The Letter Unread

Losing It

This story is a companion to The Visitor.

It seems impossible that any set of parents could sincerely dislike their child. Beyond the ingrained biological desires to protect their offspring that would give the relationship fairly sturdy grounding, the fact that the child was being raised in a world of the parents’ design would surely instill the child with behaviors, interests, and values acceptable to the parents. Still, if most parents find their children mostly pleasant, but afflicted with a few glaring faults, and a few raise offspring who surpass their every expectation, then there must be some couples who exist at the other end of the bell curve, parents whose children are never more than a dull burden to them. Eventually, Mallory came to accept her life as a statistical anomaly.

Ivy’s and August’s attitudes towards Mallory were never cruel or even unsupportive, merely uninterested. When, at age ten, she asked her parents to buy her a piano, they didn’t request a promise that she would practice everyday or warn her that this was not a present that she would receive without vowing to commit, as she later learned her school bandmates’ parents had all done. They simply bought it, and when she asked for a piano teacher, they hired the first person to respond to the flyer that Mallory herself had typed, printed, and posted around her father’s university. Her teacher was a longhaired graduate student who remarked on her progress with unironic uses of phrases like “that’s a drag” and “right on”, a tic that her parents would mock for hours after each week’s lesson. Their teasing wasn’t rooted in his hippiness, exactly. Ivy and August mocked everyone behind his or her back, which was technically democratic if not actually fair.

Ridicule was the only activity that stirred them from their natural imperturbability. Nothing else held their interests, as Mallory learned when she brought her mother the news that she’d mastered “Moonlight Sonata” and Ivy deadpanned, “To think, all you had to do was read the music.” After the sophomore year concert in which her piano playing led the orchestra through “Rhapsody in Blue”, August only remarked that her conductor “was certainly breaking ground with that obscure selection.” Ivy was more amused by the telephone book that Mallory needed to sit on to reach the grand piano’s keyboard.

In their estimation, her concerts were childish exhibitions, but for Mallory, short and relatively underendowed, music was the only attribute that made her feel grown up. While, biologically, she’d long since left childhood (four days during which Ivy’s standard detachment was particularly unhelpful), she felt hopelessly stunted when she compared herself to her classmates. By junior year, she’d only barely been kissed (by a trombonist, Doyle, while managing the sparsely visited ring toss at a fund-raiser), so her conductor’s announcement that her school band would be attending The Disney Honors music festival in Orlando the following April provoked an (internal) announcement of her own: that was the week in which she’d lose her virginity.

Having sex for the first time (or, indeed, at all) at Disney World was slightly dissonant, but, so much the better. Her parents had already been laughing at the idea of high school students being taken to a children’s theme park. How better to turn it around on them? Furthermore, setting a date six months in advance gave her time to take precautions against the hazards her sex-ed class had carefully impressed upon her. The shock of seeing dozens of photos of diseased organs, however, was far less than the shock Mallory felt when her class began the unit on family planning. The idea that parents would choose when to have their children and the corresponding sentiment that it was embarrassing to be a “mistake” puzzled her, for she’d always assumed she was unplanned.

It seemed impossible that her parents, whose lives had brought them to each other, had led them to tenured professorships, had gone so wholly according to plan, could have intended to have a child, but still be without any strategy for making the relationship successful. The proof of each day’s interactions was supplemented by the abundance of condoms Mallory found every time she opened any medicine cabinet. Packing for Disney World, she swiped a handful, replaced all but one, and then grabbed a second. She noticed that they were subtitled “Her Pleasure”, and smiled, pleased not only for the obvious reason, but also for the satisfaction of denying her mother pleasure.

The band was staying at Disney’s Contemporary Resort, an inverted V through which the park’s monorail zipped in and out. While the chaperoning parents sorted out room keys, Mallory finalized her selection: Brooks, first-chair oboe. He wore headbands and tie-died shirts of the mass-produced variety she would later learn was a hallmark of the nominally counter-culture. But he was a skilled musician, a unique conversationalist, and, as a self-styled libertine (so she’d heard him explaining on the airport shuttle), he was unlikely to obstruct her plans.

Mallory did shift her focus away from Brooks long enough to excel during Thursday’s performance, the centerpiece of which was Percy Grainger’s “Children’s March”. The concert hall could only offer her an electric keyboard, but under her fingers, it was better than a grand. She nailed the pentatonic scales, clipped her glissandos to perfect lengths, and even allowed herself to enjoy the bow her conductor signaled her to take. The second he set down his baton, Mallory wished only that he would pick it up again, that they could step back into the song. She remembered that, within certain parameters, she liked herself, and carried that confidence to her next task.

While the winds disassembled their instruments, she positioned herself behind Brooks to ask for his help in carrying the keyboard and amp. As they walked through the service hallways back to their rehearsal space, Brooks soaked up her compliments on his skill at oboeing in 11/8, landed an improbable number of witticisms, and took no time in accepting her offer to hang out. Mallory stuck with him for the next two days, stealing playful bites of his meals, “reflexively” grabbing him during roller coaster rides, and dancing with him during Sunday night’s closing gala. Though his persona obliged him to remain mellow, Brooks was visibly dizzy from her attention. By Sunday, he’d caught up, whispering into her ear while they danced. He had nothing romantic to say – he mostly complained about Thomas Edison and other “people who history has, like, put on a pedestal, and you know, they’re personally fucked up” whom he felt oughtn’t be honored at Epcot – but he was clearly prepared to follow her wherever she led. Riding the speeding monorail back to the hotel, she suggested they skip the covert after-party Doyle was hosting and go to his room. He said “sure.”

Mallory was temporarily flustered when she arrived at his room and realized that, wearing only her orange gown, she wouldn’t be able to strip off her layers gradually, as her plan had outlined. She asked Brooks for a set of pajamas and her offered her a pair of boxers and a tie-died shirt. She changed in the bathroom and looked into the mirror, expecting to have one last look at immaturity. Instead, she saw a startlingly well-cut figure. The snug hems of the boxers revealed legs that were shapelier than she’d ever noticed. Her upturned nose was not piggish, as she’d always assumed, but jaunty. Her chest, which she’d always found too easy to lose, filled out the t-shirt subtly but unmistakably. Without question, she wore the shirt better than Brooks, who used the psychedelic colors to distract from the prematurely expanded gut he balanced atop distressingly meager legs. (He hid it well, but she’d felt it all when he pressed against her, dancing at the gala.)

She could have ignored his physical shortcomings, but that line of thinking cracked open a door to a less forgiving examination of his personality defects. In three days, he hadn’t asked a single question about her. His conversation was limited to screeds against Edison, Shakespeare, and Einstein, all of which she suspected were apocryphal, and all of which she knew were boring. Brooks was mostly pleasant, but afflicted with a few glaring faults. Perhaps this was as much as she could reasonably hope for, but why settle for reason? She had discovered, at the concert, that a transcendent life lay within her reach.

Returning to Brooks, she felt mildly guilty for confusing him, and briefly considered performing a conciliatory gesture. But the idea of putting the same fingers that had been Thursday’s triumph to such ends was unthinkable. Instead, she jumped into the second bed, thanked Brooks for the pajamas, and clicked off the lamp. Once he fell asleep – a long wait for his neurons to stop firing in a vain search for reason – Mallory changed back into her dress and returned to her room. Replacing her handbag on her bureau, she caught sight of the two condoms she’d swiped. She was making a mental note to return them to their poorly hidden box in the medicine cabinet when a new thought struck her: Was it possible that she’d fallen into a trap her parents had set? It was a paranoid idea, and it was hard to imagine them even thinking of her long enough to bother. It wasn’t hard, however, to imagine them laughing as they pictured her caught in the fumbling, incompetent embrace of a pretentious 17-year-old.

She kept the condoms until next July, when, during a summer program in New York, she needed them. As a result of her performance in Orlando, she’d been asked to take part in a nationwide high school honor band performing in Carnegie Hall. There, she connected with a percussionist from the Upper West Side. Ivy and August never asked her how she liked Carnegie Hall, nor did they ask her, later that year, why she only applied to colleges in the city. Mallory never volunteered those answers, or any other personal information for the rest of her life. She accepted her monthly allowance, and spent their contributions on a life she kept secret from them. This wasn’t democratic, but it seemed entirely fair.

