Senior leadership has taken a position that it’s not time to communicate, but big changes appear to be coming. Nobody knows what’s going on.

“How are you dealing with it?” I asked.

“Well, everybody’s worried. We’re planning for a bunch of scenarios so we know what to do and can get moving when we know what to do.”

“How’s the team handling it?”

“Not well. They’re worried and I can’t tell them what’s going to happen, so they keep spinning out on worst-case scenarios.”

“So instead of doing their jobs they’re planning for how to deal with their jobs changing, even though they don’t know how they’re going to change, and they’re making themselves sick anticipating the worst?”

“Well what else are they supposed to do?”

“Their current jobs.”

“What am I supposed to do?”

So, when I was still a private in Korea I was the First Sergeant’s driver. One day during a field problem we decided to pay an unannounced visit to one of our hilltop sites. We took the morning, drove up the mountain, and arrived just after lunch.

It was a pretty standard FM retransmission site: High on the hill, set up in an old concrete bunker. Two OE-254 mast antennas, someone sitting on radio watch, a few people playing cards over in the corner. The rest of the squad were in their cots when we got there. One of the card players got up and shrugged on his BDU jacket and told everyone Top was here. The cook offered us plates of leftovers. The site chief came out wiping the sleep from his eyes and gave Top a briefing.

We kept the visit brief and headed back down the hill.

“What did you think, PFC Hall?”

“Pretty bad, First Sergeant.”

“Bad?”

“I guess they had a radio watch … but half of them were napping! The two who weren’t were playing cards! Pretty bad site discipline.”

“What did you think they were supposed to be doing?”

“It’s a field problem! Be ready!”

“Ready for what?”

“I don’t know … range control to call in an incoming attack.”

“That’s what radio watch is listening for.”

“Well they should still be ready.”

“They were. Good soldiers know when to sleep.”

A recent tasks-n-notes tool spinout felt like the liminal moment between deep sleep and awakening to some disturbance. That sense before you’re fully conscious that there is something going on, but your consciousness hasn’t engaged with it yet. It’s just a weird externality in whatever dream you’re having. It was gnawing at me by the time all was said and done.

There are times when I feel okay with all the screwing around and futzing, but things have been hectic recently and I was spending my discretionary time fucking around with tools. I’m not gonna go into the why of it, but once the week had wrapped I had some clarity.

However, one thing I was doing, or at least outcome that was happening was that as I was slowly waking up to the fact that I was deferring a serious conversation with myself, I was reminded that I used to do really well when I journaled. I’ve taken several approaches to that over the years:

• Essay-length writeups about what’s going on in my head
• Quick little notes during the day about whatever passed through my field of view
• Letters to myself at the beginning and end of the day
• A “what’s going well/what’s not going well/what’s the big task for today?” morning exercise

All are fine. All work better or worse depending on what’s going on with me.

But the idea I came across was what everyone seems to be calling “interstitial logging,” which is really just … logging?

(8:00a) Looking at the calendar. It’s going to be busy.
(9:00a) ITENG standup. Someone needs to look at the Meraki/Envoy thing
(9:33a) Caught a ping about the Zoom renewal. Need to find the MSA from last time.

Some people like to toss todos in. Other people seem to just have a little diary.

I picked it up partially because I remembered that diaries help me focus and clarify what matters, and partially because I was so busy trying to figure out where to put all the stuff that I had to do that I was afraid I’d miss something if I didn’t write down everything in the simplest form possible.

Brief digression about how I’d like to behave for a bit

I’m consciously not going into how or where I decided to keep my log. Just the process of figuring that out was slightly agonized and wasteful. It’s enough to say it was sort of a grand tour of everything I’ve played around with in the last … 10 or 13 years? To write down little time-stamped notes? The meta got pretty vertiginous by the time I was done.

I did end up making myself pick something though, and it is sufficient to this narrative to say “it is just fine for writing down little time-stamped notes.” More than fine, because you could do that with any number of things, some backed by extensive cloud resources, some operating in a container on a Synology, some running on a way over-provisioned desktop machine, some, like … 3x5 cards or a giveaway vendor swag notebook or a legal pad. I picked something in between “an expensive subscription SaaS” and “the blank side of a piece of cardboard I tore off a soda can case.”

I want this to be the last time for at least a while that I comment on the tools I am using for keeping myself in order. For a few reasons:

1. After watching enough videos from people who desperately want to be tools influencers I am saturated and tired of the entire frivolous scene. Nobody should take tools advice from people whose job it is to write about tools. I say this as a former tech journalist who wrote an ungodly number of articles about tools whose efficacy I could attest to because look at how prolific I was writing about tools.
2. As with a few other creative endeavors I share, I could begin to feel the distorting effects of getting attention for the stuff I was writing about and resenting the effect it was having on me. Like, it was super cool to get a few links from an Emacs eminence, and it blew up website traffic, and I was reminded that I don’t do well with that kind of feedback.
3. There are other things that are more important to me than documenting how I tortured an AI into writing some lisp for me.

I write all this down as a sort of accountability exercise with the ever-shifting procession of faces coming in and out of focus that I think of as “whoever’s going to read this.” I am not sure who that will be because I ripped all the analytics out of my site. For at least a while, I don’t want to know.

So back to what I was saying:

I started keeping my “interstitial log.”

At first there was a little ocean boiling: How do I account for tasks? Do I use this tool or that tool? Which markup format?

I made myself knock all that off and landed on “just make a date heading, then make timestamped entries and write something when it occurs.”

Even then, for a bit the entries were about writing entries. Throat clearing. Like a dog circling its bed 20 times before it finally lies down.

But things began to improve. The entries were what they were meant to be. I got rid of an overoptimization I allowed to creep in (elaborate todo stuff) in favor of making a little annotation either for a thing I wanted to come back to and rethink later, or manually transfer to my task inbox.

The equilibrium I’ve come to is more or less “keep an outline of the day, annotate for followup/recapture, allow the outline to take shape, make sure to sweep it all up to end the day, because you’re starting a new log tomorrow and don’t want to forget anything.”

Looking at a stretch of logs, I feel a lot of affection for them. They’re easy to scan. I can see all the stuff that happened. At the end of the day, because I have made it easy on myself, I can collect everything up that needs to be sorted and take a moment to do that with care, teeing up the next day.

I would like to stick with it for a while for the same reason I buy my underwear, socks, and t-shirts from three single sources, and have in the last few years bought multiples of other things that work for me but are subject to the vagaries of global supply chains and profit-squeezing sourcing fuckery: If it works, just go with that and remove another thing from the list of things you think about.

The tool isn’t why you work.

The process isn’t why you work.

The outcome is why you work.

“Kotek and Blumenauer Tell Local Officials: Fix Rampant Drug Use on Portland Streets, Now”:

“The frustration comes at a time when the Joint Office of Homeless Services budget for 2024 is $279 million—not counting $50.3 million in unanticipated receipts that the regional government Metro will soon pass along—and the city has untapped Medicaid funding available to help pay for Portland Street Response to address mental health crises.”

“Blumenauer says he left the May meeting about Portland’s streets with a clear understanding. ‘The consensus of all these experts we brought together is that money is not the problem,’ he says. ‘The question is how we mobilize and utilize the resources we’ve got.’”

The whole article is an interesting read: It hangs the narrative on a closed sobering center and the woeful effort to create a new one. The thing that runs just under the surface, as with almost all these stories, is the system that doles out social services in this county: Government’s role is essentially a giant procurement operation, services are provided by non-profits, and the starvation wages those non-profits can afford means nobody wants the work. I know senior non-profit managers who have lost employees to fast food jobs. Few of the non-profits can make the contracts work.

Assessed as a complete system, it’s a disaster. It reflects the neoliberal mania for privatization, but its design inherently mandates redundant layers of administration and management as dollars pass through the county procurement layer and its army of contract managers, consultants, and the management staff needed to oversee all that; then trickle into the non-profits, who have their own grant writers, development directors, executive directors, administrative staff, management, and actual direct services people.

The ecosystem of non-profits exists in a kind of market: They’re all competing for government dollars, so they exist in a state of year-to-year precarity, all eyeing how much of their addressable market they can capture in their narrow lanes, struggling to balance their capacity to actually help people in need with feeding the administrative machines they depend on to go out and bring the money in.

The disconnect between wages for county employees — the people running the procurement processes — and the people in the non-profits is grotesque. A line manager running a couple of teams in the county’s Joint Office for Homeless Services — a total span of maybe seven or eight people who primarily manage invoicing — makes a little more than a senior director in a mental health non-profit who has a span of seven directors managing whole clinics, and upwards of 50 or 60 people in their organization. It goes downhill from there, with the front-line workers in this system — the people actually delivering services — making fast food wages in unbelievably bad working conditions. It’s a rarity when someone in the non-profit world speaks up about this, because they’re utterly dependent on being in the good graces of the county to get the contracts. And it’s well understood among people doing social work that your best bet is to do your time in the non-profits, build your network, and wait for it to come through with a county job, because that’s where you can get a living wage and decent benefits. The non-profits you’re at in the mean time can’t guarantee that the program covering your wage will survive from year-to-year.

It’s important to understand this whole system, because it helps explain the rise of things like Urban Alchemy, which has contracted with the city to run managed homeless encampments:

“How Urban Alchemy Turns Homelessness Into Gold”:

“Like many other cities, San Francisco deals with visible homelessness by ‘sweeping’—in other words, dismantling tent encampments and forcing unhoused residents to move to another area. There’s a shortage of shelter beds across the region, and it is illegal in West Coast states to sweep anyone for whom no bed is available. The Coalition on Homelessness sued San Francisco over this, and a judge temporarily banned sweeps. Still, unhoused people say they are routinely coerced into moving by city officials, police, and Urban Alchemy ambassadors, and they tell us that sweeps remain the main technique that the city uses to manage its unsheltered population. In 2018, after Leilani Farha, the United Nations special rapporteur on adequate housing, visited San Francisco, she determined that this approach constituted ‘cruel and inhuman treatment’ that violated multiple human rights.

“It’s no wonder, then, that civic leaders in San Francisco and elsewhere are looking for new ways to confront—or at least to appear like they’re confronting—the homelessness crisis. UA skeptics like Kaitlyn Dey, a Portland-based homelessness researcher, argue that politicians use nonprofits to keep their promises to reduce interactions between police and homeless people without substantially changing the system. And to the average liberal city dweller, having a nonprofit administer the sweeps makes that work appear more humane than when armed cops do it. Working with groups like UA also reduces transparency—internal UA e-mails, for instance, are not subject to FOIA requests—insulating local officials should problems arise.”

UA is on the scene in Portland because attempts to deliver managed camping using local providers with a less para-police bent failed: Nobody would take the work. Urban Alchemy’s formula, depending on former convicts, lets them get costs down enough to thrive in an environment where dollars are peanut-buttered through the county procurement bureaucracy before getting into the hands of non-profits, who have to use some of those dollars to maintain their own management and fund-raising staff to remain viable.

My one criticism of the Nation article is its focus on failures to defund the police as the problem:

There is a huge amount of money in the system in our county, approved by voters. The county procurement bureaucracy left over $40 million of it on the table this year, because for all its scale and influence, the Joint Office for Homeless Services utterly failed to scale to accommodate the influx of funds, even as it insures the providers it works with keep wages for their workers low. Local journalists have let us all down on their coverage of that organization.

Maybe that’s the worst part of all of this: We’ve torn the safety net to ribbons, our capacity to help people is radically diminished, and all we’re left with is this absurd, wasteful, abusive system. If you’re a good liberal or progressive type who wants to see vulnerable people helped, you’re trapped between that system and people who don’t even want that to exist. Of course you’re gonna pick a side. But you’ve been forced into a terrible, false choice that guarantees nobody is going to speak up to hold the architects of this mess accountable: They’re all we have, which, now that I think of it, summarizes the state of American politics at all levels pretty neatly.

This morning I was messing around with my web publishing pipelines and I ran into a problem with permalinks. It wasn’t a big problem because I don’t have a lot of content on the site in question, but it was a problem. I felt a weight in my chest.

It has been a while, but for a few years I made a living making sure permalinks didn’t break for people who were very sensitive to that sort of thing. I tried to bring a level of that rigor to my personal web stuff, too.

Some of that is just what we do, right? We know how to do something “right” so we do it right.

When I ran technical websites for Linux enthusiasts, there was a high level of fixation on “doing it right” among my assorted communities. Some of that was people insisting on “doing it right” because it was their day job. Some of it was people applying an unrealistic and stringent sense of rigor to their technical lives because tech as a hobby is full of aspirants – people who don’t do it professionally but aspire to professional levels of mastery and competence.

I found a lot of those folks to be suppressive. Constantly policing for correctness, constantly applying the standards of someone running multiple data centers to someone just trying to get file sharing set up between their Linux box and their wife’s Windows laptop. They insisted on a kind of rigor that is not realistic or helpful, and that serves to simply stop anyone from doing anything.

I am not here to yuck anyone’s yum. Sometimes the fun of a thing is just doing it as well as your knowledge and skill allow. More people should just be doing stuff as well as they want because it is pleasurable to them.

But there’s a toxic side to that, as well, when we get wrapped around the axle over “doing it right” at the expense of just doing it at all: Of making a new thing, exploring a new idea, trying something out, or just unburdening ourselves of a bad decision and its outcomes.

We get tied up in knots for a lot of reasons:

We don’t want to look dumb. We don’t want to do it wrong. We don’t want to accidentally run afoul of some standard people who have to worry about state actors apply to their own work. We don’t want to give a bad impression to potential employers or existing bosses.

It used to confound me that StackOverflow is so full of questions where people initially refuse to just show their code instead of asking vague questions about code they refuse to show (that always prompt a demand to show their code) until I realized “well, they probably depleted their ego just getting to the point where they could ask strangers for help, and they’re probably worried there are fifteen things they aren’t doing right or that are not to someone’s taste.”

In the mean time, what’s ticking away is our remaining seconds on this Earth and our creative energy.

