Accomplishment Panic

We were heading to one of our weekend adventures recently, when we realized that it was Ethan and Melissa's anniversary. In the four years that they have been married, they have given the world two very beautiful girls that are the light of all our lives. Micki then recited all she had managed to accomplish in the same period. Almost everyone knows that Micki is an incredibly accomplished person. We were driving at the time, or my head might have spun to listen as she listed everything she’s managed to do—with great aplomb—in just four short years.

She published the lion's share of her 5 book series, won several domestic and international awards for those books, got her masters degree, taught for three years (middle school!) She also took on her current role as director of marketing for our community college and just signed a contract to redo her children's chapter book series called Thurston T. Turtle Moves to Hubbleville.

During the same four years—and here's the point of this essay—I really haven't done much at all. I haven't been coasting, or anything, but my list of goals met is pretty sparse. It’s positively dismal compared to Micki’s stellar list. It made me a little self-conscious. Then, I started listing the accomplishments of our kids in that same four years and I rapidly found myself completely outpaced in the accomplishment tournament.

All three lads are well-educated, brilliant, talented, and hilariously funny. They are successful at their respective jobs, and have slowly but doggedly climbed their corporate ladders. Their significant others (one wife, one fiancé and one serious girlfriend) are equally self-possessed, brilliant and hardworking. They're still young, but I shall look on their future endeavors with great interest and pride. Then I thought of our nieces, their families and my brother's kids. All of them are so accomplished. All of them were way further ahead in their lives, than I was at their ages.

I mentioned this and Micki made several concessions for me. She said that I had done a few things over the years, too. Like what, I asked. I restarted this blog, I wrote a dozen or so short stories, I went from walking at the YMCA to consistently running three times a week. These were just the personal ones. She mentioned going from a regular board member of a local non-profit to the chair in that time, also several successes at work.

I thought for a moment as the countryside passed outside our car windows. She wasn't entirely wrong. These were fairly prosaic accomplishments to me. Nothing on par with winning book awards or crossing the stage with a masters degree. My life is pretty quotidian. I'm surrounded by brilliant, talented, hard-working and successful people, a fact which, in itself, makes me extremely proud. I'm not saying that I am jealous. However, my little accomplishments aren't quite on the same level. 

The more I thought and meditated on this over the next few days, the more I wondered what was at the root of my sense of disconnection from accomplishment. Micki had given me a list of things that I had done that showed that I wasn't just a human lump. Why did they feel silly by comparison? At length I came back to that word—comparison—and saw the crack in my thinking. 

It is one thing to compare prices or deck stain colors or the duration of different routes. It is entirely another to compare one's life with others. This has the tendency to make one feel somewhat unhappy. The word kept floating in my head, when I remembered the adage, “Comparison is the thief of joy”. I started to see light in my mind.

The adage is right, to a point. Comparison may also be what inspires or impells a person to work harder, do better, take chances. I realized that I was focusing on the wrong word. It was joy that I needed to think about. In my head, I swung the ship of thought hard from ‘comparison’ to ‘joy’. Here was a destination I knew well. This was a place I had become comfortable in. Joy, for me, meant shifting from thinking my own accomplishments have no gravity or heft, to immersing myself deliciously into a very fulfilling life. 

If I were to list all the things that bring me joy, I would soon dozy the heads of my readers and wear my thumbs down to nubs. That's a good place to be. My wife, my kids, my work (generally), our family, our traditions, they bring me great joy. That joy forms the tectonic plates upon which my life is built. And for that, I am incredibly grateful.

In my mind as I performed this mental exercise, I came down hard on gratitude. I have a lot to be grateful for. The life I have is made up of all of the celebrations, joys, moments of great happiness and the stratum of pride I feel at all times for my loved ones. That is a kind of wealth that exceeds riches. One of my best accomplishments is that I have been here, sober and recovering daily, to experience it, share in it, feel pride and love for the accomplishments of my family. I am a very fortunate man. Understanding that fundamental fact—acknowledging that, accepting it, thrilling in it--has been a treasure I cannot even begin to fathom; a king's ransom of joy for this man.

Subjecting myself to comparative thinking is good. Given the chance, I have excellent examples to emulate in my own journey. And maybe I will write that novel or long-form nonfiction book. That's not a priority now, but it could be in the future and I'm sure not going to draw a line under it yet. Aunt MJ would have—in fact did—insist that I at least try my hand at it. Success is not the point, of course, because just attempting something audacious is really an accomplishment. 

In retrospect, leaving PA and coming to NC and starting a family and taking on all the challenges and joys of being a husband and a father is the best and remains the most rewarding accomplishment of my entire life so far. So, in future, when I am feeling a little short on my own accomplishments by comparison to my talented, brilliant, incredible wife, kid and family, I will remember just how lucky I am to be here and share their glory, but also the decisions that got me here. 

A Man for All Eras

If you asked me who my favorite fictional character is, I would—at first—be hard-pressed to single one out. There are so many. I might cite Samwise Gamgee, Aragorn or Gandalf from Tolkien’s Middle-Earth. I might also mention Lovecraft’s Randolph Carter, or Poe’s C. Auguste Dupin. There’s also Winston Smith (1984) and Guy Montag (Fahrenheit 451). For historical or non-magical characters, I’d have to mention the Finches from To Kill a Mockingbird and Raskolnikov from Crime and Punishment. I also love Myshkin from Dostoevsky’s The Idiot and Alyosha from The Brothers Karamazov. It’s not hard for me to find that this list, upon careful consideration, goes on and on and on. 

However, of all of the fictional characters who have spoken to me, and who seem relevant for our time, there is only one who manages to rise to the occasion in every possible way over and over again. Sherlock Holmes. My readers will know and no doubt will have seen this answer coming, but I think it will surprise you to understand why I think that he is the man we need in our current crisis. The Victorian Era was not so different from our own and though there are obvious dissimilarities, it is also clear that the fictional Holmes was a man of incredible moral and ethical sensibility, as well as being a brilliant thinker and observer. He’s coldly rational in an upturned world; he’s methodical when most rush to judgement; he takes care and is dedicated to the truth not just because it feels good. More than all of it, Holmes represents a potent and unavoidable fact about humanity: our minds (and ourselves) are only at their best when we lean toward rationality and reason, rather than emotion and reaction.

It may sound a bit silly to put a fictional character up as an exemplar for our very real and very difficult modern problems. After all, real dilemmas call for real people to solve, right? Actually, though, there’s a neat loophole here. Most of the people we look up to, the heroes from history, the mythological entities some of us worship, the legends that inspire us, and even the stories that fill us with hope are, essentially stories, just like the fictional tales we read. This isn’t to say that Thomas Jefferson or Ben Franklin weren’t real, but our understanding of them comes from stories, just like with Holmes. Interestingly, many people thought that Sherlock Holmes was real back then, and flooded Doyle letters begging for the detective’s help. It’s even a well-known fact that he used some of Holme’s “art of detection” to solve crimes in his own time. Even if he isn’t real, though, Sherlock Holmes can still teach us some very important and useful ways of dealing with modernity’s stickiest troubles.

"It is a capital mistake to theorize before one has data. Insensibly one begins to twist facts to suit theories, instead of theories to suit facts." — A Scandal in Bohemia

What could be more modern? In a world connected by a giant, convoluted series of tubes all of which floods each one of us with information, it can be hard to filter out all the noise. The world has become a nightmare version of the worst of Holme’s above quote. Everyone—yes, even you and I, dear reader—have been consistently twisting facts to suit theories. This is why so many people believe in nonsense, like flat-earth or anti-vaxx conspiracies. They backed up their beliefs with dubious sources online that support what they want to be true, rather than what is. A confirmed rationalist, Holmes never made a decision based on information that he wanted to be true, but only on what was available, regardless of what would help solve the mystery.

"Data! Data! Data! I can't make bricks without clay." — The Adventure of the Copper Beeches 

Holmes is often portrayed as solving crimes which makes the client (or Dr. Watson) reel with the power of his skill. Even the reader wonders how he can so easily point out so much, with no more than a brief glance. In fact Holmes isn’t just looking, he’s observing. In almost every story, after he demonstrates his skills, Holmes goes back and explains the trick. Time and time again, he shows Watson and others that the most important thing needed to solve a crime or mystery is data. Most of us cannot do the tricks that Holmes did. However his techniques—like close observation and deduction—are quite useful in real life, if we take his advice to Watson and apply them.

"You see, but you do not observe. The distinction is clear." — A Scandal in Bohemia 

Most of us look at our phones a lot. Some of us look at our phones a dangerous amount. These tiny and very useful tools have become extremely addictive. They do this by a careful manipulation of our reward centers, which makes us need the stimulus, but without any real or measurable benefit. It also makes us see things, but not really observe them. Hours of scrolling dulls the mind. If you asked me what the last reel I looked at on Instagram was, I wouldn’t be able to tell you. I know I looked at it, but I have no idea what it was. 

And here is the point: we see, but we no longer observe. This became apparent to me, when I had an issue with a person and I had to call the police. I had just looked at them, but when the dispatch agent asked me to describe them, I couldn’t remember what they looked like. Thank you Social Media. So I have limited myself to no more than nine minutes a day of scrolling, using the inbuilt safety timer. It seems like a very short time, but I’m also balancing that limit with intentional observation exercises, to re-train the cerebellum to not just see, but actually observe and remember.

"There is nothing more deceptive than an obvious fact." — The Boscombe Valley Mystery 

It was right there. I saw it with my own eyes. The news was obvious. The famous writer had died and I was crushed. News spread like wildfire. No more stories, no more excellent books, no more genuinely spine-chilling tales of the macabre. And then, the writer spoke up. The whole thing was a hoax. He wasn’t dead. He wasn’t even ailing. He was fine and we were all victims of a false death claim. I went back, then, feeling foolish and looked at what it was I found so credible. It looked like it had been put together by a three-year old. Given a minute and a little more observation (see above), I would have recognized that it was fake. These days, thanks to the nefarious skills of AI, it is even more difficult to tell when something has been faked. Just ask the thousands of people who had their likenesses used and put online nude and in compromising positions by Musk’s AI platform. It might not be real, but it is dangerous and harmful.

