Through the Prism: You'll Love It, Assuming You Are a Terrible Person*

Below is part of a picture I recently took of a sign at a skating rink. And while it applies to roller skating particularly, I also think it applies delightfully to life in general.

It is the nature of living that people fall down and run into one another on occasion. It's going to happen; you're going to fall down and you're going to run into others. If you want a life, you must be willing to assume that risk.

I also recently finished the poetry collection Constellation Route by Matthew Olzmann. For my review, I wrote:

So many good poems. Not a bad one in the bunch, and many I want to hoard as treasure.

Olzmann manages to intertwine the ordinary and mundane with personal anxieties and frustrations, social commentary, and philosophical ponderings, all with a few, simple words. So many associative connections so beautifully expressed.

I want to share them all with you.

While I'm not going to share all of them here, a good number are going to be woven through this post. This, the book's first, is perhaps my favorite.

Letter to Bruce Wayne

— After Borges

A good place to hide a drop of water is a stream.
A good place to hide a stream is beneath an ocean.

A good place to hide a man is among thousands
of men. Watch how they rush
through the city like water through a ravine.

I've searched many famous cities for you.
There are three listings for "Bruce Wayne"
in Houston, two in Pittsburgh, one in Miami, and one in LA.

In Tampa, Bruce Wayne is a retired chemistry teacher.
In Flagstaff, he drives a taxi and hopes
to procure a diamond for his soon-to-be fiancée.

A good place to hide a star is a galaxy.
A good place to hide a galaxy is a universe.
Look at the night sky. Justice

used to be a cowl and cape, the flicker
of wings under an etiolated moon. And you,
like a gargoyle, crouched atop some stone edifice.

To conceal a universe, place it in a multiverse--that hypothetical
klatch of alternate realities. The dilemma of the word

alternate is how it implies a norm, a progenitor stream
from which the alternate diverges. Which is the alternate?
Which is right here, right now? There is no such thing

as Gotham City, but here is Gotham City and I've been
so naïve: believing the truth of the old mythologies.
How they promised a recognizable villain,
a clown with a ruby-slashed mouth, a lunatic's laugh.

In the universe where I exist, supervillains
look like everyone else. Give them an old flannel
to wear and a square jawline to smile at the world.

They're hanging a noose in a middle school bathroom.
They're shouting, Get out of my country,
from the window of a passing car.
They're pulling a pistol in a crowded barroom,
or bus stop, or the middle of the street.
They could be anyone. They could be everywhere.

A good place to hide a sociopath is a full-length mirror.
A good place to hide that mirror is the heart of America.

In the battle of Good versus Evil, I was so sure
Good would win. Now I just hope something Good will survive,
get a job cutting hair or selling cars, make it home for dinner.

I suspect there's a parallel dimension where you, Vigilante,
long for this as well. To have a normal life is victory enough.
To remain anonymous and not be spat upon on the subway.

In Boston, Bruce Wayne owns a pawn shop.
In Milwaukee, he plays pinochle and feeds stray cats.
In New Hampshire, he goes fly-fishing on the Sugar River,
reels in one brook trout after another.

When he removes the hook from a mouth,
he might place the fish in a cooler.
Or, he might set it back into a stream--
the alternate or the original--no longer certain
in which he stands.

In the universe where I exist, supervillains look like everyone else.

Something random I posted on Facebook the other day:

I hesitate to mention it in case the algorithms catch wind and confuse it for approval, but. I make a mild effort to be eclectic and hard to pin down to preserve a hint of variety and diversity in my news feed, so this service is constantly trying new things to see if it can get something to stick. Which I like. Except I know not to click on anything because then that dominates my feed for a while and the variety goes away. And with videos, if I even make the mistake of hovering or, God forbid, unmuting, then it's mistaken for interest.

I made that mistake not long ago, hovered on a video or two just to try to figure out what exactly I was seeing--and now I have a few too many videos on my feed of horses getting their overgrown hooves trimmed.