So I’ve broken all the permalinks on my site. In fact, right now, because I misjudged the agility of a few services I am depending on, one site is just down while I wait around for some automated systems in the bowels of a provider to acknowledge each others’ work.

When it all comes back up, people who bookmarked my timeless classic about org-mode on mobile devices will be frustrated. The 20 people on LinkedIn who read my post about listening to people may not be able to find their way back to it.

Sorry.

I just got tired of having this hard-to-maintain site that I never really warmed up to and felt sort of overbaked and too much about “doing it right” to some standard I don’t have to worry about anymore. So I’m not worrying about it: I made a site I’ll have an easier time with and will like working on more, and it’ll be online soon enough.

This weekend I saw a few culture-clashes go by around the topic of photography that helped my thoughts gel. One involved a small dog-pile over charges of elitism, and one involved a putative professional talking down to someone who was just happy about their new camera. You could characterize those clashes as people talking down or talking up, but also just talking past each other.

Sometimes I want to write a screed about photography culture and inclusiveness because I’m an outsider in parts of that culture and find parts of it as frustrating and tedious as any other human endeavor that can be gate-kept. Other times I remember, as a younger person who reported to me once said, that I’ve had eight lives, including one as a writer, where I was an insider:

I was (well, am) a published author. For 15 years I successfully provided for myself & family. I was a managing editor, had credits in the industry outside authoring, I’d won awards, and I had success and leadership in multiple formats. I got very good at the parts of the trade that the web added to our job descriptions. I’m not saying that to brag, it’s just true and I’m noting it to get through this thought.

At the peak of my career in that field we were coming off the initial shock of blogging (amazingly disruptive to tech publishers) and were beginning to see the self-publishing wave roll in. A lot of my colleagues felt threatened, and that was a fair feeling to have because the people we thought of as “our readers” were experiencing the benefits of disintermediation. Also it just sucks to wake up to Dave Winer and Doc Searls reading a malediction over your still-living body.

We did reader interviews for one of my tech sites, talking to a kind of influencer down below the level of purchasing authority, but positioned to say “this is what I want” and have a credible chance of getting a purchase order approved.

Their universal responses to what we could be doing better:

“Be more like Stack Overflow,” and “you need more bloggers who just do this stuff and don’t care about all the nice formatting and filler.”

Suddenly our field was awash in amateurs. Bad ones, gifted ones, talented ones, terrible ones. And we were dealing with the disorientation of all our tools for determining “usefulness” or “quality” going out the window: Suddenly a terrible amateur could make up for 100-500 words of disjointed prose with five lines of useful configuration code slapped in a pre tag.

As a reader, I was dealing with my own feelings about the self-publishing tide rolling in. As I’d scroll the store with my Kindle I’d see tons of $0.99 books. I was less threatened by that than annoyed: Fiction wasn’t something I was interested in doing professionally, but I had a definite hierarchy of quality in my head, and you had to have some sort of professional editing to get into the higher tiers. I know I said and wrote some uncharitable things about it all.

Then someone flipped the framing around for me, asking why amateur self-publishers are so averse to just paying for a goddamn editor, even just a copy editor.

The question engaged another part of my brain that had been dealing with writers for a while at that point, and still vaguely remembered when I was first starting out, badly damaged by public education and standardized testing, carrying around a deeply held belief I couldn’t write that no amount of positive feedback from my professors was helping:

“I can’t speak for other would-be writers, but as a past would-be writer who spent a lot of time hearing he could write well from assorted authorities, I’d say it’s some degree of ego. Not the nasty, snarly ‘grar, I’m better than you!’ ego, necessarily, but sometimes a more fragile manifestation that editors are in a position to harm without a lot of thought.

Having been put back in touch with my younger self, I remembered that I knew a lot about amateur creators and had a whole set of behaviors and strategies for helping them gain confidence:

“As an editor for online tech sites, I tend to recruit writers on the basis of what they know first, how well they can write next. If I can look at their sample and imagine merely editing it—not engaging it with lash and fire—I’m happy to work with them. I’ve had a few come through who are better than mediocre: They’re adept writers, but they happened to pick another career. Some are recently out of some IT program where they had a good experience with a supportive professor who suggested that they were better at writing than they suspected.

“I’ve learned to treat them the way I wish someone had treated me when I was first being told I was a good writer and had no way of knowing for myself: I understand that their poorly understood talent might seem like some sort of magical manifestation to them. Because they have no way of understanding why they’re good writers for themselves (they didn’t spend school reading good writers or learning about what makes writing good), they depend on outside authority. At the same time, they’re afraid that as easily as one random outside authority conferred the mantle of “good writer,” another could take it away.”

Reminded of empathy I’d stopped experiencing as something other than a management strategy, I came back around to the topic, which was how to deal with this influx of self-publishers of varying degrees of professional conscientiousness and talent:

“I’ve seen a lot of $1.99 and $2.99 genre books come through the Kindle store, and the one thing they remind me of above all other things is that the barrier to saying ‘fuck it … might as well go for it’ is lower than ever. Hopefully it’ll be a remedy for a lot of people who are completely paralyzed by the presence of the Web in their lives, because it’s a non-stop reminder that someone, somewhere is being so fantastically awesome that even trying to be heard or hoping to be appreciated is pointless. A lot of people will still fail, I doubt many of them will ever make a living at it, but a number have a better chance than they ever had before to make a living doing something they love.”

… and that, eleven years later, is where I try to be today.

Unlike my time as a writer and editor, my professional and personal interests have diverged. I like “ops stuff” and “chief of staff” stuff for work, and I am passionate about taking pictures for just walking around being me. I’ve done a couple of commissions and I’ve donated some prints to help out a struggling website, but mostly I just like to make sure there’s a camera with me, I like to share the pictures I take, and I like to revisit them later to see what I can see that’s new.

I share the internet with kinds of photographers who are different from me. They’re trying to make a living, they’re in an active state of honing their craft in a way that is different from how I try to improve.

There are pockets of that culture that both annoy me and remind me of when I was making a living with my writing, because there are similar technology-driven dynamics afoot. I’ve known a few photographers who have lost niche but sustaining businesses, first to prosumer digital cameras, and then to smartphones.

I get annoyed sometimes, because people under pressure or in fear for their livelihoods, while sympathetic characters, sometimes express their angst in really poor ways, either by denigrating hobbyist amateurs and their work, tossing around sexist slurs about the social aspects of popular photography, or simply insisting on speaking to amateurs and hobbyists in professional terms, as if to say there is a single way to talk about photography that must conform to their formalist or commercial concerns.

I also get annoyed because I see myself in them, from when I felt under threat and before someone asked a question that unlocked an answer in me that I’d forgotten I had.

And I feel a dull unease because they (often unintentionally) poke at the part of me who hears things like “you’ve got a good eye,” or “you should try to sell some of this” or “your pictures are just, like, photographic” and feels that jolt of vulnerability, that sense that “as easily as one random outside authority conferred the mantle of ‘good writer,’ another could take it away.”

The annoyance and unease dissipate a little, because I found my way to kindness and can only trust other people will, too. We need more art in the world. We need more people striving to make beautiful things, silly things, pretty things, ugly things, whatever. We need more people striving to create. So we need to be kind.

Once I knew my time at Puppet was winding down I took stock and decided to take a break. I gave myself November and December to rest. I didn’t think a lot about what it would mean to rest, I just knew I was going to do it. I’ll probably write more about it, because I might have something useful to say to people who are in a position to rest but don’t know how.

If I am to summarize things in a few words:

I feel pretty good. Rested. It took me time to figure out how to stop a few runaway mental and emotional processes, and once I did things improved a lot, including my sleep and sense of optimism.

I have never felt more like I do now than when I wrote this:

“So there’s this moment where you’re just hovering, unmoored, between a state of going up or going down. Just there. You came from the ground, you’re going back to the ground. For that moment, though, maybe it seems like you could be going nowhere; or perhaps you’re in danger of going practically anywhere.”

… yet I have never felt more at ease with it.

The bad news: You’re falling through the air with no parachute. The good news: There’s no ground. — Chögyam Trungpa

The other part of the decision was that I was going to “step it up a little” come January. I have a better formed idea of what “stepping it up” might mean than I did “rest.”

So, yesterday marked the end of “Phase 0” of post-Puppet life, and today marks day one of “Phase 1,” which is meant to be about applying myself to finding a job while being as kind to myself about the whole thing as I can manage.

It’ll mean a little more structure in each day. Some of that is meant to gently bend my routine back into something that will be able to fit in with more external demands on my time, and some of it is just to keep me on track and readily accountable to myself. But I also mean to continue to use the time I’m being given and can take to do things that are restful and good for me.

That’s all for now.

Over the past month, away from work, I’ve been thinking about that routine. I’ve had more time to play around with cameras, pictures, and tools, and I’ve thought a lot about assorted technical aspects of picture-taking, but I’ve not really done anything to prime my creative pump. Worse, there’s a small part of me I have to own who is properly wondering what he’s supposed to be up to, what he should be expecting for himself, and what he should aspire to. I am so immensely grateful for the circumstances I am in, because I can sit with these things, ride them out, find new reasons to rediscover a kind of optimism I used to have in so much supply. And I have space to deal with the sense some days that I fell through a wormhole ten years ago, had some interesting adventures, and now am out the other side needing to take inventory about what happened to the me who tumbled in.

Thinking back to that morning routine, I remember the feeling I had when I’d see something go by that was just … awesome. After enough times it was sort of like a sunlight therapy lamp: Enough exposure and my sense of personal energy and creative restlessness would go up and I’d want to get out there and do it myself.

With the big Twitter flap and the sudden surge in Mastodon people, I’ve been trying to follow photographers as they turn up so I can build a list. Tonight, though, I also opened up a new Flipboard account because it really is a wonderful way to browse pictures from assorted feeds, and I imagine I can turn my assorted social media photography feeds into a Flipboard magazine.

Anyhow, here’s the post. I appreciate the me who wrote it. He was dealing with some stuff and it was really, really hard to just sit there and be overwhelmed by how much goodness there is out there, but he pulled it together and made himself stare into it.

March 23, 2011

I read a short bit a few weeks ago titled A Simple Guide for a Mindful Digital Life, and it offered some suggestions that resonated with me, along with a few that would not be practical for a good many people. I recommend it, though, because I like the author’s take on ownership of online presence. One thing that came of trying a few of his recommendations was a modification to my morning reading routine.

Over the past year, my iPad has become my morning paper. I like to get up a little early and sit by the fire reading the things I consider interesting but disposable. I use Flipboard and Twitter lists to skim through the things with which I’d like to have headline-level familiarity.

I like the morning skim because I don’t have to place any weight on anything I read there. Sometimes I bookmark useful things for later, but it’s the only time of the day I’ve got that I consider solely mine. After it’s over, my time stops being just mine for long stretches.

One neat thing Flipboard offers is support for Flickr as a “digital magazine.” You can subscribe to your own Flickr stream, those of your friends, your own favorites or (and this is the part I really like) the flickr “interestingness” feed.

Flickr’s always been a little hard for me the same way the rest of the Internet can be a little hard for me. There’s just so much good stuff going on, so many people being completely amazing, and so many things that seem almost casually wonderful that it makes ever doing anything hard. To paraphrase Theoden, who can stand against such reckless awesomeness? Why even get out of bed, because if it hasn’t been done, it’s in the process of being done and probably in the form of a multi-year project with incredible JavaScript transition effects.

That’s harmful thinking on a few levels:

• You never end up doing anything.
• Other people have an easier time telling you your limits.
• After a while, it makes you crabby about everything, because crabbiness blunts the sheer radiance of all the random awesomeness going on, making it easier to live with.

So Flickr’s been hard, because it’s full of great photographers , and the Interestingness feed pulls in a lot of their work.

It occurred to me a few days ago, however, that maybe the thing to do would be to just dive into that pool of greatness, so I modified my morning routine a little by tweaking Flipboard. I pushed a lot of the lists about Facts and Things to the second page, and I filled the front page with interesting photography feeds. First in line is the Flickr Interestingness feed. I’ve been flipping through it each morning and marking a few of the pictures I see as favorites (another nice thing Flipboard lets you do). I’m trying to treat it as a mindless exercise, something done without a lot of reasoning, because I think doing it that way allows me to silence the inner critic for others, which makes it easier to silence the inner critic for me.

I try to stop thinking about the things I used to think about: Is this image overprocessed, did the photographer go too far with the sharpening, is the image correct, is the underlying sentiment hackneyed, and on and on. I try to just like stuff. Sometimes, though, I see a picture that achieves something I once tried and failed to pull off, so I favorite that for when I can circle back later, when I’m in a better frame of mind, and consider the things that will help me take better pictures.

Everyone had to deal with their own lockdown stuff in some way or another. In our family, it took the form of not having a ton of space by the time we’d flipped a few rooms into offices.

My first swing at it involved building a cover for our tiny patio. That gave us a space to spill out onto and opened up the possibility of having guests over. We spent election night in 2020 out under that cover with our intentional family and a propane heater.

My second swing at it was to turn our garage into a movie theater (“the Coviplex”). We could have people over, open the garage door, roll out the propane heaters and have movie nights. Ben’s godmothers agreed to sit through the Marvel movies through Avengers: End Game.

Me: I’m surprised you were up for that. I mean, it’s just, like Extruded Cultural Product.

Kathleen: Well, yeah. It is. It’s still fun.

It’s sort of strange to look at both those projects now. I can remember the energy that went into them, from figuring out how to do things like build a patio cover to coding standards to how to do drywall. One aspect of my ADHD is hyperfocus, and it was on full display. I didn’t think of what I was up to as “a little DIY project,” I thought of it as a sort of folk engineering. I wasn’t interested in simply building a thing, I wanted to build it in such a way that I could also take it down in a day. I spent a lot of hours just watching and rewatching videos and reading tutorials.

Meanwhile, Ben was upstairs being a teenager. He liked the patio cover for sure – it was separate from the other living areas and we all fell into treating it like a shared resource, not a shared space. You could go sit outside and stare up through the cover at the towering pine in the yard nextdoor and listen to birds in silence. But the theater didn’t really land with him. It was a little too shared.