These images and claims appear obvious to us and yet, they are not real. Holmes was right, there is nothing more deceptive. We have to train ourselves, not only to observe, but to be mistrustful of what we’re being shown until we have all the facts. Sometimes just a bit of common sense and patience can help us step free of the swamplands of Internet fakery and into the light of reality and hard facts.

"It has long been an axiom of mine that the little things are infinitely the most important." — A Case of Identity 

This is one of my favorite quotes. Details matter. I’m not a detail-oriented person. Like most visual people, I tend to take in the bigger picture rather than the minutiae. It’s hard for me to focus on the little things. In my work, especially, though, I have had to learn this lesson and make it my own axiom. When we miss the details, we cause ourselves much trouble. It might not seem like a big thing, but when solving a technical issue for library patrons, or getting the data-entry of stats right, or even making sure that we have all items on a meeting agenda, the little things are what makes the difference. It’s how I handle those small things, too, that influences the bosses when they look at my performance. They know I care about my work, and they know I’m here to help, but if I’m sloppy or shoddy or take the work with broad strokes when a fine brush is needed, it will show up in my evaluation. The details matter.

"I consider that a man's brain originally is like a little empty attic, and you have to stock it with such furniture as you choose... It is a mistake to think that that little room has elastic walls." — A Study in Scarlet 

I have long subscribed to Holme’s concept here. What we put in our heads stays in our heads, regardless if it is useful to us or not. Uncle Dan used to say, referring to learning and packing for camping, “It is better to have it and not need it, than need it and not have it.” I have applied this to most of my life, which is why my brain is full of useless trivia, movie quotes and partial song lyrics. In fact, Holmes was right; the mind is a finite resource and if it is chock full of stupid information, like a hoarder’s garage, then there is no room for useful things.

The idea of a “mind mansion” is one that I’m fascinated with. For years, I had trouble remembering my brother’s address. Then, having read a treatise on this concept, I decided to try to apply the principle. I closed my eyes and in a state of semi-meditation, I imagined the address as if it was floating before my eyes. I then took it in my hands (in the mental picture) and set it on a shelf and placed a dancing tomato on top of it, (the tomato was a trick suggested by the writer of the treatise) and to this day, when I scramble to remember Rich’s house number or street name, I just close my eyes and think of the dancing tomato and it jumps to mind. 

I’ve successfully done this with countless other things that it is important that I remember, though my head isn’t full of dancing tomatoes. I think of something silly for each item that needs remembering, which helps as a mnemonic device. Holmes (and apparently Doyle) were far better at this trick. Apparently Doyle used a similar trick when he was studying to be a surgeon, which requires a limber mind. HIlariously, to prove the effectiveness and seriousness of the concept, Watson tells us that Holmes had no idea (and didn’t care) whether the earth rotated around the sun or vice versa. It didn’t matter to him, because it had no effect on his ability to remember the essentials to solve crimes. It wasn’t ignorance, though, it was conservation of space in the finite brain.

"Mediocrity knows nothing higher than itself; but talent instantly recognizes genius." — The Valley of Fear 

I see it all the time. Someone with lots of knowledge, like Neil DeGrasse Tyson or Bill Nye says something in a video or podcast and the comments section becomes a sewer of hatred and vitriol. When Nye agreed to debate Ken Ham more than a decade ago, the famous Biblical Creationist who built a “life-sized” Noah’s arc in Kentucky, it was obvious to anyone who hadn’t drunk Ham’s Kool-Aid who had the upper hand. But Ham and his supporters weren’t likely to believe actual science. Meanwhile, in a slightly less well-known interaction, Nye was called out by another scientist about something he had said, and immediately posted a video correcting his mistake. The mediocre fans of Ham (and Ham himself) couldn’t acknowledge that their dear spokesperson was wrong, but the man he “debated” readily adjusted himself when corrected by an expert in the field. This was Holmes’ (and Doyle’s) way of pointing out what we now call the Dunning-Kruger Effect, but I like how it is put in this quote far better. And it is an important lesson for all of us to learn.

"Education never ends, Watson. It is a series of lessons, with the greatest for the last." — The Red Circle 

The most dangerous mentality is the one that thinks it has learned all it needs to know. Certainty is deadly and in the modern era, this is so common that it is epidemic. Everyone knows all they need to know. Unless it outrages them or keeps them emotionally engaged, few average people want to learn anything new. This is a constant gripe between me and Pop Bare, especially when we talk politics. Everyone he doesn’t like is a communist. I’ve explained it to him a thousand times. I’m sure I’m like this, too. My coworkers or family might wish I updated my thinking sometimes. I sure need to—we all do.

But as Holmes suggests, here, we ought to be constantly learning and building our knowledge base. It is a joy to come home each day and feel like I learned something I never knew before. I try every day to do just that and each mistake I make provides an important lesson. I hope I never stop learning or feel like there’s nothing else to learn. That’s the mentality of a closed system, or a tyranny.

"When you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth." — The Sign of the Four 

One of my favorites, and probably the most well-known quote—certainly the most quoted—I have this one hanging on the wall in my office. It is a principle of economy, rather like Occam’s Razor, that might fit in the same context as other intellectual razors. It is a check against intuition and a means to calibrate the likelihood of an event by bringing the intellect to bear, rather than the feelings. 

The modern era is one of emotion; how something feels to us, especially a gut feeling, seems to have more weight than a coldly mental observation. This might be a natural or knee-jerk reaction at the moment, but it is just that: a reaction. Here Holmes is saying that we can do a bit better. By applying a cold and rational thought process, we may not like the answers, but we can be assured that the emotion is removed and therefore the treacherous landscape that emotion sometimes causes.

It’s not that I expect everyone to feel the way I do about Sherlock Holmes or the Doyle stories. They’re not for everyone. But aside from the stories, few fictional characters have such practically applicable ideas that really can make a positive difference not just as a subject of Queen Victoria, but also in the modern world. Holmes really is a man for all eras. 

Straight Shootin'

I’m not a naturally confrontational person. Aside from (now far rarer) arguments with friends or family, I’m unlike the Bares in this way. Pop Bare and the rest have no fear of saying what they think in public or in private, consequences be damned. I’ve always been a bit more peaceful, but then, as the youngest, I learned that I would get belted if I spoke too openly to anyone. As I’ve gotten older, I’ve gotten a little less patient, especially with the public, with people who ignore the rest of us, behave badly or in any way forget that—to quote George Costanza, “we are living in a society”. It’s been a long journey from skittery to unflinching, but I have had the benefit of many years of on-the-job training. As our society has suffered the ravages of this modern era, people in front-facing jobs have had to learn to adopt an assertive tack or be squashed under a tide of rude entitlement. My own grit has come from rough personal experience, some from direct contact with the masses. Certainly, there are some people who may be more naturally suited to saying what they think. For me, though, it has come at length and with work from a desire to be better at dealing with the sea of nonsense in the public square.

I always admire people who, like the rest of the Bares, despite social norms, taboos, fear of embarrassment or impending loss of friends or work, can just say what they're thinking. It doesn't take them to the top of any social standing. That’s not really the point. The point is to say what’s on one’s mind. It’s about communication, even when it is a bit rough. 

Most generations after mine (Gen X) tend to react very badly to people speaking directly. I get it. It's one thing to be frank and honest. It is entirely another to be hateful or unkind. I think there is an art to saying what needs to be said and being courteous at the same time. However, there comes a time when courtesy fails and all that remains is the need for straight shootin’. Most situations in the home or as a civilian never rise to the level where one needs to be verbally tough. But when one ventures out into the wilds of society, being unafraid to say what needs saying is a powerful tool.

At work, professionalism dictates that we watch our tongues when treating with some individuals in a candid and up front manner. Customer service methods taught to us and reinforced for decades make front-facing workers a little more subservient to the clientele than we normally would be in regular life. There are a few things one just cannot say while clocked in. That is perhaps for the better. No one wants to deal with Linda in HR. When interacting with the public, though, things can become rather unpleasant. Ask any of my coworkers, who can forward you documentation of their countless interactions with difficult people.

I regularly witness or partake in conversations with members of the public where I come away feeling worried for the state of humanity. People seem to have become less able to hear and process information. They certainly have become averse to responsibility, accountability and trustworthiness. Some evidently believe that the way they speak online works just as well in real life. I won't dig into the myriad reasons why this is in this essay. Generally speaking, there are some folks out there who could use a little more straight shootin’. I've had one or more moments in the last year when I’ve had to act in loco magistratus, (standing in for the police), until they arrive. I’m routinely called to deal with people who have forgotten how to act like civilized humans in public. My tolerance for such behavior is waning and it’s bleeding over into my non-work life, too.

I was wandering around at a store recently, and I heard a ruckus in the next aisle. There was a time when I would have moved away or left with celerity in such a situation, but these days, I'm not so skittish. I moved to the aisle where the fuss was, and was quickly aware of a developing situation. A young female worker was being viciously upbraided by an older woman who apparently had nothing better to do than unload a lifetime of bile at the poor girl. When my presence in the aisle didn't change the situation, I cleared my throat and interrupted pointedly and asked the girl if she could help me find something a few aisles away. We left the older woman—call her Mrs. Vinegar—standing there stammering. Then, when we were moving and clear of Mrs. Vinegar, I asked if the girl was okay and told her I would be a witness for her supervisor if she wanted. She told me that Mrs. Vinegar was prone to such outbursts and that this was nothing new. The whole staff was on edge the moment the woman came in.

I had gone back to browsing when I saw a man who looked managerial approaching with the female worker in his wake. He asked me a few questions, and I verified what I had witnessed. He thanked me. Later, as I purchased my items, I saw the manager laying into Mrs. Vinegar. He made it clear over her loud protests that she had one more chance before he involved the constabulary. She scoffed and threatened to take her business elsewhere. He then became my hero when he told her calmly that he very much hoped she would do just that. I felt akin to the manager and his employee. Here were people whose work was inventory and evaluations and schedules, and they were having to deal with a tiny focal point of nastiness in the shape of a senior citizen. 

