The Amnesiac

The Amnesiac

a short story by Benjamin Gorman

He stepped up to the podium, remembered not to tap the mic, and spoke.

“Is this on? Can everyone hear me okay?” 

He was clearly nervous, but the crowd was generous. They lowered their signs. The sun was beating down on them. They had just been chanting loudly, so his speech was giving them a break but also sucking the energy out of the moment. A few people flashed him thumbs up, and someone in the back cried out, “You got this!” to gentle laughter.

“Good, because this is going to require a little audience participation. The last time I spoke to all of you, I was asked to do it on the fly, and I wished I’d had something prepared-”

“You were great!” the same voice from the back called out. 

“Great” is too kind, he thought, but it would have been insulting if she’d said “fine” or “sufficient” or “meh,” so he appreciated her choice. 

“Well, thank you. As some of you know, I write novels. I thought I would take this opportunity to share a story with you that’s just an outline right now, and you can tell me if it works, and give me some feedback about how you would like it to end. Would you all help me with that?”

Lots of nods. Even some “Woohoo”s, but they were cautious ones. Good, he thought. Normally he would have been bothered by the way they had gone quiet, but they were listening intently.

“The story starts with a guy in a hospital bed. Mid-thirties. He looks strong and healthy, but he’s just waking up, and he’s dazed. He doesn’t know where he is. He looks over, and there’s another man in the room, a guy about his age snoozing in a chair. 

“The snoozing man wakes up and is pleased to see the man in the bed, but the guy in the bed has no idea who the other man is. 

“‘I’m your oldest friend,’ the man says. ‘My name is…”

The writer at the podium smiled and shrugged. “And I don’t quite know what their names are yet. I have some ideas, but for now let’s call the friend ‘W.’  W not only introduces himself to the man in the hospital bed; he starts to tell the man who he is, too. ‘You were in a terrible car accident. They had to put you in a medically induced coma. Your body has healed, but even before they put you under, we knew you’d lost your memory. You didn’t recognize any of us. Your name is-”

The writer laughed a little. “I don’t have a name for him, either. For now we’ll call him ‘A.’ So W has to fill A in on who A is. He tells him that A is this great guy, and everyone has been rooting for him and worried about him. W points around the room, and there are all these bouquets of flowers, obviously expensive ones. ‘You are very loved,’ W says. ‘You are a powerful person. You own a business and have employees who look up to you. You’re a pillar of the community. You served your country in the military back before you started your business, and you served honorably, and everyone respects you for that. You’re married, and…”

The writer paused because W pauses here in a noticeable way. “‘You don’t have kids of your own, but you have nieces and nephews who love you. Your sisters are going to come in over the next few days now that you’re awake, and they’ll bring their kids so you can meet them all over again. We’ve talked about how this is going to take some time, and I know it’s difficult, but we’re going to look on the bright side and try to enjoy filling you in on who you are, okay? We’ll make it fun. Because you are a great guy, A, and all of us who love you are looking forward to telling you that.’”

The writer looked up from his rough notes. “So, at this point, the reader really likes both these guys, right? We feel sorry for A, but we’re glad he has this good friend who’s clearly a thoughtful and caring person helping him readjust to the world.

“And then A’s wife comes into the room, and her behavior is really weird. Let’s call her ‘U.’” The writer chuckled. “Saying that out loud sounds strange. ‘U’ the letter, not Y-O-U.” There were a few laughs. “And not E-W-E. She’s not a sheep.” More laughter. “So U comes in and she doesn’t run over and kiss him or take his hand. She stands back away from the bed at a distance. She looks at the ground. She’s very apologetic. She says she knows he can’t understand this, but she needs him to sign some documents to get their divorce processed. She’s been waiting for him to wake up so she could get this done, but they were working on getting a divorce even before the accident. She’s really sorry this has to be his first experience with her, she says, but she’s decided it will be easier for them both if he just signs the paperwork and she walks out of his life. That way he can figure out who he is without her around to complicate things at all.

“And A doesn’t know how to respond to this. He looks to W, and he sees W is red-in-the face pissed. W looks at A, his jaw clenched, and speaks in this pinched, voice, like he’s trying not to shout. ‘I recommend you don’t sign anything just yet.’ W looks at U. ‘We told you not to do it this way. Why are you doing this?’

“U wouldn’t go near A, but she takes a step closer to W, stares hard at him, and says, “Fuck. You.’ And then she storms out without even looking at A again. 

The writer held up his hands. “Sorry about the f-bomb, kids. Characters in stories don’t always use polite language. Your parents can take that up with them.” This got a laugh, mostly of relief. “At this point, what do we think of U? She seems pretty terrible, right? The reader won’t like her very much. And this will be compounded when W explains to A that U is a terrible person. She used to be nice, back when A and U got married, but she’s become lazy and entitled since A’s business got so successful and they got rich. And that’s why W didn’t want him to sign any paperwork just yet. A will have to deal with it eventually, but according to W, U is trying to take everything she can away from A, so A really needs to learn who he is, talk it all over with his lawyers, and figure the divorce out later. W waves a dismissive hand towards the door. ‘She’s waited this long. She can wait a little longer until you’re back on your feet.’

“Then the story speeds up. A checks out of the hospital, and W drives him back to his house. U has already moved out, so A has the house to himself, and it’s a mansion. Clearly he’s done very well for himself financially. But right away there are pieces of W’s story that aren’t fitting. There are two children’s rooms, complete with toys and kids’ decorations, but W said he had no kids. And then he goes into work, and there’s applause when he arrives, but he can feel a lack of warmth and see a lot of sideways glances from the employees. He talks to one of the senior managers, an older guy named B, about this, and B says that A was a ruthless boss, and that’s exactly why the upper management respected him so much. A always played hardball. He smashed two attempts by the employees to form a union, firing the people who were calling for it under the pretext that they were bad employees since it’s illegal to fire them for trying to form a union. That allowed A to keep wages as low as possible and maximise profits, which B completely agreed with and admired. A takes this in and struggles with it. Hadn’t W said he was loved? He’d said that his employees looked up to him, but was it out of fear? A doesn’t want to be that kind of person. 

“So A starts looking into the company more deeply, and as he pours over internal documents, he finds out that the business is rotten to the core. They’ve been knowingly polluting the local river and keeping it a secret. Even worse, the product they make harms the customers who buy it. And he was cheating on his taxes, cheating his investors, cheating his suppliers, and lobbying local officials, bribing the corrupt ones and blackmailing the honest ones, to make sure a lot of his cheating was becoming legal. A realized he had a chance to start over, but he wasn’t even sure where to start. He would have to come up with a new product, safer supply chains, better treatment of workers, everything. It would be so much easier to just continue as though nothing had changed. But he didn’t want to be his old self.  He could be a kinder boss now. He could be a better corporate citizen. He had a chance to reinvent himself.”

The writer smiled, but it was a sad smile. “At this point the reader thinks this is going to be one of those stories where the guy gets turned into a snowman or a dog or a child or whatever, reevaluates his life, and suddenly becomes a decent person. But she’ll notice we’re a bit early in the story for that big turning point. It’s going to get worse before it gets better, folks.” 

Some nods and a bit of  laughter from the crowd, now rueful.

“Once A starts going through his phone messages and his emails, he learns he used to cheat on his wife all the time. And when he dumped those women, he was terrible to them, too, threatening them with different kinds of harm if they ever told U about their affairs. As he reads the threats, he gets more and more horrified by who he used to be. He decides he doesn’t want to know. He just wants to start over. Those things are in the past, and he’s a different person now. He gives up on the project of learning about his old life. That was before. This is now. That’s all he needs to know.

“And I think the reader will sympathize with that. We’re still on A’s side, despite the kind of person he used to be, right?” The writer looked at the faces in the crowd. Some nodded, but their smiles were gone. They could feel it coming, though they didn’t know what “it” was yet.

“And then a woman comes to his house. Her name is … well, let’s call her “P” for now. When he opens the door, she asks to come in, and he’s immediately attracted to her. And then she explains that she’s one of the women he cheated with. He feels guilty, not just about the affair back before the accident, but about his response in the moment, because the first thing he thinks is that he can understand why he cheated with this woman. Not only is she significantly more physically attractive than U…”

The writer looked up at the crowd. “Not more attractive than Y-O-U. More attractive than his wife.” The crowd laughed.

“Not only is P more attractive than his wife, but she carries herself with a confidence that’s compelling, and her smile is kind, far kinder than he deserves, he realizes. She explains she heard all about his accident and amnesia, and she decided she wanted to come talk to him as part of her own healing. She feels very guilty about their affair. She tells him she loved him deeply, and that was why she allowed him to treat her the way he did. He was physically abusive to her, she says, though not at first. Slowly he got worse and worse, and he did it because he was used to it. He’d spent so many years abusing his wife, U, that he just slipped into the same pattern of abuse with P as well. And the abuse wasn’t just physical.”

The author stopped. “I won’t get too graphic because I know there are children here, but I think I have to use the R word because it’s essential to the story.” No one moved. No one covered their children’s ears or took their kids away. “Okay,” the author continued, “then P explains that he raped her because he frequently raped his wife U, and when P tried to get out of the relationship, he not only beat her more, but the emotional abuse ramped up so he could keep her feeling like a possession but also keep her quiet.

“And A is horrified by all of this. He gets really defensive, at first trying to explain that he is not that person anymore. She says she knows that, but she feels he needs to know who he was. He gets even more scared and angry and starts telling her that maybe he shouldn’t believe her. Maybe she’s a liar. And then he settles on that theory, firmly accusing her of trying to trick him. She persists. He steps towards her, all his muscles clenched, thinking he’s going to demand she leave his house or maybe he’s going to throw her out or maybe …” The writer looked down at his own balled fists. He paused. The crowd was completely silent. Someone coughed, whispered an apology, and even that could be heard.  “And in that moment,” the writer continued, “he realizes she’s right. She is telling the truth. He really was the kind of person who could do such horrible things because he’s displaying it right now. He begins to weep. She steps towards him and pulls his head down into the crook of her neck, not a romantic gesture but an expression of pure comfort. And she tells him that it’s taken her a lot of hard work to not be scared of him anymore, but she’s there now, and she really believes if he confronts this, all of this, the absolute worst of it, he can choose to be a better person. But he has to push himself, she says. He has to be willing to really open his eyes. 

“So he decides to do that, and he contacts U and tells her he needs to know everything, and he’ll sign whatever she needs him to sign. He tells her he is willing to meet wherever she feels comfortable, and that lets her know he’s at least aware of some of what he did. She agrees to meet with him at a bench between the courthouse and the police station where she will feel safe. 

“And when they meet, he starts by apologizing for all the things he’s learned about. And, to his amazement, she tells him some part of her really does want to get back together. She loves him and wants to work it out. Or she wishes she could. She used to love him, anyway. She’s not sure. She needs him to understand that it’s worse than he knows. ‘I know you aren’t … him, anymore. But that doesn’t erase what he did,’ she says. ‘A, the accident that caused your amnesia? It wasn’t your first car accident. It was your second. When they found you after the second accident, the tox screen showed you were drunk and high. You were trying to forget. Because you didn’t want to remember the first accident. It was just you and our two girls in the car, and that time you were sober, but you turned around in your seat to hit one of the kids. You never told me which one. Maybe you weren’t sure. Maybe both of them. And when you turned, you must have twisted the wheel, and the car flipped, and…’ And U is looking down at her hands in her lap, and they’re shaking, and A wants to take her hands but he’s afraid to touch her now, afraid of himself and her reaction to the man who murdered her children, and … “

The writer looked up quickly, then slowly scanned the crowd. “And that’s all I’ve got so far. I’m not sure how it ends. So one thing I do when I get stuck in a plot like this is take some time to think about who the characters are, and then I let them guide me and tell me what they do next. So let’s go back to those ideas about their names.

“I think I’m going to call A “America.” It’s perfect for him. A lot of people don’t even know where the name “America” comes from. It’s not a Native American word. It doesn’t come from any of the people of the nations who were already in America. It doesn’t come from the British who landed in Plymouth or Jamestown. It’s not from the Spanish who conquered Florida. No, it comes from an Italian map maker. I guess he decided if he was making the map, he could put his name on there, so, like our character, America doesn’t have a real connection with America. So that seems like the right name.