One day he came down and said he just didn’t have enough room. Our house is sort of weird to the extent that, from the curb, it looks like a plain old two-story home. The lot it was built on, however, is closer in size to the slivers you see “tall-and-skinnies” built on … it’s just turned 90 degrees because it is built across the width of a former back yard, not the depth of a subdivided lot. So Ben’s room is sort of shallow and wide. By the time his desk, stereo stand, and bed figured in, he had a tiny patch to stand on.

His take was to figure out some kind of rearrangement, but we talked it through and there wasn’t much to do with it. It was sort of like a sliding-square puzzle. In the end, there was only so much square footage and not a lot to optimize with.

So I mentioned the idea of a loft. He didn’t like it at first: He’d had a skinny Ikea one when he was much younger and it didn’t add a lot of utility. So I showed him pictures of the kinds of lofts that turn up in dorms, where you get a full bed, better floorspace, and construction meant for an adult body. We back-and-forthed on some general design ideas, and I finally found one that he liked.

It felt good to do the project: I’d learned a lot about basic household carpentry over the previous year building the other two projects, and felt comfortable taking a basic plan and improvising on it to suit his space. One design thing that was important to me was to make it feel utterly solid, so I built it to fit exactly so, and bolted it in so that when he climbed the stairs or leaned against a post, it simply did not move.

That gave him more space, and also subdivided the room so that he had a place to hang out and watch t.v. or play with his Switch, and his desk area. It was pretty comforting to sit down in the living room or in the garage movie theater and hear him playing music and dancing because he had room.

But the thing about all of this is that it was a holding action. He still couldn’t see his friends. We’d ultimately only reclaimed about 24 square feet. My half of a 2-up army barracks room had felt more spacious. The context was still out there.

So it made some sense when Ben decided he was ready to move out after high school. The actual chain of events was a little abrupt, but I remember that same restlessness and readiness to move, and in my case it wasn’t informed by two years of relative lockdown.

One thing that didn’t work for me, as a teenager, was that my parents actually moved out of state just after I graduated from high school. I stayed back for the summer so I could earn some money before starting college. The first time I spent the night “at home” after going to college, it was as a guest in my parents’ home – my brother and sister had rooms, but I didn’t have a room there. It was profoundly dislocating.

Ben told us he felt like he’d outgrown the loft, and that in some ways it was a reminder of things that were hard for him. I completely got that, and my first impulse was to simply remove it and just somehow reclaim the space … he was moving out, after all. But I remembered that feeling of sleeping in a guest room in my parents’ house, so I asked him what he’d like: Did he still want to have a room of his own in our home, even if he was moving out? What should it look like? Could I take the loft out? I asked about everything, because wherever we are and whatever house we’re living in, wherever he spends most of his time and however much time he spends in our house, we are some kind of home.

I did ask him to clean the room out and pack as much as possible of what he wasn’t taking with him. He made an effort, but was more focused on moving on to his adventure. We spent October aware that his room needed some work to get it into a place where we could even work on it. The loft needed to come out, things he’d left behind needed to be packed. The loft had created its own share of issues to be addressed. In October I was also trying to wind down a job in one of those situations where I felt more responsibility to individuals than I did the organization, so the month was spent pointedly not going in that room or thinking too much about taking the loft down. I was worried I’d biased in favor of sturdiness and solidity over deconstructability. I gritted my teeth and stuck to my plan to have the room ready by Thanksgiving, but not starting until November 1st.

The loft teardown went pretty well in the end. I’d expected I’d need a second set of hands and was braced to get a few bumps on the head and some muscle strain. As it was, it took a few hours on a Saturday afternoon on my own. No bumps on the head. There were a few stripped screws, but easy enough to drill them out.

Over the past several weeks, as I’ve worked away, I’ve sent Ben little teaser photos: The loft in the process of being disassembled, the room stripped of carpet and molding, the first coat of paint, the first test run of flooring. Each time it’s a little bittersweet and a little tentative. Part of stepping back and letting him leave the nest meant putting ourselves on a budget for his time and attention. I love texting in a way I never did before because we can have small moments of connection without the weight of letters or phone calls.

The deconstruction photos weren’t great for him. A partially deconstructed loft looks a lot like a partially constructed one. I don’t think he liked the reminder of the periods where I was absorbed with making space. Like I said, it was a good thing to do, but it wasn’t happening for a good reason. The context cannot be set completely aside.

He has warmed up as things have progressed, and it felt good when the implicit finally became explicit after I sent him a picture of the room stripped to the plywood floor:

“I actually really love this because it is scrubbing away the the past in the most literal sense.”

Me, too.

I’m an introvert. For my purposes that means a couple of things:

Being around a lot of people doesn’t charge me up. Being 1:1 with someone, or in a small group, can. I’m not sure how typical that is of my kind, but I know my favorite parts of the work day are with “my people” in 1:1s, or with my managers. Big meetings are hard. Big social events are hard.

The other thing it means is that I’m not comfortable with a lot of spontaneous expression. I’m an internal processor.

So, when I think I’ve got to have a hard conversation with someone, I think about it a lot beforehand. I used to joke that I spent my morning commute spinning up virtual instances of people I needed to talk to so I could think through a few possible conversational directions. I though it was sort of cute to say that, but I don’t think it really leads to a good outcome.

Pre-gaming Considered Harmful

I mean, it’s okay to decide you’re going to think about what you want to say to someone before you say it, especially if carelessness with your words could hurt them. That’s fine. We should all do that. We have these little phone rooms at work that are barely big enough for a chair, and I sometimes go into them a few minutes before I need to talk to someone about something that matters a lot and think through what I’m going to say. Sometimes I even write it down in a text file. I take deep breaths and close my eyes and settle down into myself.

The “think about what you’re going to say” strategy begins to fail when you imagine what you’re going to say and then imagine them saying something back, and then what you’d say to that and then what they might say back to that, etc. etc.

It took two things to help me realize the problem there.

The first was that one day, in the middle of a period where I wasn’t sleeping much, I realized how badly the lack of sleep was affecting my perception of things around me. Passing comments suddenly seemed like they might be insults. Hanlon’s Razor sort of went out the window.

So I had a pretty good fix for that: On mornings when I’d gotten little sleep – less than six-and-a-half or seven hours – I’d spend a few minutes on my commute thinking about that and what it meant. I’d talk to myself on my bike:

“You didn’t get a lot of sleep last night. You’re going to be feeling a little paranoid and on edge. You’re going to want to take offense at things people say to you. You’re not going to be seeing things correctly.”

Then I’d get into work and try to remember to talk to myself about that a few times over the course of the day.

Things started to roll off my back more easily. It was nice.

It also started making those little conversations with virtual people go down better. I stopped anticipating the worst, or when I would anticipate the worst I’d remind myself that I wasn’t very well rested. I’d make a little joke to myself to spin that instance down and bring up another one and try again anticipating better behavior.

You’re thinking about the ways in which that’s still broken, but this is my story of self-discovery, so either skip ahead or quit reading.

Anyhow, that was my little hack that made difficult conversations with virtual people in my head go better.

I didn’t get the second piece until I went off to a sample training for a program called Conscious Leadership.

Meeting Conscious Leadership

If I had to describe Conscious Leadership in a nutshell, I’d say that it takes a lot of thinking around mindfulness and tries to make it work in a business context. If you’re at home with Zen Buddhism, you’d hear some things that are familiar to you.

I could go on and one about Conscious Leadership. I’ve given copies of the book The 15 Commitments of Conscious Leadership to managers who work for me and people I care about. I use its language in my daily living, and I measure myself against its standards.

The way it helped me in this specific instance was that it reminded me of how easily we can get pulled into the stories we create around things, and how we should always strive to take a story we’re telling ourselves and “explore the opposite.” Expressed as a commitment to sustainable behavior, the Conscious Leadership people put it like this:

I commit to seeing that the opposite of my story is as true as or truer than my original story. I recognize that I interpret the world around me and give my stories meaning.

I realized the ways in which my virtual instances were just stories I was telling myself. I’d made a certain peace with the worst aspects of them by taking care to remind myself of the times when I wasn’t well rested and was making the stories worse, but I was still just making up stories and arguing with them.

The thing is, as an introverted internal processor, it was pretty easy for me to slip into those conversations with virtual people in the process of just trying to figure out how to say what I wanted to say when I felt a conversation was particularly important.

I had to pick up a new habit, which is really what this whole post is about.

A walk on the beach

So, I went camping. On the last morning we were at the park I woke up pretty early and took my camera and went for a beach walk. I set out thinking I’d go down to the jetty, a few miles down the beach.

I hadn’t meant to spend much time thinking about things and mainly hoped to just take pictures, but there wasn’t a ton to shoot and I knew I was going to have to talk about something difficult, so I lapsed into thinking about that conversation, and that meant I started arguing with a virtual person. Because I was thinking about a difficult conversation, it got increasingly negative and fraught.

I caught myself doing it and got really frustrated, because I know I’m not supposed to do that. So I’d stop for a few minutes and think about other things, but then I’d fall back into it.

Then I remembered how I coached myself about being under-rested, and took a page from that practice.

As I made my way down the beach, each time I’d get into an argument with that virtual person, rather than getting frustrated and beating myself up, I’d just stop and say out loud “this isn’t happening. That didn’t happen. You didn’t say those things.”

Conscious Leadership advocates moving your body when you’re feeling something strong and need to process it, or see it differently, so I’d shake myself a little, too.

Reader, it felt pretty good.

By the time I’d made it to the jetty, miles down the beach, I was smiling to myself because I knew what I needed to say. I knew it miles back down the beach. I’d just fallen into my old habit of wanting to think it all the way through, to know just what to say to each possible response or argument.

And of course the conversation went fine, anyhow. They usually do. I pay attention to people and how they’re feeling, and I’m careful in the initial framing and get things off on the right foot, so just taking the care at the onset is usually enough. When it’s not, well … I stay calm in the pocket, too.

Since then, though, I’ve been using that practice a lot, and it is incredibly helpful. I’m an introvert! I think about what I want to say to people before I say it! I’ve got a life-long habit of spinning up virtual people and arguing with them, which is to say a life-long habit of telling stories to myself that aren’t true. It’s tough to break, and I haven’t broken it. But I’ve added a little thing to the loop: When I catch myself doing it, I say to myself, “that didn’t happen” and it has made me feel lighter and happier each time. I think to myself “I don’t really know what they might say, but they didn’t say that, and they could say something completely different. You’ll just have to find out.”

“… I often get asked about ‘Breadtube,’ a loose constellation of socialish vloggers and streamers, and about Contrapoints and Hasan Piker in particular. For many, they offer an easy onramp for socialist community. The trouble is that I don’t know what exactly I’m supposed to react to. Breadtube and those in its orbit appear to be entertainers first, and typical of entertainers they’re longer on passion than on coherence. Which would be OK, if such coherence lay in some larger socialist project. The problem is that there is no real socialist movement in 21st-century American politics. All we have are entertainers.”

The rest is an interesting, prickly read and branding exercise.

As I’ve picked up my reading and listening I’ve been worrying at a related idea that’s still not completely formed, so I’ll keep this brief:

As I’ve tried to broaden my reading, listening, and viewing, I’ve seen a pretty healthy outraged left industrial complex. It has staked out broadly pro-socialism, anti-Democratic Party, anti-liberal, anti-“woke” territory. The thing that really strikes me about it is the way it behaves mostly like any other political entertainment entity across the political spectrum, stoking outrage and going after the center from the left. One vlog I found tries to look sort of like a cable news talk show, only with a copy of Manufacturing Consent stood up on a shelf behind one of the hosts in a way that I can only describe as “anti-casual,” and I think that might be because the Biden-bashing, Covid-truther, pro-Rogan, anti-“woke” stuff might confuse someone without a helpful indicator that no, the hosts think Chomsky is cool so just go with it.

The content and format are pretty tedious unto themselves. Maybe the more interesting thing about it is that all of these “attack liberals from the left” outrage merchants are plainly trying to serve a market niche of some sort and seem to be doing okay at it. Like, there’s an actual market for attacking liberals from the left that can be serviced and people can make a living at it, and that says something interesting about where political sentiment might be right now … something interesting about what people are hungry for.

The bad part of it is that a lot of it recreates the stuff we used to rightly condemn right-wing talk radio for: It cuts corners, resorts to ad hominem, and appeals to feelings of disgust and anger. Its interpretation of the mood in the market it is trying to serve is that anger will sell just fine, and it doesn’t care who is alienated as it goes about serving that market.

The personal line I am walking comes from a place of opposition to a lot of stuff going on “out there” that has abandoned any attempt to bring people along, or call them in, so the left outrage merchants are as odious to me as the right-wing ones you can find on Fox or wherever.

So, I’m all paid up on my subscription to Jacobin, with its very square, not particularly outraged socialist nerds. I enjoy Catherine Liu and Thomas Frank. When I see Adolph Reed get attention in The New Yorker, I feel the same way I felt when someone from my home town made it big on Star Search.

Very wholesome. Not super angry.

A few years ago, pre-Trump, I quit social media and most news apps cold turkey. I was bothered by the effect social media dynamics had on my photography, and I was bothered by the engagement-driven nature of news apps. I wanted to listen to just myself on a creative level, and I hated the way news apps worked.

Over time I reestablished social media presences and spent some time tuning up how I read news. When I compare where I am today to where I was when I felt like I’d just had enough of all of it, I feel generally healthier. At the same time, I still catch myself exhausting the well of things to read or catch up on, and I find myself swiping down the screen in a motion Cal Newport describes as pulling the arm of a slot machine that is eating my useful minutes.

Newport’s definition of “digital minimalism” is:

“A philosophy of technology use in which you focus your online time on a small number of carefully selected and optimized activities that strongly support things you value, and then happily miss out on everything else.”

He cites three principles of digital minimalism:

Principle #1: Clutter is costly. Digital minimalists recognize that cluttering their time and attention with too many devices, apps, and services creates an overall negative cost that can swamp the small benefits that each individual item provides in isolation.