I’m usually able to muster a little patience when helping some people. There are a handful for whom my patience has run completely out and with whom I have an internal bet with myself about how long it will be until I reach the end of my tether and haul up my slacks and weigh in with verbal cannonfire. Their names are not important. There was a time when I would never say boo to them. It would have been unthinkable for me, like the good manager of the store, to let them know for all to hear how happy we will all be to see the back of them. The idea of confronting anyone made me jumpy, as if to do such a thing would be to put my head on the chopping block, but the times call for a more direct reaction.

We have better years and worse. Since the pandemic, the number of active loonies seems to have eased up a bit, but rather like a hornets nest, it doesn’t take much to stir some people up. I was 34 when I started in this role. I’m now nearly fifty. The intervening years have been one long generally good series of interactions with essentially nice folks. However, as the time passes, the difficult people we have to deal with seem to get more difficult. Just this week, as I write and revise this essay, we’ve had a few interactions that would curl your hair.

Only once thus far, I'm happy to say, have I had to face down someone dangerous but I had backup and the police were already en route. It could have gone very badly indeed. However, this individual had burned out my patience and I was no longer able to fake tolerance or professionalism. I felt no rage in the moment, just an icy chill and an intense calm. I only wanted to get the man out. He was behaving extremely dangerously. I put myself between him and my coworkers and members of the public and quietly told the man to leave again and again until he finally left. I ignored his bravado and didn’t respond to his threats. I didn't put my hands on him. My coworkers came to my aid and together we got him into the hands of the police. It was nothing like on TV. On several occasions, I was later informed by friends in our police department, that he had attacked several of them, and was charged some time later with “going armed to the terror of the public” for threatening a pregnant woman with a pipe. In every way imaginable, I and my coworkers were fortunate. Things might have gone very badly indeed. And remember, we work at a library. Imagine what it is like for all front-facing public service people out there.

I’m not looking for a fight. I haven’t set myself up as some kind of hero, like Marshal Matt Dillon or my police officer friends. I’m just a regular person. Daily, we have to help all kinds of people and we’re well trained and used to the work. I’ve been very lucky that things aren’t as bad at our library as they have gotten in other places, but we’re aware that the likelihood of something happening is no longer less than zero. The realization has caused a natural dampener on my nonsense-o-meter. I am not mean; most people really are fine and I am happy to help them. In any context. Some people, sadly, just really aren't okay, and yet I'm not even averse to helping or working with them to learn the rules. However, some people really are intolerable and I have no ability to reset the meter. Most of the time, I still opt (when I'm there) to work with them, so my coworkers don't have to, but that's the only reason. Out in the world, if I happen to see them, they will be surprised to realize that my professionalism clocks out when I do.

I still haven't mastered the ability to always say what needs (or what I feel ought) to be said. I'm curt, even terse, but I still have to bring home a paycheck. Confrontation is still not my milieu but I'm getting less and less worried about it. Some of my coworkers are less concerned with taking the guff, too. Some have no tolerance at all for the actions and words of rude or hateful people. They are upset and hurt by other people's actions, which burns me up too. Why be rude? Why be hateful? But, maybe like Mrs. Vinegar, they have no other way to manage their unhappiness. It may be sad, but that doesn’t justify it.

For every wonderful, thoughtful, genuine, kind, delightful, friendly, respectful, caring, decent and lovely person (and these remain the majority) there are those who just cannot manage even a modicum of politeness. It is part of the job to treat everyone equally. I accept their nonsense only because I have to to keep my job, but that acceptance comes with a very limited tolerance. I will only take so much. 

More than just the workplace drama, though, I worry for society. Regular jobs like ours have evolved to require dealing with mental illness, drug addiction and use and just very angry people with no positive outlet for their misery. Assertiveness, confidence and courage in confrontation ought not be necessary for the job description, but sadly, more and more, they are. The only thing that will put such nonsense to a final, total end is straight-shootin’. I'm working to get better at it. I'm hoping that I'm modeling the right way to do it for my coworkers. It isn't easy. 

It sometimes feels like the Wild West out there. Things aren't quite that bad, but some days, we go home feeling like we spent the day dealing with bad guys. Our job, like the heroes of the many westerns from TV and cinema, is to not lose sight of how to not take nonsense from people and remain the good guys and not be contaminated by the negativity, anger and rudeness of some of our fellows. And when the time requires it, I’m working hard to be the kind of guy who is willing to do some straight shootin’.

Code Brown

The planet is overflowing with fecal matter. There’s not enough smell-good spray in the universe to cover it up. As one of the larger dominant species on Earth, we produce a lot of poop. It's not a savory subject, but it is one worth considering. We are one serious engineering catastrophe away from being reverted to a very nasty period in history when being inundated with defecation was a way of life.

You may be asking whether I really want to use an entire essay to talk about number twos, and the answer is, to quote the popular and adorable children's book title: “Everybody Poops”. It happens. Whether or not we want to face it (ahem), sitting on the crapper is one of life's most inevitable things, right up there with death and taxes (both of which can cause one's bowels to release). Nothing we do can prevent poop. Not the most potent willpower, not the most intense abdominal strength can prevent the inevitable. As my Uncle Dan used to say, “It’s something that not even Superman can hold back.” 

Our entire lives are, in one way or another, ordered around going to the bathroom. We all (almost) have bathrooms in our homes, but so do offices, churches, restaurants, and there are (in some states) rest stops with the appropriate accommodations for relieving one’s bowels every so many miles along interstates. 

While preparing for a colonoscopy a few summers ago, I was astounded to discover just how full of shit we all really are. It took all of 36 hours for me to clear my intestines of all solid waste, and it was one of the most unpleasant experiences of my life in which I partook voluntarily for the health of the tubes that produce and move waste through my body to its eventual release into a receptacle and at length into an exponentially longer and convoluted set of larger pipes and drains run by our town. Contrary to popular belief, the average set of adult small intestines is only about 22 to 25 feet long, the large intestines about 5 feet. There's still a lot of flex tubing in the tummy area, but it takes that much to turn our food into absorbed nutrients and remove the unused portion along with excess water, dead cells and bacteria from our corporeal forms.

Most of us (about 50%) use the bathroom to remove solid waste about once a day. Depending on diet and exercise, of course. Some (about 28%) use the bathroom twice a day, again depending on diet. Not only are we what we eat, but we are also what we poop. The truth is, humans, whatever else we have done to change the planet for the better, poop a lot, and it is having an effect, whether we want to talk about it or not. Dealing with poop is a $9.5 billion-a-year industry.

Americans have been thinking about their backsides a lot lately. A very unpleasant parasite called cyclospora has got everyone shunning fresh lettuce, berries, and cilantro. The bug, if ingested, can cause “explosive, watery diarrhea” that lasts for several days to a few weeks and, without proper medical attention, can be lethally dehydrating. Most frightening of all is that the parasite takes time to gestate in the system, up to two weeks in some cases, meaning even people who haven’t eaten anything contaminated in the last few weeks can still be carrying the bug and not yet experience the symptoms. Horrifying as this sounds and has been for the over 18,000 people who have gotten the parasite, this particular bug might have been a far worse and more common (as well as deadly) experience even just a century ago, especially in the more sparsely populated areas of the world. Healthcare, clean water, produce-handling standards and access to appropriate curative medicines have reduced such outbreaks, as well as education about how washing fruit and veg (and hinies and hands) have helped immensely. The sad fact is we are still susceptible, no matter how many safety precautions are put in place to protect us. It is worse in poor or rural places and in countries where sanitation standards are still pretty much in the Dark Ages.

Micki had to deal with an arresting bout of something horrible on her trip to Ecuador, a decade ago. She was as careful as could be, but still fell afoul of the infamously unclean water that can occur. It was the same for a former teacher of mine, who had the honor to travel to China for a teaching gig and wound up with a serious and hard-to-eradicate intestinal bug that hung with him for months. Yes, we all poop, but regular, healthy pooping is the preferred outcome of any trip to the potty but it is intensely and still fairly rare except in industrialized nations. 

I reflected on all of this, one night recently, as the house lay quiet, and I was experiencing my own eye-popping bout of intestinal distress. I woke with severe nausea and cramps in my pelvic region. I spent some time groaning and gasping through what imitated the description of the CDC website symptoms of cyclospora mentioned above. By midnight, I was worried, by 2 a.m., I was deeply concerned. By 4, I was messaging my doctor to beg her to put in a prescription for the antibiotic that kills the bug. By 8 the following morning, I was bedraggled, dehydrated, unpleasantly rung out and very tender in the nether regions. Thank the gods for Pepto Bysmol.

Later that morning, I awoke from a dismal stupor to my buzzing phone. The nurse had put in an order for me to go to the outpatient facility to leave a stool sample. I would have laughed out loud but for fear of having an accident. The mechanics of trying to catch the required substance to get a culture seemed like something out of the scatological comedies of John Waters. No thank you, I mumbled as I took more of the pink stuff and laid back down.

As it turns out, I was being a little hypochondriacal in the wee hours but in my dessicated state, it's not surprising I got panicky. Sometimes news from the world leaks in and let's face it, I wasn't at my best. I don't want to reach for melodrama, but, other than a night of post-binge vomiting followed by a roaring hangover, there have been few times that I seriously wondered if I was staring down the barrel of a very disgusting demise.

I wouldn't be the first. About 1.2 million Americans died of complications due to diarrhea as recently as 2021, the most recent complete data we have on the subject. Over 400,000 of those were infants. The World Health Organization blames poor water and sanitation, and one might expect that to be elsewhere in the world, especially in the places that Sally Struthers shows up asking you to contribute a cup of coffee's worth of help. Actually, a lot of people right here at home are incredibly susceptible, especially way out in the “boonies”, poor communities and especially in homeless camps. The latter has been a real problem recently, as such encampments have been a fixture of almost every town in America. Similarly, contaminated wells in western NC, in the wake of Hurricane Helene jammed hospitals with intakes related to parasites and bacterial infections of the lower digestive tracts. Our Ethan had to dump copious amounts of cleansing chlorine into his own well, thereafter as a precaution. Even so, he still uses a series of redundant but mind-easing filtering solutions.