“And U is the people of the United States. She has suffered so much at America’s hands. The beatings. The rape. The murder of her children. And she’s all of us. She is the Native people who had their land stolen, their culture stolen, their languages stolen, their bodies raped, their children killed. She is the Black citizens who had their bodies stolen, their basic humanity unrecognized. She is the women who have always been treated as less worthy, their rights dribbled to them one at a time, each new right presented as though it should be enough. She is the immigrants who came from all over the world and were told they would find freedom and opportunity only to find themselves in one of the least equal nations on Earth, and then told the only way for them to get ahead here was to take part in burning the bridges behind them, mistreating the next immigrant to be more accepted by the ones who came before. She is the white worker who is told she has to be afraid of every person of color who wants to take her job, take her house, rape her, and kill her, so she needs to keep them down in every way she can. And yes, she is even the most wealthy billion-heir who is also miserable because she’s been told she has to work a hundred and fifty hours a week clawing her way up the corporate ladder and stepping on everyone beneath her or she’ll lose everything. That sense of constant desperation and dread, in a country so wealthy that no one ever needs to feel it or hurt anyone to have their basic needs met? That’s her. That’s United States.

“And W is White Supremacy and Patriarchy. He does what he’s always done. He tells America that he’s great, not because that helps America. It’s clearly not helping him repair his marriage. No, White Supremacy and Patriarchy tells America that he’s great because keeping America ignorant of who he is preserves, protects, and promotes White Supremacy and Patriarchy. White Supremacy and Patriarchy doesn’t serve white people. He doesn’t serve men. White Supremacy and Patriarchy lies to everyone and harms everyone to protect himself. 

“B, of course, is Business. Business admires ruthlessness and appreciates profit because, in our system, he’s literally, legally not allowed to care about anything else other than maximizing his shareholder’s returns. He doesn’t have to be that way. He’s not in other countries, But here, Business is legally obligated.

“And what about P? P is Protesters. She’s you. Y-O-U this time. Protesters love America, and she also feels guilty about that love. Once she did the work to get over her own abuse, she could see America for what he was. But she loves him anyway and wants him to be better. She is the one who conquers her fear so she can hold America up and tell him he needs to know his past even when he doesn’t want to.”

Then the writer looked down and shook his head. “But I still don’t know how it ends. Even after Protesters tell America he needs to learn the truth about what he has done, what he has created, the situation in which he still finds himself, and even after he decides he wants to be better, how does he possibly reconcile with United States? How do they become The United States of America after everything she has gone through? Once he knows, how can he even dare to ask to make The United States of America whole? How can he expect her, after everything she’s suffered, to ever trust him again? I don’t know how this story ends.”

“Therapy!” someone yelled. It took everyone by surprise, and a ripple of laughter spread through the crowd. 

“Truth and reconciliation commissions!” someone else yelled.

“Reparations!” someone added, and that got a smattering of “Yeah!”s and “Amen!”s.

The writer smiled. “I agree, but long therapy sessions aren’t a fun ending to a book. They’re just hard work. Seriously, though, I recognize that I will have to come up with fictional names. I know my writing is never subtle, but this is some Pilgrim’s Progress level didacticism. I can change the names so it’s not so heavy-handed; the reader will get the metaphor, right?”

Then he pointed at the counter-protesters on the other side of the lawn, the ones wearing and waving a mixture of American flags and the flags of countries the United States defeated in wars. “I just want us all to remember the sympathy we felt before we knew America’s name. He didn’t know his own history at first. And then he didn’t want to know, and we still felt for him. He got defensive and even dangerous because he didn’t want to know his own history, and we all understood. This is hard stuff to know. It’s a lot to carry. The reader will get that, right?”

He inflected as though the question was rhetorical, but a woman in the front surprised him. “No,” the protester said. “Keep the names. They won’t see it because they won’t want to see it. We’re all here because we know we have to tell them.”

A Tale of Two Protests

It was the worst of times. And then it got worse. 

Holy Crap. I just came back from two different protests in a row. VERY different. I want to share about these, not because I want to dunk on Dallas, Oregon (though some of that would certainly be deserved) but because I think the differences are illustrative of where the Black Lives Matter movement currently stands in White America. 

The first rally was in Monmouth, Oregon. These happen every day, yes, every day of the week, and have since shortly after the murder of George Floyd. They were organized by a woman from my community who is just awesome. Carol is a middle aged white lady. She absolutely has the privilege to choose to stay home and say, “Not my problem. I can ignore racism and go find a manager to shout at.” Instead, she (and her husband) organized a group of people from her immediate neighborhood, then broadened the group of leaders to include people from around her town, then connected with people from my town (Independence), and both groups are collaborating to do all kinds of good work, meeting with their city councils and police departments privately, speaking publicly at city councils meetings, getting commitments of support for the Black Lives Matter movement from public officials (just a start and possibly just words, but a vital first step) and now working with those officials on real, meaningful policy changes in both towns. Carol and her crew are out on the four corners of a single intersection every day (I only make it out there four or five times a week, so they’re my heroes), reminding this community that the dangers to Black lives in America are not going away, so we won’t either. 

I showed up like always, said high to the folks who are there each day, and stood there with my sign. I bring the megaphone I bought just for BLM rallies for two reasons. For one, because I’m wearing a mask, I can’t react to people’s honks of support with my face. I still find myself smiling at people like an idiot. Some of you are generously saying, “Ah, but they see it in your eyes.” Not mine! I bought a mask that includes goggles that go over my glasses. It’s not the best mask in terms of preventing COVID spread, and I wouldn’t wear it indoors, but it does double-duty as sunglasses and a mask, and wearing masks at these events is very important. It takes away one line of attack from the “All Lives Matter” crew who really want to not be reminded that they oppose Black people’s right to exist. They say we should be staying home because of COVID, not that they are wearing masks or staying home, mind you, but because they think it points out our hypocrisy. It’s a gotcha. It’s also wrong. We wear masks because we want to save lives. We stay home because we want to save lives. And we protest because we want to save lives. The three aren’t mutually exclusive; they’re motivated by the same ethos. More on that later. So I bring the megaphone as a prop; when people honk, I hold it up in the air. I don’t feel altogether comfortable holding up my fist. Actually, I feel far too comfortable doing it, and I’m uncomfortable with my comfort. I have read Black writers and activists who feel white people should not colonize this gesture. That’s not a universally held opinion, but it’s enough that it makes me think twice. Also (and I’ve had this happen before), if somebody catches a picture of a white person who is starting to raise their fist but hasn’t yet and hasn’t balled their fist either, there’s a point in the arc upwards where it looks like the white person is making a “Heil Hitler” gesture. Not okay. But if I’m holding a megaphone, that problem is solved.

The other benefit of the megaphone is that it allows me to do one of my new favorite things. When someone drives up and rolls a window down and shouts, “All Lives Matter,” I point it at them, pull that trigger, and smile and say in my friendliest voice, “Yeah, Black Lives Matter! Thank you for your support. Right on !” At first they think I genuinely misheard them, and they’ll yell back, “No, I said, ‘All Lives Matter.’” And I say, “Woohoo. Black Lives Matter! Thank you!” At this point they realize I’m the one with the megaphone, so every time they shout at me everyone stopped in traffic is hearing “Black Lives Matter,” the more they yell at me. They get super-pissed. Makes my day. 

The group today was really small, just six or seven of us. One really smart decision Carol made was to have it very clearly time-limited. 4:30 to 5:30 each day. That’s important because it makes it more sustainable. Folks can give up an hour of their time a lot more than a whole afternoon or evening and be more inclined to come back and do it again. The numbers are dwindling in a concerning way, though. The number of people out there makes a difference in two ways. For one thing, when there are a lot of people, it puts more political pressure on policy makers.For another thing, it changes the experience for the protesters. When there are lots of people on those corners, almost no one yells slurs at us or flips us off. Why? It’s not like anyone in the crowd is a danger to them or would treat them any differently than when they yell at six of us or a hundred of us. It’s because they recognize that their position is not popular, and they’re cowed in silence. Conversely, when there are very few of us, they feel emboldened. And unfortunately for them and for us, emboldened “All Lives Matter” folks show their whole racist asses. 

Today I only had one negative experience like that, and not nearly the worst. (Sidenote: The worst was the man who rolled up very slowly, rolled down his power window, pointed at my Black Lives Matter sign, and said, “Yeah, every family should have one or two,” then slowly smiled like a psychopath. And he just sat there staring at me, waiting for me to get his point. It took me a second to realize what he was saying. He was advocating for a return to slavery. It was one of the creepiest things I’ve ever experienced.) Today the guy who pulled up and shouted at me wanted me to know Black Lives Matter is a terrorist organization. I shouldn’t have engaged (or should have megaphoned “Black Lives Matter” at him), but at first he seemed to really want to educate me rather than just scream at me the way most do, so I stepped towards him to talk. 

I said, “I support Black Lives Matter. Do I look like a terrorist to you?” 

“They’re terrorists,” he repeated. Note the “they.”

“I’m here because I care about people. Do you see anything that looks like terrorism going on here?”

“They’re funded by George Soros,” he said. Note the “they” again.

For any of you who don’t know, this conspiracy theory is false, but it’s a lot worse than that. George Soros is a Hungarian-American billionaire who gives money to lots of pro-democracy causes, mostly in Eastern Europe but also here in the U.S. Sometimes his donations are small and sometimes they’re large. So why do we hear about George Soros’ political contributions and philanthropy more than the other billionaires who give money, often more money, to pro-democracy groups? Because George Soros is Jewish. That’s what motivates his concern about promoting democracy. As a child he was put in a concentration camp and even forced to help the Nazis in order to survive. Since then he’s devoted his life to making sure groups like the Nazis can’t rise to power in Europe and the U.S. But a major part of the white supremacist narrative is that Jews are secretly evil and out to get white Christian men. Since white supremacy is built on the lie that people of color are inferior in every way, white supremacists couldn’t rally their base by saying, “and therefore people of color [not the term they would use] are no threat to you.” They have to create the sense that people of color are a danger in order to maintain the fear that feeds white supremacy. So white supremacy is married to anti-Semitism through another lie, that Jewish people are also inferior but exceptionally cunning and evil, and they are using this cunning to secretly organize the people of color who can’t do so for themselves in an effort to create the race war that will eliminate white, Christian people. Now, this jackass might not know this part of the white supremacist narrative, but it really doesn’t matter; he was broadcasting an anti-Semitic conspiracy theory to justify his opposition to the movement built on the principle that Black people have the right to exist. And, unbeknownst to him, he was saying that to someone of Jewish descent. Awesome. 

Now, I would have loved to explain this to him, but I had a red light’s worth of time. So I stepped back up onto the sidewalk, spread my arms wide, and said, “Do I look like I’m getting paid millions of dollars to be here?” Mind you, I was holding a sign I painted on the lid of a large tupperware container (waterproof and permanent, my friends!) Then I said, “Maybe, if the stuff you’ve been reading doesn’t match what your own eyes are seeing, you should reconsider some of those conspiracy theories.”

To which he responded, “None of you are even Black.”

And I would have loved to explain that white people can, in fact, support Black people, and that this was another thing his eyes were telling him which didn’t fit into the conspiracy theories he was spouting, but the light had turned green and he drove away with his insightful recognition of our whiteness as his parting shot. That missed opportunity wrankled a little bit, but I was over it after the next couple honks of support (which still vastly outmatch the expressions of vitriol against the simple notion that Black people should have the right to exist). So that rally was chill. 

I hopped in my car and took off for Dallas. For those of you who don’t know about our little towns, Dallas is … different. It has a deep history of racism. It was once a significant regional headquarters of the KKK back in the 20s. When the KKK disbanded there [Translation: went underground] in the thirties, the high school chose a dragon for its mascot for, they assure everyone, completely unrelated reasons. There is so much overt interpersonal racism in Dallas that I expect to see at least one Confederate battle flag each time I go. Many of my friends who are people of color have told me they simply will not go there for any reason because they do not feel safe there. That being said, there are Black people, Latinx people, and Native people who live in Dallas (all with horror stories they can tell you about what they’ve experienced there) and there are some great white allies who have really stepped up in support of their neighbors. These folks have started holding rallies. The first one seemed like it might be pretty scary because there was a lot of chatter online about Proud Boys who were planning to show up and cause violence to provoke the police to crack down on the BLM protesters. It turned out not to happen. There were hundreds of supporters for that first rally and only six or seven counter-protesters. Only one of those protesters tried to shoulder his way into the speaking area that day, and he was very effectively blocked by a wall of protesters who jumped in front of him and started chanting “Black Lives Matter” to drown him out. That rally was a huge success and showed a lot of people in Dallas, including the city’s elected officials, that there is a lot more support for Black/Latinx/Indiginous lives than they thought. 

Since then, they’ve held weekly small rallies at the courthouse on Wednesdays. I’ve gone to a couple of those, and there really hasn’t been a significant difference  between Dallas and Monmouth in the amount of vitriol aimed at the protesters. 