The Visitor

The 14th Street subway station was the worst place to catch the A. It seemed to be under perpetual construction, forcing too many trains to compete for one track. It was much better to travel from West 4th Street, but Glenn’s walk along the Hudson River had left him too far north for that. As he passed through the turnstile, a group of travelers came up the stairs from the downtown-bound tracks, and among them he recognized Mallory. He would have to amend his theory that there are no bad surprises.¹

He had met Mallory two years earlier at an apartment warming. They talked about yard work and middle school tennis players. He spoke-sang along while she played “I Get Around” on the piano. Glenn surprised himself by asking for her number after two hours, as opposed to waiting two weeks. In later days, he would convince himself that this uncharacteristic act was proof that, from the outset, he was in love with her.²

Mallory walked down to the L platform and Glenn followed her at a distance. Why didn’t you tell me you were here? In his mind, the question was merely quizzical, but any spoken tone he took felt aggressive. It was worth taking the time to avoid that, as this would be the first time he’d spoken to her in nearly a year, so rather than catching her on the platform, he boarded the train with her. Sitting down two benches away and holding the displayed side of his face in his hand, he watched her through his fingers.

They had dated for just over six months, walking around Manhattan, exchanging personalized gifts, and engaging in all of the other romantic behaviors that sound silly to everyone but the participants, whose vantage point allows them to see that theirs is the only behavior that isn’t foolish. They whispered phrases that he would have been embarrassed to hear in a movie, but which delighted him to perform live: “I woke up smiling today.” “You make the awfulness seem insignificant.”

They detrained at Lorimer Street and walked down Union Avenue, separated by 30 paces. Why didn’t you tell me you were here? The word to emphasize was “tell”, but he still wasn’t sure about the pitch or the speed. A flattened and laconic “tell” or a peaked and rapid “tell”?³ It wasn’t easy to develop his delivery and keep track of her. She seemed to be accelerating, and, dressed well, she blended in with the crowds of Williamsburg’s wannabe Manhattanites.⁴

Mallory had left Manhattan a year prior, but she had the decency to admit it was a retrograde move. “New York is the best city,” she declared. “Anyone who says otherwise is just being nationalistic.” But she’d been offered a scholarship to The Boston Conservatory’s graduate program, and the pursuit of a dream was probably enough to insulate the mind against an unstimulating world. That was Glenn’s theory, which was why he made no effort to stop her leaving. They said goodbye at the 14th Street subway station after taking one last walk along the Hudson. Phone calls and online chats were unsatisfying, so he gave up on those. He didn’t want to distract her from her studies, so he never visited her or dared to suggest that she visit him.

Mallory entered a building that was hosting a roof party, and after six minutes, Glenn followed. The front door was locked, but he buzzed a few random apartments and mumbled into the speaker, waiting for a resident who was more willing to let a stranger into the building than demand ID into an evidently malfunctioning intercom. Up six flights of stairs he went, to a roof where guests danced before the Manhattan skyline that filled him with the same emptiness with which all beautiful sights now left him.⁵ It had become impossible for him to take comfort in purely external splendors, having lived long enough to experience beauty on the personal level. The memories his mind could retrieve filled him with an awe that no physical work of man or nature could inspire. His (yet unrealized) plan for happiness, then, was to take part in a tangible world that was consistently too beautiful to be adequately stored in his mind.

If any other guests were so beleaguered by this backdrop, they masked it well. His inability to share in the pleasures that delighted everyone else struck him mostly at parties, but often in parks and in restaurants, on holidays at home and on weekdays at work.⁶ Sometimes he thought it would be better if he was locked up and taken out of society’s circulation. Preparing for work in the morning, he would hesitate before slipping into his overly roomy khakis for eight hours (plus the commute), fantasizing about stepping outside and being greeted by men in white coats or men in black suits. “For your sake and ours,” they would say, “we’d like to offer you a padded room.”

Passing his eyes over the untroubled guests, he located Mallory leaning against a vent. Why didn’t you tell me you were here? The proper tone, he had decided, would be to expand his voice from “why” until “tell”, then contract it over the remaining three words. Like a siren, his pitch would peak at that crucial, central syllable. He was preparing to step over to her when he caught sight of a dancing man whose weight was, at a conservative estimate, pushing 300 pounds. He was the fattest young person Glenn had ever seen. Sweat matted the man’s hair against his forehead and temples, and his laborious breathing was audible over the music. But he possessed a limitless energy, and the triumph of the action itself – his impulse to dance overriding his naturally limited mobility – lent the whole spectacle a noble beauty. To present himself this nakedly, Glenn thought, would suggest that his self-perception is hermetically sealed, unassailable by any outside judgments. What must it be like to move so nimbly, unbound by the weight of your body, or the weight of your consciousness, or the weight of your past? The dancing so mesmerized Glenn that he failed to notice Mallory until she was directly before him.

It was the first time he had seen her upturned nose or heard her permanently detached voice in nearly a year, yet both seemed so familiar. She had been foremost in his thoughts, not only in the year since she’d left, but also in every moment since he’d first met her. But for all its photorealism, this version of her couldn’t compare to the Mallory staring at him now. His mind was incapable of adequately capturing her.

Why didn’t you tell me you were here? The question was ready to go, the tone and the pacing practiced to perfection, but before his brain could transmit the proper signals to his mouth, they became enmeshed with every other thought he had of her: the asymmetrical way she scrunched up her lips, her irrational hatred for E major, an image of her leaning over a Pier 45 railing towards New Jersey. And a million new thoughts were coming to him now, just by the very sight of her. Too many trains were competing for one track, and Glenn was unable to say anything before Mallory asked him a question.

“What are you doing here?”

Unprepared though he was to begin their conversation with anything other than his rehearsed line, hers was a reasonable question, so he answered it as concisely as he could, hoping to move on to his promptly. But his answer – “I saw you at 14th Street.” – elicited another question – “Did you follow me here?” – and answering that failed to close the discussion, and the rally went on for several shots.⁷ By the time she settled into a silence that he hoped was satisfied but that he suspected was stunned, he had heard himself articulate such a lunatic series of thoughts and actions that it was no longer even necessary to ask her his question.

My Secret Diary

Despite having kept one for nearly four years, I’m still not sure for whom a journal is written. It can’t be written for other people, for that invites self-censorship (and furthermore, at that point, really, just do some editing and show people a short story if you want attention). At the same time, how does one write for oneself? Your thoughts will always be more meaningful to you in their natural amorphousness than they can be in concrete words. At best, a journal is a photograph of your mind: imperfect, but an acceptable representation, one that can at least jog your memory, and remind you of the person you used to be.

I began keeping a journal midway through my freshman year at college, the same week that I read Joan Didion’s Slouching Towards Bethlehem, which contains (in addition to an eerily timely piece on keeping a journal) an essay entitled “On Self-Respect”. The essay, as I wrote in my journal,

speaks uncannily to my current situation. Just to highlight some lines: “I lost the conviction that…these rather passive virtues that had won me approval as a child automatically guaranteed me…happiness, honor.”…”To live without self-respect is to lie awake…counting up the sins of commission and omission…the gifts irrevocably wasted through sloth or cowardice or carelessness.”

At the time, I was feeling as though I’d taken some grievous missteps during my first semester at NYU. At a time when I should have been outgoing, I had carved out a position of high-browed aloofness, refusing to – or rather, being too cowardly to – engage in normal social intercourse with my schoolmates. These were the “passive virtues” that had seemed to secure me approbation and serenity throughout my life, and I had seen no need to change. My adolescence was fairly painless (except for once, at age 14 [14!], when I was hoisted off of the ground by a large kite and dragged along the beach [past plenty of girls, I’m sure] for 50 feet) and I assumed that the tricks that had worked in a high school in Colorado would translate to an immense university in the country’s largest city. When this failed, I fell into a funk and – because the nature of the funk was thinking I had no close friends – poured it all into the journal.

