Everything we’re going through as modern humans — it feels fated, no?
We’re caught in this Herculean struggle between our animal selves — our neurology, our inability to look away from distraction — and the thing we want most.
We want peace in the face of death and freedom from the fear of it. We want to be held and comforted and told we’ll be okay, told that we needn’t spend our entire waking lives worrying about what’s coming. We want so desperately to be loved.
There’s nothing else that matters, is there? Nothing more important to us than that assurance, and we’d do anything for it.
But we can’t look away from our screens long enough to experience it. We can’t look away from the technology that’s captured our minds by hijacking our neurology. We’re prisoners — waking prisoners — in this life, hostage to the algorithms we’ve created.
Our thoughts are shaped by how information moves. Think of how information moves in the era of the internet, and why. Think of how our brains now have access to world events almost as soon as they happen. Think of all the information, the news of the day, all the entertainment created each day by each member of our species, all of it accessible at your fingertips.
It’s too much for the human brain to resist. It’s an impossible task to expect one person, let alone an entire generation of them, to turn off their phones. I hate to be so certain when I say it, but that will never, ever happen.
It’s horrible to watch, terrifying to know, and scarier still to find yourself in with the inmates, both prisoner and witness.
I've been sitting in this tiny cottage in central Idaho, sick as hell, for the last four days. I was hit with some kind of virus unlike anything I've experienced as an adult — extremely elevated heart rate, nausea, diarrhea, heart palpitations, an inability to feel warm (of which I was reminded is actually my body's response to an elevated temperature — which according to my watch, topped out at 104 degrees). It was the most unnerving feeling I've had as an adult — the complete loss of control of my body. No amount of controlled breathing could bring down my heart rate, no amount of focus would prevent my heart from skipping beats. I was convinced, very early that first morning, that I might not make it through the night.
All this at the conclusion of a day that was otherwise sublime. I ran errands that morning, tried out a new restaurant for lunch (perhaps it was food poisoning?), and drove to a hot springs in the mountains that night (or maybe a norovirus I picked up from the water?) where I sat in solitude for hours, reading Alan Watts' The Wisdom of Insecurity. I remember thinking there in the water that if I were to die there & then, I would die at some kind of peace.
Shitting my brains out on the toilet twelve hours later, I couldn't have felt any less at peace with death — certainly not in such an undignified way. In a hot spring in the mountains, alone? Yes. On the toilet in an Airbnb in a remote mountain town, surrounded by other people in houses just a few feet away, yet still alone? Absolutely not.
Funny how we carry around these precious little delusions. We invent these elaborate constructions about the way we think the world works, the stories we tell ourselves of who we are and what we mean to one another. None of it is real, of course, none of it grounded in anything external to ourselves. All these narratives we conjure are subjective — they exist only in our heads.
I have a few things on my mind that I have been wanting to work out on the page. A few topics where I feel I've been wrong or merely where my thinking has evolved over the time I've been writing here. Politics, artificial intelligence, death, my personal relationships. Yet I've been reticent to do this — why?
In the two years I've maintained Dispatches, it's been curious to watch the way my writing has brought some people closer, including a few folks I've never had the pleasure of meeting in person. More interesting is how my writing has pushed others away, particularly when I write about politics. Last summer, when faced with what felt like (and by all practical accounts was) a binary choice between Biden or Trump, I supported RFK. Friends I've known for years reacted with anger, derision, condescension, disbelief, their noses turning up and away. Eight months later, a few still refuse to speak to me.
I'm interested in those responses and what it says about our culture at this present moment. I think I've been fairly magnanimous with my opinions on the rest of the political spectrum (though not at the expense of humor). You're welcome to disagree. Yet as I've watched the first month of the second Trump presidency unfurl, I'm astounded by the reactions of those on the Right and the Left. It's like I'm witness to two entirely different realities, and I've begun to feel as though I might occupy a unique position in our culture — an interlocutor.
I was in the shower the other day, before the virus, when a question came to me: who is my intended audience? When I'm writing here on Dispatches, who am I writing this to?
Thinking on it, the most likely answer, however broad, was 'urban liberals.'
I spent my younger life living in cities, but about ten years ago, I realized they no longer made me happy (and perhaps never did). As expressed before, I felt the creeping gnaw of groupthink descend on liberals everywhere once Obama was elected, and though I couldn't have expressed it so clearly then, it was profoundly unsettling. Attending grad school in Portland was a hell of an experience — one I would not trade — but I started to notice how smug and certain many people around me were of the way they saw the world. There was a right and wrong way to live, and they were convinced they were living the right way.
At the time, I wasn't sophisticated enough to articulate my unease, but I was nonetheless compelled to leave. I feel no comfort surrounded by people that think as I do, and if I'm honest, I fear for those who aren't themselves bothered by orthodoxy. Yet there's something that compels most humans to feel secure in their worldview, to surround themselves with a community where they feel safe and protected. Inevitably, this invites groupthink. It's largely why a city like Portland exists (and needs to exist): a lot of people who live in these liberal enclaves have felt driven from their homes elsewhere — small, rural, conservative, often religious places where the intolerance of difference was rampant, repressive, and toxic. I grew up in one of those towns. I was gay, though not yet out, and the hatred, bigotry, intolerance I felt from my "community" was palpable.