Oh boy did that change today! I’d heard rumors online about some counter-protesters coming in from the Proud Boys, and other counter-protesters motivated by the threat of antifa damaging local small businesses. I didn’t take that very seriously because they hadn’t shown up last time. Well they sure did today. Their numbers dwarfed the BLM protesters when I first arrived. They were loud. They were menacing. They were unmasked. They were armed. (In addition to the predictable AR-15s, one dude had a Civil War era sword. Replica or family heirloom? We can guess.) In addition to chanting “All Lives Matter,” they were really free with their racial, homophobic, and sexist slurs. In case there is ever any doubt about what “All Lives Matter” actually means, it is chanted by people who call Native people “Pocahontas,” who call a Black lesbians “boy,” who waggle limp wrists at gay men, who tell women they need to get a man, and who tell a Guatamalan American to go back to his country. Oh, and also they claim to love Jesus. So the next time you say, “All Lives Matter,” thinking you’re expressing some safe truism, please understand why people bristle at this statement you expected to be uncontroversial. You are, perhaps unintentionally, associating yourself with the people who chant, “All Lives Matter.” And their definition of “All Lives” is a very exclusive club.

I’m going to share a clip of one of our speakers. She is a Native woman from the Grand Ronde tribe nearby. She not only spoke, but, you’ll see, she performed a dance … while crying because the people who ostensibly care about “All Lives” were trying to silence her the entire time she spoke, and shouting at her the entire time she danced. 

The first speakers were all very good. Frequently they were interrupted, but only, ONLY the women. Then things kinda went off the rails on our end. A speaker, in an effort to illustrate that we were willing to listen and learn while the other side was not, offered the megaphone (my megaphone) to the “All Lives Matter” folks, and while the first one, a Black man who was a pro-Trumper, was simply nonsensical and shared a bunch of a-historical non-facts (including, bizarrely, that his grandmother had 500 children. Not just a slip of the tongue, either. He really believes this. I’m no expert, but I’m fairly certain the math doesn’t work for him on that claim). Eventually I stepped in and said the next pro-Trumper could say whatever he wanted, but he couldn’t use my megaphone because I wouldn’t allow it to be held by people who don’t wear masks, and that seemed to improve things, but only for a moment. The lead organizer, Rebecca Hunt, has decided to run for mayor (Good for her!), and after she spoke about that decision, out of generosity she allowed another woman to speak who is not a BLM supporter but is running for City Council. That candidate gave a long, rambling speech, mostly about the depressed business climate in Dallas. At that point, without designated speakers lined up to go next, the lead organizer was desperate. So desperate she asked me to speak!

Now, I think it’s really important that the speakers at these events should be people of color, so I never ask to speak or even volunteer. But those of you who know me understand that if you ask me to speak about racial injustice anywhere, anytime, I will always say, “Yes!”

I will try to find a video. I started with a land recognition, made a joke about how I am not running for office to cheers, and another about how I teach at the rival high school to boos. Then I explained that I had a perspective the counter-protesters might find valuable. Since they’d shared the concern of the previous speaker about the woeful economic situation in Dallas, I thought they might like to know that some of the kids from Dallas choose to come to my high school because their city’s racism makes them feel that unsafe. I gave some examples of the horrific treatment my students endured in their town. And then I told them those kids, those Black, Latinx, Native, gay, and trans kids, are some of the best, smartest, most wonderful human beings Dallas could ever ask for, and they’ve lost them to another community because of their racism and bigotry. So the reason their mainstreet is dying is because the racism on display from the counter-protesters, who claim to be there to protect mainstreet from dangerous antifa window breakers, is exactly what is killing their own town.

I think it was recorded by a couple people, and if I can find it, I’ll share it, not so you will hear what I said, but so you can hear the reaction from the counter-protesters. While I, a cishet white guy, spoke, they were almost completely silent. As soon as the next speaker started, they tried to drown her out. They did this to Black women, to Native women, and to gay white women. Later I was asked to speak again. And guess what happened? The counter-protesters went silent and listened. So, among other things, I talked about how the people assuring us they are not racist or sexist or bigoted are demonstrating all three and they don’t even know it. I really do hope I can find the video for you. The difference is amazing and obvious. 

I also got into a couple pretty heated arguments with counter-protesters. One woman tried to push her way in and was loudly proclaiming that we shouldn’t be making things about race. Someone pointed out that Black people are being killed by police at a much higher rate than white people, and that’s why it IS about race. She started going off about how we shouldn’t talk about race and it will go away. I asked her to consider why she, as a white woman, was so uncomfortable talking about race that she found it preferable to avoid the subject rather than discuss the problem. She tried about four different detours to other marginalized groups, and each time I pointed out that she was doing it again, and I kept asking her why she was trying to change the subject to anything other than race. She got super-pissed at the implication that she was a white woman because, she explained, she’s part Portugese. I explained that presenting as white affords us the privileges of whiteness. So she said she was being attacked because of the color of her skin and was now the victim of racism. Turns out she DID want to talk about race, but only as long as she got to be the victim! At that point other people were joining in and she was too defensive to hear any of us, so I walked away…

...only to find myself shouted at by another guy because the speaker at the time was talking about the KKK and he wanted me to know the KKK were Democrats, and I should learn my history. So I turned around and explained that they were Democrats when the Democrtic party was the official party of racism, but when the party was divided on the issue of Civil Rights, the Republicans saw an opening and decided to welcome the most virulent racist politicians who literally switched parties to become Republicans, which is why the KKK officially endorsed the head of the modern Republican Party because it has chosen to be the party of racism. He did not like that, and he accused me of going to college (Yep!) and said I should take that back to Portland (Huh?). And then he said I should get out of HIS town. I said, “Wait, did a white man standing on Kalapuya and Grand Ronde land just declare this town to belong to him? The only thing that would make that even more perfect is if he was planting a flag right here in the grass while making his declaration. Oh, wait! He is!” I kid you not, the dude flinched like he wanted to hide his giant Trump flag behind his back for a second, but of course he couldn’t do that, so he just stood there planting his flag. I hope someone filmed that. It was glorious.

While those exchanges were tense, at least they were just words. What was far more concerning was the violence. Now, people can have a reasonable debate about whether or not certain kinds of speech also constitute violence. In general, as an author and educator, I favor a pretty expansive view of free speech, but I have to step back and recognize that, as a cishet white male, it’s easier for me to endure some kinds of hate speech because I’m less likely to face material consequences, so I’m willing to defer to people from marginalized groups who feel things like racist slurs (when directed at someone and not just being analyzed in some abstract way) are a form of violence since they presage physical and/or material harm. But here’s what cannot be denied: Not only were the “All Lives Matter” people shouting hateful slurs, but they were also the only ones to be physically violent. They would push their way into the circle to try to take over, and the police would have to come over and gently escort them back to their place of safety. Do you think, if one of the BLM protesters who is Black or Latinx or Native had done the same thing, they would have been escorted back rather than being arrested and charged with assault? We’ll never know because none of the BLM protesters did that, but I have my suspicions it might have been treated differently. Regardless, we do know that the “All Lives Matter” counter-protesters claimed they were coming to protect their town from violence and then were the only ones to commit any acts of violence. Will any of them reflect on that and allow it to challenge their assumptions about who is the real threat? They did not strike me as the most reflective crowd. 

In addition to being bad at being decent human beings, the “All Lives Matter” protesters were bad at politics, and when I was asked to speak a second time, I pointed that out. For one thing, they stood around us in a big semi-circle. Yes, that was imposing, but it was also stupid from a political perspective: To anyone driving by, it looked like there was a huge BLM rally with a few Trump fans in the back. Dumb. Also, we had an organized list of speakers (though not enough to fill the time and too much time to fill, in my opinion). They had none. It made it painfully obvious that we were there to learn and grow and discuss further action, while they had no message beyond their opposition to Black lives mattering. Lastly, they had no messaging discipline. They were standing around holding up Trump flags and signs while yelling racial slurs. It makes it very difficult for anyone to claim the Trump campaign isn’t racist when his supporters are on video taunting Native women and Black women while wearing MAGA hats and waving flags with his name on them. So please don’t waste your time trying to convince me there are non-racist Trump supporters. Every single Trump supporter supports a racist candidate who is pushing racist policies while they are standing shoulder-to-shoulder with people exhibiting the most obvious and ugly racism.

But here’s the bigger take-away from today which I want supporters of Black Lives Matter to know: Shortly after the murder of George Floyd, support for BLM spiked. It was impossible for people who saw that recorded execution to say Black people do not face injustice or that police brutality is not a problem.  Back in 2014, after the murders of Dontre Hamilton, Eric Garner, John Crawford III, Michael Brown, Ezell Ford, Laquan McDonald, Akai Gurley, Tamir Rice, Antonio Martin, Jerame Reid, and Renisha McBride, and the expressions of outrage particularly in Baltimore, MD, and Ferguson, MO, support for BLM was still quite low. In fact, even after the white supremacist Unite the Right rally in Charlotesville, NC, where a racist murdered a BLM protester, “net public support for the Black Lives Matter movement was about negative 5%, meaning 5% more Americans disapproved of the movement than supported it” (Christian Science Monitor). Then, after the deaths of Ahmaud Arbery, Breonna Taylor, and George Floyd, “Net support for Black Lives Matter recently reached 28% (with 53% approving of the movement and 25% disapproving)...” (Christian Science Monitor). Even among Republicans, the support grew to 10% supporting and 32% neither supporting or opposed at its peak on May 29th (Civiqs). This was enough for politicians and corporations to come out in favor of Black Lives Matter (motivated by the desire for votes and profits which is really the same motivation to maintain themselves rather than a genuine concern for Black people). But Donald Trump is not swayed by the normal political impulse because he’s a through-and-through racist and stoking racial resentment has been his go-to all his life, so he began applying pressure to his propaganda machine, Fox News, to turn on the Black Lives Matter movement by convincing his base that caring about Black people encourages violence and makes white people unsafe. And since there’s nothing old white people like to hear more than the notion that all their fears are justified by racial stereotypes, they’ve been buying in. The support for Black Lives Matter among Republicans has dropped dramatically recently. The percentage of Republicans who support Black Lives Matter is still slightly above where it was the day before George Floyd’s murder (8%), but the number who neither support nor oppose is back down to where it was at this time last year (16%) and the number opposed is back to where it was in September of last year (74%) and climbing rapidly (Civiqs). Meanwhile, support for Black Lives Matter among Democrats (yeah, that party the Trump fan tried to convince me is the party of the KKK) is at 89%. That’s good (really good for the party that started the KKK, right?), but it climbed up to that point back on the 5th of this month and has plateaued since then. That’s an artificial ceiling created by the reverberating effects of the Fox News echochamber seeping even into Democratic opinion, and I saw that firsthand yesterday.