But reading Didion’s essay alleviated the gloom. “I don’t know why,” I wrote at the time, “but seeing this in print has lifted almost everything off of my shoulders.” I now know why: I was relieved to see that my feelings were not unique, and therefore, not without a cure. (One of the most alienating parts of rereading these journals is glimpsing epiphanic moments like this and realizing how many “breakthroughs” of mine are now so obvious and axiomatic that I’m embarrassed to bring them up.) The cure, I believed, was to reverse course, and begin sharing my feelings with others, a task I attempted clumsily for the next year.

From January of 2008 to March of 2009 my journal was bloated with useless details (“I went to work, took a break to take a psychology study, then went back to work.”), which is also how I conducted personal conversations that year. In my effort to connect more deeply with my friends, I subjected them to excruciating stories and half-stories in which no incident was too meaningless to ignore, and no detail was too irrelevant to merit inclusion. Their patience was admirable, and I was sure to note their – and any – kindness in treacly journal entries: “If you have people who like you…and who are concerned for you, then you have a lot. It was touching to hear that _____ evidently cares about my well-being.” And that was in reference to a kid who had been gossiping about me.

Eventually, I was able to get those interactions under control, and the remainder of 2009 passed undramatically. I was finally occupying the psychological space I’d been hoping to inhabit since I started the journal. But restlessness gradually crept in. By December, I wrote, of an action I was considering taking, “Perhaps trouble and drama will arise, but then, I always get a perverse enjoyment out of that.” For the sake of giving myself something to think about, I began working myself into anxieties so patently manufactured that one entry’s parenthetical closure – “How do I manage to make myself so distressed all the time?” – was immediately followed by another, berating myself for the phony protestation of innocence.

Whatever was missing from my life was apparently instated when I went to Ireland, for the next six months of the journal are full of cheer, excitement, and, because I was in such a good mood, some straight-up jokes. (Since I’m never going to write a travelogue, I may as well use this joke here: “I walked along the River Liffey, passing its numerous bridges, including the Samuel Beckett Bridge, which, presumably, will not actually take you across the river.”) Page after page is filled with glee. I was living in rarefied air, but if I knew it then, I certainly didn’t show it. “How nice that some things only get better,” I wrote at the end of my trip, swiping a blurb from a Harry Potter book jacket.

I continued in this tone until July, at which point the journal gets very heavy. I suffered a big embarrassment, the shame of which lasted two months, easily eclipsing the 30 seconds I was kite-dragged across the beach. The entries I wrote during this period are so primal that I’m almost proud of them. They’re naked displays of raw humanity – the intellectual version of Cro-Magnon Man killing and devouring a saber-toothed tiger – unlike anything I had hitherto expressed. “I felt like a cowardly asshole,” I scrawled, “I felt angry, embarrassed, betrayed, and depressed beyond all reason.” “I have failed repeatedly, in increasingly wretched ways.” (Yes, “increasingly wretched” is a phrase I use in the heat of my emotions.) Even in later, calmer, more reflective entries, I was writing passages in which I weighed the total sum of my life and concluded, “More so than not, this does not reflect the person I want to be.”

But from that summer, I developed the personality that I have today, the one that seems to suit me best. That incident (combined with the Christopher Hitchens/counter-culture fandom I picked up at the same time) has made me less approving of the world, more prepared to see the worst. But these allegedly cynical qualities have actually made me more satisfied. Because I went through such a vigorously emotional experience, I’ve conquered the inability to forge emotional connections that dogged me in 2008. By looking at the world more critically, I can always find the intellectual stimulation whose absence left me feeling so restless in 2009. And the more negative worldview I’ve developed doesn’t preclude me from feeling joy as I did in Ireland; it makes the joy stand out. “I may have concerns about the future,” I wrote after one great day, “both on the personal and extrapersonal levels, I may feel despair about much of the world, but I have a group of immensely intelligent, witty, fun people in my life.” When 2010 drew to a close, even the dreariness of the summer gave me no hesitation in labeling it my best year yet.

It seems to me that the personality I have now is the last stage in my evolution, but I’m sure that’s how I felt at every intermediate stage. In his essay “Centrally Located”, Jonathan Franzen writes that the agony of adolescence comes from feeling the genuine emotions of the experience alongside the awareness that the real world is yet to come and that none of these genuine emotions actually matter. “This cruel mixture of consciousness and irrelevance” he explains, “is enough to account for how pissed off you are.” But this sensation isn’t limited to teenagers. “The double bind, the problem of conciousness mixed with nothingness, never goes away. You never stop waiting for the real story to start, because the only real story, in the end, is that you die.”

The “me” I am today seems entirely suited to The Real Story – more than any earlier “me” does. But if Franzen is as right as he usually is, then this version of myself will eventually just be another exhibit in the procession. And if that is the case, what consequence does that have for the beliefs and values under which I operate every day? In what ways am I dead wrong again? It’s an unsettling train of thought. (On the other hand, it’s equally unsettling to imagine that, yes, I have figured it all out, and I’m going to stay this way for the remaining 75 years of my life. [I’m estimating high because I just became a vegetarian.])

I haven’t written in my journal for some time, because nothing interesting has happened to me for some time. But when things pick up again, I’ll resume the project. It’s satisfyingly mysterious to look back on a time gone by, a time when I could write, “For the bleak and uncaring universe that it is, it certainly has done me a gracious turn” and not have any second thoughts about the sentiment. That’s why this is a record worth having: it’s a window to a past that’s at once familiar and totally unfathomable. When you write a journal, you’re not writing for yourself, but for the person whom you never imagine you’ll be.

He Ain’t Heavy

My mother told me she was pregnant during the summer between seventh and eighth grades. She came down to the basement where I was watching Cartoon Network and told me she had an announcement. (I had to turn off the TV, but since Scooby-Doo was on next, that was no loss.) Upon hearing the news, I could immediately recall a few hints – arriving home from a road trip to Mt. Rushmore to find her drinking ginger ale instead of Coca-Cola, for one – but it was still rather surprising. In my 12-and-a-half years, the notion of having a sibling never occurred to me. It wasn’t that I especially enjoyed being an only child – not anymore than I enjoyed wearing a shirt everyday: that was merely standard, and it never crossed my mind that the world could be anything but what it was. (I don’t have this myopia anymore. Instead, I’m constantly weighed upon by fantasies of infinite worlds that could be. It’s haunting when I’m alone with my thoughts, but helpful when I’m writing a script.) I took my mom’s announcement in a mellow fashion, and don’t recall giving the matter a great deal of thought for eight months.

On March 14th, 2003, my little brother was born. (He was only “my little brother” for the first week – “Nathaniel” wasn’t ready when he was born.) The first few months of his existence are totally outside of my recollection, probably because I was occupied with The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker. I’m not pleased with this behavior, but in retrospect, a possible psychology suggests itself. The Wind Waker was (and I don’t mean this to suggest it was derivate, unoriginal, or anything but a masterpiece) something familiar to me. I had played three Zelda games already and knew the moves. But dealing with a brother – dealing with any infant – was something for which I lacked all confidence. The only sharp memory I have of that time is anxiousness caused by the soft spot in his skull – it seemed a terrible oversight in design – and by the fragility for which it was a synecdoche.

Fortunately, he grew up astonishingly fast. He started smiling and laughing quite quickly, which was all I needed to feel I could be useful to him. Once he learned to walk and talk (his first word, which I was fortunate enough to hear, was “doctor”) he became very agreeable company: cute, energetic, and, except when asked to nap, cheerful. But one day, with terrible abruptness, that all changed for the worse.

Shortly after he turned three, he began having seizures: petit mals, which are characterized, not by convulsions, but by periods of eerie absence. For about half a minute, he would freeze in his tracks, his eyes would glaze over, and he would become completely unresponsive. It was a terrifying experience the first evening it happened, but it became positively nightmarish when the attacks became regular. For over a year, he was put on various cocktails of medication, none of which stopped the seizures, and all of which left him uncommunicative, enervated, and, so it seemed to me, constantly sad; sad for knowing that there was something dreary in his life, and for being incapable of even identifying the problem.