Principle #2: Optimization is important. Digital minimalists believe that deciding a particular technology supports something they value is only the first step. To truly extract its full potential benefit, it’s necessary to think carefully about how they’ll use the technology.

Principle #3: Intentionality is satisfying. Digital minimalists derive significant satisfaction from their general commitment to being more intentional about how they engage with new technologies. This source of satisfaction is independent of the specific decisions they make and is one of the biggest reasons that minimalism tends to be immensely meaningful to its practitioners.

I’ve known a few people in whom I can see those principles at work, and I’ve always admired the deliberation with which they approach new technology. It has often read to me like a particular kind of self-care. I’m more of a magpie when it comes to new things and have thought that kind of self-care might be a good thing to adopt.

There are a few tics in the style that I suppose are just part of what is normal for this kind of book. The phrase “it turns out” pops up a few times. The phrase “we’re wired to …” pops up a few more. But rather than being a Jonah-Lehrer-like recitation of a bunch of studies (though a few are cited) this book is a little more quiet and less breathless. I was left feeling relieved that Newport has a full-time job he likes, because there’s a moment where it feels like the book could have tipped over into the sort of cloying pseudo-movement merchandising play but ultimately did not.

What is most compelling to me about it is less its identification of everything that is wrong with digital technology – the attention-mining, the emotional toll, the wasted time – and more its temperate prescriptions.

Yes, it does discuss a 30-day “digital declutter,” but less as a cold-turkey feat of will and more as a call to fill that time in other ways and see what you get before gradually letting things back in as you determine the ways in which they can serve you.

There is a mild fixation on doing all this “to live a more remarkable life,” and that stirs in me a peevish resistance, but it’s tempered by noting that it is okay and life-enhancing to simply do things for their own sake, or because they bring you pleasure or make your life better, and not because you should be out there crushing it in all things. It does argue in favor of more vigorous, mindful leisure, but not so much because it’s important to be constantly “productive” as much as it is because it will probably make you feel better than social-media-enabled “doing nothing.”

Published in 2019, one poignant, melancholy aspect of this book is that it spends a lot of time on the value of unmediated human connection. Its prescriptions include avoidance of assorted “like” and other reaction affordances in favor of spending time talking to people. There are a few examples that are about being with others in gyms, exercise groups, etc. that are almost jarring as we close in on two years of pandemic life. It helpfully suggests that Facetime is a great technology for keeping personal connections over distances, but cannot anticipate the dull, suffocating exhaustion of contemplating yet another video meeting for people who have spent the past two years staring into screens full of flattened, grainy faces staring back.

Finally, it was kind of interesting to see the ways in which, over the past three years since the book was published, at least Apple has begun to help implement some of the attention-preserving, deliberate living practices Newport advocates. The Screentime tool provides a way to understand how you use your phone and where your time goes. The Focus tool makes it possible to filter out notifications or tailor the interruptions you’re willing to indulge.

So, definitely recommended for its low-key vibe, and its emphasis on deliberation and care over simple prescriptions or tech abstemiousness. I’m going to give some of its ideas a try.

Digital Minimalism by Cal Newport 📚

The closest anyone has ever come to likening me to Gandalf is probably a friend at work who took to calling me “The Bhagwan” for a period, and I get that on the merits of my beard alone, though I was told there was also some sort of “calming and warm presence” component that would have served me well as a spiritual leader.

Anyhow, I’m going to play along with the idea that I’ve been quietly *trying * to be like Gandalf all these years, because I was talking to Al about The Current State of Affairs in the World while we were out for a walk, and I realized I don’t feel very hopeful at this moment, but for reasons people might not identify with much. I haven’t felt this way since Obama was in office, and then Clinton before him, because when people from “my side” are in power, it always feels like you can see the hard limits of our society and culture; how much we’re willing to change or flex or bend or improve, and I would like more of those things than we seem to be capable of.

So, we went down the rabbit hole of “what on earth are we even supposed to do about this?” and that took us a few places, including the idea that things feel so profoundly polarized right now that it is very hard to engage with much of anybody. There are so many presumptions of bad faith and so much eighth-dimensional chess going on. There’s a huge amount of energy for change, but right now it is a very wild energy, and people believe all sorts of contradictory things that they apply to other humans in a destructive, reductionist way that will leave us poorer when this moment has swept through.

Basically, it’s a good time to ask yourself what you know about Gandalf. I have identified two Gandalfs.

There’s the one with the wizard staff that lightens the shadows a little, bringing comfort to the people right around him. We’ll call him “the little light in the dark Gandalf.” This one:

The Little Light in the Dark Gandalf provides that little light not because it will solve the biggest problems or strike down the worst evils, but because the dark itself is oppressive enough, and it is comforting to gather in some pale patch of light.

Then there’s the one with the staff and the sword who is going to fight the Balrog, even though he’s pretty sure he’s fucked. We’ll call him “the Balrog-fighting Gandalf”:

I am guessing that most people would prefer a Balrog-Fighting Gandalf action figure over a Little Light in the Dark Gandalf action figure. He’s just sort of getting down to business with the biggest problems. He’s all righteousness. If he has a tagline, it is “there is nothing wrong with punching Balrogs.”

I remember a long while back, when I took it upon myself to be a Balrog-fighting Gandalf. It felt pretty good to be the righteous one with the sword, and it felt even better when I “won” against a person who was being bad. I felt very clear about my rightness, and dead certain about their wrongness. Looking back, through a lens of whether the way I was behaving was sustainable – that is to say, behaving in a way I’d feel comfortable behaving every day – I’d say I wasn’t. Right side of history, wrong side of my moral compass, I guess you could say.

Some years I can overlook that more easily than I can others. Other years, the things that are going around me, and the way people are behaving in response to them, cause me to say, “I don’t think I’m okay ignoring the voice I’m hearing inside myself. I can see there’s something going on over there, and I’m sort of attracted to the heat and light it is generating, but most of the people I agree with on what to make of that thing are behaving in a way I’m not okay with. I can run over and join anyhow, and ignore what I’m hearing from myself, or I can figure out another way to be useful somewhere else, in some other way.”

None of this is simple, and I try to maintain a measure of humility when I do judge. I am pretty sure that the person who pushed this journalist to the ground, maced her, and called her a “slut” thinks he was being Balrog-fighting Gandalf:

I bet I agree with the person who did that on a few particulars, to the extent we probably both hate fascists, both want to live in a society that is committed to the end of domination, and want to live in a community that is free of people coming in from the outside to intimidate and antagonize us.

But I’m not okay with what he did at all. He pulled on a thread that unravels a lot of the things he would probably claim to be defending or protecting, and he’d probably cite Karl Popper while pulling on it. Maybe more importantly to me than the fact that he did that is the way in which attempts to bring it up with friends, and to ask if assaulting journalists is really good praxis, was met with uncomfortable silence. I’m relieved nobody I know very well tried to defend the assault, but I’m bothered that beating up a journalist wasn’t something worth noting and condemning beyond reliable “both-sides!” voices and right-wing goons who had already tried to bear-spray her but took advantage of the opportunity to condemn “the left.”

That’s just a meatspace example of the mounting discomfort I feel with the way people I’d ordinarily consider ideological confrères – or at least second cousins – are behaving.

For the past couple of years, I’ve carried around my sense of growing difference with others I once considered to be like me a little guiltily, because I stopped doing things I used to do as part of my political and philosophical identity and wondered if I had finally hit some cultural tipping point and had changed without realizing it. I wondered if other people could see it in me. I felt some measure of despair, because some of that political and philosophical identify was wrapped up in being Balrog-fighting Gandalf, and if I wasn’t on some crusade, waving a sword around and punching Balrogs, what was I?

Then a few days ago, I got a Slack message from someone who told me that when they worked with me they felt included and safe. Beyond any ideology, politics, or programs, they simply felt included and safe.

They feel the things a million HR trainings, best-sellers, and tweet storms are ostensibly aiming for. Maybe they’re even hitting the mark. It’s hard to say. One idea I find very bleak is that our institutions are too corrupt to save, and that rights are best secured when corporations have deemed them beneficial to the bottom line. Any sense of “progress” you might measure that comes from a milieu where entities with a fiduciary responsibility are adjudicating matters of human dignity and freedom has to be qualified at least a little.

My takeaway from that Slack message was that someone who doesn’t always feel safe or included does so around me in part because of things I do that aren’t particularly as noteworthy or as fun as, say, Balrog-punching.

The thing I said to Al as we walked along the Springwater in the dark was, “I think we just have to know what we know for ourselves, and not because we need people to agree with us. And we need do the best we can to provide a little bit of light for the people right around us.”

I am going to leave the Balrog-punching to someone else for a while.

As the camping season started this year, we were enjoying our Livin Lite Quicksilver, but found ourselves wanting something a little simpler. We researched a bunch of different trailers, trying to stick within a 1500-pound weight limit so we wouldn’t have to trade in our car, and aiming for something that might give us a fourth season of camping. We looked at Scamps, Backpackers, and Meerkats, but they were all very backordered or a little outside our price range by the time we got done building up from the bare-bones “as low as” price.

The main issues we ran into were weight and space. Traditional campers with room to stand up, an indoor galley and some sort of seating/bedding tend to run a little heavier than we wanted to deal with. The few we found that seemed close involved pretty close quarters, and the cost tended to be a little high for us. We were slowly deciding that some sort of teardrop or other small form factor would probably make more sense for us, and we were coming around to deciding on a long wait for a Backpacker.

While we were camping near Detroit Lake in May, a couple pulled up along side us in a teardrop trailer. We really liked the galley in the back, behind a fold up door, and the general look of the trailer, and we got to see how the owners worked with the size constraints. Unlike all the extra space and hangout room of our Quicksilver, the teardrop form-factor pushes people outside. Our neighbors dealt with that by bringing along a quick-deploy canopy, where they spent their time hanging out. The trailer was just for sleeping and changing.

I snapped a picture of the logo (“The Pinecone”) and the manufacturer (Three Feathers) and looked it up once we got home.

Ordering from Three Feathers

Three Feathers Mfg. is located in LaGrande, OR. It has a pretty barebones website, but I was able to look up the Pinecone and browse a few other models. The designs tend toward a more rugged, utilitarian look, like the sort of thing you might take on a hunting or fishing trip that involved a few fire roads. They remind me of old-school camping trailers, but where camping trailers tend to have canvas tops, Three Feathers models have hard sides and diamond plate, and the interiors get a few more affordances.

The other sticking point this whole summer has been finding anything in stock any time soon, so I filled out the contact form and asked how far out they were. I got a note back from Mel Sandland, the owner of Three Feathers, telling me he was pushing people away from the Pinecone, with its trendier teardrop shape, and more toward the Outfitter 1, which is more boxy and offers more interior space for about the same weight and outer dimensions. It doesn’t have the same galley the Pinecone does as a standard feature – just a storage area – but Mel offered to customize a build to include cabinets, a counter, sink, a water tank. He also told me he could have it done by early July, but wouldn’t take any deposit money until he had a chassis up on the assembly line.

We had to wait a bit longer in the end. Mel was good about communicating with us about supply problems, and for a while our camper was just sitting there waiting for doors to come in. He called a couple of times and offered Facetime tours of our camper as it progressed. “You’re really gonna like it when you get to touch it, though,” he told us.

He finally wrapped it up this past Wednesday and called us up so we could come get it.

Meeting Mel

Three Feathers is a small business working out of a small factory space by the LaGrande airport. I think Mel has about five people working for him, and from conversations with him over the weeks we waited I gathered that they tend to work on two trailers at a time and take about two weeks to complete a unit (when all the components are in supply).

We drove out to Pendleton on Thursday night and spent the night in a hotel. After breakfast on Friday morning we drove the last 40 miles from Pendleton to LaGrande.

When we arrived, Mel came out and greeted us and took us for a walk around our new trailer. Mel’s going to be 81 in October, and over the course of the day we learned that he came to LaGrande from Los Angeles, where he grew up, and that he managed RV plants in the area for a lot of years. Three Feathers has been a way for him to keep doing what he loves.

Among the jobs I can claim, I spent one summer working in an RV factory. I did undercoating, installed air conditioners and top vents, assembled and laminated cab walls, and built step well covers. I didn’t leave the job a master craftsman, but did learn how to make things without the benefit of machine tooling that still had nice fit and finish. As I walked around the trailer, I could see a few little things you learn to spot: A slight dimple where a screw went in too tight, or a faint zigzag where a power screwdriver slipped off and the bit slid across the aluminum. All in all, though, it is tight and well assembled, erring on the side of sturdy, built-up, and generous. Poking my head into the cabin it smelled of plywood and laminate glue.

We both fell in love with it there on the shop floor. Our July vacation took us into Bureau of Land Management land in the painted hills, and while our Quicksilver held up, we would have loved the higher clearance, better tires, and more rugged axle/suspension of the Outfitter, not to mention the doubled water capacity of the built-in tank, seven-pin charging connector, electric brakes, and 360 LED porch lights.

One of Mel’s folks – I’ll call him Brad – gave us a rundown of how to work everything, from the brake breakaway connector, to the electrics, to the galley and sink, to the awning.

The last detail we had to deal with was picking up a hitch connector. The Outfitter hitch sits about 22" off the ground, and our Subaru’s hitch receiver sits closer to 12".

“Well,” Mel said, “have ya had lunch? You hungry?”

We hadn’t, so we piled into his pickup and he took us to Kauffman’s Market outside LaGrande. Besides groceries and produce, it sells sandwiches, clam chowder, and pie. Mel introduced us to the folks behind the counter as friends of his and bought us lunch: Roast beef sandwiches with a cup of chowder and Marionberry cream pie. Everyone knew him by name, and he stopped folks who worked there as they walked by the table to ask how things were going with their family farm.

Kauffman’s is owned by a Mennonite family. Mel initially called them Amish, but when Alison asked him if they drove cars he said “oh, no, not that kind of Amish … Mennonites.” I mentioned that my dad was a minister in the Church of the Brethren, and he lit up. He knew Brethren folks, understood the kinship with Mennonites and other Anabaptist sects, and was pretty delighted to talk about his own church life and faith.