No wonder people left and moved to cities. No one wants to feel hated or judged for what they are, and let's not mince words: for a long, long time, the provenance for that bigotry was conservatism. Mainly, though not exclusively, religious conservatism. It's right there in the name…conservative.
But things in this country have changed over the last twenty years. The culture is far more tolerant than it once was. I see this first-hand, living most of my adult life in small, rural towns across the Mountain West. Plainly, my sexuality no longer seems to be a point of contention. Sure, there are (and will always be) times when it comes up. Every time I walk into an auto parts store, I have to fight the instinct to deepen my voice and slow my gait a beat or two. I know how I look and sound — I'm thin, wear clothes that fit my body, and have a voice that once you hear it, can't be unheard as 'gay voice' — and in order to get the guys (always men) behind the counter to really listen to my questions, I can't help but code switch. But largely, my need to do this has faded with time. Some of this has come with age and with feeling secure in who I am, but some of it is the culture having changed. I rarely feel threatened over my sexuality like I once did.
But my point is this: I was subconsciously writing for urban liberals because they were the bubble from which I was escaping.
Or maybe I was writing to them because I blame them for the broken systems in which I live. Each time I hear a liberal react to something Trump does with horror or disbelief, a bit of rage flares. Where the hell have you been, I wonder. They aren't living where I am, that's for sure. Everywhere I go, in every small town across this country (aside from those clustered near moneyed enclaves), there's been strong support for what Trump is attempting to do — gut the federal government — for years. Years! So how can so many liberals be so shocked that Trump is following through on it?
It all comes down to trust. For years, I've watched friends and family — all well-meaning, thoughtful, loving people — put their faith in certain institutions. Often the same institutions I have some measure of faith in, too. Old-fashioned shoe-leather journalism: newspapers, cable news, etc. Education: many people in my life have at least a bachelors, and many of them have gone on to get a masters degree, too. And let's not forget government. Three foundational institutions in our culture that have served many of the people I know.
But most of my friends and family are not living in poverty. Most of my friends and family did not grow up in poverty. Most of my family and friends grew up with two loving parents that have remained married. And while most of my friends cannot afford a home, almost all have them have careers that might allow them to one day.
The people in my life are not a representative cross section of America.
But I would argue I live amongst a very representative cross section of America. My town, as well as the other small towns I've lived in over the years, are husks of what they once were. The husks of old lumber or paper mills dot these towns, empty buildings line the streets. Abandoned railroad rights-of-way hash the landscapes I love. It's obvious that better days are in the past, not the future.
I'm not here to litigate the economic reasons for this (though I would happily criticize the effects of NAFTA on rural America until I'm blue in the face), but we cannot deny it has happened. And when people in these towns are left without purpose, without a strong community, when their kids move to cities because there are no jobs at home, what do we expect people to do? Be happy with it?
There's this unreasonable expectation liberals have of people in rural America — that if things aren't working out for them economically, "just leave." Worse still, "learn to code." Remember when Hillary told the coal miners of West Virginia the government would put them out of business? What a condescending, tone-deaf thing to say. People of all kinds take pride in their work, however dangerous or outdated it might be, and to tell them we'll put them behind a desk, well, that sounds like hell to me. I'll pass on that promised monotony. Liberals, almost always more educated and better-paid, seem to think everyone wants to live as they do.
It's this condescension that rural people find so distasteful. I find myself recoiling from some things my liberal friends say — things that just slide out of their mouths — about rural people. Because people in rural spaces are more conservative, often more religious, often less racially diverse, they're labeled as 'stupid' or 'backwards.' I've seen this in my own profession — institutions like the New York Times send reporters into the rural areas once every four years to figure out just why on earth they could vote for someone like Trump. And that they have to send reporters out is precisely the issue: they aren't here already. Rural spaces are ignored, forgotten, and left behind.
What do you think this does to the trust people had in institutions like journalism and media? When you turn on the TV, your life is no longer reflected. Not forty years ago, much of the culture looked and sounded like you. I think it's undoubtedly a good thing to have more diversity in media and culture — white, middle America was for too long the default — but the culture has swung so far in the other direction. Now, rural white people are too often coded as dumb, unintelligent, ignorant, hateful. And while it certainly felt that way back in my home town growing up gay, I can promise you things have changed. Just because someone isn't "educated" doesn't mean they aren't intelligent, and it certainly doesn't mean they're stupid.
A vote for Trump does not mean someone is hateful or ignorant. That's what liberals still cannot seem to grasp.
But let's get back to trust.
What happens when every institution you once trusted no longer serves your best interest?
What happens when journalism no longer covers your town, or the issues you care about? What happens when the town newspaper folds, and now the only news organizations left are headquartered in faraway cities?
What happens when the universities you work tirelessly to send your kids to are full of people that think you are racist and bigoted just for being white? (Lest anyone say this doesn't happen, I can attest to this one personally, and at more than one university.) When they teach queer theory and identity politics and your children no longer share your values? I'm not advocating for or against those values, but just imagine watching younger generations move away for an education and economic opportunity, never to return? What do you think that does to a community?