Diarrhea was, until about 1900, one of the three top killers of humanity, alongside tuberculosis and pneumonia. Clean water, sanitation and working sewer systems provided some relief. In the age of vaccines, a particular kind of infant-susceptible intestinal bug was nearly eradicated until the most recent administration started putting out false information that the vaccine caused intellectual delays. Credulous parents and anti-vaxxers went on a tirade about the drug and many more infants died as a result. None of the claims made were based on actual (and very available) empirical data. But then the man making the claims had dead worms in his cerebellum, likely caused by drinking unclean water while in Africa. Go figure.

Generally, Americans have faced a fairly robust reversal in sanitary water, not just from storms but from severe cuts to infrastructure, which puts into context not only how important such funding is, but also, just how close we are to old-world horrors. Without saying that this was the direct intent, there is a Hobbesian feeling to it all. People who are forced into dangerous water situations, whether by lack of access to clean water, safe disposal of waste, or by dismantling of education and tax-funded resources, have a way harder time thinking critically about how to fix their world.

Hobbes said, in his masterpiece Leviathan, that such a condition pits human against human and human against the natural world. The implication is fairly straightforward: it doesn't take much to tip things back to an older and more dangerous time.

At any rate, we tend to take all of this for granted. With each successful flush, I was brought back to just a few months ago, when our household plumbing was compromised by a root system that blocked the drain line from our en-suite bathroom.

Our house is nearly ninety years old and is, in some parts, a series of four additions onto the original house (not all made by us). One of the earlier renovations turned the former garage into a bedroom with an en-suite. The plumbing was tied into the house's larger drain system, and it was done with oil-soaked cardboard tubing called Orangeburg pipe. This ridiculously fragile system is easily cracked and shatters like a terracotta plate. It took three months, some serious outdoor demolition and an obscene amount of money to get it fixed with a functional outdoor cleanout to a state far better than we purchased, but for that time, we had to use a half bath that we wittily call The Chocolate Bathroom, not because of what's done in there, but because of the color it was painted when we bought it. We've since decorated it with Hershey's memorabilia. We're a funny family.

There's nothing funny about drain plumbing. I did a little math to make the point. The average adult poops two-to-three times per day. Assuming a family of four grown-ups, that's 8-to-12 poops a day per household, assuming everyone's tummies are functioning more or less normally. On our street, from one intersection to the next, there are ten houses. That's 80 to 120 poops per day, just from a very small section of our street. There are 27,990 residents of our small town. Assuming each one poops about 3 times per day, that's just shy of 100,000 flushes, not including guests in town, people with intestinal issues, and kids, who poop a lot more than adults. The burden of waste on the city's aging infrastructure is a topic for another essay, but suffice it to say, that's a LOT of crap. Larger towns have larger issues, and big cities are terrifyingly huge poop bombs just waiting to destroy communities downstream.

This happened in Asheboro, recently, when a very high concentration of a potent chemical was not completely filtered out by an aging and strained system, affecting the Deep River and communities and water systems that depend on the same reservoirs. Our system is being monitored and updated, but such a failure is fairly critical.

Most sanitation systems are quite old, and understaffed, as well as susceptible to threats like cyber attacks, upstream inundations of water, excess storm runoff, chemical spills and, like from Helene, massive storms. Under regular operational standards and proper upkeep, most systems can handle daily amounts. But as the weather becomes more chaotic and equipment more expensive and difficult to acquire, many US towns are on borrowed time.

The good news is that, from 1900 on, continually improving systems for dealing with sewage and pollution have been developed and are available. The real question is whether or not they are affordable. A small town like Asheboro has limited funds and many needed projects to attend to. Most of us want things we can see, like parking or building remodeling, to be managed first, because we all take for granted that our next flush will be as successful as the last thousand.

The reality is, it takes everyone informing themselves, not just of the dangerous parasites that can cause serious problems, like cyclospora, but also, an awareness that each person's tax bill helps to keep things—for lack of a better term--regular.

In the meantime, I'm avoiding salads, berries, fresh parsley and cilantro, and washing my hands like a fiend. It turns out my illness came, not from contaminated veggies or berries, but from failure to clean my water bottle regularly and also the water tube on our fridge. The combo was intensely disruptive to my sleep and my naturally sleek digestive system. I won't soon forget the inherently important lesson. And I will continue to send thoughts to those who are suffering with digestive issues: I hope they feel better soon. I cannot think of a much worse way to feel.

The Entropy of All Things

I once wrote an essay about the heat death of the universe. Based on the Second Law of Thermodynamics, it basically says that all the moving things in the universe will eventually lose steam and flop over. It was a gloomy topic to research. A good illustration is if you set a top spinning on the table, eventually the top will wobble and stop. Hot tea cools down. Cold tea warms up. Energy runs out. Our sun will slowly expand as it runs out of the elements necessary to keep up fission; it will generate less heat, but grow beyond its current girth to a red giant, enveloping all of the inner-system planets. Then, when its fuel finally hits the big “E”, it will collapse on itself into a white dwarf, and maybe, some way far down into the future, it will further implode into a black hole, sucking in all light and whatever remains of our former home into an inescapable void of gravitational destruction. Of course, to quote Bill Bryson in another context, we will be “considerably past caring”.

As I say, gloomy. But the great cosmic petering-out is many millions of years off, and we can console ourselves in the meantime by the apparent lack of evidence for cosmic entropy in our daily lives, right? After all, the sun ‘rose’ this morning and it will ‘set’ later. All is well, because all appears normal. 

At least, that's what 6’3” Dave might have said. Unfortunately, the Dave writing this essay, is 6' 2 and 7/8”. I used to be 6’3”. I've shrunk a bit recently. Why? Well, the Organic Mechanic says it is age and gravity. She says my vertebral discs aren't as youthfully springy as they once were. Almost fifty years of walking upright under the 1G gravity pull and atmospheric pressure of our homeworld, combined with that aforementioned loss of supple springiness in the back region, has compressed my spine the tiniest bit so far. The Organic says there will be more to come. 

This decline from an orderly system (my perfect springy spine) to a disorderly one, is just one more example of entropy. It’s not just my back, either and it’s not just me. It is happening to all of us, every day, all the time and it is a perfect example of the Second Law of Thermodynamics: all systems lose energy over time and come to disorder.

We have a picture of the two of us, Micki and me, sitting at the beach at dusk, waiting for fireworks. My beard is without even a sprinkle of frost. Micki hasn't changed—she fortunately has strong Sicilian genes—but I have nary a crow's foot or crease in the picture. I was probably not thinning so much on top back then either. It was the long-lost age of 2018. I was 41. Compare it to a picture of me from just last Spring. I have aged more than a decade in less than a decade. Sure, some of it is genetics, but it is really just entropy. 

Other than for jellyfish and the naked mole rat, aging is a universal and extremely odd thing. No one is really sure exactly why it happens. They know what happens as we age, of course, but not why the aging factors, sometimes called senescence, turn on. When it does, though, cell death becomes more frequent, skin loses tone, muscles atrophy more quickly, the long, lean form of the body thickens and shortens, knots from arthritis appear at the knuckles and other tender joints, our eyes cloud over, and of course, my favorite, hair turns grey, loses its luster, thickness and color and then turns loose. 

Some of the consequences of aging come from star damage. The sun’s rays are essential for life and provide a lot of Vitamin D for us, but those same rays also damage our eyes and skin over time. Compared to that lovely pic of us at the beach, I look a lot like I’ve spent the last several years living out in direct sun all day every day in every season. Pop Bare saw a more recent picture of me and said that I looked “weather-beaten”. It’s funny, because I have an inside job.

Back before AI took over generating pictures by scraping the internet, I asked a popular (at that time) application what I would look like when I was old. I shared a pic of myself sitting at my work desk. The result was me, but looking more like Arnold Schwarzenegger than myself. Still, the result of the aging was not completely inaccurate. That was more than a decade ago, now, I think and the creases and lines suggested by the app are turning out to be pretty accurate.

Speaking universally, we all age. Some of us more quickly than others. Some seem to age more brutally than others, too. I helped someone recently and in the course of helping them they told me their age. It was a year off from our Elliott, but this person looked for all the world like they were older than me. I had a second startling moment a few weeks ago, when I got an invitation from a High School classmate for a [redacted] year reunion. It has been a while and of course, I'm not really in denial about it. Obviously, I opted out quickly. I worked hard for 4 years to clear my obligation to the state education requirements and though I made some very close friends during that time, we few, we happy few, we band of graduates do not need a reunion on that scale. At any rate, looking at some of the pictures of my former “peers” I was horrified to see that some of them (of an age with me give or take a year) actually looked weather beaten. I guess I should have sent one of them to Pop Bare.

By those lights, I guess, I have been quite lucky. I could look like an extremely elderly man while only in my (very) late forties like some of my former school mates. Still, eventually, I will succumb to a countenance that looks more like that than the man in that beach picture. I'm not so vain that I cannot bear to see the Bare face reach its wrinkliest stage. Rather, my dread of entropy is a more cerebral problem to consider and by that, I mean literally my brain.

After a dramatic fall at age 95, our Nana had to be moved to a senior facility. After that, her once sharp mind atrophied. It was devastating. Of course, by then, too, she had lost her ability to walk or to see because of severe macular degeneration, so she just pulled herself around in her wheelchair, and sang hymns with her friends. The idea of slowly but surely losing oneself in a labyrinth of dementia is horrifying. It has motivated me to keep the brain as limber as the physical form.

The other end of the same spectrum is no less terrifying. My dear Aunt MJ was sharp as a razor her whole life—in many ways the smartest and best person for family memories, book recommendations and recipes on the Bare side—but for her rebelling physical form. Lung cancer, horrible arthritis in her back, and a terrible sickness near the end, reduced her piteously. She never lost her wit or sharp memory, but she confided that the pain was not worth it.