It was good to feel a small barrier fall away. It wasn’t like we were struggling to relate to Mel, but it felt good to see him extend us a little more trust and talk to us about something personal to him.

He also told us he has sold trailers to people in Korea, and described pictures of packed campgrounds. I mentioned I’d been stationed there, and another barrier seemed to fall away. The conversation turned to Afghanistan ever so briefly. Nothing heavy, and I didn’t so much try to downplay disagreement as simply route around it, sticking to commonly accepted facts and my own observation that the pace of events has a way of accelerating we seldom anticipate.

After lunch, we piled back into his pickup and drove to a farm supply place where I picked up a hitch connector to give us a little more rise.

Back at the factory, Mel took our connector to Brad to have him attach the ball. Brad came out while we were taking our second look at everything.

“Heard you were airborne.”

“Yep.”

“That’s cool, man.”

A little piece of me shifted inside. I’ve been out of uniform for 24 years, and outside a few perfunctory “thank you for your service,” nobody’s ever said anything like that to me. Most places I’ve lived and worked, it was more a thing to get out in front of than to be admired.

We brought the car back to the trailer and Jason walked us through how to hook everything up, then we walked into Mel’s office, wrote the check and signed the paperwork. There’s a cork board in his office with pictures of him and his family. Down in the corner was a photocopy of an Umatilla County jail booking photo featuring Brad.

Mel caught me looking at it.

“He asked me to pin it up there because he said I’m like a dad to him. I said ‘you’re not my kid, but okay put it up there.’”

Mel saw us out to the trailer to see us off. He gave Al a hug and said “You turned out to be good people.” Then he gave me a hug and said “you remember what your dad does and keep being good.”

Bringing it back

On Friday afternoon we drove up over the Columbia and stayed in the Plymouth Park campground. It’s a small Army Corps of Engineers recreation site with hookups and pull through parking at each site.

The awning was a little fussy to figure out, but everything else was just what we hoped for. Before we left Portland we grabbed all the storage containers we kept in the Quicksilver with first aid stuff, tools, fire starters, and other sundries along with our camping pots, pans, and dishes. At Plymouth Park we moved it all over from the Subaru to the Outfitter and got settled in.

The next morning we drove from Plymouth, WA to the Rock Creek Reservoir camp ground in the Mt. Hood forest and spent the night there.

Once home, we tucked it into a secure parking space we’ve rented because I’ve read about a few RV thefts recently, and neighbors have told us people have prowled our driveway a few times looking at our other trailer, which is not obviously a camper under its cover. I’ve gone out and found the tonneau snaps unsnapped and the door opened. I prefer to pay a few bucks, stick a hitch lock and wheel claw on it, and drive five minutes to the lot to hook it up and head out.

This week, after heavy floods, I went back to the floodplain and the tree was gone. I guess it finally toppled in the flooded ground. I don’t think I ever solved it, but I did love it very much.

“Once we recognize that all things are impermanent, we have no problem enjoying them.” — Thich Nhat Hanh

“Research has shown that accepting negative emotions, rather than dismissing them, may be more beneficial for a person’s mental health in the long run. As Zuckerman says, ‘Feel your feelings. Sit with them. Do not avoid them. Avoiding discomfort only prolongs its existence.’”

I was taught a pretty curdled kind of resilience as a kid, then a very animal kind of resilience in a more institutional setting. I learned a thoroughly different kind of resilience late in life from someone dear, and it involved feeling things all the way through.

On the other side of learning from their example, I know that sometimes the very best thing you can do is say, “wow, that sucks. I’m so sorry.”

Goes double for leaders. People always think a veteran will sympathize with the false rigor of hard-ass tough talk. Those were the leaders I trusted the least. The ones I would have picked up and carried up the hill acknowledged when they were hurting, and honored it when I was hurting.

Resilience isn’t denial. Resilience is acceptance.

Elsa had arthritis in her back legs, and it had made a lot of things very hard for her. She wanted to be with us wherever we were in the house, but getting up and down the stairs was harder and harder on her. She began to fall every now and then, and would sometimes cry out from the pain when trying to climb the stairs. We ended up putting up a gate to keep her downstairs, and that was pretty tough: She slept in a bedroom for as long as she was part of our family, and it was hard to leave her downstairs at night.

We adopted Elsa from a shelter ten years ago. We didn’t know much about her history except that she had been brought up from California, and had been found outdoors with two puppies.

She was often a challenge. We don’t know what kind of trauma she endured before she came to our home. Loud noises and sudden movement were hard on her, and she once smashed through a wooden fence when a car backfired and she got off her leash in a panic. She hated being outdoors or out of sight of the house. She was usually content to just be with us wherever we were in the house. We took it as a sign that she re-found some sense of spirit when she started barking at strangers just two or so years ago.

She was a sweet dog and we’re going to miss her. I’m so glad her suffering is over.

I love this sentiment, which echoes a book about Enneagram I’ve been working through that talks a lot about the personality as an overlay on our essential self:

As human beings, not only do we seek resolution, but we also feel that we deserve resolution. However, not only do we not deserve resolution, we suffer from resolution. We don’t deserve resolution; we deserve something better than that. We deserve our birthright, which is the middle way, an open state of mind that can relax with paradox and ambiguity. To the degree that we’ve been avoiding uncertainty, we’re naturally going to have withdrawal symptoms—withdrawal from always thinking that there’s a problem and that someone, somewhere, needs to fix it.

One of the core ideas of When Things Fall Apart is that of how to be alone. She talks about “cool” and “hot” loneliness in this excerpt:

Usually we regard loneliness as an enemy. Heartache is not something we choose to invite in. It’s restless and pregnant and hot with the desire to escape and find something or someone to keep us company. When we can rest in the middle, we begin to have a nonthreatening relationship with loneliness, a relaxing and cooling loneliness that completely turns our usual fearful patterns upside down.

“If my happiness at this moment consists largely in reviewing happy memories and expectations I am but dimly aware of this present.” — Alan Watts, The Wisdom of Insecurity

Sitting in this well-lit room with the sound of the surf coming in from the balcony, it is easy to be here now.

One thing I miss about paratrooping: The moments where I had no choice but to be right where I was in time and space. The five seconds between stepping out the door and feeling the yank of the static line. The few moments I had to do the right thing when something went wrong. The exhilaration of running 75 pounds of gear and silk off the drop zone, wholly inside the animal. No thought about the choices that put me there, no next meal, no beer at the picnic table in the barracks. Just there.

Nostalgia for that is its own kind of dislocation. It’s a longing for the quiet up there in the sky between handing off the static line and stepping out the door and the five seconds before the next useful input about the situation at hand. It’s resistance to how things are here and now: The twisted risers, the feet of another jumper scrambling across your canopy, being put out over the trees. A faster fall because it’s raining and the silk got wet. Landing, but being taken aloft again by a strong gust, helpless just above the ground for a moment before being dropped, hard, seeing stars and tasting blood. Being dragged along rocks and dirt, holding wrist in hand to pull the canopy releases in case you broke something and haven’t felt it yet. Disorientation on a moonlit DZ.

Longing for a remembered state of perfect presence is to not be present with this imperfection.

Nothing to do but make another cup of tea, follow the sun out to the balcony. Turn back to my book. Be here, now.

1. I started an early rise routine a few months ago, mostly to make the commutes for the occasional 7 a.m. meeting feel less onerous. I have mostly kept the routine but without the 45-minute commute. I have so much time in the morning before work, now.

2. That time often goes to making good breakfasts for Ben. Play a podcast, make the pancakes or biscuits and gravy, drink tea.

3. I love my office. I’m surrounded by my pictures, I have the lighting dialed in. It’s bright and welcoming. There’s decent sound. My mood improves when I walk in first thing. At the end of the day, I sit in the lounge chair in the corner with the lights low and think about nothing.

4. We have a lot of discrete spaces now that the weather is turning: bedroom balcony/porch, front porch, little back patio with sun sail, our offices, and the living room. It’s great to just go out and sit on the balcony in between meetings and get a little sun and breeze.

5. Our patterns throughout the day take us in and out of offices/rooms. Sometimes we all end up in the living room; Ben sewing or playing a game, Alison and me working. It’s companionable. After a while a phone call or whatever breaks up the moment and we drift away.

6. It is easier to consider what’s next during the day. At first home is a distraction, but after a while it’s back to deeply familiar and comfortable. Grab a glass of water, sit on the porch for ten minutes and think about what’s important for that next meeting or work sprint.

7. It’s so quiet now. You can see more stars at night.

8. People are masked and all skirting wide, but the friendly little wave–a sort of manual curtsy–is back in vogue. I was a friendly little waver when we moved here 20 years ago, but the move to the sorta WASPy, chilly northeast Portland beat it out of me, and Lents people are more about the uptilted “sup?” chin, which is less a greeting and more a fleeting nonaggression pact.

9. I see more of Ben and he wants to talk more.

10. In the quiet and relative calm I’ve carved out around me, I have space to remember people are not at their best. Sometimes people aren’t at their best sort of at me, and it has become easier over the past few weeks to return to center afterward. We’re all sort of alone with our egos right now. People succumb. They need understanding and patience, and a sincere belief on my part that there is nothing to forgive.

11. No commute home at night. Just that last email or Slack, a quick check for invoices or purchase orders or expense reports, then gather up the mug or glass, lights out, and head downstairs.

12. People reaching out and being closer in the isolation.

13. Space to sit in the dark and grieve, or feel shitty, or cry, or worry.

14. Writing more feels like an adaptive behavior, at the slight cost of coming to believe meetings are best for the truly novel, but not being sure how to address that.

15. I have finally found the sweet spot between keeping handwritten notes and capturing actions reliably. It’s simple: Take notes, annotate actions with “!!!” and then sweep that into Things at the end of the meeting, which is easier when you’re not rushing down a floor and across the building to get to the next thing.

16. Ben’s room is a marvel to me. He understands comfort and coziness in a way I was incapable of at his age. Throw pillows, big blankets, fairy lights, candles. I poke my head in and my heart melts. He learned how to figure out what he loves and he surrounds himself with it. It took me forever–well into my forties– to stop being angry and hard on myself, and to learn how to find things that brought joy or comfort. I’m really proud that he just has that.

This is a hard time. Sometimes I think it could swallow me. I worry for people I care about, and people I don’t even know. I sense inside me a resistance to listening to angry people because they are a demand on my reserves, so I worry that I might starve my own pet anger and begin to forget important things.

So this wasn’t an act of “it’s all fine!” It was an enumeration of things that are good because of so much that is bad. It is a reminder of how much I have. I’m grateful for it.

I’ve also let pass a few oblique references to mid-life crises. If you’re reading this because you have made it out of your teens, have moved on past the vast and ever-extending frontier of late adolescence, and are now enjoying the years where it has become slightly bewildering that people your age look much older than the Bitmojis you and your partner made together one Saturday morning while the 14-year-old was out doing whatever but it involved some friend you haven’t met, public transit, and a promise to be home before curfew, welcome. My main advice to you about whatever side-eye your inner monologue is giving you about taking up this hobby is to ignore it: One of the nice things about wisdom is that it includes learning about your limits. Just get out there, give it a shot, see how it feels, and quit if/when it stops being fun. If it never becomes fun in the first place, put the board up on Craigslist for $25 off retail. Someone will grab it then ask /r/longboarding if it was a good deal, but by then it’ll be too late.

Finally, this guide is written for people who just want to learn how to cruise around safely and comfortably, and have not developed a particular interest in one discipline or another, whether that’s downhill, dancing, or freestyle. A lot of the advice out there tends to assume you’re interested in a particular discipline, and that’s going to take you places you might not need to go right away if all you’re trying to do is figure out if longboarding is even something you want to stick to.

Unfortunately, like any hobby that involves buying gear, a lot of longboard review sites are nothing more than poorly-written, dubiously researched Amazon affiliate plays. At some point I will add a few links to topics where I’ve gone back and found a decent resource I’d recommend. In the mean time, just know that YouTube is a pretty good resource, and that most longboard reviews are either written by the retailers themselves or garbage designed to get clicks on the affiliate links.

A Quick Cultural Note

Though longboards are pretty much “long skateboards with big wheels,” neither longboarders nor skateboarders think much of that sort of reductionism, and they represent two distinct tribes.

It’s important to understand this distinction because each group will have very different advice to offer you as you go out onto the ’net to learn more about your new hobby. I strongly recommend you read this essay by Kathy Sierra (yes, that Kathy Sierra) to get an idea of the roots of this cultural divide and how it plays out today. It is my observation that skateboarding is dominated by and marketed for boys and young men, while longboarding has provided a more welcoming space for girls, women, and older folks; including older skateboarders who are looking for a gentler way to remain on four wheels a bit longer than the halfpipe and swimming pool will allow.

1. Buying your first longboard

Here’s what I did first: I picked one from Amazon that looked nice and cost under $75. It was not great, but I didn’t know that and it was perfect for the three-week crash course I embarked on at a nearby playground.

That wasn’t the best way to do it, but I wasn’t up to going into an independent shop and I’d had a bad experience buying Ben a skateboard at a Zumiez.

On the bright side, Amazon reviews let me find my people: Older folks who had never been on a longboard before, or who had been skaters as teens but had not done it in a while. The former could speak convincingly about their experiences as newbies and how they did on the board; the latter could probably comment on where the board fell short and offer advice on easy fixes.

Here are some characteristics to look for:

• Long – For stability and smoothness. Definitely look for something longer than 36". Any shorter, and you’ll gain maneuverability but lose both stability and tolerance for poor foot placement. At the same time, keep it under 48" or so unless you’ve had past experience navigating barges, commuter ferries, or oil tankers.
• Wide – So your feet fit comfortably. Look for something around 9" or more.
• Low – So your center of gravity is lower and your balance is better. Look for “dropthrough” or “dropdown” boards: They’re built in such a way that the board itself is lower to the ground. That makes for better balance and easier pushing.
• Stiff – To remove a little variability while you master being on a board with wheels. Avoid plastic and look for hardwoods.