Of course the people waving the Trump flags were opposed to Black Lives Matter, but when they heckled, some of what I heard coming back from Black Lives Matter supporters speaks to this infection of anti-Black Lives Matter information finding purchase even in the left. Remember, Trump and his allies know they aren’t going to get the majority of Democrats to oppose Black Lives Matter, so they don’t confront it directly to the left. But Democratic support for BLM should be 100%, not 89% and holding. So why is it getting sticky? Because different bits of Republican propaganda are finding purchase. This is where we lacked message discipline yesterday, and it’s a big problem. For one thing, the counter-protesters would shout things to try to create what-about-isms related to the failings of Hillary Clinton or Barack Obama. Neither of those politicians are perfect human beings or always took the right positions on every issue. They’re human, and they screwed up. A lot of the right wing smears are just lies (Pizzagate), others are wild exaggerations (Benghazi, emails), and some are distortions based on what I consider to be very legitimate criticisms. For example, Hillary Clinton’s vocal support for the Crime Bill (and, for that matter, Joe Biden’s vote in favor of it) was a mistake which has caused incredible harm to communities of color. We shouldn’t be afraid to say so. We should also contextualize that by remembering the bill had overwhelming support from the leaders of those same communities of color at the time. Clinton and Biden were standing with the Congressional Black Caucus. But they all made a mistake, a terrible mistake that has had disastrous results. Similarly, Barack Obama’s deportation policy was terrible. Again, we can contextualize it by acknowledging that he was trying to win over Republican support in an effort to create a far more humane comprehensive immigration policy, but he got rolled by Republicans and sacrificed the wellbeing of a lot of people of color in the process, and that’s indefensible. The Trump fans want to find these holes in the records of Dems to try to drive a wedge within the left-leaning half of the electorate. But false equivalences are false! Standing with the Congressional Black Caucus and supporting a bill that turns out to have disastrous consequences is bad, but it’s not anything like actively and intentionally encouraging police to beat up Black people which Trump is doing right now. Obama’s deportation numbers were terrible, but (contrary to what some Republicans believe) he did not split up families and put children in hastily built concentration camps ...in the “care” of sexual predators ...during a global pandemic! Yet I heard people (exclusively white allies) on the BLM side slipping into this “Both parties are the same,” rhetoric when baited. Even worse, they were repeating this false notion that both candidates are rapists and pedophiles. Joe Biden is not my first choice for a bunch of reasons. He used to support segregated bussing, and though he changed his stance on that a long time ago, I find that one hard to forgive. He supported the aformentioned crime bill. Privately, he tried to discourage President Obama for pushing for major healthcare reform. While I’m pleased to see how far he’s come when you look at all his current positions on issues, my confidence in him is diminished by how long it has taken him to come to those positions, and it makes me worried that he’ll abandon them once he’s in office. But that wasn’t what I was hearing from the supposed allies. I was hearing he’s a rapist and a pedophile. I strongly believe we should believe women when they make accusations because the vast majority of the time they are telling the truth and even more of the time they are not speaking out at all because they know they won’t be believed, so believing women until proven otherwise in the court of public opinion (not in the court of law) should be our go-to. But we would be wrong, and dangerously so, to let that initial belief so calcify that we are unwilling to recognize it when an accuser turns out to be lying. False accusations do happen, especially from white women towards Black and Brown men, and when we find out an accuser is a liar, we need to be willing to admit we were wrong. Unlike Trump’s more than 20 accusers, Biden has one, and she’s proven to be a serial liar, a fabulist who makes up stories for money or attention. Now, that alone doesn’t mean her story is false; serial liars can be the victims of rape, too. But her specific story about Biden has fallen apart when scrutinized. Sorry, Trump fans, but Joe Biden is not a rapist. He’s not a pedophile, either. The guy was way to handsy with everybody, especially women and children. I suspect that was something he learned when glad-handing as a young politician back when his impulse to touch everybody was something most people probably liked about him. He’s learned to respect appropriate boundaries way too late. But someone who puts their hands all over everybody during photo-ops is not a pedophile. Donald Trump violently raped girls and boys as young as 10 years old at Jeffrey Epstien’s parties. (Trump has threatened to sue people who report that story, but he never does it because he doesn’t want it to come out in a court of law. Go ahead, Donny. Sue me. Let’s have those charges fully investigated.) Calling Joe Biden a pedophile isn’t just false, it’s a huge insult to the victims of Trump’s violent rapes to repeat that false equivalence. 

And that’s the heart of the problem with white allies going off message and getting baited into these discussions with Trump hecklers: It reveals some of us to be really bad allies. Because white allies tend to be more liberal and more politically engaged, we’re very used to arguing with right-wing low-information voters, so we easily slip into the habit of thinking we have more information upon which to make political judgements. But when it comes to allyship, this can lead to a dangerous kind of white supremacy within the ranks of supposed allies. We identify as leftists, so we’re hesitant to tack to the middle for strategic purposes because we’ve seen movements get co-opted by centrists so many times. But being an ally isn’t about being an extreme leftist or a centrist; it’s about supporting rather than leading. When Black, Brown, Indiginous, Asian, disabled, and LGBTQ people tell me they want me to be more extreme, I don’t say, “Well, I support you but I will turn my back on you when I see images of a Wendy’s on fire because I oppose the destruction of private property and I think it’s bad political strategy and I know better than you.” I say, “If you think it’s time for an expression of pure rage, you know better than I do, and I will stand with you.” And when BIPOC tell me, through polling and overwhelming majority votes in the primaries, that they want to choose the centrist candidate because getting rid of Donald Trump is that vital to their safety, I don’t say, “Well, I support you, but I have these longer term goals to get rid of the two party system and to protect the planet from an extinction level event caused by human-created climate change, and I know what’s better for you in the long run, so I’m turning my back on you and voting for a third party.” I say, “If you think it’s time for a centrist candidate now so we still have the ability to vote and can work on other issues in the next election, you know better than I do, and I will stand with you.” Of course BIPOC are not a monolith, despite the way the acronym makes them seem, and allies have to carefully weigh lots of evidence and not just listen to the anecdotal accounts and personal opinions of individual Black or Latinx or Asian or LGBTQ people when figuring out how to best support all marginalized people. But in this case it’s very clear. The vast majority of all of those groups are telling us Donald Trump has got to go. We are not being good allies if we stand up and undermine BIPOC by undermining the only candidate, Joe Biden, who has a realistic shot of accomplishing that goal of BIPOC. There are plenty of left-leaning BIPOC who are going to be holding their noses when they vote for Joe Biden. If we’re going to be true allies, we have to be willing to pinch our noses just as hard. 

This is why the two rallies are so illustrative to me. Historically, every push for civil rights for every marginalized group produces a backlash. That’s why feminism has waves, y’all; after each wave the culture pushed back and said, “Full equal rights and opportunities for all women? Hold on now!” The most successful civil rights movements can weather these, just as Black Lives Matter has survived the backlash after Ferguson and has come back stronger than ever. What really undermines civil rights movements, particularly for people of color, is not the “All Lives Matter” backlash. It’s white allies deciding they’ve been in the fight long enough that they either give up or try to take over and make the movement about some other concern of their own. Read Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man. Read Ta-Nehisi Coates’ The Waterdancer. Read Malcolm X. Read James Baldwin. Heck, if you’re pressed for time, just re-read Martin Luther King Jr.’s “Letter From a Birmingham Jail.” The biggest danger to Black progress is always betrayal from white people who think they’re allies and then undermine the movement because they think they know better. 

So please, please, please keep showing up. If you can, go to protests. It continues to apply pressure and helps the folks sitting in the boring meetings. If you can do the harder work of going to the boring meetings, speak up and support the leaders making changes, because that’s where the change happens. If you can do even more than that, be like Rebecca Hunt and run for office so you can make the decisions during those boring meetings. And at every turn, if you’re a white ally, keep asking yourself, “Am I advocating for the changes BIPOC are telling me they want, or just the ones I have decided they should want?” 

Don’t be like Plant-His-Flag Man. This is not your movement. This is not your town. This is not your land. We’re on stolen land working in racist institutions in a fundamentally white supremacist system. We cannot fix all that. But we can commit to the principle that the people directing the repair operation need to be the ones who best understand how the machine is broken. 

A Very Short Essay on Random Grammars

Back when I was learning to teach English to second language learners, I was exposed to the concept of "random grammars." This is an important piece of compelling evidence that humans have grammar hardwired into our brains: We do not come across people speaking in absolute nonsense. Even our errors tend to fall into basic grammatical structures. For example, a child may say, "I runned around the house," because she hasn't learned the conjugation of the irregular verb, but she will not say, "The around runned I house." Though the combination of possible words is very large, there are many sentences which have never been uttered because they don't fall into basic grammatical structures.

This could create the false impression that humans are likely to reuse the same sentences because we are bound by grammar, but as a publisher I learned just how rare repetition is even in properly constructed sentences. Authors and editors, asking me to make changes, would often say, "There's an error on page X in Y paragraph." I learned to ask them to copy the erroneous sentence into an email instead. Using the "Find" feature, I could get to the sentence much more quickly because, in the whole of a novel, in a hundred thousand words, the same combination would almost never repeat. That's not because authors use random grammars. We don't. It's because the combination of correctly written sentences really is that varied.

I reflect on this now because, as I prepare myself for tomorrow, I speak aloud a strange sentence and then realize that particular sentence may never have been spoken before and may never be repeated despite being grammatically correct. The sentence obeys all the rules of grammar, but it may be unique in all the world. There is a metaphysical, even, dare I say, existential significance to this realization. Despite all we have in common, not just life experience but shared vocabulary and shared rules of grammar, we still experience the world in a completely unique way. And while the quality of being unique might seem valuable in many circumstances, it is also incredibly isolating. We communicate as best we can to try to bridge the gap, to reach out, to connect with others, yet even language itself reminds us we are stretching and struggling and striving to make this contact because we are completely alone in a universe of individual experience. And I feel that loneliness acutely now.

The probably unique sentence? "How should one dress when going to the courthouse in the midst of a global pandemic to sign the divorce paperwork?"

Monthly Newsletter: Dancing on the Ashes for June, 2020

Dear Dashing Devotees of Dependable Newsletters,

In an effort to keep this one short, I will resist the temptation to start with a sentence about my desire to keep it short.

Dammit. 

Lotsa’ Good Stuff:

At the end of May, William Schreiber’s Someone to Watch Over hit digital store shelves, and then Claudine Griggs’ LGBTQ crime thriller Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell launched on June 1st, the first day of Pride Month. To celebrate Pride this year, not just because of Claudine’s book, but to honor my LGBTQ family, friends, and students, I did this:

So that was fun. 

On the flip-side, there’s still a global pandemic raging, and I’m back to being single, and while those are by no means equivalent, neither is pleasant.

I have been heartened by white America’s newfound recognition of 400 years of systemic racism. The problems aren’t new. The murders aren’t new. But the levels of support for Black Lives Matter and other civil rights activism is higher than it has ever been. I tend to be overly optimistic and it frequently bites me in the ass (see above: Back to being single), but in this case I’m really hopeful that we will see more than cosmetic changes which not only reduce the likelihood that an innocent Black man will be murdered by police on any given night, but that we’ll continue to work to address other forms of systemic racism in housing, employment, and within the institution wherein I am most complicit in producing racially disparate impacts: public education. We have a looooooong way to go, but I think America may just defy its traditionally short attention span and do something truly meaningful this time. And maybe those efforts, in concert with our rediscovery that we are inextricably linked by our shared susceptibility to a deadly virus, will inspire us to tackle the looming existential threat of climate change.

If not, I take pictures of my roses each day to remind myself that life and beauty will persist even if our species decides we can’t. 

Speaking of which, last month I shared the second chapter of one of the books I’m writing, tentatively titled Ellipsis Between Worlds. I posted Chapter 3 today. Check it out and let me know what you think. 

Tweet from someone you should consider following

I encourage you to follow Sara Benincasa (@SaraJBenincasa). I had a short conversation with her on twitter a few years ago, and now she’s famous (because she’s amazing, not because she exchanged some tweets with me), and that’s why I love twitter: It allows you to connect with these great people you might never get to meet in the meatspace. Check out here whole thread about Josephine Baker:

I was today years old when I found out that after years of spying for France, Josephine Baker went to Germany to perform for sick and dying former inmates at Buchenwald concentration camp after the camp was liberated. She apparently never spoke about it publicly.

— Sara Benincasa (@SaraJBenincasa) June 29, 2020

Monthly Poem

This year has had a bit of a 1968 vibe, so I’ve been thinking about a song written in 1967, then covered by another artist, which then became a huge hit in 1968 when it seemed to a lot of Americans that the world was falling apart. We’re not in a year like that because we’re not even in a year yet. So here’s my reflection on that:

Mid-Year

Standing on the watchtower

one turned to the other.

“I’m enjoying this

Far less than I expected.”

“There’s not much fun in it, is there?”

the trickster god agreed.

“I’d hoped for more laughs.”

“Yes, and more sex and gore,”

the fallen angel said.

“A year of choking and coughing?

Not very romantic or dramatic.

There’s too much confusion.

Not enough fear.

Most don’t even know it’s happening.”

They watched the horsemen

gallop across the plains

leaping playfully

over new mass graves.

“We shouldn’t give up so soon,”

the glowing one said.

“I didn't plan on these two arriving first.

But there are still two left

before the end.”

Book recommendation

And since it can’t get more depressing than that, if you decide you want to escape into laughter, I recommend Shakespeare for Squirrels. It’s the third novel of Christopher Moore’s starring Pocket, the fool from King Leer. The trilogy (I hope it’s more than a trilogy) started with Fool, a novel that’s one of my all time favorites, continued in Serpent of Venice. Moore doesn’t just retell Leer. At this point he’s covered Merchant of Venice, Othello, Midsummer Night's Dream, and bits of Troilus and Cressida, Romeo and Juliet, and Hamlet, along with Poe’s "Cask of Amontillado" and Moore's own additions of monsters in the canals of Venice and (sorry for the spoiler) magic squirrels. Why squirrels? Because Christopher Moore watches squirrels frolic out the window while he writes. So the novels are a messy mish-mash, right? Nope. They’re brilliantly constructed, deliciously filthy, and satisfying in more ways than I am comfortable describing. 

Announcements/reminders

Last month I encouraged you to sign up for our Writing Against the Darkness Team. We crushed it this year! The team wrote 86,799 words in a single day. For those of you wanting a conversion, that’s a solid novel worth of words. We’ve also raised $4,440 of our team’s $5,000 goal. It’s not too late to contribute, so if you can pitch in a couple bucks to help find a cure for Alzheimers and provide care for families suffering through this disease, every dollar helps! You can donate HERE.

