pantleg tucked into a sock to keep it from being eaten by the gears, tie flapping in the humid breeze. I hunted down the chapel where I attended services, where I helped baptize the last family on my mission in May of 2004, a couple of weeks before I returned home. I smiled in fond remembrance at seeing the Publix nearby, marked on the Google Map with the white grocery cart on a blue field. Seeing that reminds me of the Miamian habit to abscond from the grocery store with the cart (many of the people lived close enough that they didn't need to drive or they were carless), resulting in occasional graveyards of abandoned wire carts on the side of the road. My companion and I, biking past them, would do an impromptu joust where we would give a nearby shopping cart a swift kick as we cruised past. If we could knock it over, we won. I only won once, though it nearly sent me toppling over, too. (As a 130 pound--maybe 150 counting the bike--elder with a poor grasp of Newton's Third Law of Motion, I didn't realize how solid a wire cart really is; I understand that better now.) I tried to find other familiar landmarks, with the occasional, "Wait, I think I remember that!" mumbled as I zoomed in and out on the map. I cruised to other areas where I'd live, including Hollywood (we're still in Florida, mind you) and stared at the bizarre-yet-endearing semicircle roads that spiral off of some of the traffic circles there. I looked over Bayside, where we missionaries would sometimes spend our preparation days. I gave a fond sigh as I looked at the grid-like (and completely out of sync address system) of Hialeah. Memories of October 2003 came, when the Marlins won the World Series and bedlam brought us out of our apartment. (Missionaries for the Church aren't allowed TVs or to listen to the radio at that time, so while we knew that the World Series was going on, we didn't know any details. I, personally, don't think there's a way for me to care less about baseball, but I was still happy that the entire city, it seemed, was happy.) Cars honked, people shouted, and it sounded almost like we were being invaded. But, no. Just baseball. Other recollections slip in and out of my mind, not only as I fiddled with the map but also as I write this essay. I don't consider my mission often--or, more accurately, I don't dwell on my mission often. Every time I speak Spanish, it comes with it a whiff of humidity and too-sharp sunlight. Whenever my "second state" does something newsworthy (which is now memetic, even), I think about some of those places that I took for granted, took for constant. It's natural to do so. Yet locations are Horcruxes of memories: They're places where parts of our souls are shaved off and stored, personal snapshots in the photo albums of our minds. Revisiting your elementary school, saying goodbye to your grandparents' home, driving past the turn to your first apartment as a married couple…these nostalgic particles drift around, undisturbed until some excuse puts you back in the place where you once were. Not all of these memories are fond ones--the waiting rooms in children hospitals, the intersection where you almost died--but they're part of the wheres of what makes up our whos. Looking over the maps that I used to pore over in the evening while trying to determine where I would go to work the next day reminded me that it was one thing to see the world this way--removed and above, complete and broad--and quite another to live it. Herman Melville's Moby-Dick has a line that has long stood out to me, and I think that he's pointing at what I'm trying to say. "It is not drawn down on any map; true places never are." |
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