Eventually, my parents decided to put him on the ketogenic diet, a high-fat, high-protein, low-carbohydrate diet that alters the metabolic process in such a way that has been known to prevent epileptic seizures. Its effectiveness varies from patient to patient, but on Nathaniel, it worked perfectly. His seizures stayed away as long as he was on the diet and in the two years since. To have kept up this rigorous diet for three years – every single meal must be prepared in precise measurements to keep the fat/protein/carb ratio balanced – is one of the more remarkable achievements I’ve seen in my life. Credit goes to my parents for having the dedication to guide Nathaniel through his diet (though I suppose, to paraphrase Will Bailey, three years spent measuring grams of butter for your child’s health is a fairly stunning act of culinary skill and a fairly ordinary act of parenting), and to Nathaniel himself for carrying through with it. The years he spent on the diet overlapped the years he started school, years when it would have been difficult to be the kid with the unusual lunch, difficult to be unable to share treats with his friends. But he understood the importance of sticking to his diet, and he never broke it, a feat many people can’t manage at age 40, much less age five.

Nathaniel is growing up to be a fine fellow: kind, intellectually curious, and witty: Once, my father insisted that the jokes he was telling were, Nathaniel’s stone-face not withstanding, actually funny. Dryly, Nathaniel responded, “I could take any one of your jokes and explain to you why it is not funny.”

But I don’t mean to give the impression that he’s growing into a snark. Last week, he told me that he’d begun playing Animal Crossing, Nintendo’s open-ended communication game. He confided that it was strange playing Animal Crossing since, unlike other video games, there were no explicit goals. Asked for a favor by his fellow villagers, he was free to aid them or to leave them in the lurch, with no apparent consequences. “So,” he told me, “I just try to make everyone happy.”

People assume that because of the age and geographical gaps between us, Nathaniel and I aren’t close. I honestly don’t feel that way, and I don’t say that only because it would be too sad to say the opposite. I understand him, I love him, and I would do anything for him, which sounds very much like closeness to me. Beyond that, I admire him. It would be a better world (and thanks to my brother’s very existence, one of those infinite worlds I can now envision) if more people tried, as he does, to make everyone happy.

King Me

It may surprise those who know me from New York, but in high school, I was nominated for Homecoming King. Actually, it may surprise those who knew me in high school as well, for I was then a spotty boy who, despite plenty of advice to the contrary, tucked several layers of shirts into his pants. But every week, my spotty face appeared on the televised announcements, garnering me some name recognition, and I had my feet in the band and theater worlds, two quietly powerful interest groups. It was enough to put me on the first ballot.

It’s evident now that, beginning at the end of sophomore year, I had been transitioning from a widely ignored goof to a cheerfully acceptable fellow. But this was difficult for me to believe at the time, as being an outsider had always seemed inescapable. Growing up, my heroes of fiction were characters like Lisa Simpson and Lewis Barnavelt who were bookish, well-behaved, and forever on the fringe. In my interpretation, these qualities were inseparable. Because I loved reading and never broke a rule (only once did I get in trouble in school – for reading during recess), I assumed that I was always going to be ostracized. So I preemptively acted as though I was unpopular, setting off a self-fulfilling prophecy.

A few days after the nomination, I was taken in front of the school for a newspaper photo shoot with my fellow nominees. With one exception, these were people, not only whom I had never met, but also whom I hadn’t even known existed outside of fiction. They carried themselves with a confidence that both put me at ease and left me in awe, which is the acid test for the truly cool. During the shoot, I attempted to ape their style by affecting a detached, half-lidded stare, but blew it by tilting my head in such a way that the sunlight really captured my scrap-stashe. My answers to the reporters’ questions were similarly dorky (when asked what reality show I would most like to be on, I answered “Last Comic Standing…if it’s still on. Would you count Jeopardy!?”), and I biked home immediately after finishing, rather than mingle with the peers I knew weren’t.

At home, I recounted this story to my dad, emphasizing how little the experience meshed with the artistic personality I was attempting to cultivate. “I kind of hope I don’t win,” I said, “That would be more interesting”. I’m not sure how much I believed that first line; surprised though I was, I’m sure I still thought it would have been pretty exciting to win a crown. Still, I did believe that it would have been more “interesting” to lose. All of my artistic idols seemed to have had lousy high school experiences, and I figured it was best to follow their example.

My dad wasted no time in rejecting my comment. He said, “If Paul Feig” – creator of Freaks and Geeks, and whose memoirs of adolescent nightmares I was fond of reading, rereading, and reciting – “had been elected Homecoming King, he would have found a way to write about that.” He was cutting through the lazy axiom you often hear: to be an artist, one has to suffer. It’s not suffering that makes one an artist, for everyone suffers. It’s what one does with suffering (and with joy, and even with boredom) that makes an artist. I didn’t immediately absorb all of that, but his remark did shake up my thinking.

At halftime of the homecoming game, the other nominees and I were raced around the football field in golf carts, then trotted out to the center of the field to stand with our parents (!) while the announcer read our names to the crowd. (I was introduced as “Luca Stern”.) I lost, which didn’t especially bother me until I went to the dance and the winner treated me rather shabbily. (His Queen attributed it to his being drunk, but that’s hardly an excuse.) My parents gave me a Butterfinger, and I returned to bleachers to rejoin my band friends, happy to have their consolation, but sad that the experience was over.

I’ve never again been as popular as I was that year, but then, I’ve not really tried to regain that status. (I knocked about a vague plan to spend my last year at NYU becoming the most popular kid in the entire university, but that was only of academic interest.) I no longer think that being on the outside is a necessarily corollary to my interests, or that it is an obligatory part of the artistic process, but I think I’ve traveled too far into iconoclasm to ever be widely liked. My interests and opinions are rarefied, and I don’t feel as though I get along with the vast majority of people. I don’t mean that in its usual misanthropic sense – I actually like most everyone I meet, and those people I don’t tend to grow on me rather quickly. I only mean it objectively, that the particulars of my personality are statistical outliers, placing me at the periphery of society.

I’m not especially enthused about this. While I am disappointed with so much of what my species does, I still don’t consider it especially honorable to be left out. I would love to feel a greater sense of kinship with people – for what else could I possibly be on Earth to do? But I’m unwilling to compromise my personality to achieve this. So I’ve decided to live “As If” I can have it both ways; to live “As If” I will be broadly accepted as I am.

I may fail to achieve this, but I won’t fail for lack of trying. I’ve been buoyed by the realization that so many of the oddballs I admire have struck this balance (obviously, for if they hadn’t achieved popular success, I wouldn’t know them to admire their uncompromised personas). And I too have, at times of creative or social success, briefly felt that I had it all. So I’m not looking for sympathy for having lost the Homecoming crown. As it happens, three months later, I was elected Winter Ball King.

The Complete and Annotated Prose

Since I began writing, I’ve worked solely in the forms of drama and creative non-fiction. For whatever reason, I’ve never felt a yen for (or an aptitude at) writing fictional prose. But in early 2009, I stepped – slightly – out of my element and wrote a short story for a liberal arts class. I have not returned to the story, or even the form, since. But as Bill Bryson, a hero of creative non-fiction, has explicitly recommended, “never hesitate to recycle material”. Here is “Doug’s Birthday”, exactly as I left it three years ago, and with a new afterword.

Doug looked over at his bedside alarm clock and realized that, as it was ten minutes past midnight, it was now officially his 25th birthday. That he had not realized it sooner came as no surprise to Doug himself. In his family, birthdays were not greeted with much fanfare. This is not to say that Doug had a bad childhood or that his parents were neglectful. They simply didn’t care much for ceremony. “Tradition,” his stepfather Noel once told him, “is just a fancy way of hiding your fear of the unknown.”

Noel told him that when Doug asked why he had decided to cancel Christmas that year. At that time, it was not a satisfactory explanation, but then again, Doug was only seven. He had been hoping for a Nintendo, and the pride that his stepfather took in distinguishing himself from the “consumer sheep” (as he called them) held little appeal for a second grader. Furthermore, this came only five months after Rebecca, Doug’s mother, had married Noel, and so Doug was inclined to distrust him.