So far, now entering the last half of his time as octogenarian, Pop Bare is still sharp, too. He has the occasional problem with what he calls “CRS”, an ailment I also struggle with daily, but his doesn't rise to the level of dementia. He seems fit and takes good care of himself, and can talk for ages about all kinds of things, but especially automobiles and his favorite show about treasure hunters digging on Oak Island. Since he retired from all his jobs, at 80, he’s less physically fit than ever before, but is still hale and hardy by comparison to many other people I know, his own age. That may mean that, other than my weather-worn face, I might have a chance at longevity, but entropy is still coming for all of us.

Of course, entropy, while a universal law of physics, can be influenced. Compared to our ancestors, life expectancy has grown quite a bit since industrialization. It varies by country, region (and in the South, by county and town, judging by what I’ve seen) but people are living longer, healthier lives. Even just in my short few decades here, the term “old people” has changed. Anyone at the base level of the AARP range when I was a kid was “old”, looked old, dressed old, acted old. Today, a man or woman can be seventy and be the fittest they have ever been in their lives, running, exercising, eating right and getting plenty of rest. Proof, perhaps, that we can slow the aging process, if not stop it altogether.

Thankfully, entropy is usually extremely slow. The sun won't burn out for millions, possibly billions of years. Humankind, if we can survive the next few generations and the incalculable damage done to our earth by greed, lust and brutal disrespect for the web of nature, will have a shorter time than that. If dinosaurs could talk, they would mention the Chicxulub Asteroid and the cataclysm that brought the Cretaceous period to a crashing halt.

There have been five such cataclysmic chapter endings thus far (that we know of) on our meager backwater planet. Survival—human or any other kind—is not guaranteed. That puts a slightly different spin on the problems of entropy I mentioned before. If true, then the whole human race may need to find another home or space station to dwell on.

This brings another problem to the forefront. Humans are short-lived (sorry, Methusela). Our minds, memories, and capacity for knowledge are necessarily limited. If we were to live to be 900 or more, with—like Moses—our “eye undimmed and natural force unabated”—our minds would definitely not be able to handle the strain. To live that long would be flatly impossible.

A good friend of mine is a transhumanist. He feels that, very soon now, human consciousness will be able to be uploaded into the Internet, or into mind-like programs that will go into humanoid or android bodies, allowing us to transcend the natural barriers of our physical forms. I leave this to him, though I have read some believable theories that show that a human mind will not be able to stand the transformation. The emotional stress of not being one with the body, or the devastating need to rest or die without reprieve would eventually cause a kind of cascading failure. It would be like organ rejection, but on a cybernetic and cerebral scale we cannot anticipate.

How then do we bring ourselves to the furthest reaches of the galaxy to find that special and rare new homeworld? The distances of our solar system, let alone our galaxy, even at incredible speeds, wouldn't have us arriving within three or five generations, meaning that humans would have to learn to dwell on space arcs, traveling the bleak and dangerous cosmic oceans, until we found a new home. Even there, we would not escape aging and entropy. 

This is not to say that such hopes are unreasonable, but that they present significant barriers to immediate solutions. The strange and terrifying fact is, we will have the same problems of entropy on those other worlds. If the gravity on Earth 2 is higher than our Earth, I will presumably shrink even faster. The sun that charges the mechanisms of life on that hunk of rock, might be even closer to its own fuel crisis. There is genuinely no telling. The only good news is that, being on a space ship or space station (as in the ISS) are both good for counteracting entropy (time dilation means that people onboard age just a few seconds slower than those on the planet surface) and the micro-gravity helps to stretch one’s back to its regular length.

These are perhaps problems for the next generations, but mine is most assuredly an earth-bound age group, focused on the wear and tear of earth-bound living, aging, facing the slow and interminable slowing down of ourselves, first, and then, eventually, all things. In the immediate future, therefore, we must face our own fragile mortal frames, the disreputable reliability of our tiny, primitive brains, and the potent, unavoidable reality that our solar system is a top, slowly but inexorably losing steam. We may still destroy the earth with war or famine or pestilence, long before the planet ever dies. All that makes the grey in my beard, the thin spot on my head and the crow's feet by my eyes seem pretty tame by comparison, but I can at least take some hope in the fact that naked mole rats and some jellyfish will still be here. 

Notes to a Ghost

I didn’t believe in ghosts. Despite the wondrous literary usefulness of spectres and shades, as they were called in Victorian literature, they aren’t a very appetizing reality. Great for motivating Hamlet when his father’s ghost appears, and motivating when Jacob Marley returns for Scrooge's “reclamation”. In all other ways, the idea of the recently deceased still wandering around is too distasteful to be taken or considered literally. And yet, there are examples of ghosts in the real world that feel too real. People who have lost loved ones claim they sometimes hear them speaking. I had a friend who lost a dog and he kept hearing phantom barks in his backyard at night. I would chalk these and other examples up to the horrid damage that loss does to the human mind, but they are no less real to those who experience them. For all that I may doubt the experiences of others, I have a kind of ghost following me, even as I write this. 

My friend Wade died in December. It was a terrible shock and those of us who knew and loved him reeled with the suddenness of it. Wade had become a dear friend that I got used to texting, calling, speaking with and sharing memes with in the short time we knew one another. He would send things to me, I to him, we often hung out or went to dinner after our meetings. I got used to him being around. I took his presence, and his friendship for granted, as we all do with the people we care about. His words of wisdom, his refusal to judge, his intensely authentic personality made him that rarest of things: a dear friend.

Friendship has never come easy to me. I'm fine making acquaintances, and I can talk to just about anyone in a social setting. Getting to a point of closeness is difficult for me because I’m a very private person. Also, I don't have the bandwidth for it. I give a lot of myself to my family. The relationships I have with Micki, the boys, their significant partners, our grandkids, our nieces and their families, Pop Bare and my brother's family take precedence over all other people. Ask my coworkers, they will tell you that although I hold most of them in high esteem and respect, there are only a few I consider true friends. I keep to myself a lot and it takes me a long time to open up to new people. This is a normal tendency among Scandinavian and other Northern European people, and I take it as evidence that my ancestry lies in those places. I just don’t open up to people easily.

It was like this with Wade. I liked him at first and we gradually got to know each other, but I kept him at more than arm's length for a long time. It wasn't anything about him really. Yes, there were aspects of Wade—his humor, his lifestyle, some of his opinions—that were offputting, even offensive sometimes. He had an irritating habit of telling me what kind of person he was, or funny things he said to other people. I later gleaned that this tendency was born from his belief that he did not have his father's approval, and desperately wanted to be seen as a person of worth. I brought my own foibles and weirdness to our still-growing friendship too. However, within a few years, Wade proved himself to be not only a good person to talk about our mutual fondness for reading or Batman comics, movies and music, he also proved himself to be dependable when I needed him. I tried to be the same for him and that’s when the friendship cemented.

The realm of friendship between males is an odd place. Guys are much more likely to be straightforward with one another and eschew drama. Sometimes, too, we’re better at accepting people for who they are and not worrying about the other things. I have one hard and fast rule about being friends with someone: once you’ve gained my hardwon trust, you have it until you don’t. I’m not sure if this is how it is for everyone, but trust is not easily gained from me but once you have it, you’re in for as long as you keep it. I accepted him, as he accepted me and because I valued his friendship, I honored him as often as I could, reminding him of how grateful I was that we became friends. When he would occasionally call me, I always tried to empathize and encourage him. His was not always the best home life and he needed a lot of reminding that he was a good person. When I would call him, struggling or frustrated, usually about work, he would say, “I’m sorry, buddy. That sucks. You’re a good man and a good friend. It will be okay.” 

It was in the interim, when things were fine, or status quo, that I most depended on him, though. We kept up an ongoing, meandering conversation, seamlessly picking it up, no matter how long we’d not been in contact. It was this that provided the most comfort for me. Though I never shared much about the family or personal issues with him (it’s not my style), it was through our texting and phone calls that he demonstrated our friendship to me most. It turned out to be the place where I felt his absence most keenly too.

Wade passed in December, but it was a while before it became real to me. He constantly rose to my mind, especially when things were quiet. Questions about how he died, or concerns and doubts about whether I could have done anything to prevent it flooded my mind. Discussions that we had right before we lost him eased some of the pain, because I had been able to say how much he meant to me, but it was a long time—months, really—before his absence began to take hold as an immovable fact.

Then, sometime in May, as I was lazily scrolling through a newsfeed, I saw an article about the coming sequel of the Batman movie we had gone to see together and both liked. Back then we’d chatted about who we thought the sequel’s rogue would be, but Wade departed before that information ever came to light. So it was that I queued up a text to him with a shared link to tell him that his guess had been, in part, correct. As my thumb hovered over the send button, reality struck me like the afternoon train, a few inches above the belt buckle: no one was at the other end of that text. The months of grieving, healing, trying to get used to him being gone all came back like an avalanche. As unbidden tears streamed from my eyes, I told Micki what had happened. It was the emotional equivalent of restubbing a recently stubbed toe that was just starting to feel better. Then it happened again. A little while later, while enjoying some solitude on a Monday morning, I saw an ad for a coming show and started to text Wade. Again, I came up short, stung and stunned.

I might, under other circumstances, actually go through with sending the text. His phone, his email, his personal belongings were managed, no doubt, by his family. But I had a sick feeling of one of them turning on his phone, only to see recent texts from me. It would give them an unnecessary and thoughtless pang, too. I thought better of it. So I did something slightly strange, but that has really helped. I created a ghost file. When I think of something I want to say, or a joke to share or just to drop a line in a knee-jerk, habitual way, I open this file and write what I was going to say there. Sometimes I share a link, other times, I just say what I’m feeling and thinking, much as our correspondence was before. Mostly, it is to tap clear, concise words to him about how much we all miss him and how stupid and arbitrary his death was. At first, I felt odd, slightly morbid. I love gallows humor and appreciate—as did Wade—a good joke about death, but then a surprising thing happened.