Sign off

I’ll keep sending you flowers every day (digitally, through Instagram and twitter and FB) to try to bring some added beauty into your life. Stay healthy, keep protesting and demanding change, and find time to read some good books.

-Ben

Sponsored section

No sponsors yet, so if you have a friend who wants to reach a few hundred of the very best people, tell them to contact me. I think I’ll do the first one free just so folks can see that I really do post them. Got something you want to advertise for free?

To sign up to receive this newsletter in your email each month, go HERE

Ellipsis Between Worlds: Chapter 3

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Albert stared at Dr. Norton while he tried to make sense of his feelings. First, shock, of course. He thought of that quote attributed to Joseph Stalin: “When one man dies, it's a tragedy. When thousands die, it's statistics.” What would Stalin have thought of the deaths of billions? Albert wondered. He would have found it just as incomprehensible as Albert did. When the numbers get big enough, the distance between a genocidal tyrant who killed millions and a college professor turned construction worker shrank down to insignificance. Albert realized he probably could have asked Dr. Norton for the difference in percentage between the people Stalin had killed and the people Albert had killed (zero), relative to the number of people Dr. Norton had just declared dead, and the man in front of him could have spit out the number almost instantaneously. Would the doctor have resented being used as a calculator in that way, or would he have enjoyed it? Albert didn’t test it, not out of sympathy for Dr. Norton, but because he didn’t want to know the answer to the math problem.

The shock was followed by a focused concern. If thousands are statistics and billions are incomprehensible, what about one person, one grain of sand on that beach, who may or may not have washed in on that poison tide? And what if Albert wasn’t sure if he wanted her dead or alive? Surely he wanted her to be alive … didn’t he? This concern turned to a sharp guilt.

And then the guilt became shame when he realized Dr. Norton’s last words included him, and the news of the death of billions was a precursor to information about his own impending death. Albert felt horrible for wondering about anything in the wake of the revelation about the fate of most of the human race. His instincts for self preservation felt like the worst kind of egotism.

And yet, he had to know. A problem that would mean the end of the human race, Dr. Norton had said. How could Albert, even in the name of virtue, reasonably pretend he didn’t want to know about that?

“I presume you mean the virus?” Albert asked. “That’s what’s going to kill us?”

“Oh, no, not at all. Well, not directly, no. We will have a preliminary vaccine shortly, just as we have informed everyone. Then we’ll have to do some animal testing, then Phase One, Two, and Three trials. Those take time. You have to make sure the vaccine doesn’t kill people first. That’s Phase One. Then you have to make sure it helps prevent the virus from infecting people. That’s Phase Two. Then you have to make sure it helps people enough. That’s Phase Three. All these things take time. But not as much as they used to. It used to take people years to do this work. Now, with the synthetic molecules we can manipulate, and with the computer modeling we can do to predict their efficacy, we expect we can have a safe and effective vaccine produced to the necessary scale in a matter of months. Quite impressive, really. People should be impressed. But they aren’t. And that’s the problem.” Dr. Norton held his hands out, palms up, in his second employment of the only hand gesture he’d made during the interview, and he sighed loudly, an expression so intentional he made it almost into a word. “That’s always the problem for me, you see. People. If this were a mechanical problem, I could solve it. I’m much smarter than you are, Dr. White, and I recognize you are of above-average intelligence. I know I’m not supposed to tell people how much smarter I am. It’s impolite. I do not understand why. It’s a simple fact, not an insult. It’s not like I’m mocking someone’s absurd religious beliefs. That is rude. But I am not supposed to say that I am smarter. Well, in this circumstance, I think it needs to be made clear: I am much smarter, and I could solve this problem if it were mechanical.” 

Then he looked at the ceiling. “I know that technically it is mechanical. Neurons firing. Chemicals in brains. Muscles activated. Human behaviors. Humans reacting to the behaviors of other humans. I understand all that. But it’s far too complex a mechanical problem. More chaotic than Earth’s weather, even with the anthropogenic activity removed. Completely chaotic, but governed by predictable forces. Gravity, wind velocity, humidity, convection. Just too many forces simultaneously. And people are worse. Cultures and nationalities and religions and individual actors. Frankly, it makes me want to take a nap. It makes me very anxious. I’m dimming the lights. I hope you don’t mind.”

“Go right ahead,” Albert began, but his voice trailed off because Dr. Norton had already fished out his phone and was turning the lights down without Albert’s permission, and Albert realized the doctor hadn’t really asked for permission, anyway. 

Once the lights were dimmed, Dr. Norton looked down towards his lap, closed his eyes tightly, and took some deep breaths. Albert felt his own anxiety rise in the silence, then he began to calm himself, and he had almost reached a normal state of equilibrium when Dr. Norton’s head snapped up, eyes once again fixed on that far corner of the room. Albert started a little in surprise, just as he had when Dr. Norton walked in upside down, and he bit down on a shout so it came out as a grunt that wanted to escape through his nose. 

Dr. Norton didn’t seem to notice. “As I said, this ship is populated by volunteers. Though the company did weed out some of the least desirable candidates, those with a violent criminal history, for example, it would have been unethical to over-determine which members of the population would live or die, compounding the dubious ethics of the lack of forthrightness about the consequences of the ships leaving Earth. We are doing our best to preserve humanity, not some perfected strain of humanity. That means we brought along many of Earth’s problems. Not only was someone carrying a new virus for which we do not yet have a cure, but people have brought along their old enmities and distrust. I can assure you we will find a vaccine for this illness and have everyone out of their cabins and ready to build our new home on Enceladus when we arrive, but only you get to decide if you believe me. Some people onboard have already begun spreading rumors that there is no virus, that it is all a ploy to keep the population under stricter control for the duration of the journey. This makes no sense to me. People employed in their work preparing for colonization would be far easier to control. Instead, this quarantine has caused something of a powderkeg. Do you understand that idiom? It’s a historical anachronism, but you are a professor of history.”

“Yes, I know what a keg of gunpowder was,” Albert said, consciously trying not to be offended or express sarcasm.

“Good. Yes, well, that’s what this ship is now. And, we suspect, it’s not an accident. The people spreading this misinformation are doing so intentionally and in a targeted way. We need to figure out who these people are and identify their real motives. Perhaps today they want to cause rioting. But tomorrow? A mutiny? Ethnic cleansing of some sort? Some kind of religious mass conversion and purge of unbelievers? We don’t know. That’s what I want you to help us find out.”

Albert nodded slowly. “I see. I mean, I understand why you need to find out who is behind this movement. But I don’t understand why I was selected as a candidate for this position.”

“Oh, not a candidate, Dr. White,” Dr. Norton said. “You are the only candidate. If you choose not to take the position, we could go back to the drawing board and try to find someone else, but they would not be as suited. You are the only person I want for the job.”

“Why me?”

“Well, that’s a bit complicated, also. We’ve had a split within our own security services. Some of the security personnel and the high ranking officers of the ship’s crew want the ship to be run far more like a military vessel, with a stricter chain of command. Others want to preserve more of the civil liberties of the rest of the crew and make the ship’s leadership more democratic and transparent. These groups have become increasingly distrustful of one another. It is very possible, in fact quite likely, that some members of the security services are working with whoever is behind the misinformation campaign regarding the virus. But we don’t know who. And since neither side trusts the other, even if some members of the security services were to identify culprits, those findings wouldn’t be believed. We need an outsider, someone who can participate in the investigation and then vouch for the findings. And if that person had expertise in insurgencies, propaganda, and coup attempts, they would also be helpful to the security officers. So, a person with the skills to be helpful but with no history of military service or police work. A detective who has never been a detective.”

“You have a crack team of investigators, and one of them is a mole, so you want to throw Encyclopedia Brown into the group.”

“Precisely. Or, metaphorically. And imprecisely. Because I don’t know if there is one mole. Perhaps all the investigators are moles. Also, if these agitators are willing to risk the health of everyone on this ship by encouraging the spread of a deadly virus, do not for a moment think they will hesitate to eliminate a history professor brought in to expose them. Encyclopedia Brown didn’t have to worry about losing his life in his neighborhood sleuthing. You, on the other hand, will be a prime target. I want that to be clear. However, do the math this way: Maybe these people want to kill you. But they also might want to kill everyone onboard, and you might be the key to stopping them, so if you don’t take the position, you may be just as emperilled as if you take it.”

“Those are not good options, Dr. Norton.”

“No,” the man said. He shook his head slightly but kept starting into the corner. “No, they are not. Now you see why I prefer mechanical problems.” Then he leaned back in his chair, straightened his spine slightly, and almost looked Albert in the eye. “So, will you accept the position, Dr. White?”

It was Albert’s turn to look down into his lap. “I just learned that most of the human race is dead or dying, and that, one way or the other, I will probably be killed soon, too. My first choice of a response would be to go to a bar and order strong drinks until I have the courage to speak to confident women. But since the bars are all closed, and since I don’t want to return to my cabin to contemplate this new information, I would like to take the job, and I hope I can start immediately.”

Dr. Norton smiled, a flash of a rictus grin that appeared and disappeared as though he’d read a stage direction in a script. “I’m glad to hear that.  Let’s go meet the team you will be working with. And remember, one or more of them may want to kill you. So I suggest we walk in on the ceiling. It’s a power move.”

Monthly Newsletter: Dancing on the Ashes for May

Dear Beautiful Readers with Excellent Taste in Newsletters (and those are very fashionable sweats you’re wearing, I might add),

We’re two thirds of the way through May. Know what that means? Nothing. It’s 2020. Nic Pizzolatto was/is/will be right: “Time is a flat circle.” 

Lotsa’ Good Stuff:

In just a few days, on Tuesday the 26th, William Schreiber’s Someone to Watch Over, will launch. As I mentioned last month, it’s a wonderful story about family and redemption which gets lumped into the unfortunately named category “Women’s Fiction.” Sorry, dudes, but women read more fiction in just about every genre; it’s all “Women’s Fiction.” But then, calling Bill’s book “Literary Fiction” tells you next to nothing about it, either. We need better descriptors. 

But how far away is Tuesday the 26th? An eternity? The blink of an eye? Ask Bill Schreiber how far off that feels to him. I don’t understand time anymore.

Claudine Griggs’ Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell, an LGBTQ crime thriller (see, that actually tells you something!) will launch on June 1st, the first day of Pride Month. I have a big plan to celebrate Pride this year, not just because of Claudine’s book, but to honor my LGBTQ family, friends, and students. Keep an eye out for my posts on twitter, Facebook, or Instagram that day. I think it will be … memorable.

Last month I shared the first chapter of one of the books I’m writing, tentatively titles Ellipsis Between Worlds. I posted Chapter 2 today. Check it out and let me know what you think. Thanks to author Steve Davala for some good suggestions after Chapter 1 that are already shaping the rest of the novel, and thanks to my girlfriend, Sandra, for making sure I continue writing it. Being with someone who wants to read everything I write has been excellent for my productivity!

Tweet from someone you should consider following

I’m still riding high on this tweet from Roxane Gay (@rgay):

I love that you responded this way. It means so much to me.

— roxane gay (@rgay) April 25, 2020

But another great follow is Mikel Jollett (@Mikel_Jollett). He’s the lead singer of The Airborne Toxic Event, the author of a forthcoming memoir Hollywood Park, and one of the most incisive voices on our current political reality. For example:

Ok how about this:

No more billionaires. None.

After you reach $999 million, every red cent goes to schools and health care.

You get a trophy that says, “I won capitalism” and we name a dog park after you.

— Mikel Jollett (@Mikel_Jollett) March 22, 2020

Monthly Poem

My girlfriend reminded me I hadn’t written her a poem in a while, so I wrote this for her that same night. Was I showing off? Yes! I want to impress her!

On Demand

Someone cannot reasonably expect

A poem to appear at their request.

There is a process one must show respect

Like coming to an interview well dressed.

Your one justification is quite fair.

I did use poems early on to woo.

But shall I to a summer’s day compare

You in some hastily scribbled haiku?

Or tell a joke through a limerick’s lines?

Sestinas lead to madness as they scheme,

And sonnets often struggle to find rhymes,

While villanelles are harder than they seem.

But this unjust demand I can excuse

Since you have volunteered to be my muse. 

Book recommendation

I’m a big fan of N.K. Jemisin’s The Broken Earth series, and this month I read her newest novel, The City We Became, a love letter to New York mixed with a superhero story mixed with H.P. Lovecraft twisted back on his own racist ass to represent gentrification and systemic racism. It’s a fantastic ride and as sharp as all the angles in New York. 