Last year I had a long post about my James Kennedy experience and his two (at that time) books. He has a new one coming out, and I'm getting very excited to read it. Here's an excerpt from an interview:

Interview: Sinister Twisters—Author James Kennedy Talks Horror and His New Book, Bride of the Tornado

A tornado is a uniquely American monster. Indeed, 75% of tornadoes in the world happen in the United States, about a thousand per year. And what a stupendous villain a tornado makes: a pulverizing, godlike column of spinning air! A skyscraper-sized predator of the prairie that can appear and vanish in the space of minutes, demolishing everything it touches!

It’s also the perfect monster to haunt the flat American Midwest. In the old days there was a thing called “prairie madness.” People would go crazy from the monotony, the isolation. Pioneers traveling for months in their covered wagons, seeing the same empty plains day after day, finally settling in a random piece of that flatness, and losing their minds.

And then suddenly, roaring into that horizontal world: something supernaturally vertical, an air-monster devouring and wrecking. It’s a contradiction of the landscape. You can’t argue with a tornado, you can’t stop it. Nature has the upper hand, and it doesn’t need to give you reasons. A tornado will destroy an entire neighborhood but leave one house unaccountably untouched. A tornado might kill you, or throw you for a mile, or rip off your clothes. It’s capricious.

As a Kansan who has directly witnessed tornado destruction, I love this so much. I've never thought about adopting them as part of my personal-place mythology, but now I might need to.

And then there's this one.

“What the Hell Did I Just Read?”: A Conversation with James Kennedy

The response has been intense but strangely consistent. The phrases I hear again and again are “fever dream” and “nightmare you can’t wake up from.” But different people have different tolerances for this kind of strong medicine. You get some people who post five-star reviews that say, “What the hell did I just read?” but you get other folks who post one-star reviews that say, “What the hell did I just read?” They all say that Bride of the Tornado is super weird; they just have varying reactions to dealing with this level of weirdness.

And that’s where I want to be, culturally. If I read a book or watch a movie, and it goes down too easily, I forget it pretty quickly. It ends up not mattering much to me. The stories that have stayed with me and changed my life are spiky, hard to digest, and alienating. For me, good stories pull you in with one hand while they push you away with the other.

Not everyone likes that. But indeed, my favorite reviews are the ones where, even when they’re trying to give you a bad review, they can’t help but end up complimenting you. I’m thinking of this one-star review I found on The Storygraph which goes:
I hated the experience of reading this book so much that I suppose it’s a recommendation. It’s self-consciously weird, violent at exactly the wrong times, gross when it doesn’t need to be, and the cat situation was unacceptable. It was also well constructed, well written, well plotted, with characters who a reader can care about. You’ll love it, assuming you are a terrible person.
That last sentence is everything. I want it printed on the cover of all future editions of the book.

Lori Rader-Day: For the promotion of Bride of the Tornado, you have worn a tornado costume to speak as the character of the sentient tornado in the book. I don’t even know what to ask here. “Why?” doesn’t seem to get to the point. Explain yourself, sir. . . .

Good stories pull you in with one hand while they push you away with the other.

Indeed.

As with life in general.

Life pulls you in with one hand while pushing you away with the other.

If Bruce Wayne isn't my favorite of Olzmann's poems from the book, then this one is.

Letter to William Shatner

1.

Dear William, I was hoping to talk to you about the time I first saw the movie version of Fight Club. If you haven't seen it, it's about young men who punch each other in the face, urinate in the food of strangers, and blow things up. Basically: a documentary. This is their response to the problem of contemporary masculinity, though when said like this, it sounds illogical. Made sense at the time. But there was one scene, where Brad Pitt and Edward Norton's characters discussed who they'd fight if they could fight any celebrity, living or dead. Edward Norton said, Shatner. I'd fight William Shatner. Everyone in the audience laughed. But I wasn't sure why.