Rather than running up against the cupboard corner with an already sore toe (emotionally speaking) the file has allowed the feelings to process through the words that I wouldn’t be able to share in the former ways. I can shoot him a short text, as I would have done, and it eases the pain of the sudden remembering. The one obvious thing is that he never responds, but then, it would be truly weird if he did. In fact, it would be more than unsettling.

There have been a few times over the last month or so when I’ve begun to feel that I’m moving past the worst of the grief. I’m pretty good at grieving, having had to learn how to do it the hard way. This is an odd statement, because, who is actually good at grieving? What I mean to say is that I try to pay attention to how I’m feeling and accept the wolf when it shows up and sit with it until it goes. Those visits have become less frequent and I’m happy to say that they are no longer as painful. Where once there was hurt, there is now gratitude and joy at the memories. I’m not sure how much longer I’ll write to my friend’s ghost. It is a solution only for now. I don’t want to let the act become a final thread that I cannot let go of and let him have peace.

All-in-all, we were only friends for about eight years. I met him in the spring of 2018 when he came back to our meetings. We didn’t start getting close for another few years, but by the time we lost him, just before Christmas, Wade was one of the most valued people in my life, outside the family and very old friends. I let him in and I’m grateful I got to know him. I’m not sure if I’ll ever be good at making friends, or if I’ll ever have a friend like Wade again. What I am sure of is that I’m deeply grateful for the chance to have been called his friend. 

Though I miss him and feel his absence keenly, sometimes, I will carry the memory of him close. Now and then, when I think of something I want to share with him, I’ll shoot his ghost a little note. If death isn’t the end (I respectfully think that it is) I hope he knows I’m thinking of him fondly, remembering who he was and doing my part—for now—to keep up my end of our ongoing conversation. He’s not a ghost in the traditional, literary sense, but it does mean he’s still around, at least in thought.

Listening to the Sky Talk

At the summer solstice in June, I noted something that probably seems depressing to think about: half our solar year is done, already. The calendar year, which turns on a slightly different fulcrum than the solar year, marks the midway point of summer on or around July 4th. It doesn't matter really, but then, the calendar year is full and sometimes fraught with its own list of challenges, appointments, celebrations, holidays, deadlines, cumbersome hills and v-shaped ravines, whereas the solar year just plugs along without many bells or whistles. 

The calendar year dominates all our lives. We spend our time thinking about what this Monday meeting will add to our to-do list, or where we will spend this long weekend, or when to schedule an appointment. All the rest of our time is spent staring at our phones or tablets or TVs. We seldom look up. Even when the sky performs its most breathtaking artistic flourishes, we rarely have a chance, or take time to notice. This is a shame, because the solar calendar surpasses the former in beauty, splendor and the simple reality that we are part of this cosmic machinery of whirling planets and dust and gas.

I've said before how I tend to notice changes in the light as the year moves through its orbit. This comes from early tutelage from Uncle Dan, who taught me that observing the sky could provide a rich reward and keep one safe. The only time I don't glance at the sky is when I'm sleeping, but even then, I have been known to step out and look up during my nightly wanderings, just to see which constellations are over us, or where the moon is in its fullness and arc.

The calendar year is only loosely based on anything naturally occurring. It barely pays heed to the seasons, except as a chance to celebrate its commercialized holidays. Those holidays, the vacations, the seasonal borders, are all founded on somewhat arbitrarily established long weekends put in place by humans, not nature. If humanity were to vanish completely in some cataclysmic event that didn't destroy the earth or disrupt its orbit, the solstices, equinoxes and seasonal changes would still occur even with no one here to see them. Meanwhile, Labor Day, Memorial Day, Christmas, Independence Day, Halloween and Easter would all go away forever.

Fascinating as it might be for a budding horror novelist to consider, it isn't necessary to eradicate humanity to focus more on the celestial year and its beats and measures. Actually, doing so not only enhances the annual experience, but with some time and practice, it can become a habit.

This isn't some buzzword-rich influencer slop as found in wellness culture on social media. There's no astrology, no fad caveman “natural” diet, no new age self-help list of rules. It isn't about gaining some internal peace or balance in a chaotic world. There's nothing performative about it. It is just about looking up and observing.

Back when I was regularly walking to work, especially on long winter evenings, I liked to look up and see where the Orion constellation appeared to be positioned overhead. I also enjoyed tracking the moon's phases, or watching the signs of the shift of light as the sun appeared to move from the true west, sliding along the horizon daily until it appeared almost due south in the winter. 

These shifts are what influence the changes apparent in the natural world, too. You may have noticed how the deep golden light of June becomes watery, pale and murky, and the hazy days of July and August rise and fall through mists. Then, there is a flash of gold again as the sky sheds its humidity, and sweeps to deep, hard azure before fading again to silver-white as winter steps on the stage. All of this is enhanced by the trees growing from pale green to deep, rich verdency and then burning gold, orange, red and purple before falling to earth.

One has to keep one eye on the sky to watch this show in four acts. The beauty of it is enough of an incentive, but there are other benefits to paying attention that may not be immediately obvious. More than what I’ve mentioned above, it pays to stay alert because paying attention is a skill that we are losing in the modern era. The regular culprits apply. We spend a lot of time (one might say an inordinate amount) looking at our screens. We spend more time indoors than previous generations. We’ve become inured to the world around us, the web of nature and our place in it.

Uncle Dan’s habit was to always look up, gauge the weather, see what, as he put it, the sky has to say. Not only the weather (which we might think is obvious) but also our surroundings. It is only recently that humanity has turned its back on the natural world’s messages. How can we see the vast, complex interplay of life that surrounds us if we won’t look up to see it? It is largely because most of our holidays no longer gel with the solar year, and though we are peripherally aware of the seasons and light, we almost never stop to experience it.

Most calendar year holidays didn’t come about until the 19th Century. President U.S. Grant established four major holidays for federal workers (in the District of Columbia only, at first) around 1870. Memorial Day (formerly Decoration Day) and Labor Day came later. One forgets how recent most of the things we take for granted really are. 

Of course, I’m not against the regular holidays. I enjoy a good calendar year celebration as well as the next guy. Well, mostly. Recently, I’ve been celebrating the 12 Days of Yule, at least in spirit for several years. We still do Christmas, of course, but it starts earlier and lasts longer when you apply Yule to it. Yule is based on the solstice, not some arbitrary church feast or federal holiday. 

In the north of Europe, the summer solstice is called Midsummer. Of course the climate probably fits this title better, but to me, it makes perfect sense. June 21st is the midway point between the vernal and autumnal equinoxes, marking the literal halfway point of the year. We say that this is when summer actually begins in the Northern Hemisphere, dividing the seasons into four equal quarters of the entire year. 

Actually, the ancestors didn’t really use written calendars. Their entire awareness of the passage of time and seasons was by observation. The years were divided mainly by where the sun rose and set, each day. At each solstice, the sun stays in the same place for a few days, before moving a little to the right of where it rose (moving toward summer) and left of where it set the day before (moving to winter). Winter’s onset had more to do with the experience of nature, the first frost or serious snow, than anything else. 

Those days are past us, but for much of human history, awareness of the weather and the sky meant a great deal. Not knowing or paying attention to the sky could mean the difference between life or death. This is partly why, even now, our association with the gods living in “heaven” or the skies comes primarily from ancient propitiations intended to maintain clement weather. Prayers for those who traveled, especially by sea, exist in almost every polytheistic system and each has its own gods of storm and harvest to call upon. El, upon whom Moses placed the burden of being “Almighty God” was just a Sumerian storm god, one of many such ancient creations whose will covered our doom under the rolling clouds.

We have new gods these days. In place of a storm god, we have a phone app that tells us the will of the weather. Who needs to look up, if you can look down at doppler radar on a screen? Who needs to gaze at the place where the sun rises or sets, if you can look at your built-in calendar? According to the modern way, that May Monday off is the real beginning of summer, and that first September Monday off is the official end. Fall is more marked by Halloween than the Autumnal Equinox. Likewise, spring by Easter. Actually, Easter is still defined by old seasonal rules, since it happens on the first Sunday after the Paschal Full Moon, which is the first Full Moon after the Vernal Equinox, which is why it shifts from year to year.

Overall, to me, it seems foolish to cast our heads down and to ignore the world around us. Beauty, warnings, mysteries of nature all happen around us every day and we miss it, while we gaze stupidly into a bright window on emptiness and misery. In the meantime, in the periphery, we are hailed by the most amazing reality imaginable. Each of us is sitting on a planet, slinging around a star, whose light and gravity mark the very real experience of the nature that supports us. Uncle Dan was right. It is a pity to miss the sound of the sky talking to us.

Happy 250th Birthday, America

This week, I have decided not to write a complete essay, nor dredge up anything from my old newspaper columns. I feel I have been a little too serious of late, and I am pretty sure I'm not saying anything that most of my readers don't know already.

Writing about America and her big birthday brings up a bunch of unhappy feelings I have about where we seem to be heading, creating an undue sense of unease about our fellow Americans who decided to follow an authoritarian cast of characters and the rampant religious funding that has gone to back much of the current versions of legislation. I’m not easy in my mind about it, but I still think that there is much of worth to celebrate, and if we celebrate the good things, it will cause us to remember that they’re the more important, in fact, vital part of our republic.

It can feel pretty hopeless. I have, I admit, over the last decade, had some real moments where I felt that the ship was going down. If, like Spock in Wrath of Khan, I asked, “Ship out of danger?” I wouldn’t get good news. However, despite how rough things have been and are, I will say that I believe we are not done yet. We have traveled down a very dangerous road and undone many essential things in the process, but I believe that America is not wholly lost. In our national core, there is a strict lack of tolerance for bullshit. It may take a while to present as such, but when it finally does, most of us do not care to keep going with it or those who produce it.