Announcements/reminders

Last month I encouraged you to sign up for our Writing Against the Darkness Team. On the longest day of the year, June 20th, we’re going to participate in The Alzheimer’s Associations annual The Longest Day fundraiser by writing from dawn to dusk. The team is growing! We might not be getting together in person this year, but this is the perfect opportunity to do some good for the world from home, and doing good is a great way to maintain your own mental health, so please consider it. Find out more and sign up HERE.

Sign off

I’ll keep sending you flowers every day (digitally, through Instagram and twitter and FB) to try to bring some added beauty into your life. Have a great Pride Month … in five years, when next month arrives. 

-Ben

Sponsored section

No sponsors yet, so if you have a friend who wants to reach a few hundred of the very best people, tell them to contact me. I think I’ll do the first one free just so folks can see that I really do post them. Got something you want to advertise for free?

To sign up to receive this newsletter in your email each month, go HERE

Ellipsis Between Worlds, Chapter 2

I posted Chapter 1 of this novel last month just to see if folks might be interested in reading it in serial form, and some people really enjoyed it. One reader gave me some excellent suggestions that are already shaping where the novel goes from here (shout-out to author Steve Daval), and my girlfriend Sandra is making sure I continue to write it, so I’ll keep posting chapters and taking your suggestions. I know it’s hitting a little close to home, but I hope that will help readers relate rather than being a turn-off.

Ellipsis Between Worlds

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Back when Albert had given up his tenure track teaching position at Oberlin in Ohio and moved to Chicago to take a somewhat menial construction job, he’d marveled at the design of The Enceladus. Of course the sheer size of the ship had taken his breath away, just as it did for everyone. Even from the surface of Earth, it was visible in its berth in orbit, a ghostly white balloon in the sky at the end of its space elevator thread. But the more he learned about it, the more impressed he was. Because they’d known it would take fifty years to build, and because they expected technology to improve dramatically during that time, they’d focused on simplicity. It’s exterior hull looked almost like a globe. But the engine, which was not nearly the diameter of the ship itself, was a core that hung suspended between the poles of the orb, creating indentations at those poles, the rear pole sinking in to the main exhaust port that would launch the ship to Saturn’s moon, the front pole of the ship sinking into the exhaust port that would deccelerate the ship on the second half of its journey. Most of the globe was hollow, the people living in the ten storey thick skin of the balloon, the wildlife living under the artificial sky thirty stories further in, and then a vast nothingness, not even filled with oxygen, between that artificial sky and the core. Most impressive, once Albert learned about it, was the way the ship had been designed to be built; all in prefabricated interlocking pieces that could be made on Earth and then lifted up the space elevator and simply set in place. Much as ancient wooden maritime ships were designed to use the pressure of the water to push the pieces of wood together to remain water-tight, once The Enceladus was pressurized, the force attempting to suck that air into space pulled all the pieces of the ship into place so perfectly they kept the air in. Of course, back when he’d been working at loading those prefabricated pieces onto the space elevator, the ship had lacked its most magical ingredient. In the last months before the launch, they’d used the space elevator to pump trillions (he’d read it was nearly a quadrillion) gallons of water from the Great Lakes up to the ship where it was carefully applied to form a perfectly clear bubble of ice fifty feet thick around the whole ship. (In fact, they’d even covered the exhaust ports of the main engine, then drilled in to make the openings for the exhaust. That was easier.) The ice served as a shield against solar radiation, a protection against any micrometeoroid that would hit the ship with the force of a bullet, a source of oxygen, and a source of fuel for the hyper-efficient hydrogen engine. Sure, they had the solar sail behind them for extra juice and protection, but they had more than enough fuel to make the journey ten times over in the shield itself. It was this kind of beautiful simplicity Albert admired about the ship. 

Here’s what he hated: Elevators. In the ten stories that made up the space in which everyone worked and lived, people had to take elevators up to the floor just beneath the wildlife area. Then they had to board a maglev train to the right place, then get off and take another elevator down to where they were going. Back before the quarantine, there had been frequent lines at these elevators that wasted everyone’s time. Now, when most of the crew were remanded to their cabins, the elevators were easily accessible even though only one person could be in one at a time in order to prevent the spread of the infection. But that meant, on his first day out of his cramped cabin in weeks, Albert walked down an empty hallway and got into an even smaller room by himself. Then he got out of the small room and climbed into a compartment of a maglev train, essentially another small, windowless room, and shot under the surface of the wildlife floor to a station where he got into a second elevator, another small, windowless room. He’d just traded isolation for more isolation. 

But this elevator was headed in a direction he’d never traveled before. Instead of going down to some spot in the crew’s working or living areas, this elevator was going up. Actually, up and down were relative. It was going further in, away from the hull that was the focus of the ship’s artificial gravity, towards the core where there would be none. And while those other trips “down” were, at most, ten stories, this one would be ten times as long. If the elevator had windows, he would have spent the first moments rocketing through the wildlife area, watching the green plains populated by herds of grazing animals, the rolling hills, and the the bodies of water of different sizes, elevations/depths, and selenities with all their teaming fish. Birds in flight would have passed below him, mostly, though many soared as high as the artificial sky and could have flown much higher on Earth. Most of the ship’s food was produced in facilities below, but there were farms growing some kinds of produce under the artificial sky, and he would have recognized the rows of corn shrinking beneath him, turning into simple golden squares. 

And then, quite suddenly, he would have been terrified if the elevator had windows. Because when it passed through the artificial sky, it entered a space unlike anything except in the heart of the other four great ships rocketing off to their destinations. Above him (what felt like “above” due to the artificial gravity) was the core, and beneath him there was the spherical back side of the artificial sky, but in between was nothing, a huge emptiness punctuated only by the thin spokes of the various elevators and pointed in to the core. The light of a few stars might have peaked in from the front of the ship, around the control deck and through the clear ice shield at the front of the ship, and similarly from the space around the exhaust port at the stern, but most of the light would have been blocked by the hull, and there was no reason to illuminate the core. It was the largest, emptiest, darkest space ever created by human beings, possibly the largest cave in the universe, and only a few techs doing maintenance checks on the outside of the core would ever have seen it.  It was not designed to be seen. It was the empty body cavity of the ship, and the ship’s heart floated far, far from its ribs.

As Albert raced toward that heart, the same maglev technology that moved the trains side to side now pushed and pulled the elevator up/down/in, and he could feel the gravity dissipate. There was no sensation of spinning any more than a person feels the Earth’s rotation around its axis, or around the sun, or around the center of the galaxy, spiral inside spiral inside spiral. But as he neared the core, the centrifugal force of the spin lost its grip on his body, and he began to bounce off his chair and against his seatbelt for longer and longer periods despite the elevator’s smooth movement. Just flexing his butt muscles sent him floating off his seat and into the belt, and he entertained himself by seeing how long he could make himself bounce with the minimum amount of force. It felt childish, but he was completely alone inside the elevator, and, he reasoned, childish glee was a reason to engage in an activity, any activity, not a reason to avoid it. 

When the elevator arrived, he reached down and pushed the buttons on the tops of his shoes. In most respects they looked like tennis shoes he would have worn back on Earth, but they had a button near the toe, at the end of the laces, and when pressed it lit up a soft green to let the wearer know the shoes were working. Pressing one’s feet down into the floor activated the magnets in the soles, and lifting one’s foot pressed the sensors in the inside roof of the shoes, deactivating the magnets. This made it possible to walk along the ground without giving any thought to the lack of gravity, and it let the muscles of the ankles orient the body 90 degrees from the floor. The position of the magnets in the sole, and the way they came online and when turned off, made for a remarkably natural stride, and Albert took off his seatbelt and walked out into the hall without thinking of the shoes.

The first room on the other side of the elevator looked like an airlock and might have been able to serve as one, but currently it was being used to make sure none of the virus made it into the ships core area. He walked to the center of the room, stopped, and held his arms straight out. He knew the drill, though he wasn’t looking forward to it. A red warning light flashed, reminding him to close his eyes tightly, and a digital bell sound gave out a slow note that incresed in volume. At its peak, Albert felt the cold mist of the disinfectant, then the heat of the flash of UV light that evaporated the moisture on his skin away. Too much of this would leave his skin dry and cracking. Hell, too much of it would probably give him all kinds of crazy cancer, he thought. But he understood why they were doing it. And it was no guerantee; if he’d picked up the virus and it was already inside his system, he could bring it into the core area. They must have high confidence through their contact tracing that he not only didn’t have it yet, but also hadn’t passed through any area on his way to the elevator where an infected person had been since that route’s last deep cleaning. 

The door on the other side of the little room opened automatically, and Albert stepped through into a hallway. He needed his phone to give him directions down to the office where he would have his interview, and he didn’t cross paths with anyone else as he made two lefts and three rights until he found the door marked with a simple number 47 on the door. Inside, he found a bare room, a cube with an empty desk standing between two chairs. He sat in a chair facing the far wall and waited. His anxiety built in the silence, and he fought the urge to pull out his phone. He didn’t want his first impression on a prospective employer to be found staring at the screen in his hand. But when the door finally opened less than two minutes later, he started at the sound and turned in his chair like a frightened animal, then had to compose his face before the interviewer entered.

Just when he was feeling controlled, the man came in. Upside-down. The doorway didn’t rise quite to what Albert perceived as the ceiling, so the man had to step over a bit of the frame, but he did that as naturally as a submarine sailor used to walking into doors with raised door jambs. The man had short brown hair, a clean-shaven face, a thin build and long neck, bad posture. Because he was standing on Albert’s ceiling, his hunching was even more disconcerting. He walked across the room, dodging the desk just as he might if he’d been on Albert’s floor, only his head passed next to the desk. Then, in the corner, he turned his body at the ankles, maintaining his curved spine, then walked down what Albert perceived as the wall, then rose up to Albert’s orientation. He pulled out the chair and sat, but he still didn’t look at Albert’s face. 

“I’m Dr. Bradley Norton. Always ‘Bradley,’ never ‘Brad.’ I don’t like the name ‘Brad.’”

“Nice to meet you, Dr. Norton,” Albert said.

“Yes, that is better than ‘Bradley,’” the man said, still staring at a corner of the room over Albert’s left shoulder.  “And you are Dr. Albert White. It’s nice to meet you. I won’t shake your hand, for obvious reasons. I should mention that I’m not a medical doctor. I’m a Ph.D., like you. Multiple, in fact. But the hard sciences. Mathematics. Physics. Engineering. I do not do well with people or anything involving people. That’s why you are here. I entered the room in the way that I did because I have been told that it’s a power move. But I am not supposed to tell you it’s a power move or it loses its power. And that’s okay. I don’t want to make you uncomfortable.” 

And then he sat in silence.

“Alright,” Albert said, and couldn’t think of anything else to say.

“It’s interesting that your name is ‘White’ even though you are not white, Dr. White.” Dr. Norton did not smile as he said this. Albert couldn’t figure out if it was a joke.

“No. One of my ancestors was a slave who was owned by a man who was named White, and he had to take his master’s name. There has been lots of racial mixing in my family’s history, including white people, but, to my knowledge, there has never been a white person named White in the family.”

“Yes. That is interesting. Not technically ironic, but interesting. One interesting thing about me is that I have autism. That’s why I am uncomfortable with eye contact, although I understand many people who do not have autism are also uncomfortable with eye contact. It is also why I frequently say things that make people uncomfortable. I have learned to be very up front about this. That will be especially important for our conversation today because I am going to say things that will probably make you very uncomfortable.”

Then Dr. Norton stared in silence again.

“Alright. I appreciate that.”

“Good. I am not a Vulcan. I do have feelings, and I’m sorry this will be uncomfortable. Dr. White, how many people are there in the solar system at present?”

Albert blinked. “Um, well, Earth’s population peaked at around 9 billion and has been going down, so, somewhere between 7 and 8 billion?”

“That may still technically be correct, though I highly doubt it. But we need to stop thinking in that way. We need to start thinking that the entire population of the solar system is under ten million people, and they are all on this ship. That is almost certainly not true yet, but it will probably be true soon.”

Now it was Albert’s turn to stare in silence, though he gaped directly at Dr. Norton. “I don’t … I don’t understand.”

“No, you wouldn’t. You shouldn’t, in fact. That’s by design. There are very few people who understand this completely. Perhaps only a few thousand aboard this ship. Though, a few thousand used to be point zero zero zero zero zero zero zero two five percent of the universe’s human population, and I’m asking you imagine it as point zero zero zero two, so ‘small’ is relative. Here is what that small number of people understand, and what you must understand in order to do the job I’m asking you to do. 

