I have no idea what it’s like now, but at the time that meant that they just took all your paycheck minus maybe $20 to cover stuff you don’t get for “free” or couldn’t beg from the supply sergeant, so I was looking at six or eight weeks of being flat broke: I’d spent all my money living it up on leave.

The whole thing was pretty humiliating: Brand new to my unit, wanting to make a good impression, and suddenly my entire chain of command had me down as a deadbeat.

My team chief told me what was going on and said it was a bad look for me, and he asked if I was going to be okay. The one bright spot was that I’d set up a bunch of allotments, and the Army wouldn’t disrupt those, so other bills were getting paid, and some money I was sending home wouldn’t be touched. So I was going to be fine, I was just embarrassed, and $20 was going to be okay to cover toothpaste, starch, and boot polish. My team chief was careful to point out that boot polish and starch were my new priorities, because I needed to not look like the bum I appeared to be.

He ended the conversation with “you’re one of those new 31Us … so you know a lot about computers?”

Yes, I knew a lot about computers. So much so that back in advanced training, when we got to the instructional block on the UNIX-based combat control system the instructor had gotten sick of me answering all his questions about UNIX in too much detail and just put me in the front of the class to explain it to everyone else.

“Can you come over to my house for dinner? I need help with mine.”

So I came over and helped him with a computer he’d just gotten and couldn’t get to work. Then he offered to drive me back to the barracks.

On the way back he said, “I need to stop by the store,” so I said okay. He put a bunch of stuff in his cart – shoe polish, starch, three cartons of my brand of smokes, coffee, junk food. When he let me off at the barracks he handed me the bags.

“Save your money for beer until this is over.”

I said thanks, embarrassed. He said “mission first, people always.”

On this particular day I am trying to pay that forward. It is not being made easy by everyone but the human in the middle of it all, but I’m going to try.

Newport’s take on how to do that starts from what I guess you could call a naive footing, dumping everything and then considering it without a lot of preconception. I think that is fine, but I’d been giving a lot of this some thought already, have done a few declutters in the past, and had heard Newport talk before reading his book, so I colored outside the lines and skipped a few steps with some parts, but kept a few things from his approach, too.

I have a few things in mind:

I want to radically pare back the number of tools hanging from my belt. I keep a lot of things hanging around for this edge case or that, this possible scenario or that. I decided to reduce as much as possible by getting rid of things that repeated each other. For instance, I like Ulysses well enough but it repeats other things and it has a subscription fee. So, yes, it can post to micro.blog and has a few other tricks, but none that I need. I’ve also bounced back and forth between RSS readers for whatever reason, but Feedly’s native app works great for my workflow.

I’ve also built up a lot of papercuts with the things I do use regularly, such as:

• How do I block a site in Feedly so that I can keep a little serendipity with a few eclectic sources without constantly bumping into the same site with a paywall I’ll never click through?
• How do I get something into an Obsidian inbox using a shortcut to keep me from pecking around inside Obsidian and ultimately forgetting the fleeting note I wanted to create?
• Why does micro.blog pick the images it does to send when I crosspost to Twitter?
• Can I get more folders in SaneBox without paying more? How much would I have to pay to get more?
• I’ve got good automated note import into Obsidian, but am I linking ideas and and concepts adequately? (A: No.) How can I fix that?

And I want to do the sort of core thing, which is unplug my brain from all the social media inputs and stuff that doesn’t feel nutritious.

The more I thought about it all, the more I realized there was a project there. Turns out that trying to be more intentional means doing stuff like writing it all down and prioritizing.

Fixing Todos

So, realizing I needed to capture tasks, I started by cleaning up my todo situation. I’ve been living in a few places over the past few years. I recently tried to retrench on Apple’s Reminders because it has gotten pretty good, but it turns out not good enough. It’s great that you can nest reminders under each other, it is terrible that when you painstakingly set up a morning routine with subtasks and then turn on recurrence, the only thing that actually reoccurs is the parent item.

I also gave Obsidian a shot, on the premise that it is pretty much org-mode except with Markdown, an actually good mobile app, and no dependency on Emacs. It is great, but it also has some challenges in terms of making quick entries, and the task management stuff that would take it to the next level has a lot of the same issues most plaintext todo systems have in terms of awkward and visually cluttery metadata. org-mode does a great job of hiding or restyling that stuff, but you’re still living in Emacs, and the power comes at the cost of a complex and sometimes brittle pile of configuration code and stability-threatening Emacs extensions.

What else? Omnifocus, Todoist, Remember the Milk, Trello, and Workflowy all suggested themselves. I won’t go into why not for each, but it came down to “want Apple-native, a good mobile experience, decent capture, subtasking, recurrence, decent in-task notes, and integration with my calendar.”

So, I went with Things. I’ve had a license for years, I’ve always preferred it to Omnifocus for its relative visual calm.