Slightly longer-term, I’d prioritize width and height over flex and length if I had to settle on my first board being my last for a while, and if cruising were what I was going to be into. The board I eventually bought as my “real” board is much flexier than my first, which has its pleasures, but I appreciate the fact that it’s much lower even more.

Definitely buy a skate tool before you check out. They’re a three-way socket tool with a little screwdriver insert. The sockets allow you to do a number of things when you get your longboard:

• Tighten the kingpin/trucks.
• Tighten/loosen the wheel nuts.
• Tighten the hardware that mounts the trucks to the board.

You’ll have to do these things, or at least have a tool that allows you to do them, before you can ride, and paying the $8 for this tool beats rummaging around in the toolbox. You can also stick it in your back pocket when you head out for a session so it’s easy to do some initial tuning as you learn. Long term, you’ll have to be able to work with your trucks, wheel nuts and hardware to keep your board in good working order.

Also, buy some protective gear:

• Knee guards
• Wrist guards
• Elbow pads
• Helmet, though you can use a bicycling helmet if you have one

Over time, you’ll probably drop the knee guards first. Of the several spills I’ve had, they haven’t been essential. I’ve been very grateful for the rest. I won’t go out without wristguards and helmet, and I recently began to take my elbow pads along again if I’m going to be navigating sidewalks or sketchy terrain because I got tired of opening my elbow back up even when wearing long sleeves.

Finally, shoes are a consideration: I bought some Vans because they’re easy to find, fit my wide feet pretty well, and offer a large, flat sole with plenty of grip. You can probably get away with any rubber-soled sneaker if all you do is cruise. Sometimes I wear retired running shoes, but I prefer my Vans Sk8-Hi Pros for the ankle support. Just remember that you’re going to be making a lot of hard, repetitive contact with the pavement when you push, and you’re going to be shifting your weight around a lot on the foot you keep planted on the board: You’ll want some cushion. Vans offer that, cheap Chuck Taylors do not.

2. Receiving Your Longboard

When your longboard arrives, take it out of the package and give it a good look. Having ordered a few cheap boards and one less cheap board online, I’ve been surprised at how variable assembly seems to be, so take the time to do this little pre-ride inspection:

• Grab each wheel and give it a spin. Each should spin freely. People get hung up on whether the wheel can spin for more than a minute. Don’t bother. If it spins freely for 10 seconds or so, it’s fine. If it doesn’t, use the skate tool to loosen the nuts a little bit, but not too much:

• Give each wheel a wiggle to see how tightly it’s on the axle. If there’s much play at all, tighten it down to minimize that as much as possible while still letting it spin freely. You can improve this with “speed rings” (washers that go between the nut and the wheel) and “spacers” (metal sleeves that go on the axle inside the wheel) but for now don’t bother.

• Check the hardware that mounts the trucks to the deck. You’ll see four small nuts and bolts on each truck. Use the smallest socket on the skate tool along with a screwdriver to make sure all these are tight. If they’re loose, it’ll affect your ride and it’ll make annoying buzzing or rattling sounds.

• Give the trucks/wheels a wiggle. They should move easily and return to center. If they don’t return to center or flop around, look for the kingpin—a nut and bolt pair that hold the axle to the hardware mounted under the board—and tighten it. The best advice I can give on this is to tighten it until the washer underneath the bolt doesn’t turn freely, then consider another half-turn of tightness, at least when you’re starting out.

Something to remember about the advice you’ll read about truck tightness: In your first few weeks, you will probably not be putting yourself in positions where you need to–or could safely–make a sudden maneuver. People advocating for loose trucks are more experienced and put themselves in different situations from someone trying to learn how to push around a parking lot or playground.

3. Picking Where to Ride

If you can, go find an empty parking lot or playground with blacktop. If there’s a slope, make sure it’s gentle. Watch out for:

• Even small pebbles and twigs
• Cracks
• Weeds growing out of cracks

… all those things will send you flying, especially if you haven’t mastered how to distribute your weight or are still moving slowly.

Park-n-ride lots are ideal on weekends: Pretty empty and unused.

At first, you should probably avoid:

• Streets. Motorists can be unforgiving and they’ll ride right up on you then blare their horns. In Portland, you’re allowed to be on the street, but you don’t need to be looking over your shoulder or taking a spill in traffic.
• Sidewalks. Lots of cracks, pebbles, and twigs that aren’t great under normal circumstances, and will stop you dead and make you fall off when you’re going slow.
• Multi-use paths. Like streets, you’re allowed to be on them, but you’ll have fast-moving bicyclists, dogs, other pedestrians, etc. to deal with. And think of other people: Usually when you spill it means your board flies off straight behind or in front of you. Even a bicyclist being careful around you shouldn’t have to dodge your board (or your body).

4. Early riding

I am not going to write about how to actually start moving around on a board. There are tons of tutorials that all repeat the basic advice of “figure out which foot you balance on, stand on the board with that foot, push with the other, bend your knees slightly” etc. I’d recommend searching YouTube, and if I ever get around to putting together a bibliography, I’ll pick a few for you.

I will suggest a few things you should do as early exercises, and consider doing just one thing at a time:

• Push so that you go in a straight line. That takes some fine-tuning of your balance, so once you’re able to move on the board at all, make “going straight” your first goal.
• After you push, pay attention to how gently you put your pushing foot back up on the board. If you plant back on the board hard, it destabilizes you.
• Lean gently to steer inside a narrow path. Rather than taking on curves and turns right away, learn how to weave and drift. My local playground had handy running lanes for the 50m dash, so I picked the two lanes I wanted to stay inside and learned to weave around within them.
• Learn to gently drag your foot to stop. It’s another balance and muscle control challenge to drag your foot enough to slow you down without planting it and falling off. It’s okay to just hop off, but you won’t be able to control your board as well and it’s sorta hell on your joints.

Also remember that a little speed is actually your friend: If you go too slow, the stopping power of a twig or pebble increases quite a bit. If you’re going faster, you tend to roll over them.

Finally, consider tightening your trucks down when you’re first learning to just go in a straight line. The board won’t be as responsive to leaning to steer, but it’ll also feel more stable. As you get more comfortable, loosen the trucks a half turn at a time. One way I learned to judge how to tighten my trucks was foot pain: the board felt wobbly underneath, and my feet hurt because I was “monkey-toeing” the board. Tightening the trucks helped give me a sense of stability, my feet relaxed, and things felt better. I eventually loosened back up as I got more comfortable.

Oh … one more thing:

Rest!

I went out and rode for an hour or two every single day for a couple of weeks. I got sore and tired, and stopped progressing. After taking a forced week off so my knee could stop throbbing, it got easier again. 
Since then, if I do a long session one day, I’ll try to take the next day off. That makes my next session feel pretty good, and I can tell some muscle memory consolidation has gone on during the break.

5. After-market improvements

People eventually come to have opinions about every single component of their board. I’m going to propose a few high-priority things for the beginning rider that are easy to replace or experiment with that will make a difference, in priority order:

First off, bushings: These are the barrel- or coned-shape bits of polyurethane that sit in the trucks. They come in a variety of hardnesses (“durometers”). If you’re a heavier person, you want harder bushings. Remember that in the youth-dominated world of skateboarding and longboarding, the definition of “heavier” shifts to the left a bit. I’d recommend either “barrel” or “standard” bushings.

When I took my board into a local shop and asked for advice on how to improve the ride, the first thing they did was grab some harder standard bushings and pop them in for me. The ride improved immensely: I was able to loosen my trucks while keeping a feeling of stability underfoot, so the ride got more comfortable and I had more maneuverability.

If you don’t weight more than 170 or so pounds, you can probably leave your bushings alone, though anyone over 140 or so will probably benefit from consulting that intro and picking something of medium hardness.

Next up, wheels: These are sorted by hardness (“durometer”) and size (in millimeters). From what I’ve seen, most retailers will sell complete boards with a 70mm wheel of soft durometer (78a). That’s a good, general-purpose choice.

If you’re just interested in cruising around, I’d recommend looking at a larger wheel. If you’re a heavier rider, I’d recommend looking at a harder durometer.

This is a good time to take the plunge and visit a local longboarding specialist, along with your board, because they can help you make a good choice and avoid some problems.

Larger wheels make it easier to roll over rocks, twigs, and cracks. They accelerate more poorly, but they hold a higher speed and roll longer. If 70mm is “normal,” 80-85mm is on the larger end. If 78a is “softer,” 86a is at the hard end for a longboard. 75-80mm/83a is a good cruising wheel for a larger person.

You should go in and ask at a shop, though, because if your wheels are too large, you risk the board coming in contact with the wheels in turns (“wheel bite”) and that can dump you off your board. Your board manufacturer may have a recommended setup on their website, but they tend to be conservative. Your local shop may know, and if they don’t they can take the time to help you figure it out.

Next, bearings are worth a look. Amazon decks probably have cheap bearings that don’t spin very well. Bearings are rated with an “ABEC” number, the higher the better. Most boards ship with ABEC 5 or 7 bearings, ABEC 9 is the highest rating. “ABEC 11,” btw, is a brand name designed to confuse you, so don’t humor them.

I’ll offer some very specific brand advice here. If it’s spring or summer and you have months of dry riding ahead of you, just buy Bones Reds: They’re great. If you’re headed into wet weather, or live somewhere that’s wet a lot of the time, consider Zealous bearings: They have built in spacers and speedrings, with a thicker lubricant that resists washout in wet riding. Zealous bearings have a slightly longer break-in period, but people who ride in all weather swear by them because they don’t require as much cleaning and lubrication.

Finally, you’ll read some advice about speed rings and spacers. While they do allow you to tighten down your wheels (which makes them more stable) they aren’t absolutely necessary. Spacers in particular, if they aren’t built in to your bearings, can sometimes rattle or buzz and they don’t do much for novice riders or cruisers. For just cruising around, you probably don’t need to bother with them, and not having them makes changing your wheels or bearings easier and faster.

That’s a great springboard into the next section, which is …

6. Learning to shop retailers

I mentioned just going to Amazon for your first board because I assumed you’re as shy as me, and are possibly wanting to avoid a big commitment if you’re not even sure you want to do this. I don’t feel 100 percent comfortable with that advice, so I’m going to make up for it by recommending that you engage with a local, independent retailer early on, even if you hate dealing with specialist retail. There aren’t any secrets to doing this, really, so think of this as a way to set expectations and judge whether your local retailer deserves your money:

First, just avoid Zumiez if there’s one near you. If you go in to buy a custom board and mostly know what you want, you’ll probably do okay: I’ve watched the folks at the one down the road build boards and they seem competent, but those folks aren’t always around and they will try to upsell you when they are. I stopped through to buy bearings once, and they “strongly recommended” $75 Bones Swiss. I said “no thanks, just the Reds” and got a little smirk and a “had to try” shrug. When we got Ben his first skateboard, they kept pushing premium stuff in the name of “your board being unique to you.”

Worse, you might get a clerk who doesn’t even skate. I hung back and watched Ben get interrogated at length about his riding, only to be told, “I don’t skate … I just like the clothing culture.” And another, when asked if he had any risers in stock, tried to sell me bushings.

I feel sort of bad writing this because there’s a middle-aged store manager at our local one who is friendly, non-aggressive, a little flirty, and definitely skates, but she’s the outlier. Sorry if you’re reading this!

If you do have a local, independent shop, give them a shot. In Portland, we’ve got [Daddies], and they’re great: The shop itself is well stocked with boards, and they’re a large online retailer so there’s a ton of stuff in the warehouse even if it’s not right there on the retail floor.

They set the standard for retail: They help you stand on several different kinds of board to figure out what’s comfortable. If they’re building one for you, they talk you through the options based on what you want to do with the board, starting from a reasonable baseline of good but inexpensive components. They’re happy to assemble it for you, and will talk you through why they’re doing what they’re doing. When I walked in unhappy with the way my board was handling, they knew to swap out the bushings right away, and installed them for me, too.

If you can’t get that kind of treatment, I’ll note that none of the routine stuff about a longboard is hard once you do it a few times:

• Picking and changing wheels
• Changing or cleaning bearings
• Tightening the kingpin on your trucks
• Changing out your bushings

All of that stuff is easy. There’s a ton of information online, and if you don’t care to use Amazon on principle, there are several online retailers who will ship stuff for free.

The best piece of advice I can give you if you choose to do any of the routine stuff on your own is to just change one thing at a time. For instance, most retailers don’t offer to customize bushings when you order from them, so you’ll have to do that for yourself. Disassemble just one truck so you can model from the other one and make sure you’ve put it back together correctly.

I’ve known for a while that it’s good for me to have some sort of journaling to help deal with ADHD. I slip in and out of it, and use a variety of means to journal, including this blog, plain text files, and physical notebooks .

For a while, my practice involved a pair of daily entries meant to help me figure out the day ahead, then retrospect. It evolved from something I learned from one of my commanders at Fort Bragg, who started and ended each day with a sheet of legal paper she kept by her keyboard.

Over the past month, though, I’ve come to use journaling as a way to capture thoughts and feelings quickly and as on the spot as I can manage. I’ve adopted an informal template, making sure to capture most of the classic five W’s. My journaling tool supports hashtags, so I have a loose taxonomy to connect related entries. Sometimes I’ll make an explicit link between entries, too, if time allows or if an entry is so fragmentary that I want to make sure to connect it to one with context.

An entry usually involves what I was thinking about, how I felt about that (the emotional truth), what I think about that (the considered response), and what I want from all of it, either as an outcome/resolution, or a next step. I try not to self-censor if I can help it, avoiding the quiet temptation to record my best self in these entries.

I guess there are a few kinds of value to be gleaned:

First, I can see the ways in which the inner story-teller is always trying to impose a narrative, even in a moment of relative remove.

Second, I can see the ways in which thoughts and feelings are always changing. It’s a “two steps forward, one step back” sort of thing. Sometimes they refine and improve, sometimes they’re not super worthy. Getting that—understanding and embracing that variability, acknowledging my own messiness—makes it easier to engage a more objective self. I know about the messiness and imperfection of other people. Stepping back from myself long enough to see my own messiness—the messiness I forgive other people for all the time—makes it easier to cut to the ethical heart of hard things. I’m just another human. What would I tell another human if they asked me about this problem? What things would I remind them of? How would I counsel them to act?