2.

I too live in a movie where the men are always angry. They're revving their engines and spitting from the windows. Cracking their knuckles and glaring. Burning like flares on a stretch of abandoned highway. They clean their fingernails on the point of a buck knife. Going outside and kicking the dirt. Thinking of their mothers, then yelling at the sky. That sort of thing.

3.

For the past 45 minutes, I've been on hold with Priceline's customer service. I'm being transferred again, to someone who, again, will not be able to explain why my flight reservation which is eligible for cancellation is not actually eligible for cancellation. Every so often, a recording of your voice--dear William Shatner, dear company spokesperson--interrupts the music to tell me that the world's fastest roller coaster is Kingda Ka. To say you'll stay on hold with me. To offer a recitation of a poem you wrote about a woman named Ruth.

4.

Out in the world, men are shouting. Gathering on their sidewalks and shouting. Marching through the streets and shouting. Punching their pals in the ear and shouting. It's how we say things like, I have the happy feeling, and also things like, Every cogent analysis of masculine irrationality determines that its manifestation is more of an ontological inevitability than an innoxious aberration.

5.

Still on hold with Priceline. And, for an eighth or tenth time, your voice comes in to say, The world's fastest roller coaster is Kingda Ka. And by now, I'm saying, Jesus Christ, can you stop with this already? Then you offer, again, to share a poem you wrote. And I'm yelling, No! Just let me talk to a human. Which is when you actually begin to recite the poem, saying, There was a young lady named Ruth--and suddenly I understand: Shatner. I'd fight William Shatner.

6.

And just like that: I'm part of the problem. I've punched my card and am back in the He-Man-Spontaneous-Combustion-of-Wrath Society, pacing my living room and shouting. Pressing the phone against my head and shouting. Pounding a fist on the table and shouting. A portable inferno for one, a singularity at the center of the town causing everything to fold inward, all the pipes to rupture, all the buildings to crumble. The men gather around it to holler into the wreckage.

7.

I should say, I don't really want to fight you. Or anyone. That I'm embarrassed by rage, particularly when it's mine, the ordinariness of it. Three strangers, one after another, all trying to fix a problem over the phone, a problem that--like most of my problems--was probably my fault to begin with. There are good people out there. And they fix it. They correct the problem, cancel the flight, and tell me to have a pleasant evening.

8.

The town is quiet, and the streets have now emptied. As if all the shouting men caught a brief glimpse of themselves and, startled by their reflections, ran out of things to yell about. Rethinking their lives, perhaps they've gone home, to rest in moonlit rooms, to light lavender-scented candles, to recline against pillows that cradle the shapes of their fragile heads, to dream of soft hands touching their weathered faces.

9.

The world's fastest roller coaster is Kingda Ka. I know this because you told me. But I've since looked it up. It's named after a 500-pound Bengal tiger. The males of the species are territorial and aggressive, renowned for their teeth, their claws, and their fury. They rip things apart. They are beautiful, but they spend much of their lives alone and are nearly extinct.

Aye, I've been there. Too often.

An article:

In Countries Where Manhood Must Be Proven, Men Have Shorter Lives

Stereotypes of manhood link it with strength, aggression, toughness, and courage. . . . one way men can protect their masculinity is by engaging in risky behaviors like fighting, binge drinking, or fast driving. (Male readers might themselves recall something stupid they did to “prove their manhood.”) . . .

In countries high in precarious manhood beliefs (one standard deviation above the average), men lived 6.7 fewer years compared to men in countries low in precarious manhood beliefs (one standard deviation below average). The result held even when controlling for potential confounding variables such as human development and availability of physicians. . . .

“Country-level endorsement of the belief that manhood is ‘hard won and easily lost’ uniquely and strongly predicts how long men in that country will live.” . . .

“While past research has linked masculinity to health, this is the first study, and the largest in scale, to show that a basic belief about the nature of manhood may have far-reaching implications for men around the world,” the researchers concluded.