What had happened to Doug’s father was still a bit of a mystery. His mother always told him that he had died in a car accident shortly after Doug’s third birthday. This seemed like a fair explanation until he accidentally eavesdropped on a telephone conversation between his mother and his aunt wherein she referred to Doug’s father as “a jackass”. That, combined with the fact that Doug could not seem to find any family photographs in which his father had not been defaced, led him to believe that it may not have been death, but abandonment that drew him away.

When Doug first settled on this theory, he considered asking his mother for confirmation, but decided it might be unwise. At the time, she was divorcing Noel and her stress was palpable. As the years went by, the question seemed less urgent, and by this night, ten years after it first occurred to him, it was the last thing on his mind. Of greater concern to him, as he drifted off to sleep, was the question of what he would do on his 25th birthday.

As he ate his toast the following morning, Doug realized what good fortune it was that his birthday fell on a Saturday this year. It gave him the entire day to treat himself to whatever he wanted. Also, he thought with a slight pang of guilt, it saved him from having to interact with his coworkers who, were they to find out it was his birthday, would certainly have lavished him with an embarrassing amount of attention. He got along well enough with the other employees at the bookstore, but he sometimes felt they demonstrated a lack of professionalism, especially whenever it was somebody’s birthday.

It was the over-exuberance that Doug thought was unbecoming. He cringed unconsciously as he remembered the last birthday he’d been witness to. Ella, another cashier, had been so overjoyed to see the cake everyone had bought her that she burst into tears. She kept it up from the moment that Greg, the night manager, brought it into the break room until long after she’d blown out the candles. Doug had forgotten to chip in for the cake, and thought it best that he quietly slip out. He crept toward the door, but was stopped by Ella herself.

“Doug!” she called. “Aren’t you going to still have a slice?”

“I didn’t put in my share” he responded with an apologetic shrug.

She bounded over to him with a plate in her hand.

“That doesn’t matter. Just have a piece.”

Doug opened his mouth to protest and she responded by sticking a forkful of cake into his mouth.

“Good, no?” she asked, and Doug had to admit it was.

Just the memory of its taste was enough to make his breakfast seem bland and inadequate. He threw the toast into the trash and decided that his first gift to himself would be a nice breakfast.

Before he left, he considered calling his mother, but stopped when he remembered that it was only six o’clock back home. Since her separation from her Harold (her third husband, whom she met through Noel’s divorce lawyer–a particular that never failed to amuse Doug), Rebecca had been taking full advantage of Seattle’s nightlife. As a result, she often slept in on the weekends. With this in mind, Doug decided he would wait until the evening before he called.

Doug stepped into his car, buckled his seatbelt, and adjusted his mirrors. There was no need for this, since only he drove this car and the mirrors were always left in the same position, but it was a harmless compulsion and he saw no reason to stop. Besides, it gave him one last chance to examine his appearance before he began his day. Today he lingered on the appraisal longer than usual.

He was 25, but he could have easily passed for a high school student. Any high school student but himself, that is. Doug had the misfortune of being, as it was always tactfully dubbed, a “late bloomer”. He had gone into high school looking like he was 12 years old, and graduated a full foot taller. At least, thought Doug (for now this was all he could think about), he had eventually grown taller. Roger (the man his mother dated after her separation from Noel, but before she met Harold) had barely squeaked past five feet before his body evidently gave up.

When Rebecca introduced Doug to Roger, he was a bit disturbed by Roger’s height, but he eventually found it comforting. It was nice to talk to somebody who wasn’t miles taller than he was, and Doug had the feeling that Roger found it equally pleasant. Roger would go out of his way to spend time with Doug, buying him lunch and taking him to movies. He had been disappointed when his mother threw Roger out, and to this day, Doug thought that, of all of his mother’s partners, Roger was the only one with whom he really got along.

This reverie carried Doug through his drive and all the way into the restaurant. It was only when the waitress asked him what he’d like to order that he realized, with a start, that he had been completely disengaged from the real world for at least 20 minutes. Flustered, Doug told the waitress that he’d like some toast.

After eating, Doug decided that he would go to a movie. He strolled a few blocks to the downtown revival theater and found that they were screening Ed Wood. Doug hesitated to buy the ticket. He loved the movie, but it was unfortunately, inextricably linked to a particularly painful memory.

Shortly after his 16th birthday, his new driver’s license making him feel particularly suave, Doug asked his lab partner Lily, if she’d like to come to a movie with him. She accepted and the following Saturday, Doug took her to Moore Theater to see Ed Wood. Driving her there, Doug realized that, beyond discussing their Physics class, he and Lily had little in common, and nothing to talk about. He spent the duration of the movie trying to think of some other topic of conversation the two of them might enjoy for the drive home, but nothing came to him. As it went, they spent the 15-minute trip back to her house talking about how “incredible” and “totally amazing” the movie they’d just seen had been.

The remainder of their semester together in Physics class had been excruciatingly awkward, and it was hard for Doug to think of Ed Wood without remembering the strained conversations he and Lily had as a result of that ill-conceived date. Then again, thought Doug, it has been nine years. He bought a ticket and thoroughly enjoyed the movie. Only twice did any embarrassing memories surface.

By the time Doug walked out of the movie theater, it had begun to snow. He decided to spend the rest of the rest of the day at home with a book. That, of course, necessitated a trip to the bookstore. It was ironic, although completely understandable, that since he’d begun working at the bookstore two years earlier, Doug’s interest in reading had waned. It just felt so ridiculous to spend both work and leisure time with books. Still, there were times when only a book seemed appropriate, and a snowy evening was one of them.

Doug arrived at the bookstore just after five. The evening rush had not yet begun, so all the cashiers were congregated at the information desk, idly chatting. Seeing him, Ella broke off her conversation, ran over to Doug, and embraced him.

“Happy birthday, Doug!”

“Thank you. Who told you it was my birthday?”

“Nobody had to tell me,” said Ella with mock-indignation, “I wouldn’t forget.”

“You came by on your birthday?” asked Greg. “You must really love this place.”

That was one reason Doug hated to come into the bookstore on days when he wasn’t working: somebody (invariably Greg) would make that exact joke.

“I thought I’d buy myself a gift.” Doug explained.

Ella gasped. “I have just the thing.” She went into the storeroom and came back with Deaf Sentence by David Lodge. “You told me he was your favorite author. This is his new book.”

David Lodge was indeed Doug’s favorite author. He had been hooked since Roger had bought him a copy of Therapy for his 17th birthday. Though he couldn’t fully understand the book, it was the first novel Doug had read to talk frankly and honestly about sex, and he much appreciated that. His mother had not been as happy about his reading it. He remembered her opening it to a random page and shaking her head at what she saw, probably foul language, or the description of some unseemly activity. Fortunately, she didn’t blame Doug, but rather Roger for buying him the book in the first place. It seemed, looking back, that Rebecca never liked it when other people bought things for Doug.

Doug and Ella walked over to the registers and she asked him about how he’d spent his day.

“I wish I’d known you were going to see that movie.” Ella said after he explained. “Johnny Depp is just about my favorite actor. I’ll watch anything with him.”

“Well, it’s playing until the end of the month,” said Doug, recalling the poster at the entrance to the theater, “so I bet you could see it whenever you have a day off.”

“I guess I have tomorrow off,” Ella replied, “and I don’t really have any plans.”

There was a pause as Doug’s receipt was printed.

“Me too. I think I’ll just stay home and read.” Doug said. “Thanks again.” With a wave to all of his other coworkers, Doug headed out into the cold.

Driving home, Doug remarked to himself what a pleasant day it had been. True, he was still a bit hungry, but that was a quick fix. He could order some Chinese food, or, if he couldn’t find the menu, throw together a plate of pasta. He could spend the remainder of the evening curled up under a blanket, drinking tea and reading his new book. It would be a fine end to his birthday.