It's just one of many characteristics of our nation that I hope will hold us to a higher standard in the future. 250 years isn't a very long time for a country, but it is long enough to learn some very important lessons. The last decade will have to go down in history as a warning, as some decades in the previous century did. I just hope that this time, we remember those lessons and don’t make them again. It will have to be checked and verified by future generations.

One evening, while Micki and I were flipping through streaming services looking for something to watch, I came across old episodes of Saturday Night Live, from somewhere in the middle of the first season. Kris Kristofferson was the guest host. It was made in 1976. America was still reeling from Nixon’s criminal activity and resignation. There was a lot of political commentary about Ford’s fitness to serve (lots of comic hilarity around how klutzy he was), and much of it seemed relevant to today, though it was 50 years ago. The names have changed, but not much else has. It is amazing how much things change and how much they stay the same. Jokes about Spiro Agnew could have been jokes about our current VP. Jokes about corruption, misuse of power all fit now as well as they did then. It was a timely reminder that we’ve had a lot of the same issues going on for a long time now.

Some of us feel like the last decade has been unlike any other time in our history. I have felt like that, too. Things that used to seem like they were unthinkable happen all the time. In point of fact, America has been battling the same demons for much of its existence. If America were a superhero, her arch nemeses would be the same gallery of rogues: greed, lust for power, dogma, xenophobia, miseducation, corruption, and rampant classist tactics to keep the poor, people of color, immigrants, the asylum-seeker, and anyone who doesn't look, worship, or have access to massive wealth, down. Maybe it is more amplified these days. Maybe the ones committing the crimes against the nation are more brazen. This is certainly why things have felt so helpless to me.

Even so, I don’t think it is the end. We can turn the ship of state around. It will take courage, dedication, a steadfast faith in our founding documents, and an adherence to the idea that the only ones who can change our nation for good are the people who live, vote, fight for, and believe in her. It seems we’re beginning to remember this. More and more, I see people caving, backing down, making concessions rather than doubling down. It will take more time, but I think it is happening.

In the meantime, I will keep hoping. And it helps that I'm proud to be from here. I'm far from a nationalist, but I do care deeply about this, our nation, built entirely on enlightenment ideals. It's not a perfect system—we have learned that there are scoundrels who do not care and will take down the essential (to us) establishments for their own gain. We will have to rebuild and we can. We can secure the best parts of America and make it a place where the ultra-minority of wealthy and hateful people have to pay their fair share, too, even for legislation that doesn't directly enrich them or kowtow to their confessions.

We are a nation built upon a very clear idea: when something isn't working, change it. Make it better. There will always be those on the wrong side of history, but we must press on despite them. We can only proceed in unity. Screaming diatribes online or in person won't solve anything. We have to forget our political affiliation with party and denomination. It is time to reach across the aisle and work hand in hand. 

I truly believe we can do this. Soon, we will wake up and the era of authoritarians will be gone. They will be done and gone. And in that dawning, it will become very unpopular to be seen as having supported the movement. Some will get their just comeuppance, and they will have their day with the law. Some may not. That’s okay. The movement toward liberty and justice is not about vengeance. It is about growth. It has to be. We will never go back to a time before. We have to move on, grow past this era.

Yes, it will help if we can outgrow our childish addiction to iron-age myths, and our fear of ‘the other’. I hope we can find a way to spread the wealth around for the benefit of all. Scandinavian countries have both billionaires and free healthcare. It can be done and I think if it could be done better, then America is the land where it can happen.

Back just after 9/11, there were a lot of signs and stickers going around that said “United We Stand”. It is a worthy sentiment. My political bent has not always been in the direction of unity. For a while, I too, was determined to show others just how wrong they were and keep clear of them because of it. Now, though, it is time to move together. We just have to change our movement and ask which policies, candidates, legislation move us toward unity? That movement could be my party. Let’s come together, as the Beatles said. Let’s show the 1% minority that we will no longer worship them just because they have money. Let’s start reaching out to our fellow humans and loving them, as we were meant to do, no matter how they look, who they love, or how they worship. That is, to me, the genetic inheritance of men like Jefferson, Adams, Franklin, and Paine. They are worthy to be emulated, and it will make us worthy of their great experiment.

In the meantime...

I hope we all have a safe and happy Independence Day. We have a gift of such rare beauty and promise in America. I hope we stop wasting it to make scumbags wealthy and start helping one another.

Be safe, use skeeter and tick repellent, put on sunscreen, cover your ears, and go easy on the drinks and potato salad.

See you next week.

No Hot Runs

I don't really consider myself a runner. I love to get up, go to the gym, and run on the treadmill three times a week. This is, for me, an activity of joy and of benefit, but I have long felt that it doesn't really count as anything other than a technologically assisted exercise. I run five kilometers every other day, but I have never run in a 5K race. I don't own fancy running shoes. I don't own fancy, absurdly short running shorts (and never will). I don't belong to a ‘run club’. I don't keep a run log. I don't read books about running, and I do not have a runner's physique. Just like with many other things in my life, I perform this thrice-weekly exercise with a high level of non-conformity. I suppose if I owned a Harley-Davidson chopper, I wouldn't ride with a group or only wear HD-labeled clothes. To quote Shakespeare in Henry V, “Such outward things dwell not in my desires.”

Aside from being averse to taking things to the point where they replace my personality, I never understood why people wanted to show everyone that they are for real-life runners. Unless I join the Marines and am kitted out with a rifle, battle fatigues, a 40 lb pack, and am running up a hill in balmy South Carolina, while a man in a campaign hat screams at me, I'm going to keep my running private and appropriately comfortable.

This past weekend, as we were headed out for a quick dinner after the kids left, we crossed town against a large-ish group of psychopaths out running at 5 p.m. in 90° heat. As we passed this slow-moving herd of sadomasochists, I laughed, reflecting how grateful I am that I am not a runner as the world and modern culture define the term. If I felt compelled to be out there with them, I would soon quit running altogether.

There could be nothing more distasteful to me than going outside in the summer heat. Being in that mess to run on purpose is unthinkable. The only thing that could make it even less appealing would be to go outside in the heat to run with other people. I am a practical man. I like to do things in a way that makes sense. None of that makes sense to me.

My aversion is visceral and based on experience. It all started with a man we called Chops. I was in sixth or seventh grade, and Chops was our recreational league soccer coach. I was not an athletic teen, at least not like the other kids, but I liked to play soccer and had spent several years to that point kicking around with my older stepbrothers. Given the option, I would have chosen literally anything other than being on a team sport, but I was told (like with everything back then, my own choice was flatly ignored) that I would be playing soccer, and I was put on a team of misfits and rejects from all the other local rec teams. 

Chops decided that the best way to teach us the fundamentals was to have us run. And we ran. It was all we did. I don't think I saw a soccer ball the entire time we practiced for that season. The practice field was a large, flat acre of grass surrounded by a high chainlink fence, near my old elementary school. Each evening around 5, we would meet there and run ten laps. 

I did not have asthma then, and had probably not started smoking yet. I was somewhat fit, being a country kid accustomed to country chores, and I rode my bike everywhere back then, which may have given me an edge. Even so, all the running did for me was create a strong desire to do anything but run. We weren’t in cross-country or track. Each practice brought me closer to the breaking point, and finally, I did break. I complained to my mom, but I wasn’t allowed to drop off the team, so being a pragmatic lad, I gained the support of my teammates and then, pointed out to Chops how miserable we all were. When that didn't change anything, off to the Parks and Recreation folks I went to register an official complaint.

The parks and rec muckety-mucks did something decidedly practical and efficient in response. They canned Chops, absorbed most of the team into the other teams (every good soccer team needs kids to sit on the bench the whole match to keep it from flying up in the air) and I got cut. I don’t think I was ever happier to that point in my life.

Many years have passed since those hot days running inside the chainlink fence, but the aversion never faded. PA summers aren't as hot (or they weren't), but the idea of running in a group with other people in the heat fills my mind with the pimply face of a badly-permed man with a mouthful of metal and a clipboard, standing or sitting while we slogged endlessly. I’ve done my time. It was useless then, and it remains so now.

I have had moments of insanity over the years when I thought that I could be a runner. The idea of getting into peak physical shape, of putting my disturbingly long legs to some use other than as a reason to lose sleep trying to find jeans long enough to cover the ankle, has occurred now and then over the years. When I reached age 30, I asked for a run journal and a pair of Nike running shoes for my birthday. I intended to run around the circular neighborhood we lived in. I calculated how many “laps” would get me to a mile and woke up early to get the run in before it got hot. I started out pretty determinedly, but it didn't last more than a few weeks. 

My evolution into running came less from a desire to be considered or seen as a runner and more from the joy that I felt after each session of working toward a goal. When I first started back to running, just a few years ago, I couldn’t muster the energy to run more than about 30 seconds at a pop. As time went on, though, I grew more fit and started to make actual progress. It was a source of real pride that I earned through discipline and dedication. I was meeting a challenge, reaching a goal, improving myself, getting into shape a little at a time, and doing it all in a tiny gym provided for county employees, early in the morning when no one else is around.

That's not to mention the physical benefits I have gained. Running does far more than just build muscle and endurance. I sleep better, feel better, have more stamina, more core strength, and I have a much more balanced demeanor. I stay in a good mood almost all the time. 

All of this has reinforced a central premise to my running habit: don't do anything to ruin it. I continuously challenge myself, run hard, and push forward toward goals I set for myself. I never do anything to make the exercise distasteful. I have had some “hairbrained” ideas over the years, where I thought this or that would be good to aid me in my running, but it always winds up pushing me too close to asking the forbidden question, “Why am I doing this?”

The consistency of my habit has created a strong desire to get up and run, even when I don’t necessarily feel like it. If I go, I’ll feel better; if I don’t, I’ll regret it and lose a day I cannot get back. I get up and I run. It’s not pretty. It’s not stylish. It’s just practical and steadfast. Yes, I do it with a large fan blowing at me, less than a foot away. I still sweat myself to the point of dehydration and yet, I go home, shower, change, go to work and feel wonderful for the next 24 hours. I love it.