Is your manhood hard won and easily lost?

It is the nature of traffic that people fall down or run into one another.

Letter to Matthew Olzmann from a Traffic Light in Durham, North Carolina

Actually, I'm less of a traffic cop, more
of an amateur thaumaturgist. What miracles might
I perform, you ask? I adjure the passage of time.
Wait here, I say. Go ahead, I say. And in fits,

your world stops. Then starts. Then stops.
Then proceeds. Then ceases. Then ensues.
Then halts. Then pulses and lurches forward,
like blood through a valve to storm

the command center in your cranium. Up there,
something seethes at every red light, authorizes
your clenched teeth, your mad muttering of, God,
please make this light turn green. And I say,

Nope. And I say, Not yet. And I say, Remain
in place and observe. Look: there goes your world.
And there it goes again. How is it that you
who have begged to believe in anything, see only

this one road before you? This one delay. This brief
intermission. Not the wonderment of highways
it touches. Not the intersections I present, void
of collisions, all windblown and ghost-town quiet.

Not the order I foist upon each crossroad
you encounter. These zippy motorcycles.
These sleek sedans. None of them broadsiding you.
No fiery ruin. No Wreck-of-Matthew.

Each vessel, with a particular terminus, and each vessel,
I send on its way.

Thaumaturgist is such a good word.

An article:

America Is Getting Lonelier and More Indoorsy. That’s Not a Coincidence.

Our relationship to nature and our relationships with one another are deeply intertwined.

As nature grows unfamiliar, separate, and strange to us, we are more easily repelled by it. These feelings can lead people to avoid nature further, in what some experts have called “the vicious cycle of biophobia.”

The feedback loop bears telling resemblance to another vicious cycle of modern life. Psychologists know that lonely individuals tend to think more negatively of others and see them as less trustworthy, which encourages even more isolation. Although our relationship to nature and our relationships with one another may feel like disparate phenomena, they are both parallel and related. A life without nature, it seems, is a lonely life—and vice versa.

The Western world has been trending toward both biophobia and loneliness for decades. David Orr, an environmental-studies researcher and advocate for climate action, wrote in a 1993 essay that “more than ever we dwell in and among our own creations and are increasingly uncomfortable with the nature that lies beyond our direct control.” This discomfort might manifest as a dislike of camping, or annoyance at the scratchy touch of grass at the park. It might also show up as disgust in the presence of insects, which a 2021 paper from Japanese scholars found is partially driven by urbanization. Ousting nature from our proximity—with concrete, walls, window screens, and lifestyles that allow us to remain at home—also increases the likelihood that the experiences we do have with other lifeforms will be negative, Orr writes. You’re much less likely to love birds if the only ones around are the pigeons you perceive as dirty.

The rise of loneliness is even better documented. . . .

Orr wrote in his 1993 essay that appreciation of nature will flourish mostly in “places in which the bonds between people, and those between people and the natural world create a pattern of connectedness, responsibility, and mutual need.” The literature suggests that he’s right. Our sense of community certainly affects how comfortable or desirable we perceive time in nature to be . . .

Relationships between racial and ethnic groups can have an especially strong influence on time spent in nature. . . .

Being in nature or even just remembering times you spent there can increase feelings of belonging, says Katherine White, a behavioral scientist at the University of British Columbia who co-wrote a 2021 paper on the subject. The authors of one 2022 paper found that “people who strongly identify with nature, who enjoy being in nature, and who had more frequent garden visits were more likely to have a stronger sense of social cohesion.” In a 2018 study from Hong Kong, preschool children who were more engaged with nature had better relationships with their peers and demonstrated more kindness and helpfulness. A 2014 experiment in France showed that people who had just spent time walking in a park were more likely to pick up and return a glove dropped by a stranger than people who were just about to enter the park. The results are consistent, White told me: “Being in nature makes you more likely to help other people,” even at personal cost.