“A little over one hundred years ago, shortly after the outbreak of the Corona virus, a group of people at very high levels of government had the forethought to examine the way people immediately returned to behaviors that were destroying the global climate, and they realized this would be unsustainable. Furthermore, they realized they could not change people’s behaviors, even the behaviors of their own governments, in time to prevent the Earth from becoming inhospitable to human life. So they went to their governments and proposed to provide a Plan B. Actually, a Plan B, C, D, E, and F. They suggested building the ship we are on now, and they told them we needed this option just in case global warming got out of control, or in case of an asteroid strike against the Earth, or in case of another pandemic just like they’d all recently survived. Even these arguments would have been unpersuasive, but when these forward thinkers pointed out that all the other continents were going to have their own ships, each group of governments signed onto the plan for fear of being the odd person out. 

“They designed the ships to hold vast numbers of people. Ten million each. But I think you can imagine what would have happened if they had said that only those fifty million people would be leaving Earth. They would have been dismissed as alarmists, or, worse, they would have had to decide which people lived and died in the face of a massive public uproar. Instead, they got to decide from the volunteers quietly over time. They announced the journeys and let people apply. They made it clear that we did not know, and still do not know, which of the five ships will be able to create a sustainable colony. Maybe they all will, but that’s unlikely. Maybe none of them will. That’s slightly more likely, unfortunately. People, knowing they were going on what may prove to be a suicide mission, were very reluctant to sign up. As the conditions on Earth worsened, more and more people decided to take the risk, but it was still a small enough percentage of the population that we avoided an Escape from Saigon scenario. You are a history professor. Do you understand that reference?”

Albert nodded. The Vietnam War wasn’t his area of specialization, but he’d seen the pictures of people hanging off the last American helicopters as the capital of South Vietnam fell to the North. 

Dr. Norton held out his hands, palms up, his first gesticulation in his whole speech. “This ship isn’t even full to capacity. There are 9,438,426 people on board. There were more when we took off, before the epidemic, but not the full complement of ten million. Some babies have also been born, and some people have died for reasons not related to the virus. But you get my point. We weren’t even full. People on Earth decided to take their chances, most believing they would have to live out their lives underground after the ships took off. They thought that was a much safer alternative than a suicide mission to a remote planet or moon. And we mostly let them think that. We didn’t try to completely prevent the truth from getting out. That would have been impossible. 10,000 people can’t keep a secret. But by letting it just be a rumor and not an official pronouncement, we allowed it to be drowned out by other rumors. There are always conspiracy theories that some people will believe and others won’t. We just withheld some of the evidence that might have elevated one theory to the top for people concerned about evidence.”

Albert swallowed. “What evidence did you withhold?”

“The real numbers in our modeling. When the original group designed the five ships, they sold them as Plan B, C, D, E, and F. What they didn’t say was that the construction of the ships themselves, the mining, the moving of the parts using gasoline, the extraction of the water for the shields; all these things made the global warming worse. Much worse. Much faster. Having these Plan Bs meant there was no longer a Plan A. It’s possible some people will learn how to survive under Earth’s surface until the planet heals, but I find that very unlikely. In fact, since we drained the water for the ice shields, it’s more probable they are all already dead.”

Albert fell back against the back of his chair, a movement that took some intentionality in zero gravity. “Holy shit.”

“Yes, I understand this is a very hard thing for you to hear. I have just told you that many people you know, probably many of the people you care about, are dead. It would be most polite for me to give you some time to process this information. I understand the grieving process takes most people some time, often years, though there is quite a bit of variation. Unfortunately, we don’t have that luxury. If you need to take years to process this grief, you will not be able to do the job I need you to do. Are you ready to learn about the job? I can give you a few minutes of silence, but then we have to move on. Because, if the 9,438,426 people on board this ship are the only people still alive in the solar system, we have a problem that must be solved or it will mean the end of the human race. Would you like five minutes of silence first?”

Monthly Newsletter, Dancing on the Ashes for April

Dear Fetching and Insightful Readers,

The end of April is here. I had this whole opening monologue planned wherein I would make fun of myself for taking on new projects and making myself so busy that I’m avoiding the pandemic outside my door by risking a stress-induced heart attack indoors. But you know what? This month has been rough for a lot of folks, far rougher for many than it has been for me. So let’s just skip to the good stuff, shall we? 

Lotsa’ Good Stuff:

Kate Ristau’s Shadow Queene, the sequel to Shadow Girl, launched on Tuesday, and Kate did a bunch of cool online events. That was a great day for me, a milestone for Not a Pipe Publishing (25 books in print!), and an even better day for all the folks getting their copies of her great novel.

William Schreiber’s Someone to Watch Over, will have its cover reveal and pre-order announcement on the 4th of May. Excited for that launch. It’s a wonderful story about family and redemption which gets lumped into the unfortunately named category “Women’s Fiction.” Sorry, dudes, but women read more fiction in just about every genre; it’s all “Women’s Fiction.” But then, calling Bill’s book “Literary Fiction” tells you next to nothing about it, either. We need better descriptors.

Claudine Griggs’ Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell, an LGBTQ Thriller (see, that actually tells you something!) will have its cover reveal during May and launch on June 1st, the first day of Pride Month. Keep an eye out for that one; it may force you to ask yourself some uncomfortable questions about how far you would go to fight for what’s right.

In addition to these other author’s books, I have been working on my own. For those of you who dared to defy the title of Don’t Read This Book and have been clamoring for the sequel … yes, for both of you ... I’m about nine chapters in and making good progress. But I also started a different novel I’m writing simultaneously. “Why would someone do that?” you ask. Because my girlfriend, Sandra, really wants to read more of my writing, and I’m not used that in a relationship, so I want to keep her wanting more. I’m thinking I’ll release this other novel as a serial if you all like it. It’s about a guy stuck in a room during a quarantine, only his room is in a spaceship traveling from Earth to Enceladus, one of the moons of Saturn … and then it turns out the situation is even more dire than he thought. Sound like something you might like? Check it out HERE and let me know if you want more!

[Working Title] Ellipsis Between Worlds, Chapter 1

Tweet from someone you should consider following

One of my favorite people on twitter is Jamelle Bouie. I’ve admired his writing and thinking since he was on Slate and a frequent guest on The Slate Political Gabfest. Now he’s at the New York Times and on CBS. I feel like I almost know him personally. He’s into cooking (not my thing), photography (I admire it but am not good at it), and comic books (so with him on that), but mostly I appreciate his incisive political commentary and eye for important and illuminating stories. Give him a follow. 

Racism is a system for the distribution of personhood. To be white is to presumptively be a person, to be black is to presumptively be a non-person. https://t.co/3uNnzGSsCK

— b-boy bouiebaisse (@jbouie) April 28, 2020

Monthly Poem

No long introduction is necessary for this month’s poem. You’ll be able to guess what inspired it.

Little Bird

Sometimes

Do even the smallest birds

while chirping their way through

a sun-dappled

cloud-splattered dawn

greeting their neighbors

and flitting about

looking for worms or seeds

just doing their daily chores

fix their wings out stiffly

and glide in a fast arc downwards

that swoops up

so they are perfect models

of the freedom of flight

and think to themselves

"Damn I'm cool!"?

Or is that the point of 

millions of years of evolution

to make creatures 

who can stand beneath them

watch their perfect shapes

silhouetted against the sky

to learn we are lesser

lower

than their simple greatness?

Book recommendation

The most powerful book I read this month was Roxanne Gay’s An Untamed State, but it is so brutal, I’m not sure I’d recommend reading it during a global pandemic. Want to cry? Then grab a copy. I tweeted about how much I admired it, and Roxanne Gay replied! That was a high point of the month, certainly. 

Announcements/reminders

Last month I encouraged you to sign up for our Writing Against the Darkness Team. On the longest day of the year, June 20th, we’re going to participate in The Alzheimer’s Associations annual The Longest Day fundraiser by writing from dawn to dusk. Well, we might not be getting together in person this year, but this is the perfect opportunity to do some good for the world from home, and doing good is a great way to maintain your own mental health, so please consider it. Find out more and sign up HERE.

Sign off

I hope this finds you physically and mentally well and weathering this storm as best you can. I’ll keep sending you flowers every day (digitally, through Instagram and twitter and FB) to try to bring some added beauty into your life. Take care!

-Ben

Sponsored section

No sponsors yet, so if you have a friend who wants to reach a few hundred of the very best people, tell them to contact me. I think I’ll do the first one free just so folks can see that I really do post them. Got something you want to advertise for free?

To sign up to receive this newsletter in your email each month, go HERE

Serial Novel, Maybe? Chapter 1

So I’m thinking of writing a novel in serial form during this whole COVID thing. I’m a couple chapters in, and I’ve outlined it through the ending. I think it has legs. But I want your feedback. What do you think? Want more of this?

---

[Working Title] Ellipsis Between Worlds

Chapter 1

It was strange; there, on his screen, he had more entertainment than he could watch in a thousand lifetimes. Comedies. Action movies. So-called "reality" programs. Documentaries. And that didn't include all the games he could play. Old fashioned two dimensional side scrollers, three dimensional first-person shooters, immersive virtual reality role playing games. Many of the movies and games were set in fictional settings, some completely fantastical but others rooted in the world of before, the one with soil and trees and waterfalls. He could have spent his time looking at those. Remembering. There were so many ways to fill the hours trapped in his apartment. Instead, he would just stare out the window.

He remembered movies he'd seen where characters, noble heroes in fancy uniforms, stared out their windows into space. The stars would zip by, sometimes stretching into long glowing lines, to show the audience the ship was moving at some incredible speed. Ridiculous. Out his window, the stars were glowing specks. They didn't move. There was no sun coming up to hide them for half the day. The ship's clocks counted through each twenty-four hour "day," then rolled over, and the stars never changed. He thought about getting a grease pencil and trying to mark all the stars’ positions to see if there was any change in the entire duration of the journey. He was no astronomer, but he didn’t think it would work. He knew they were moving at an average speed of 25 thousand miles an hour. He knew the trip would take almost four years. And he knew they would end up about 800 million miles from Earth. He suspected those stars, when 800 million miles from home, would be in almost exactly the same positions they had been in the Ohio night sky on the rare nights they’d been visible. And he also suspected he didn’t have the technical know-how to place the markings on the window precisely enough to make any change visible to the naked eye from some vantage point in his room. These were, at best, guesses based on his general knowledge, just musings from a guy who understood less about astronautics than most of the people on the ship. These speculations were all superseded by his absolute certainty that he’d never have the motivation to undertake the project. He didn’t stare at the stars because he cared about them. He stared at them because he had trouble caring about anything.

Also, it was impossible to strike a brave pose when the window was in the floor. Albert found it frankly shocking that none of the old movies got that part right. Sure, it would have made for bad camera angles, but at least some of the most realistic movies should have predicted that correctly. If the fake gravity had to be created by rotation, of course all the windows would be set in the floors. He assumed there were windows in the front and back of the ship that looked out towards their destination or the home they’d left behind. But he’d never bothered to check. There’d be nothing but a star-filled night sky in front. And behind? Nothing he wanted to think about. Most of his cabin had a normal, opaque floor. The porthole was circular, three feet in diameter, and set in the middle of the room. Some people covered theirs with a rug. Albert set his only chair at the edge and stared into space between his feet. Why would he want a window set in the wall so he could stand up and look backwards along the ship’s flightpath? That would be even more depressing. 

Albert didn’t wear a fancy uniform or rest his hand on the grip of a high-tech laser pistol while staring out his window. On a good day, he wore jeans and a t-shirt. On a bad day, he wore sweatpants and sometimes didn’t bother to put a shirt on. He had a uniform of sorts, a polo shirt he hated with the company’s stupid logo on the left breast and a scratchy, completely pointless collar. He figured someone had done some research and found that people were more productive when wearing uncomfortable clothing, so the company had spent millions on the stupid shirts. He did the math in his head. Billions? Yeah, they probably had spent billions on shirts. Not that it mattered at that point. The whole idea of money had been breaking down. He imagined some executive saying to a sweatshop worker in Malaysia or the Marshall Islands, “Hey, want to make us shirts? I’ll pay you a million dollars per shirt. Also, you’ll be dead in a year. Or you can come with us, and I’ll pay you a penny a shirt in a currency that will have no value in a year. But you’ll be alive. Your choice.” Albert almost laughed. But then he thought about the choices they all made - and the ones that were made for them, choices made by the powerful, choices made by previous generations, choices made by the people who said they loved them the most and turned out to be the biggest liars of all, and the humor soured into something bitter, then sank into his stomach where it was more acidic than bile. He reminded himself he needed to stop thinking of choices, or he’d contemplate himself into an ulcer.