The only thing that would improve the evening, he thought with a twinge of sadness, would be if he had someone with whom to share it. But then again, he realized, brushing it off, there’s no sense in being greedy, and even less sense in getting sad on your birthday.

Upon returning home, Doug called his mother, but she was already out for the evening. At first, Doug was a bit insulted that Rebecca wasn’t around on his birthday, but then he realized that he was being irrational. She might be treating herself to a nice day out, just as he had. After all, that today was his birthday was as much her accomplishment as anybody else’s.

With due acknowledgement that I am stating the obvious, Doug is me. With the exception of his relationship with his parents, which is considerably more baroque than mine, every detail about Doug is extracted from my life at age 19: his physical description, his mannerisms and his artistic taste, but more so his intense and depressing fear of expressing himself in the face of even the slightest danger. I remember having these feelings, but until rereading this story, I did not remember their depth.

But that may be because this work has been overshadowed by the play I wrote just afterwards, which wound up being my first meaningful script. The same unexpressed sadness that cripples Doug afflicts the heroes of that play, but in the latter, I was able to do more than inventory the problem: I came up with a few solutions as well. I still don’t know whether the play’s conclusion is happy or sad (depending on what state my life is in when I consider the question, I find the ending either naïve or sagaciously Zen), but I’m proud that I at least offered the possibility of moving forward, rather than consigning myself to the miserable present. That may be why I have continued my work in drama and left aside fictional prose. When I wrote this short story, I saw who I really was. When I wrote that play, I saw who I wanted to be.

The Year in Music

Whether by the natural ebb and flow of the universe, or by the trickling down of John Boehner’s new budget austerity, 2011 was a year less ornamental than 2010. The extravagant set-pieces of 2010 – four months in Ireland?! An independent theatrical production?! - were largely eschewed in favor of a domestic quietude. I spent all but five weeks within New York City, mostly just writing, working odd jobs, and generally puttering around. But the increased downtime gave me ample opportunity to reflect inward on what kind of a young man I was developing into, and outward on what kind of a world I had been born into. My conclusions were not conventionally uplifting.

I started the year in Boulder, living at home for what would prove to be the last time. While driving to the dentist one morning, I heard “Like the Weather” by 10,000 Maniacs.

It’s what I think of as an archetypal Boulder song: poppy melody, honey-voiced singer, Second-Wave Hippie sensibility. (The local radio station calls this type of music, rather abstractly, “World Class Rock”.) I’d heard it many times in my youth, but now I could actually hear the sadness behind by the chirpy guitar and open cowbell. “What a cold and rainy day,” Natalie Merchant sings. “Where on earth has the sun hid away?” As you come to realize that social niceties leave no option but for us to conceal our melancholy behind a regulated façade, every bit of cheer seems suspect. (As another Boulder-beloved band has put it, “Every silver lining’s got a touch of gray.”) This isn’t to say that one should greet happiness with an inquisition, but we might do well to acknowledge that there is more gloominess out there than appearances necessarily suggest. I realized, as I left Boulder for the last time, that such a misleading appearance might be part of my life from then on, for any cheer I felt at returning to Boulder would henceforth be nagged by a sad truth: that this was no longer my home.

I returned to New York for my last semester of college just as R.E.M. decided to release what would prove to be its last album. Collapse into Now featured the usual R.E.M. assortment: a few of slow ballads, some upbeat singles, and a couple of hard-rocking tunes, including “All The Best”.

When the news that R.E.M. was disbanding broke, all of the songs on Collapse Into Now seemed to gain a greater significance. Each one is part of their panoply of feelings about the end. “All the Best” takes a defiant, “good riddance” attitude, one I often saw in my fellow graduates that spring. There was an awful lot of finger-flipping at the inanities of NYU, none of which was entirely undeserved, but all of which seemed to be rather limited. I felt it too, an eagerness to leave behind some of the nonsense of university, but I also knew that I was going to be losing something that meant a great deal to me. (And, natch, now that I’m out, I can’t for the life of me recall anything bad about the place). The bluster of an “All the Best” attitude has validity, but it’s best when put in context with its surrounding emotions. No wonder they made a whole album.

This year, I began to read Matt Taibbi (having first encountered his Rolling Stone work at my dentist’s office). Between reading him, Christopher Hitchens, and Hunter S. Thompson, I was well on my way to self-styling myself a dangerous radical. Then, during spring break, on the day – the very day – I started Taibbi’s The Great Derangement, I heard Billy Joel’s “Prelude/Angry Young Man”.

The song suffers from the same problem as many of Billy Joel’s – namely that, while it is pretty good, it is not very good. The instrumentation can’t be beat, but the lyrics are overly literal and even-handed. Still, with its careful enumeration of both the pleasures and the pitfalls of being an Angry Young Man, this song did me the favor of gently reminding me that this new attitude, like every other I’d previously entertained, wasn’t going to solve all of my problems.

In April, after a staged reading of my thesis project (a play about R.E.M.), a man whom I very much admire introduced me to a song that he said “has been destroying me since 1988”. It’s been said that it’s a mistake to meet one’s heroes, because their reality will invariably deflate their mystique. But in my experience, seeing the foibles of my idols has always made me admire them more. To achieve greatness despite being encumbered by the weaknesses of human existence is impressive, so I appreciated getting this glimpse at his psyche. The song was Randy Newman’s “I Want You To Hurt Like I Do”.

The song is too clever by half, a deadpan ode to the perpetuation of human misery set to a soothing variation on Pachelbel’s Canon. The manner in which Newman’s character (for this cannot be the voice of Newman himself) exacts his revenge on the world is cruel and needless, but knowingly so. It’s a terrifyingly intelligible attitude, one that I (and evidently, my advisor) has seen, and even been seduced by. But it’s ultimately nihilistic and (since Randy Newman has already mined it for a beautiful song) lacking in any remaining artistic inspiration, so I try to stay far away.

I graduated from NYU, moved out to Brooklyn and entered the main world. (Given that most every grown-up lives his or her life under some set of preposterous illusions, I refuse to call post-school life the “real” world.) But before I could seriously face this new set of circumstances, I was plucked out of my apartment and taken on a ludicrous trip to the Hamptons. En route, an iPod was plugged into the car stereo, and I heard “Oblivious” by Aztec Camera.

The song is a sweet tune, one of the rare numbers that actually earns the descriptor “toe-tapping”. I don’t think it stands for anything but the joy of being young and artistic, which happened to describe the fun of my stay in the Hamptons. We were a couple dozen kids living in an enormous beach house, making a movie. The weekend was no more complicated than that. There’s an indivisible pleasure in creative expression, which is why that weekend, so uncluttered, remains one of the nicest memories in recent memory.

The rest of the summer was mellower, but not particularly unpleasant. I continued to work at the NYU gym, and usually, I’d spend mornings there listening to music on YouTube. A song that appeared frequently in my rotation was Dire Straits’ “Tunnel of Love”.

The story is a beautiful rendering of the fantasy of love at first sight. But Mark Knopfler is too smart to allow a dream to go unexamined, and by the last stanza, he forces it into reality: “In the roaring dust and diesel/I stood and watched her walk away/I could have caught up with her easy enough/But something must have made me stay.” The summer of 2011 was the last gasp of a fantasy for me. Many of the same visuals of my life at NYU – the park, the library – remained, but I was no longer living in Manhattan, I had to pay bills, and many of my friends had departed. In August, I ended my job at the gym, which, in tandem with a few thudding social embarrassments, drew me completely out of my dream world and into a stark reality that was not especially enjoyable.

Autumn began, and I started a full-time work schedule. In the evenings, I would come home, put on Spotify, do some Kenken puzzles, and hope that I wasn’t fossilizing into a dreadful routine. On one otherwise nondescript night, Spotify turned up Oingo Boingo’s “We Close Our Eyes”.