We are deeply intertwined.

From Olzmann:

Letter to My Future Neighbors

Because this is New Hampshire,
there's a 97% chance you are not Black.
My wife insists that I tell you that she is
(she would like this known before you meet her).

She wants me to mention it will be safer for her this way,
safer than if she were to ring your doorbell
and introduce herself, by herself.

Not that she's worried that you've got a shotgun
and will shoot her through the door, but
she does want me to point out that this
is a thing that "accidentally" happens these days.

She just doesn't want anyone to get suspicious
when she parks her own car in front of her own house,
or when she carries groceries (which she did not steal)
to the door of her own house.

Not that you would do that, of course.
You're going to love her.
Her name is Vievee and you'll find her very approachable.

The other day, I looked out the window of the apartment
where we currently live, and in the parking lot
she was chatting with a couple who moved in nearby.

I was happy because she looked happy
and she was pointing to our place, as if to invite
them over, saying: Hi. Yes, it's wonderful

to meet you. Yes, I live in that unit right there.
That one. Right there. No, I live here. No, I said,
I live here. These are my keys. This is my car.

No, I'm saying that I live here. Not visiting,
I live here. No, I live here.

Psychologists know that lonely individuals tend to think more negatively of others and see them as less trustworthy, which encourages even more isolation.

This week's post from Homeless Training by Ryan Dowd:

I had two hip surgeries during peak Covid. (I don’t recommend it).

I followed all of the surgeon’s instructions:

I did physical therapy.

I stretched daily (and still do).

I stopped running and playing Pickleball (giving up running wasn’t as hard as I expected, but I’m still bitter about Pickleball because I was pretty dang good at it!).

At my two-year checkup, the surgeon said my recovery has been as close to perfect as he has seen.

Most days I barely notice my hips.

This morning, though, I had to get out of bed at 3am because my left hip hurt too much to sleep.

It struck me that it took almost no time to damage my hips, but the recovery is taking years.

Damage is fast. Healing is slow.

Life is like that.

It only takes five seconds to say something cruel to someone else that may haunt them for the rest of their life.

A momentary ethical lapse can cause decades of guilt.

Marriages, friendships and family relationships can be damaged almost beyond repair in minutes.

There is an obvious lesson here:

Try REALLY hard not to do damage. This is true of damaging others and damaging ourselves.

I think there is a more important—but less obvious—lesson:

Start the process of healing as soon as possible and don’t stop.

We want quick fixes to life’s greatest pains, but that’s just not how it works.

Starting to forgive yourself today is better than next year.

Going to rehab (or finding a counselor) this week is better than in a decade.

An apology 30-years late is better than no apology at all.

Healing takes time.

Healing is hard.

Healing takes courage.

It’s not fair, but that’s just how life is…

…so get started and don’t stop.

peace,

Ryan

Good wisdom, that.

Olzmann:

Letter to the Person Who, During the Q&A Session after the Reading, Asked for Career Advice

The confusion you feel is not your fault.
When we were younger, guidance counselors steered us
toward respectable occupations: doctor, lawyer,
pharmacist, dentist. Not once did they say exorcist,
snake milker or racecar helmet tester.
Always: investment banker, IT specialist, marketing associate.
Never: rodeo clown.
Never: air guitar soloist, chainsaw
juggler or miniature golf windmill maker.
In this country, in the year I was born,
some 3.1 million other people were also born, each
with their own destiny, the lines of their palms
predicting an incandescent future. Were all of them
supposed to be strategy consultants and commodity analysts?
Waterslide companies pay people to slide down
waterslides to evaluate their product.
Somehow, that’s an actual job. So is naming nail polish colors.
Were these ever presented as options?
You need to follow your passion
as long as your passion is not poetry and is definitely a hedge fund.
If I could do it over, I’d suggest an entry level position
standing by a riverbank,
or a middle management opportunity
winding like fog through the sugar maples of New England.
There’s a catastrophic shortage
of bagpipe players, tombstone sculptors and tightrope walkers.
When they tell you about the road ahead,
they forget the quadrillion other roads.
You’ll know which one is yours because
it fills you with astonishment or ends with you being reborn
as an alpine ibex--a gravity-defying goat, able to leap
seven feet in the air, find footholds where none exist,
and (without imagining it could ever be anything else)
scale a vertical sheet of solid rock
to find some branches, twigs, or wild berries to devour.