It has helped me a few times so far in the past month. It has created a book-ending joy to go with the joy of those moments where I catch myself making up a story in my head and manage to stop doing it.

Journal for the Mission

I’m more kind to others than I am to myself, but my inner- and outer-directed kindness are never too far away from each other. My ability to be kind to others seems to have a ceiling set by how kind I can be to myself. The connection between those two capacities for kindness can be a liability, or it can be leveraged.

When I’m not objective about myself—when I allow uncomfortable or messy truths about myself to go unconsidered and unforgiven—I’m harder on others. I guess the ego casts about outside itself when it’s not comfortable with what it sees in itself. It distracts and comforts itself with the failings of others.

When I think about that small gap between my inner- and outer-directed kindness and try to apply the forgiveness I can muster for others to myself, then the ceiling on my kindness to others goes up that much more the next time around.

That’s important.

When I was pretty young, my dad took me to our church’s annual conference. I don’t embrace that church or its kind of spirituality any longer, but the mission statement for the conference that year has stayed with me:

Do justice. Love tenderly. Walk humbly.

It’s a paraphrase of a verse in Micah, and it has become a sort of meditational anchor over the years. I think a lot about the ways those three directives depend on each other:

Justice without kindness or humility is cruel.

Love depends on fairness and humility, or it becomes mere neediness.

We must temper humility with fairness and kindness to ourselves. We must understand the ways in which unconsidered self-effacement can be deeply unfair and ultimately cruel to others.

It seems to me that the more I can participate in a cycle of reciprocal kindness, to others and to myself, the more readily I can accomplish that mission.

A Few Notes on Day One

DayOne is a journaling app available for both MacOS and iOS. It offers a few key features that have made it great for this practice:

• The ability to make quick entries, with a keyboard shortcut from the Mac desktop, or with a long press on the iOS icon
• Fast, transparent cloud sync between devices/computers
• Passcode/Touch ID security, end-to-end encryption
• Hashtags
• Inter-entry linking

It also understands Markdown, and automatically records location and weather in each entry.

I love being able to make a quick entry anywhere, from whatever device I’m using: Quick, thumbed entries on my phone, or longer and more considered entries with a real keyboard on my iPad or desktop machine.

I like knowing the security is pretty strong. If I switch away from the app on iOS, I can set it to require a thumbprint right away. If I sleep my computer, it’ll require a password before opening. That’s all less about security and more about having a strong sense of privacy: I record a lot of stuff in there. If you picked a random entry to read, who knows what you’d get.

You’ve just woken up in your tent down on the Springwater Trail.

You climbed into a sleeping bag the night before. The temperature was headed down to the low 40s. You’re sleeping in a tent among dozens of others in a similar situation. The small ad hoc community around you has all sorts, including  people who seem angry all the time, and young men who are dressed much more nicely than everyone around them. They don’t spend the night: They just make a few deals and then head home for the evening.  If you’re a woman, there’s a better than even chance you were assaulted within 72 hours of beginning your life outdoors. Since it’s April in Portland, it’s muddy and wet. You might have gone to sleep to the sounds of people fighting or yelling at each other. You probably woke up because it’s really goddamn cold, or because your children woke up with the light, the way little kids do. 

So, about the time you’re unzipping your tent, grateful that nothing happened to it or you or maybe your family the night before, a pair of people on expensive bicycles, all kitted out, ride by. They look around at all the tents, and one looks to the other and says “Jesus Christ, this is fucking disgusting.  Who the fuck are these people?”

Well, friend, they’re my neighbors. I ride by them every morning on my way to work, and again on my way home each evening. I’ve got a pretty simple protocol for making my way through the little community that has sprung up on the Springwater near 82nd. I’ll list some of its key elements:

• I slow down. There are a lot of people down there, including families with small children. Nowhere I need to be is more important than any of those people. 
• I don't gawk or comment if I'm with someone. I wouldn't want to be gawked at if I had to live in a tent along a trail. I wouldn't want someone to loudly wonder "who the fuck" I was, or comment on my "fucking shithole" accomodations. 
• I say "good morning" or "good afternoon" to the people I do make eye contact with.  That's my practice with just about everyone I pass on the trail. 

I’d really like to believe that the “Jesus Christs” and “who the fuck are these peoples” are coming from a sense of deep moral outrage that we live in a country where families with little children, the working poor or anyone else for that matter has to live in a tent in the mud along a trail on the edge of town. Because I read nextdoor.com and the Facebook groups for my neighborhood, I know that’s not always the case. At least sometimes they’re also coming from a place of deep revulsion with the people in those circumstances themselves, and from a deep desire to erase them from awareness … to push them out of view with no regard for where that might be or what it might mean for them. It comes from a place of rationalizing the existence of that kind of misery that comes from ones own precarity (though maybe that’s not so true of the people on the nice bikes out for a pre-work ride). 

Wherever it’s coming from, I’d really appreciate it if you’d keep it to yourself next time. Those people are my neighbors and I want you to be kind to them. 

I say 'I consider myself a feminist,' because I really do. But I always feel like I'm taking a big risk when I say 'I AM a feminist,' because there is always, always some other feminist out there who will show you that you're wrong. Usually they'll also show you that you're awful for it. — Someone somewhere I visit regularly

Another feminist here. That’s an understandable sentiment.

Personally, I hate calling myself anything at all, ever. I spent four years trying to reconcile what I thought I was, what I wanted to say to people I was, what I wanted people to think I was underneath, and what I wanted to be with what I was being every single day by just waking up where I was waking up and doing what I was doing.

I spent even more years after that trying to work through whether I’d ever known or could ever know what I was: Maybe I’d stopped listening to my better angels. Maybe the better angels had never been real. Gandhi had suggested that nonviolent behavior could be motivated (and tainted) by cowardice, so I wondered to myself if what I’d thought had been a nonviolent worldview hadn’t actually been a sort of cowardice, and that by enlisting maybe I’d just embraced what I’d always been.

Some understandings about myself and the world around me crystallized, some things just got more complicated:

Could I jump out of an airplane at night? Yes. And for the last year I was jumping out of airplanes, it’s fair to say I was frightened every time. By the time I got to that point, I’d healed up a lot. I wasn’t who I’d been when I walked into the recruiter’s office: If the controlled environment of the army had been a splint or a cast, it ended up setting my bones into shapes they hadn’t been before I enlisted. So I gained some understanding of what it is to be deeply afraid and yet still do the thing you set out to do. For a period, living that pattern allowed me to say to myself that I wasn’t a coward, that I had a core I could depend on. So I started looking beyond where I was, and having thoughts about what could be next, and wanting it. I didn’t want to give up and disappear into the army.

Then I was out, and rather than going back to be near the people who had cared about me and supported me while I was in, I chose somewhere else. I couldn’t just go back to where I had been, among people who might have been tempted to say, “well, that’s all over now and you’re back.”

I was loved and cared for, but not a lot of people knew me. They just had the biography, and that question of cowardice was still very real, and was suddenly unresolved again because I figured out that physical courage isn’t moral courage. So, I wanted the new people in my life to know something more about me than where I’d been, but I was still struggling with what it was I’d want them to know, and if it was possible for there to be anything more to know. After all, there was what I thought I was, what I wanted to say to people I was, what I wanted people to think I was underneath, and what I wanted to be, but there was what I had been every single day for four years by just waking up where I was waking up and doing what I was doing:

I’d been the guy who got sent to the chaplain because he wouldn’t sing the baby-killing cadences, and then invited to declare himself a conscientious objector. Didn’t do it, though, because I wasn’t. I just didn’t like baby-killing cadences.

I’d been the guy whose boss told him he should seriously consider taking a subordinate into the woods to beat him up, and briefly wondered if it would need to come to that, then learned how to make anger and its energy palpable; maybe to help avoid taking that step and maybe to make it easier if I had to.

I’d been the guy who told a barracks bully that I’d take an eye or an ear, and needed to believe it.

I’d been everything that environment demanded of me, and I chose to stay in it.

I nearly started typing, “but in the end,” because that would allow this to be narrativized and resolved. But there’s no end because I’m still sitting here typing. There’s an ever-unfolding now that I needed to learn about.

There were all the moments where I looked back on some of the things I said and did and hated them. When I’d tell stories about things I’d seen or done and I’d realize people were repelled by the mere fact that I’d been there to see them. There was the year where I needed to get help because I’d see a picture of a maimed child in an Iraqi marketplace bombing, or read about a murder-suicide on an army post from some solider who’d come back from the wars changed, and I’d think about how I’d wanted to be some part of that, and that’d be it for the day, stopped by anger and grief. I’m so glad I worked at home: I don’t know what I would have done with people around when those moments came. Maybe I would have just swallowed it whole instead of composing some polite fiction of a status message and going to sit in my room.

Then there was just more life, and a slowly growing recognition that I couldn’t ever un-be those things. When he was little, Ben thought I’d once been a knight. It was heartbreaking to explain that I hadn’t been. But it was strengthening to realize that the more truthful I could make myself be with him, the better a parent I could be to him.

I figured out that I had to start being the person I wanted to be in that ever-unfolding now. I had to accept that some people would see the biography and think things they’d be justified to think, and that I had to set that aside: There’s no erasing it, and to erase it would be to erase me. Instead, I had to learn how to be open to the things that I can hear and feel are right, and accept that they might be incongruous with what I’ve been.

Because of all that, because I once set aside everything I said I was and became something else, and because I then spent years trying to make all of that make sense, I’ve got a deep aversion to saying I’m anything at all. To the extent it’s any of my business how people talk about themselves or what they are – and it almost never is – I wish there’d be less “speaking as a …” and more “because I live my life thus.”

At the same time, self-identification helps people, right? It helps us hold each other – and ourselves – accountable.

I read bell hooks’ Feminism is for Everybody where she writes “the soul of our politics is the commitment to ending domination,” and I thought to myself “yes, that’s right, I want to live that and teach my son that.” I put down the book and thought “I agree with her, and other people who call themselves feminists,” and then I felt okay saying “I’m a feminist.”

Despite my aversion to saying “I’m this” or “I’m that,” I think “I’m a feminist” is a thing worth saying.

Because I’m a man, steeped in this culture and taught habits of thought that are anti-feminist, I’ll sometimes do things that aren’t feminist things to do. I’ve been lucky to have people in my life who have been gentle and patient with me when I’ve done this. Some day I’ll meet someone who won’t be as kind, or who will want to prove that I’m not a feminist at all. Depending on who that comes from, that could be upsetting or embarrassing.

The alternative, my heart tells me, is to be less supportive than I could be; to be an “ally” who can still maybe slip back and forth, maybe never having to own being wrong or hypocritical ever again because I remember how hard it was to put a sense of self together again after being something besides what I wanted to be.

All we can do is be what we are in the ever-unfolding now. We can open ourselves to hearing what’s right, and we can try to choose what’s right, or at least choose what’s less wrong. We can accept that we’ll sometimes fail at that. We can allow ourselves to be held accountable. We can try again.

Ben’s got a usual: 2 scrambled eggs, a sausage patty, a cinnamon roll and a cup of decaf. He settled on that after a streak where he was all about the bacon pancakes, which are incredible but also torpor inducing. Lately I’m all over the place. The coffee is a constant, but it’s hard to choose between all the scrambles and omelettes, plus the occasional bacon pancakes or plain old hotcakes.

When we first moved here, the space Oliver’s is in was occupied by Le Sorelle Café. You could get coffee and pastry and panini there. We’d stop in on Sundays after going to the farmers market. Le Sorelle didn’t last. Coffee in Lents, in general, does not last unless it’s being served out of an espresso hut. That’s a shame, because until the neighborhood is ultimately overrun by people like me, it’d be nice to have a slow but steady coffee place to go work at now and then. We had that in the form of Lents Commons, but it fell apart pretty quickly because it was never meant to be a coffee place: The owners wanted it to be a performance space.

Oliver’s has been at it for a couple of years now, and I hope they’ve cracked the code for remaining viable in Lents: They’re only open until 2 each day. They’re not even attempting dinner service.

Anyhow, this isn’t its Yelp page, where it is mostly appropriately revered by the neighborhood.

Ben and I have been walking down there most Sunday mornings for a while. It’s about 10 minutes from our house, so we’ll go all but the worst days, unless we’re feeling lazy and don’t want to get out of our pajamas.

Some days, we don’t say much. Other days, Ben wants to talk about World of Warcraft or something he saw on YouTube. This last Sunday, he was curious about elections and what it would be like if we had more than two major parties. “Winner takes all” was pretty easy to explain. Proportional representation was helped along by our recent Munchkin Cthulhu binge, because forming a coalition government in parliament is exactly like agreeing to gang up on a level 16 eldritch horror in exchange for a cut of the treasure.

When we get there, we’ve got a few preferred booths over on the east side of the restaurant, where it’s more isolated. Our waitress this past week is new – or new to Sundays – and she’s only seen us four or five times. She was visibly disoriented when we had to sit over on the west side in straight-backed chairs like a pair of chumps, though.

So, most of the wait-folks there know us pretty well by now. Ben still delivers his order each week like it’s going to be news to the waitresses. I’ve made more of an effort to mix it up ever since I caught a waitress starting to write my order down before I spoke it. The next week I deliberately broke my rut and there was an expression of polite surprise that I wasn’t having the omelette.

After I left the newspaper – my first job after college – I ended up in a burger joint for a while. On the days I had the lunch shift, there was a group of three mailmen who’d come in every day. They ordered the same thing every time, and one of them brought exact change every time. The first time I served him his burger I forgot to apply some discount the owner had made up for mailmen and there was a diplomatic incident. I never got the comfort of that routine because the three of them were pretty sour-faced guys. I just saw them sitting there eating their burgers in silence, maybe tipping a curt nod at the counter person on the way out, back to their routes.