He could see his own reflection between his shoes. His brown skin almost glowed against the darkness, and his black eyes were spaces in the vacuum where no stars lived. Albert was handsome, but he didn’t think so. That truth had been taken from him, too. He didn’t see an attractive man in his mid thirties with slightly curly, jet-black hair, fit if a bit on the thin side, a rakish amount of stubble growing along his square jawline. Albert saw a man past his prime who had weak shoulders, felt doughy around the middle, needed a haircut and a shave, and had black holes for eyes. 

His phone rang. When Albert had first learned they would be using cellphones on the ship, he’d been a bit disappointed. He’d expected something more futuristic, like a sexy woman’s voice that would talk to them from the wall and do all their communicating for them, or devices that would wrap around their ears and project holograms a foot away from their faces. But no. Just cell phones and ship-wide wifi. If it ain’t broke.

“Hey, how are you doing, man?” Luis asked. 

Albert was relieved to see his best friend’s hair was getting a little too long also. Luis’ hair was as black as Albert’s but straight. Normally he combed it back, but it looked like he’d been running his fingers through it a lot lately, and two locks fell down either side of his face. Albert could relate. “I’ve been staring out the window again,” he said.

“That bad, eh?”

“I guess.” Albert looked over Luis’ shoulder. “Are you taking a shit?”

Luis laughed. “No. Only private space in our cabin.”

Albert smiled for the first time that day. “Oh, we’re having a top secret conversation?”

Luis looked at the door to his right. “You know I love my family. But … No, no ‘but.’ I love my family. But seriously, man! The kids are driving me crazy. I love them. I do. But they are starting to get on each other’s nerves. And then they fight, and they get on my nerves. And then Julie gets irritated that I’m irritated and tells me I need to be more patient with them. And I know she’s right, but you know what will never make me stop being irritated? Telling me not to be irritated! So then I’m irritated with her, and that’s never good. I know you don’t think you’re lucky, but…”

Albert just shook his head quickly. A warning.

“Yeah, I know,” Luis said. “Sorry. So, any news on the job search?”

Albert bowed. Luis was sitting on a toilet in a room the size of a shower because it was a shower. The ship’s designers realized they could save a lot of space if the toilets were inside the showers, and the water that sprayed down from the ceiling would keep the toilets and small sinks in the little square rooms that much cleaner. By holding out his phone arm to it’s full length and sweeping the other to its widest, Albert could illustrate that he at least had more room than Luis. It was a spiteful gesture, but he was still stinging a little from Luis’ intimation that Albert was lucky to be in that cabin alone. “Just one more non-essential worker at your service,” he said. “How about you? Any nibbles?”

“Nah. I heard that they were trying to figure out some other things us non-essentials could do just to make work. You know, like manufacturing supplies for the med bays. Or delivering the medical personnel food or something. But basically, unless you have medical training, there’s no reason to let us out. Some people are taking classes to get jobs in the medical field just to get out of their cabins. Isn’t that crazy? I mean, the only reason there are jobs in the medical field is … well, you know.”

“Right.”

“So, non-essential,” Luis said. “But maybe if a job opens up in food delivery. That has to be a growth industry, right?”

They both chuckled cynically. 

Then Albert heard the knock on the bathroom door through the phone. Luis didn’t react much, but his lips pressed together just a tiny bit, a poker tell.

Albert smiled. “You should get that.”

Luis closed his eyes. “Five minutes. Five minutes of peace. That’s all I want, man. I love them. I love my family. I do. But five minutes.”

A muffled woman’s voice came through the door and the phone into Albert’s room. “Sorry, honey, but Carrie has to use the bathroom as a bathroom.”

“Daddy!” A little girl’s voice. “I have to go poop. And I can’t wait anymore, Daddy. I have to go right now.”

Luis looked hard at Albert. “She isn’t lying.”

Albert shrugged. “She’s very persuasive.”

“Fine, fine,” Luis said to the door, and then the light changed as he stepped out of the little room and into his cabin. 

“Sorry, honey,” Julia said. 

“It’s okay. You go ahead, Carrie.”

The top of a little girl’s head passed along the bottom of the screen, and then her hand flashed up into the middle of the picture as she said, “Hi, Albert!”

“Hey, Carrie. I hope everything comes out okay!”

“Gross. My poop is private!” the girl yelled. She sounded genuinely angry. 

“Sorry, Carrie,” Albert called.

Luis just shrugged into the camera.

“Don’t make her self conscious about her pooping, Albert,” Julia said from offscreen, but Albert could hear the smile in her voice. 

“Thanks a lot, Mom,” Carrie called through the door. 

“I got your back, honey. Here, Luis, gimme the phone.”

Luis rolled his eyes, but he was smiling, too. Albert was glad to see they were doing so well. He found he was more invested in the couple’s happiness than he was ready to contemplate. 

Julia’s face took over the screen. “Hey, Albert. How are you?” Julia had a round face and caring eyes, but Albert mostly noticed that her straight blond hair, pulled back into a ponytail, looked much neater than his or Luis’. Then he remembered she was still working, though remotely, and had to remain presentable. 

Now it was Luis’ turn to speak from off camera. “You could use your own phone. We could add you to the conversation.”

She looked out of the frame. “I’ll just steal it for a second.” Then back to Albert. “So, how are you getting by?”

“All things considered?”

“Right. Did you think about my advice? There are lots of counselors doing virtual therapy sessions. I can give you the names of dozens. Or you could find someone I don’t work with, run their name by me, and I could tell you if I know them, if you want to make sure it’s someone I don’t know.”

“No, that’s not the issue,” Albert said. “I’m sure they’re all very professional.”

“Right, but I know sometimes it’s weird if your counselor is a colleague of one of your friends. I just don’t want that to stop you. Because I really think it’s a good idea, Albert. You’ve been through a lot.”

“Everybody has been through a lot.”

Julia nodded vigorously. “Yes. Yes, we have. We all need to be talking to someone. And you’ve been through more than most. So just think about it, okay?”

“I promise.”

She looked skeptical. “Okay, please do, okay?” Then she handed the phone back to Luis. 

Luis smiled in his wife’s direction. “She’s right, man. Support the industry. Keep therapists employed. In a roundabout way, you’ll be keeping her out of my hair.” Then his face lit up. “Oh, did you hear about the petition?”

Albert shook his head.

Luis looked more animated than Albert hd seen him in weeks. “This is so stupid, but it cracks me up. Okay, so there’s this whole online outcry to rename either the ship or Enceladus ‘America 2.’”

“You’re kidding.”

“No. It has tens of thousands of signatures. And the Canadians have mostly laughed it off, but a lot of the Brits and Kiwis and Aussies are pretty pissed. There are even counter proposals to name it England 2 or Scotland 2. And those are dumb. But America 2 is by far the dumbest. I mean, how many of those people even know where the word ‘America’ comes from? At least England was named after one of the groups of people who lived there. And Scotland, too. But naming a moon after an Italian mapmaker because the people moving there aren’t even Italian? I just … I can’t with these people.”

“Lucky Europeans,” Albert said.

“Right?” Luis laughed.

The ships had all launched on the same day. There was no other way. They technically weren’t associated with any government, but they had to be placed in different parts of the world so the people could get to them, so they could have central hubs to send the supplies, so they could be built at all. Also, it was a lot more convenient if the people onboard spoke the same languages. It wasn’t required. Some folks had traveled a long way to be on ships with people more like them. Even though it would have been closer for the Australians and the New Zealanders to get on the ship being built in China (well, technically 250 miles above Beijing), most of them came to the one built in the U.S. (250 miles above Chicago). And though the ship in the US would have been closer for people from Mexico, most of them went to the one built in Argentina (250 miles above Buenos Aires). Albert had read that almost everyone in Israel had gone to the ship built in the U.S. or the one built in Europe rather than the one built in Nigeria, but Muslims from as far away as India and Pakistan went to the one built in Nigeria (250 miles above Lagos) rather than the one built in China. But despite these exceptions, the ships took on a rough sense of a geographic and cultural identity unrelated to their official names which matched their destinations. There were hundreds of languages spoken on the ship built in Nigeria, but everyone thought of it as “the African ship” rather than the ship headed to Jupiter’s moon, Io. The one headed to the southern pole of Mars was “the Asian ship.” The one headed to Jupiter’s Callisto was “the South American ship” (sometimes referred to as “the Spanish ship” even though the people from Spain weren’t on it). But the ship built in Germany and populated by people from all over Europe? It was headed to Jupiter’s Europa. That made it easy. Everyone agreed to call that one The Europa.

The people on the ship built in the U.S. couldn’t even agree on how to pronounce “Enceladus.” And Enceladus was one of Saturn’s moons, so they had the longest trip to be stuck together onboard The Enceladus arguing about different names. 

“Think the company will take the petition seriously?” Albert asked.

“Hell no. They shot the idea down and hinted that people making too much noise about it might even face consequences for threatening to cause disunity that will lower morale. It’s all nautical with the powers-that-be now. Not a corporation, a crew. All for one and one for all and make people walk the plank.”

“Think there really will be consequences? Like, what kind of consequences?”

“Who knows? I’m betting, if they’re like us, non-essentials hoping to find work, then having their names on that petition might drag their resumes into a different file. And maybe, if they have jobs, they might find themselves furloughed so some people like us can take their spots. But maybe that’s just wishful thinking. I do think you should take Julia’s advice about talking to a therapist, though. That could help your resume get to the top of a pile.”

“Really? You think they’re paying attention to that kind of thing?”

Luis shrugged. “I’m an economist flying off to live on a moon with no money. You’re a historian flying off to live on a moon with no history. And a lot of what we know about economics and history is already irrelevant. But think about this. The corporation had one job: Make money. And then that went away, and it is trying to reconstitute itself as a governing body with no military adversaries or international trade. It knows basically everything there is to know about every person on this ship, and it has one new focus: Survival on a distant world. And then a new disease shows up, and we’re in quarantine in a metal bubble flying through space. Now you know how plagues have been used by governments to prevent dissent in previous centuries. Is this the time you’d want to be pissing off the people in charge? Or, if you could help yourself out by spending some time talking to a shrink and also impress the brass by showing you’re going to be a good little employee, wouldn’t this be a good time to do that?”

Albert couldn’t deny the logic. After the call, he looked up the names of the therapists Julia had recommended, then picked one just to prove the association with Julia didn’t make him uncomfortable (though, now that she’d mentioned it, it was starting to). He scheduled an appointment.

And the next day, before he’d even had the appointment, he got the email about his new job. He opened it, read the position description, and flopped down in his chair, his head in his hands, infinite space between his feet. “Holy shit.”

Photo Essay: My Most Recent Project

As many of you know, I have a hard time relaxing. My (admittedly unhealthy) idea of relaxing is taking on another project (or a fifth or sixth side-hustle). This habit ain’t great during a lockdown.

Back in January, I read about the outbreak of COVID in China, and I thought to myself, “Self, this could spread here, and we might end up quarantined in our homes, too.” So I ordered some masks and a woodworking kit. Before you make the mistake of thinking I am smart, I did not think about selling any stock. THAT would have been smart.

A couple years ago, when my Uncle Dave passed, I inherited some of his pipes because he and I both smoked tobacco from pipes just like my Grandpa Don. I also got this kit to carve a pipe.

The pipe starts out looking like this:

I had a model I decided to use. It’s not the most appropriate for the memory of a lost loved one; that’s not why I chose it. This is a representation from a character in my next novel, the sequel to Don’t Read This Book. She (eventually) looks like this:

So I got to work carving the pipe. And the effect on my psyche was surprising. I felt so calm while I was carving. I would lose all teack of time, sometimes stitting still and carving for six or seven hours before feeling a stiffness in my back and realizing I hadn’t moved. I’d organize my schedule to try to get things done so I could get back to carving. And this was one of the coolest effects: At night, instead of my COVID anxiety dreams, I had this incredibly boring and pleasant dreams about carving!

In the end, the carved pipe looked like this:

Next, I colored the tentacles.

Then I used watercolor paint to fill it in.

Then began the process of sealing it. To do this, you bake it and heat up some beeswax, and you keep pulling it out of the over and applying layers of melted beeswax to the hot clay until it can’t absorb any more (or until you run out of wax, as I did). Then you let it cool, and it looks shiny.

But that’s not the coolest part. Check this out!

Yeah, that’s right: When used, smoke comes out of her eyes.

Next I’m either going to start a brand new project, a large fountain for my backyard, or a more modest project, maybe a long stem for the pipe that has matching tentacles curling around it. I can’t decide which will come first. I have a lot of other work to do (teaching my high school students, teaching a class to teachers, getting four or five more books ready for publication this year, finishing my own novel), but this was a great way to relax, and I’ll come back to projects like this to fill the time.