I could have kept my old Things tasks around and cleared them all out, but I decided to just wipe and start over, and borrowed a page from Getting Things Done by doing an initial braindump into my new trusted system (for tasks, not ideas … that’s Obsidian, but I’ll get into that some day). A lot of the things I knew I’d want to get to in my digital declutter came out during that dump. I made myself sit still, get everything out in its simplest form without trying to schedule, label, or organize.

Once I did the braindump I did start looking for organizing principles. Things has the whole “Areas” concept, so “Personal” and “Work” presented themselves as obvious candidates for top-level. I also added a “Meta” area, which I’ll get to.

So I hucked everything into either “Personal” or “Work” then started sorting into projects, subtasks, and tags.

The “Declutter” project had a lot of items, so I took advantage of Things’ ability to create headings, and broke the project into:

• Tools
• Services
• Media Outlets
• Practices
• Social Media

Into each I put all the things I use or have around, all the papercuts I’ve thought about, and all the questions I wanted to answer:

• What do you need a break from?
• What do you need to do to be intentional about this thing? Is that practical or useful?
• When you adopted this thing, what aspirational idea did you have about it?

Daily/Weekly/Monthly Routine

Recurrence in my todo tool is important to me because I want to codify a daily routine I’ve had on and off over the years, starting back when I was stationed at Ft. Bragg and started and ended the day with a pen, a legal pad, and a list of tasks:

• Morning: Write down deliverables. Start doing things.
• Evening: Make sure you crossed everything off you managed to get done. Tear off the sheet, copy over the undone stuff to tomorrow’s list and leave the pad front and center on your desk when you shut down for the day.

Since then, I’ve tended to move todos into a digital tool, but that list is just part of the daily page.

For starters, there are some prompts for morning and evening:

• What are the three most important things today?
• What are you most concerned about right now?
• What are you most happy about right now?
• What happened today?
• What went well today?
• What could have been improved today?

I also have tasks for each morning:

• Reviewing todos and blocking time in my calendar to get to them.
• Reviewing places where a deliberate break will be a good idea.
• Reviewing the day for manageability and pushing things out that aren’t time sensitive if I need some space.
• Review my email inbox

My weekly and monthly kickoffs are pretty similar in shape and intent: Try to predict where I’ll need time or space and get ahead of the week or month.

To support this routine, I tweaked Sanebox to send me work email digests at the beginning and end of the day so I can quickly sweep through and bulk archive or flag things.

Writing it down

Getting my todos straightened out and having a daily routine to stick to gave me a safe space to think in, so I turned to Obsidian and set up a few pages to write down everything I was thinking about.

I’ve got a tentative Zettelkasten-like folder and document structure using a few plugins:

• Daily pages as a recipient of fleeting notes. Fleeting notes are meant to be ephemeral, so I could have gone with a lot of things, but I also added …
• … the Lumberjack plugin, which allows me to make Shortcut actions to do quick capture under a “Fleeting Notes” heading on my current daily page. The action lives as an icon on the dock of my iPad and iPhone, and I can get at it from the task bar on my Mac.
• Zettelkasten numbering for permanent notes
• Readwise to import highlights from Pocket, Kindle, and web clippings into a “Literary Notes” folder

Thanks to Things and Obsidian having URL schemes, it’s possible to link back and forth between the two apps, so my Things declutter project can link back to the index page for the writing I’m doing about that project in Obsidian and vice versa.

Progress So Far

That’s a lot of table-setting, but I had some downtime today so I was able to dig in on some of the actual tasks in the project: Unsubscribing to media, deleting apps, asking questions on support forums or via help forms to address papercuts, disconnecting auto-posting tools, paring down follow lists, fixing papercuts as I was given answers or figured things out for myself, comparing features on tools in the inventory.

Something I never used with Things before but now really appreciate is the Logbook area, where completed tasks go. I’ve adopted the practice, when a task is about answering a question or learning something, to include the answer in the notes. I really like being able to end the day by going back to the Logbook and seeing everything I checked off.

Now for the hard but nice part

All of this was to get me into a place where I can unplug from social media for a month.

Things I’ll stop doing:

• Looking in on social media.
• Posting anything to social media, including automated stuff.
• Adding any new digital tools, even just to play with them.
• My nightly pre-bedtime YouTube binge.

Things I’ll keep doing:

• Reading and keeping notes

• Writing and posting small entries about what I read

• Taking pictures and posting them to my blog

• Writing about my declutter:

  • What do you need a break from?
  • What do you need to do to be intentional about this thing? Is that practical or useful?
  • What aspirational ideas do you have about this thing?

• Keep in touch with people over email, texts, Signal, etc. Hopefully even more.

• Reach out to people with whom social media is my only real contact and make sure there’s a way to stay in touch. I don’t see a bright future for Facebook in all this.

Things I’m adding:

• A daily journal practice.
• A real effort to maintain a Zettelkasten for my reading and writing. This feels intimidating for some reason. The system is easy, but I’ve only recently restarted my reading habits and I’m curious about what will emerge. I’ll be sure to document whether I’ve become an idiot.

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.

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.

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.

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.