I’ve certainly had routines since. Al & I were regulars at the Barracks Road Mister Donut in Charlottesville, VA on Sundays: chocolate angels to go with the Sunday Times for a long while. The fall and winter she was pregnant with Ben it was me going over to Jae’s Low Beer Price on Belmont for ice cream sandwiches, Diet 7-Up and the big box of Dots (which were fresh maybe one time out of ten, which always provoked pleased exclamations).

But I’ve got a weird thing about my routines being picked up on, too. It can feel strange and intimate, and I think about those mailmen and how little I knew about whatever they did besides eat burgers at the College Mall Road G.D. Ritzy’s in Bloomington, IN and (I hope) deliver mail, and how flattened out they seemed to me.

Sounds a little neurotic when I see it there in black and white, but there it is. Most major demons and powerful wizards are similarly particular about people knowing their true names, let alone their preferred breakfasts.

But with the exception of adjusting my ordering habits now and then to appropriately reset expectations with the wait staff at Oliver’s, I don’t mind being a regular there so much because the other half of things I think about in the process of regularing there is my childhood:

Several moves around town before I was five, a big move from Texas to Pennsylvania before kindergarten, cross-town moves and a few elementary schools, a move to Chicago, then back to Pennsylvania (way down the road from where we’d been before), then Indiana in the middle of eighth grade.

I recently did the math, and realized that this time in Oregon – since July 6, 2001 – is the longest I’ve lived in any state my entire life by a couple of years. We’ve been in this house just a few weeks over 5.5 years, and that’s the longest I’ve ever lived in a single house.

I’m not going to say moving around a lot was bad for me. I got a lot from it, especially because it was all so varied: suburban Chicago, dairy country in Pennsylvania, small-town Indiana, Texas, suburban Pittsburg. Lots of experiences – jumping up from dinner to help our host birth a calf out back in the barn! – and lots of people of all kinds.

But it was also kind of lonely. The Pennsylvania farm kids hated the accent I picked up in Chicago. The small-town Indiana kids didn’t really care about hunting much, and my hunter’s ed certification badge wasn’t really a mark of achievement to them. The Chicago kids – I guess they all went on to become John Hughes characters, but I don’t know because I only knew them for this little slice of their grade school lives. I had friends but they didn’t last, and I didn’t ever learn to expect them to.

So when Ben was getting ready to start kindergarten, we decided to make up our minds about where we’d be living, and we picked our house partly because we could see the elementary school he’d be going to from the front porch. I was pretty set on the idea that we’d be looking from that porch to that school every morning until middle school. That on Ben’s first day at middle school, he’ll be in a new place with friends from that school. And that when he starts high school, there’ll be familiar faces in the halls that first day – faces he’s known for almost as long as he can usefully remember anything.

Ben went on this Lady Gaga kick a couple of years ago. He loved her makeup and costumes, and “Born This Way” just sort of resonated with him. He got marked as a weirdo for it, and there was some trouble at school briefly. A group of mean girls started a playground “Ben’s a fag” campaign and he got pushed around. We briefly freaked out – I took six months of that kind of abuse from a bunch of farm kids in Pennsylvania in eighth grade – just five or six punches on the arm or in the gut every morning before gym for six months straight – and it sucked. We’d managed to “win” the elementary school lottery, though, so we could have picked another school to transfer him to the next year. But the thing we learned from the teacher when we talked to her about it was that Ben’s friends had all stuck up for him, and even if there was some stuff going on from a few shitty little kids, after the first shoving incident his friends had all just surrounded him and kept him safe. I thought about it some and realized transferring him to another school would just mean starting over, and maybe not making those friends he’d need before a mean girl clique over there decided he was a weirdo, too.

All of which is to say, that’s part of what we bought – that sense that the best school is the one his friends are at. I have to randomize my breakfast orders to keep from – whatever would happen if I let myself be known that way – but Ben gets to walk into a place where sometimes we hear the waitress behind the counter say “the guys are here,” and he can have his usual.

prologue

When I lived in Bloomington, IN, some guy spent a week in one of the student neighborhoods attacking women. The one account I read from a victim was that he walked up to her with keys sticking out from between the fingers of his balled fist, slashed her cheek open, and said, “not so pretty now” before running off.

i.

#YesAllWomen BC on campuses all over the US women are leaving their schools because their confirmed rapists are not expelled. — Soraya Chemaly (@schemaly) May 25, 2014

A while back, before Ben was born, I took a few night classes. A few of us getting out of class together had to walk four or five blocks down a quiet side street to get back to a common parking area.

So, class would let out and we’d make our way down to the street. Throw in some random travel variables — like getting backpacks repacked or chatting with classmates on the way out the door or whatever — and you’d end up with four or five of us spread out over two blocks headed the same way down a side street after dark.

Most nights, there wasn’t much to think about: Out the door, down the street, into the car, home.

One night, I ended up falling in behind a woman from my class. She was about half a block ahead. I don’t think she noticed me at first, but I stepped onto a loose metal plate and it made a big noise. She glanced over her shoulder and appeared to notice me for the first time, and I think the next several blocks were very frightening for her.

Within a block, everybody else had headed down another street. It was just the two of us. She kept glancing over her shoulder, and I could tell I was making her anxious. There was no way it made any sense to pick up the pace to just get past her — I was engaged enough to realize that — but there was a smaller, stupider part of me that was pretty fixated on just getting to my car and going home. That part wasn’t doing much problem-solving that didn’t involve getting to go the direction I wanted to go as quickly as possible.

Well, let’s not dissociate.

I wasn’t doing much problem-solving that didn’t involve getting to go the direction I wanted to go as quickly as possible.

In the end, she ended up picking up the pace, she got to her car a block ahead of me, and it finally occurred to me that if I slowed down just a bit she’d be able to get into her car without feeling quite so much like she was racing me to get something between us but distance on a dark sidewalk.

So I slowed down and she got into her car and she drove away and I quietly congratulated myself for the five percent of our separate but shared walks where I had really thought about her and what she might be going through.

ii.

Every time I get in a cab I send the cab number, and cab drivers name to someone, just in case #YesAllWomen — expert subtweeter (@meaganewaller) May 25, 2014

The next week, class let out and I went out the door with another woman in the class who’d been in my workshop group. We’d enjoyed each others' work and we were talking about it. We walked out onto the sidewalk and I noticed we were headed the same direction. I didn’t want the conversation to end quite yet, so I pointed the way she seemed to be headed and said to her, “are you headed this way, too? I’ll walk with you.”

Her face tightened for a moment, but then she agreed. We walked a few blocks, she got to her car before I got to mine, and I had yet another belated realization that she’d been nervous the whole time. She couldn’t say goodbye fast enough.

iii.

Because "Text me and let me know you got home safe" is standard, necessary and normal. #YesAllWomen — pleasedonteatjo (@pleasedonteatjo) May 25, 2014

So, when class let out on the third week it was back down onto the sidewalk and assorted variables came together to put me about half a block behind the classmate I’d walked with the week prior, just the two of us on the quiet and dark sidewalk. And — just like two weeks prior — she didn’t notice me until I made a sound. Then we spent a block with her looking over her shoulder at me, noticeably picking up the pace.

So I stopped and put my backpack down on the sidewalk to get my keys out of it, which helped her put a block between us. Then I crossed the street so I’d be on the opposite side from her, and slowed way down until she made it to her car.

iv.

I’ve done pretty much the same in similar situations ever since: If I end up behind a woman on a quiet sidewalk, I just go across the street. If I see that she’s noticed me behind her before I can do that and seems to be watching me, I’ll backtrack to the last intersection to do so.

It’s the smallest, saddest thing.

#YesAllWomen

The days of our years are threescore years and ten; and if by reason of strength they be fourscore years, yet is their strength labour and sorrow; for it is soon cut off, and we fly away. — Psalm 90:10

There is no safety in the threefold world; it is like a burning house, replete with a multitude of sufferings, truly to be feared, constantly beset with the griefs and pains of birth, old age, sickness and death, which are like fires raging fiercely and without cease. — The Lotus Sutra

9

When I was nine years old, I borrowed a collection of Star Trek stories from my dad. It included this one, wherein William Shatner, Leonard Nimoy and DeForest Kelly all end up in the 23rd century owing to some sort of freak transporter accident.

That was a pretty exciting premise to me. Since I knew that I was living in the 20th century and that Star Trek was happening in the 23rd century, I could do the math to figure out how long I had to wait to see it all for myself.

23rd century - 20th century = 3 centuries, pretty much.

So if it was 1977, then I was looking at having to wait around until 2277. I grabbed dad’s Commodore calculator (it looked like this) to help with the next part:

2277 - 1968 = 309 years.

So, dad being in seminary at the time and our family being church-going anyhow, I had some idea that some people lasted a pretty long time. Methuselah had a pretty good run. Hadn’t Noah made it to 900? Needed to check with mom, though.

Yes, she explained, people in the Bible lived a long time, “but we get threescore and ten years now.”

I knew how much a score was because Abraham Lincoln was my hero.

So …

1968 + (20 * 3) + 10 = 2038

and 2277 - 2038 = not even close, really.

Further away from now than last year’s bicentennial had been from the first Independence Day.

I just wasn’t going to make it.

21

My favorite grandfather is dying of a brain tumor. Mom goes down to Texas, hoping to make things right, but all she does is get in the way of the t.v.

23

I don’t think what I experienced was a “death trip,” exactly. I just remember that things got pretty morbid some time around dawn. I was in the tv room at the house in Indianapolis, looking out at the parking lot behind the back yard. Cody and Kevin and Bill were riding bikes in the morning fog, gliding in and out of view.

24

Hudson was so stupid and inept. They made him my buddy and told me if he didn’t make it out of basic, it’d be my fault.

The last week, we were out in the field under a tree. It was raining and Hudson had fucked something up and all he could do was cry. All I could do was put my arm around him and tell him it’d be fine.

25

Jump school seemed like a good idea. It never really occurred to me to feel frightened during the day, but every night I dreamed of falling and falling with no parachute. My subconscious mixed it up by letting me ride a mattress into the dirt one night.

26

The team’s up on the Richmond site outside of Taejon. It’s an old building behind a gate. We’ve put up the mast and we’re on the network. The team chief asks us what we’d do if the balloon went up. Oh … I know this one:

“We take our defensive positions and the one on radio watch burns the SOI and takes an axe to the COMSEC gear, then we all defend the site.”

The team chief says, “you do that. I’m gonna run my ass down the hill before it gets shot off. They won’t bother with soldiers anyhow. They’ll just dial us in and light us up.”

and

I arrive at Ft. Bragg the week a major in my brigade had a bad landing, broke his leg and the bone severed an artery. He bled out on the drop zone before anyone could find him and help him. I don’t know if he knew what was happening.

29

That last nine months I was on jump status, I was pretty sure each jump was going to kill me. If you could be on jump status, though, you were supposed to be on jump status. That’s how it was. The sergeant major would cut your wings off your chest in front of everybody otherwise.

33

They aspirated a lump in my throat on a Wednesday, the doctor fucked off on vacation before the labs came back on Thursday, and nobody would tell me anything until the next Tuesday.

It was fine.

35

Ben. He stirs some things up.

39

“I mean,” says my friend, “FORTY. Aren’t you freaking out?”

“I just don’t, I guess.”

It wasn’t a question for me though, was it? In retrospect, I regret the answer.

46

Here we are.

I still don’t.

Some days, I feel naive or clueless and I think to myself that I might be wrong, and that I might be giving the wrong answer on a cosmic test.

Some days I think, “you’ve taken advantage of a number of opportunities to consider it.”

Mostly I think we’re born in a house that’s on fire, and there’ll be a moment between flame and ash.

We’ll need to have been kind.

This aircraft is used to train astronauts in zero maneuvers, giving them about 25 seconds of weightlessness out of 65 seconds of flight in each parabola. During such training the airplane typically flies between 40-60 parabolic maneuvers. In about two thirds of these flights, this motion produces nausea due to airsickness, especially in novices, giving the plane its nickname. — Wikipedia entry on reduced gravity aircraft, a.k.a. "The Vomit Comet", photo courtesy kwc under a Creative Commons License

So there’s this moment where you’re just hovering, unmoored, between a state of going up or going down. Just there. You came from the ground, you’re going back to the ground. For that moment, though, maybe it seems like you could be going nowhere; or perhaps you’re in danger of going practically anywhere.

When you search for “vomit comet” photos you see a lot of expressions. Some people are smiling, some look very still and maybe afraid, some look determined … just 25 seconds to be in that state and learn the ropes of being that way before it’s back to normal.

I’ve never been in an airplane like that. I remember my first drop in jump school, though; the way it was so loud in the plane from the engine noise and the jump master’s shouting and the rush of the wind. Going out the door felt like what it might feel to walk in high gravity, not because of any of the physics involved but because it’s taking hours to walk five or six feet to the jump master who’s waiting to grab your static line, then more hours still to pivot and walk for the door. Maybe other people thought it was the same as walking out the front door in the morning, but to me it felt like walking into a wall of ballistic gel.

The door isn’t wider than one in your house, but between turning toward it and going out of it, it becomes as big as a drive-in movie screen showing nothing but horizon. Then out the door and the horizon flips and turns and spins. You’re not falling, you’re not flying, you’re not hanging. It’s just you and blue sky and green fields, and by the time you feel the snap of the static line telling you that one more thing has probably not gone too badly wrong, you’re in the middle of quiet like you haven’t heard in hours. You feel like you’re just hanging around up there, not going up, doesn’t feel like you’re going down. By the time you pull even with the tree line, though, you can tell Earth wants you back.

You land. Gravity works again. There’s noise, too, even if it’s just the Black Hats yelling at you to get off their goddamn drop zone, but sometimes because somebody lost a piece of gear up there and it lands right next to you with a whiz and a smack, kicking up sand. You look around, look up, orient and get used to being back down again. You start gathering your chute, bundling up silk and risers, stuffing it in a sack, and you run off the drop zone. You didn’t die, and for a few minutes maybe you’re that much more alive, but you’re not between anything anymore. Sky’s up there. Ground’s down here.