I'd take an entry level position standing by a riverbank. Know anyone offering?

An article by Anne Lamott:

At 33, I Knew Everything. At 69, I Know Something Much More Important.

Age has given me the ability to hang out without predicting how things will sort out this time (mostly — depending on how I’ve slept). . . .

The great darkness says to me what I often say to heartbroken friends — “I don’t know.” . . .

“I don’t know” is the portal to the richness inside us. . . .

In my younger days when the news was too awful, I sought meaning in it. Now, not so much. The meaning is that we have come through so much, and we take care of each other and, against all odds, heal, imperfectly. We still dance, but in certain weather, it hurts. (Okay, always.)

The portals of age also lead to the profound (indeed earthshaking) understanding that people are going to do what people are going to do: They do not want my always-good ideas on how to have easier lives and possibly become slightly less annoying.

Now there is some acceptance (partly born of tiredness) that I can’t rescue or fix anyone, not even me. Sometimes this affords me a kind of plonky peace, fascination and even wonder at people and life as they tromp on by. . . .

Another gift of aging is the precipitous decline in melodrama. Enjoying how unremarkable life is takes practice and time, and then the little things start to shine and delight. Life gets smaller and in its smallness it starts winking at you.

“I don’t know” is the portal to the richness inside us.

A final poem from Matthew Olzmann:

Letter to My Car's Radiator

Like a bull, the transmission fluid boils and charges
through its arena of tubes toward you,
and like a matador, you make all of it miss you completely.
Look: it's on the highway a quarter mile behind us!

Congratulations! I'm impressed by your artistry.
But if you could kindly knock that shit off,
I'd be truly grateful.

A man stands next to his broken vehicle
on a dirt road in the American South. The sky
grows dark. The forest, even darker.
And those low sounds from the trees
and the gurgling creek--sounds that sound like murder--
could be the mud-filled groans of the Carolina gopher frog.
Or, the early hunger pangs of a zombie apocalypse.
No way to tell. Dan McKernan (friend of the author,
amateur zombie expert) says the first thing to do
is search your car for a zombie-killing instrument,
anything available, most likely: a tire iron or crowbar.

I cannot confirm or deny whether the protagonist
of this story crouched by the side of his car,
a tire iron in his fist, fear in his eyes,
and Armageddon in his heart.

I cannot verify that--around him in the dark--twigs
snapped like small bones, and dry leaves shuffled
like ankles of the dead inching closer.

The point is: I feel helpless.
The point is: the world is going to devour us, and both

the thing-made-by-man
(i.e. the car and its system of tubes and coils that
spit steam into the gravel and sky)

and the thing-made-by-nature
(i.e. the forest, the darkness, the frogs,
the zombies, and so forth)

are beyond my ability to comprehend, repair, or control.
Does this sound ridiculous? Absurd?
Let me remind you: I'm writing a letter
to a radiator of a 2006 Dodge Neon.
The Absurd is the only country I've known.
I've been mapping its territory since I learned to hold a crayon.
And you, Dear Radiator, have been of little assistance
in my negotiations with this topography.

One of the earliest attempts to map the known world
comes from Babylon. It's damaged, but the labels
of at least three distinct islands can be understood.

One where the sun rises.
One where the sun is hidden.
One beyond the wings of any bird.

We all travel toward that last island, and when
it gets this dark out here, Earth is ancient again.
Tonight, everything that flutters up beyond that tree line
is impossible to see.