And yet, as the last straggler ran past us that day, I reflected that, despite enjoying running as much as I do, I will never understand like that. What possible good can they get from that kind of miserable activity? It makes no sense to me. It looks horrible. When it was me, running for Chops, it was horrible. If that’s what it takes to be considered a runner, I will never be one. 

I get almost as much happiness from feeling a sense of eye-rolling derision when I see them as I do during my treadmill outings. If I ever get to an age when I can no longer run, I will be happy that I confined my exertions to a semi-private discipline that never became about performing an exercise. 

Private Noir

Recently, I have been delving back into detective fiction. As my readers will know, my favorite detective is Mr. Sherlock Holmes, followed closely by Poe’s C. Auguste Dupin. However, this foray into crime detection was informed by a more modern variant: the private eye, as most often characterized by the noir style of filming as popularized by Fritz Lang, Billy Wilder and later perfected by Orson Welles in movies from the middle of the last century. I read four books, each one much different from the others and, though I’m done, I thought it would be worthwhile to categorize this grim, monochromatic genre.

The setting is usually (but not always) Los Angeles in the early-mid part of the last century. Here is the rough-hewn private dick, a life-hardened loner, with a penchant for finding trouble and the skills to fix things. The lexicon of film and literature is filled with tropes from this genre that we all know well.

Perhaps my favorite private detective from that era is Phillip Marlowe, as written by Raymond Chandler. Smart, chivalrous and strong as chilled steel, Chandler’s protagonist is perhaps the archetype for the genre. He doesn’t play by the rules (except his own) , takes no guff from anyone, is almost always in pursuit of a femme fatale, and is perpetually scouring the streets of the Los Angeles underworld. 

In the blue-smoke filled dream-realm, everyone drinks too much, parties devolve into secret orgies and reputations are made and broken by what makes the front page. Almost always, a woman’s reputation is at stake, or a friend disappears into the city’s underbelly, subsumed into a world of rumor, innuendo, sleaze, drugs and despair and behind it all, a wealthy man, paying to keep every blackmailer silent, every damaged reputation out of the papers. Reluctantly, Marlowe wades in, usually to the detriment of his own good name.

This year, I read Chandler’s The Long Goodbye. The story is red hot, and I highly recommend it. What I admired most, though, was Chandler’s economy of line. He writes at a blistering pace. The sentences are like the rattling of a machine gun. The plot moves in an undercurrent, propelled by Marlowe’s first person narrative. His dedication to a friend is tested when the man disappears after a wealthy socialite is found brutally murdered. When her sister appeals to Marlowe for help, he winds up in the sights of the police, the murdered woman’s bevy of lovers, disgraced doctors and her rich, straight-laced father. My favorite line from the book is, “Most people go through life using up half their energy trying to protect a dignity they never had.”

After Marlowe,I flew across the country to a brownstone in Manhattan inhabited by a most unusual detective. I’d read Rex Stout novels before, of course and so was familiar with the author’s unconventional hero, Nero Wolfe, but this time I went back and read the first in a long series of novels, called Fer-de-Lance. 

Stout’s structure is unusual. Mr. Wolfe is a mountain of a man that we would now call deeply obsessive and compulsive. He never leaves his brownstone. He takes interviews with those in need (only if their mystery captures his attention) between 9-11 and 4-6 each day. Otherwise, he is either dining on gourmet meals as prepared by his cook Fritz, or tending to an entire third floor garden of rare and priceless orchids. 

If Wolfe never leaves home, you ask, how can he solve mysteries, as the primary rule of all detection requires going to the scene of the crime and interviewing eyewitnesses? The solution for this is the author's brilliant and original character Archie Goodwin. 

Goodwin does all the footwork and is essentially Nero Wolfe’s field agent. Archie is also the first-person narrator of the stories and relates everything from his notebooks and his interactions with Wolfe. Nero Wolfe is an eccentric who drinks huge amounts of beer (but never to the detriment of his mental acuity) and solves crimes using only his imagination and Archie’s notes. While he acknowledges that other such detectives are men of science, Wolfe considers himself to be an artist of crime solving, allowing his genius to work through Goodwin and others.

Fer-de-Lance, by the way, is the name of the most deadly snake in South America, which is sent to Wolfe when his solutions stray too close to the truth and it is up to Archie Goodwin to zoom about the city, looking for the murderer who hired a machinist to construct a deadly golf club that kills the wrong victim. Lighter in prose than Chandler, but no less intense, the character of Archie Goodwin is that of a knight errant, who wins over his interviewees with charm and wit and an eye for details unrivaled by any but his boss. My favorite line from this book: “I had long since learned from Wolfe that the corner the light doesn’t reach is the one the dime rolled to.”

Second-to-last on my list of private eye detective fiction is I, The Jury, by Mickey Spillane. This story struck me as being the grittiest, pulp novel-style tale I have read in a long time—or maybe ever. Where Chandler never goes too deep on scenes of intimate sex or violence, allowing the reader’s imagination to fill in the blanks, Spillane’s Mike Hammer’s first-person narration is downright sweaty. Licentious descriptions of women, all of whom seem to throw themselves at Hammer, baroque details of murders, pulpy characters and Hammer’s hard-boiled narrative all add up to a little too much for my taste.

Spillane really was considered a pulp novelist, so he knew that sex and violence and alcohol sell, but the mysteries aren’t as interesting in the intellectual sense. Hammer solves them the same way he does everything, with a roaring, overloaded sense of self-importance, a swollen sense of his own right to commute justice, a gun in one hand and a “dame” in the other. 

In this book, the first of a shelf of Mike Hammer stories (I will not say mysteries) Hammer’s best friend and former Army buddy in the war (yes, that war) is brutally murdered. Vowing revenge, Hammer begins a race with the police to find the killer. Along the way, he falls hard for a psychologist (who is also a knockout—all the women in these stories are knockouts, and all come undressed in every scene). As he brutally slams through the backstreets and brothels, looking for the killer and always arriving just too late to stop several more murders. He eventually learns that he’s been duped in the most predictable way ever. The book closes on Hammer making good on his vow to kill the killer, leaving nothing to the imagination, but then, no part of the book actually does. I didn’t have a favorite line from this book, largely because there wasn’t a noble sentiment in the entire thing and since every other page was tastelessly X-rated or thoughtlessly violent, I probably won’t return to Mr. Spillane.

Finally, following a recommendation from a friend who dove into this author’s books with abandon, I read James Ellroy’s The Black Dahlia, based loosely on the famous 1947 murder and brutal Ripper-like vivisection of Elizabeth Short, the eponymous victim. Ellroy’s novel is far more noir than I expected and though it started slow, grew into a fascinating novel of illicit sex, self-deception, lust for power, obsession and, the slow madness that comes with it.

Ellroy blends a critical understanding of late 1940s culture in Los Angeles, with an uncanny knowledge of how the police force worked, building a story about two police officers, Bucky Bleichert and Lee Blanchard, both former boxers, hired to fight one another to help pass a bond referendum. 

The duo become best friends and work up through the nebulous ranks of LAPD power, until the murder and investigation of Elizabeth Short drives Blanchard off the reservation. The two officers live together with Kay Lake, a school teacher and former prostitute within an organized crime syndicate ring. Blanchard and Lake and Bleichert form an unusual family, until Blanchard’s emotional crash and disappearance. Bucky’s obsession with Short only serves to drive him to the edge of mania, as he navigates the over-sexed daughter of a corrupt real estate magnate, his marriage to Kay and the ever deepening need to solve the murder.

The novel is beautifully written. Told from the first-person perspective of Bucky Bleichert, the story is deeply honest and in places, extremely graphic. Unlike Spillane’s novel, the behavior is very human, flawed and misguided. There are dark and licentious scenes, but they all serve to bring the plot forward.

Bucky’s is unreliable narration, taking the reader on a long, unwinding mental breakdown, starting in moments of high and joyous celebration, then down into the depths of depravity and ultimately the most carefully hidden and devastating personal truths. As a backdrop, the Short murder becomes a kind of litmus test of madness, where everything up to the point of her grotesque dismemberment is ground worth crossing if it leads to her insane killer. Ellroy asks what there is left of our humanity when the answers we so badly needed are not what we thought they would be. 

My favorite line from this novel was hard to sort out, because the book is a masterpiece of writing. It never sinks to the level of pulp, though it never shies from showing us the true depravity at the heart of all of us. Ellroy’s “hero” is all too corruptible. However, if I have to choose (after all who is making me, if not me?) I’d pick: “Some people don’t respond to civility.”

I’m now fedora-ed out. The inside of my head smells like Chesterfields and cheap booze. The hardboiled detective, burned on a hard life and grim memories of the war; the mystery to be solved, the punches to be thrown, the bullets to be shot and the spectacle of self-destruction, misery and bad decisions made in haste or anger all have an unfortunate way of bringing me down. I like the gritty detectives, the monosyllabic narratives, the noble intent of flawed characters, the mysteries and, of course the images, shadowy, dark, uncertain. I like how uncomplicated the complications are, and how straightforward the action is. 

This is a world modeled on reality, but darker. The men are all noble savages, merely wearing the accouterments of modernity, while living on some morally primitive plain, draped in suits instead of animal skins and drinking whiskey instead of blood. The women are all too beautiful, too voluptuous, too dangerously sexy; each using their feminine wiles to navigate a world that (in most of the novels) still considers them to be the root of all society’s most depraved ills. 

Here the physical takes the place of the intellectual. The fist comes before the probing question, the bullets before deduction. Everyone lies, everyone is untrustworthy, out for themselves alone and everyone stifles their feelings with any substance or activity that pushes away the pain. Although crime noir is just a kind of social commentary on a particular age in our recent history, it nevertheless feels too seedy, too corrupted and too vicious to be anything but a passing fancy for me.

And yet, for all that there is a draw to it. Perhaps it is a kind of animal magnetism in the characters, but I think it is really (in all except Spillane’s case) a brilliance of writing and composition; a truly midcentury modern prose that cuts through the fat and gets right to the bone. I think that's why I like it.