It’s easy to have no truck with Oingo Boingo: it is a gaudy and hyperactive band. But it is never pretentious, which is why in this song, taking on the intractable absurdity of life, a subject that lends itself to endless portentous nonsense, it comes away with one of the most lovely responses I’ve ever heard. It begins with an acknowledgement of the tragedy of contemporary values as well as an admission that rebellion is tractionless (and all in only four lines – take note, Billy Joel). Dismissing the viability of suicide, the song moves into the chorus, plaintive repetitions of how “We close our eyes”, and let time slip away. But by the end of the song, Danny Elfman has turned this notion completely inside-out and found a way to defy sadness and the passing of time. I won’t explain how, for it will sound trite in my recounting, but by the end, when he sings that “if we really try/To make the seconds count/Then we can close our eyes”, he convinces that there’s no other way to live.

The music of my 2011 seems to resonate with a recurrent duality. The inability to settle for platitudes and conventional happiness abuts the frustrating futility of finding genuine satisfaction in a world that is weighted against you. I blame the heat death of the universe for this: in a life where the grandest entity that exists is rushing towards a cold non-existence, that helplessness trickles down to every lowly bit of life within. But it is not only possible to give off occasional sparks of joy in this void, it is required.

I fully expect that 2012 will be another harrowing year. Life is perpetually unsatisfying: “a mystery that never ends”, “a rough, rough world”. Often, the future, as far as can be seen, is “coal gray”. To hope for joy leaves you statistically poised for failure. But giving up on even the most fleeting moments of satisfaction is no option. Which is why Billy Joel’s hero “will go to the grave as an angry old man”, and Mark Knopfler’s will search “everywhere, from Steeplechase to Palisades” to find the girl. The path of hope leads often to misery, but then, the path of complacency leads always to misery, so it’s hardly a contest. “I think I’ll sing it and rhyme,” says Michael Stipe, facing down the bleakness with a defiant tune. “I’ll give it one more time.”

2011 showed me that both suffering and satisfaction were more powerful than I’d ever realized. I’m now prepared to face any agony for even a shot at a smile. I know how to fight back against closing my eyes, and letting the world turn around again. Plus, in the downtime, I can always count on art, and on the simple sensory pleasures: a warm blanket, the taste of peaches, and, oh, music.

Christopher Hitchens Sees It Through

That Christopher Hitchens’ death came at the end of a particularly kidney-stonish week for me seems entirely in keeping with our special (entirely one-sided) relationship. Low days in my life are always bested by abysmal days in Hitchens’. I began reading Hitchens last summer and just when I’d read enough of his books (two?) to know that I would be forever enamored, he was diagnosed with esophageal cancer. This was in keeping with the pattern developing that summer, where sources of eudemonia would sour with terrifying briskness, leaving me winded and staggering, slack-jawed incredulity mingling with bone-curling despair.

But to help me through these travails, I had Hitchens’ writing. His essay collections, his pamphlets, and especially his Letters to a Young Contrarian lightened my mood with both their ideas and their rhetorical fluency. So it was that when I emerged from the summer’s gloaming and put my angst into a play, I named one of my characters after Hitchens – a gesture that I’m sure meant a lot to a man to whom Martin Amis and Salman Rushdie dedicate books. Beyond that summer, I continued to read anything of his I could find (even Imperial Spoils: The Curious Case of the Elgin Marbles, finishing which was a bit of a challenge), and his influence upon me deepened. While other journalists, such as Hunter S. Thompson and Matt Taibbi, have done more to shape my particular opinions, Hitchens did more to shape my general perspective, and the intellectual standards to which I now try to hold myself.

I do owe to Hitchens (and also to Thompson and Taibbi) one specific political shift: my decision to depart the Democratic Party. Having no money and no influence, this was largely an academic gesture, but it’s done me some good. I cut my political teeth on Al Franken who, for all of his many talents, is a company man, sporting “an absolutely copper-bottomed, 100 percent, and unironic allegiance to every known tenet of the Democratic Party’s version of liberalism”, in Hitchens’ words. As a result, I’d picked up an intellectual laziness, assuming that, though there were different kinds of Democrats, in simple binary terms, any Democrat was better than any Republican. I realized, by reading these journalists, that to even treat partisan rivalry seriously was to ignore (or rather, to be fooled into missing) the actual fights going on for the direction of the country. The real conflicts are the clashes of values that happen – or all too often, don’t happen – behind the televised spectacle, and it embarrasses me to think of how I might have understood the moral depravities of Boehner’s Congress or Obama’s White House if I was still a mindless Franken-Stein.

I didn’t need Hitchens to convince me that god was not great, having been an atheist ever since I learned I had the option, but his work did lead me to understand that religion – properly seen not as a holy trinity of ritual, community, and modesty, but as a nasty hat trick of superstition, tribalism, and totalitarianism – was a enemy worth fighting. More broadly, Hitchens convinced me that there were fights worth having. I don’t mean in a literal, militaristic sense (I still think he was mistaken on the Iraq War [and I suspect he thought so too. Though he never admitted it – how could he? – his shifting rationales betrayed a bit of bet hedging]), but rather, in a personal sense. Hitchens’ suggestion to stand up straight and live “As If” – that is, as if you, your opinions, and your values will be accepted, regardless of the fear you have that they will not – has made me a little bit brave. In the last year, dialogues have arisen from which, prior to reading Hitchens, I might have shirked, opting for a peaceable silence. Instead, I have declaimed the big truths (as best as I have them) in matters political and personal, risking (and often receiving) ire or embarrassment. It’s still a challenge, but by this method, I’ve been able to dispel some of the cloud of regret that regularly plagued me for the first 20 years of my life.

But I’m not, and will never be (for who could?), as combative as Hitchens. As much as I agree with his diagnosis of religion’s toxicity, I can’t match his militancy. In practice, I have aligned myself more with the attitude of Hunter S. Thompson, who wrote,

I have never felt comfortable around people who talk about their feelings for Jesus, or any other deity for that matter, because they are usually none too bright…but I have never seen much point in getting heavy with either stupid people or Jesus freaks, just as long as they don’t bother me. In a world as weird and cruel as this one we have made for ourselves, I figure anybody who can find peace and personal happiness without ripping off somebody else deserves to be left alone.

Hitchens had a great deal of negative traits, but it’s worth noting that he was never a swindler. He never said or wrote anything solely for financial or social gain. He was rude and stubborn, occasionally overly affected and slightly too willing to pick fights for their own sakes, but these qualities were always in the service of intellectualism, humanism, and literature. How many of his critics – or, more to the point, how many of his targets – can claim the same?

There was never going to be a good day for me to learn that Christopher Hitchens had died, but today feels especially bad. Had I not been in a state of melancholic navel-gazing, I might have written a eulogy that was a little bit less self-involved. But perhaps the timing was serendipitous. At just the time when I needed a pick-me-up, circumstances contrived to put him in my mind again and have his imperishable words give me a morsel of joy. “I have learned to live,” Hunter S. Thompson continued on the subject of joy, “with the idea that I will never find peace and happiness. But I know that as long as I know there’s a pretty good chance I can get my hands on either one of them every once in a while, I do the best I can between high spots.”

So long as Christopher Hitchens’ writing is at hand, our high spots will never be far.

A Link to the Past

Tomorrow, Nintendo will release The Legend of Zelda: Skyward Sword, the 16th game in the Zelda franchise, and the first home console release since 2000 that I haven’t anticipated with drooling avidity. While I was aware that a new game was forthcoming, the release date almost entirely snuck up on me. But its sudden imminence was a nice surprise, and conclusive proof in support of my theory that time is going faster. This happens more and more as I get older, either because every year, any individual year becomes a smaller percentage of my life, or because I have finally developed the assurance, so ungraspable to children, that time will always pass, that no future date will fail to arrive. (Of course, while the inevitability of time’s passage makes one feel better about waiting for weekends or birthdays, it does add a little more menace to the looming specter of the last date you need mark in your calendar, the sleep that needs no sheets, the Game Over from which there are no continues.)

Majora’s Mask was the first Nintendo 64 game I owned that was purchased new. It was novel to bring home a proper box and a colorful instruction manual to supplement the game, rather than just a used, disconcertingly yellowed cartridge. Because I was playing it at its release, there were no earlier adopters to spoil the secrets for me. I solved every puzzle and slew every monster on my own. (Except those my mom beat for me.)

I spent most of eighth grade waiting for The Wind Waker, preparing arguments in support of its controversial art style. I could say that I was vindicated when the game was released and it proved to be a masterpiece, but since nobody had cared to listen to my opinions on the game prior to (or after) its release, the were no witnesses to applaud my prescience. Even my usually interested mother wasn’t paying attention, occupied as she was with my newborn brother, who was released ten days before the game.

The summer of 2004 found me emerging from a fairly disagreeable freshman year, hoping that the multiplayer charms of Four Swords Adventures would reunite me with my increasingly estranged best friend. It didn’t, but I had a good time playing it alone.

In November of 2006, I had entirely checked out of high school, but had not yet begun my (laughable) exploration of colleges, so the decision to spend an entire night camping out in front of a Target to procure a Wii and a copy of Twilight Princess seemed the most valuable use of my time. (The fact that I even conceived of such a plan, much less executed it, might explain why I had no interfering social obligations on that Saturday night.) Aside from being threatened three times by a man with an aluminum baseball bat (why does that scare me more than a wooden bat?), I had a pleasant evening, and the game carried me through to the last months of my primary education.

My graduation from high school marked the end of my serious gaming. From kindergarten to the afternoon I moved into the dorms, I played every day. Now, I hardly play at all. In the last two and half years, I’ve only bought three games: Animal Crossing: City Folk, Super Mario Galaxy 2, and Donkey Kong Country Returns. But none of these games exist in the same plane as a Zelda title. Animal Crossing is less a game than a meditative exercise, and neither Mario’s nor Donkey Kong’s adventures have the gravity of Link’s. This is not to take anything away from them – Donkey Kong Country Returns was magnificent, and Super Mario Galaxy 2 was a transcendental experience – only to say that there is an efficient simplicity to those games. They require only that you play. In a Zelda game, much of the fun comes from investing in the familiar mythology, the broad humor, the hushed gravity. You have to let down your guard and allow yourself to be stirred by the musical cues. You have to appreciate the recursive elements, and commit yourself to a study of each new title’s place in the series’ history.

At least that how I’ve always played them. I don’t know if I’ll be able to bring that same excitement to the table this time. When I was a kid, video games were a fine escape from the busywork of school, the nastiness of other children, and my meager scope of possibilities. In a world of limited horizons, a series of 15 different, explorable worlds was much appreciated.

Now that I’m older, sure I see and feel more acutely this world’s sense of diminished possibilities, but I also have more ways of handling it. I can write and I can read (and I mean actually read, with an eye to the work’s existential meaning, not that lousy, sterile, droning, and enervatingly reverential treatment of books that is so favored in AP Literature classes). I can engage with friends on a deeper level than the superficial commonalities that bring people together as kids. (Not that my friends and I aren’t still very similar superficially.) Instead of my emotions being limited to the simplistic cheer of childhood or the humming tedium of adolescence, I can be scared, or be angry, or be in love. The real world has finally surpassed Shigeru Miyamoto’s imagination.

I don’t think that playing video games is a foolish or wasteful pastime, nor do I even think it is an inherently childish activity. But it’s a taste for which I’ve been satiated. I still hope to have fun with Skyward Sword, and I probably will, but I expect that the experience will be better suited to somebody without the array of activities I have to choose from.

I’m thinking of somebody like my nine-year-old little brother, who is just growing to love video games. (In fact, we beat Super Mario Galaxy 2 together, which was about the most adorable brotherly spectacle you’ve ever seen.) I hope that his gaming career is as satisfying to him as it was to me, that he gasps when the King of Red Lions reveals his true identity, or that he chokes up at the titularly telegraphed twist at the end of Link’s Awakening. I’m a bit envious of him for being able to experience those moments with fresh surprise. But then, what I’ve been discovering since I weaned myself off of the games is that there’s plenty out in the world that I’ve still got ahead of me, to experience for the first time.

The One I Love

Today, R.E.M. announced that it would be breaking up. Unlike most musical separations, this does not seem to be the result of an explosive dispute, or of years of attrition having left the band creatively exhausted. (They’ve been together for over three decades, but their last album – Collapse Into Now, released last March – showed them enjoyably close to the top of their game.) Michael Stipe, Mike Mills, and Peter Buck seem to have simply decided that they’re ready to move on. It’s the most graceful exit since Calvin Coolidge left the White House.

It is a fittingly gentle departure. In both accolades and disparagement, R.E.M. does not seem to inspire a great deal of passionate intensity. Haters dismiss its personality as aggressively uncool or awkwardly preachy, but even its strongest denigrators never seem especially irritated by R.E.M. I’ve loved the band uninterruptedly since May of 2001 (the release of Reveal, the first album I ever owned), but you wouldn’t know it. I don’t own any band shirts. I don’t care one way or another that they left their indie roots to become Warner Brothers superstars. I’ve never even seen them in concert. Perhaps I’ve been lax in my duties, but no other fan I’ve met has expressed much more ardor towards the band than I do. Being an R.E.M. fan doesn’t require any excessive enthusiasm or pageantry. R.E.M. records its albums and leaves the songs in your hands to do with as you please.

Over the years, I’ve used R.E.M. music to supplement my own creative career. In 2002, two of my friends and I performed a cover of “It’s the End of the World as We Know It” for our seventh grade talent show. My dad wrote us parody lyrics (“That’s right, it starts with a large rock, chicken pox, a lost sock. Fanny Brice is made of glue” – “It only took me ten minutes” he would later say, first with pride, then with remorse), and we belted them out, harmonizing pretty well, considering we were working with cracking voices. It was my first live creative performance, and I floated off the stage, delighted by this new outlet. True, within 15 minutes I was deflated by a review from an assiduously sadistic classmate Tom, who told me that “nobody could hear you, the lyrics were so weird, and nobody could hear you”, but it remains that R.E.M. boosted me into an exciting world.

Four years later, I was cast in a production of Clue as The Motorist, the third murder victim. I was deeply into David Sedaris at the time, and decided to honor the man by ripping him off. Sedaris had wrung brilliance out of working as a lowly Macy’s elf in “Santaland Diaries”, and I thought I figured I could do the same by documenting the life of a wretched understudy. My work hadn’t one micron of Sedaris’ skill, as you might have guessed, but it was, at the time, the best thing I’d ever produced, because it was honest. I was no longer writing about characters who weren’t me, who had nothing to do with me, as I had hitherto thought authors did. Everyday, as I added more to this diary, I listened to Automatic for the People. It was a library copy and I renewed it every week for 12 weeks (more than a patron is allowed, but that’s one of the many fringe benefits of having librarian parents) because I was convinced that it was partially responsible for the enjoyment I was having with the project. I’m not sure I was wrong.

Nearly five years later, I was beginning my thesis play, and an idea came to me, fully formed: I would structure the play around Automatic for the People, each of its twelve tracks corresponding to a scene. The idea came from nowhere. I hadn’t seriously listened to the entire album since Clue. I had no other music-related concepts. All I had really decided on was to make the play as self-indulgent as I could. (Luca: The Play, my friend called it.) It was, after all, my final project: when would I have another chance to vent my spleen and get constructive feedback?

So I melded my personal exorcisms and navel-gazing with an analysis of a nearly 20-year-old album and turned out (this with as much objectivity as I can muster) an engrossing piece of theater. Successful writing is always a kind of black magic, but my experience writing The River’s Goal was eerily effortless. Synapses in my brain were firing, discovering that the emotional agonies tangled up in my conscious mind, begging to be reckoned with in drama, had already been resolved in the lyrics I’d been listening to for years.

R.E.M. doesn’t stand out as other bands I love do. It hasn’t the breathless, kinetic genius of Talking Heads, or the virtuosic musicianship of Dire Straits. It’s diligent and restrained, if occasionally embarrassingly excitable; a little wimpy, but mostly kind; a little pretentious, but mostly contemplative. It is music written by men for whom the music is everything. For them, there is nothing outside the songs: they wrote them, they performed them, and they left them for the fans to till. R.E.M. is the best band ever.