I'll spare you the guesswork: it breaks the heart — and back — of the community.
And let's not get started on banks or the stock market or the government selling out your jobs to other countries.
And then the liberals talk about you with open condescension and derision.
Who would you trust?
My country, the United States, is in a mess.
We're in a precarious spot, teetering on the edge of an oligarchic dictatorship. Elon Musk is rampaging through the federal bureaucracy — a bloated, over-stuffed bureaucracy that needs to be audited and thinned, by the way! — with all the grace and magnanimity of an angry middle-schooler. It didn't have to be this way. But for so long, those on the Left insisted that the concerns of so many Americans were unjustified, irrational, unwarranted. The government wasn't too bloated, it was working for you, the economy is strong — just look at the stock market.
But the uncomfortable truth so many of these aghast liberals can't seem to wrap their minds around is this: the system hasn't been working for other people for a long, long time. The system has benefitted the wealthy, the investors, the corporations, the landowners, the banks we Americans bailed out in 2008. Both the Left and the Right give tax breaks to the already-rich and routinely sell out the poor. This has been happening for decades.
Do I think Trump is going to reverse this trend? Of course not. My family stands to benefit financially from another Trump term, just like we did during his first. I don't think Trump gives a rat's ass about anyone other than himself, and he give power and money to anyone that tickles his fragile ego. Musk, Putin, and every other grifter, despot, or billionaire. Let's not bullshit ourselves — we all know someone like him. Maybe a kid we went to school with, maybe some insecure guy at work. A deeply insecure man with a fragile ego is a dangerous thing to behold, for he will do anything to avoid feeling the ache of his insecurities. Anything.
As I've said before, we are all now at the mercy of his fragile ego. But the blame for this rests solely on the backs of over-educated liberals, on backs of the people who conflated their education with intelligence. Their entire ideology was supposedly grounded in the principles of Enlightenment — reason, empowerment of the individual, the goddamn social contract. Yet the beckon call of neoliberalism — the profound allude of money and comfort and (a false sense of) certainty — proved to be too strong, and they sold out their fellow citizen. Worse still, they continue to blame him for his failure.
I don't have a tidy conclusion to this musing, but I can say this much: I'm tired of subconsciously writing to an audience of people that seem to have no sense of curiosity, to people too afraid to venture out of their enclaves and ideological bubbles, to people who turn their nose up at an article or a podcast just because it doesn't fit their already-determined ideological and political worldview. I'm tired of translating for people who themselves express so little compassion for their fellow citizens, despite making so much noise to the contrary.
This profound incuriosity isn't confined to the Left, of course. But there's an unbearable hypocrisy to anyone loudly proclaiming to care about others, yet so obviously not giving a single shit about those who don't think as they do.
Maybe some day soon I'll have more sympathy for liberals, but not today.
There is something pleasingly pure about having a task to be accomplished and then accomplishing it. It is the exact opposite of writing, and pretty close to the opposite of teaching.
OpenAI is also using the bigger version of Strawberry to generate data for training Orion, said a person with knowledge of the situation. That kind of AI-generated data is known as “synthetic.” It means that Strawberry could help OpenAI overcome limitations on obtaining enough high-quality data to train new models from real-world data such as text or images pulled from the internet.
Using AI to create data on which to train ever-larger models of AI.
Huh.
Well, now that I know this, yeah, of course this is the next step. The whole of the internet is not nearly large enough (nor does most of it quialify as “high quality data”) to train the ever-larger models.
As the summer stretches on, I’m more in line with Gary Marcus than I’ve ever been. The anxiety I have over artificial general intelligence (AGI) — defined by ChatGPT as “a type of artificial intelligence that has the ability to understand, learn, and apply knowledge across a wide range of tasks at a level comparable to or exceeding that of a human being” — is waning, at least temporarily. I don’t see the path for LLMs in their current iteration to become AGI, at least not in-and-of themselves.
But will LLMs be enough to fool many, many people into thinking that they are sentient? Of course. They’ve long passed that threshold. And that’s remarkably dangerous in a populace with little to no understanding of how computers work.
There’s a short-sightedness of the AI optimists that willfully ignores just how incomprehensible this stuff is to non-tech people — the people I engage with every day, often within some form of tech support. Most everyone has no clue what AI or LLMs are, let alone how they work.
Sure, those optimists would say, but most people have no clue how a tractor works, or an alarm system or a steel mill or an elevator, either.
And while that’s true, none of those things are designed to present as human, and therein lies the danger. When computers can present as human beings convincingly enough to fool other human beings — and other computers! — we are in trouble.
We will adapt. Humans adapt. But this doesn’t condone recklessly incorporating AI into our lives in ever-more complex ways without being sure the general population understands how it works.
What (still) keeps me up at night is not the emergence of AGI, it is the disruption that regular ol’ AI will have on our lives. Just look at the release of the ‘Reimagine’ feature on the new Google Pixel 9 phones. John is correct to point out that “this technology becoming ubiquitous feels inevitable,” but does it have to be? I’m not saying that it isn’t inevitable, I’m saying why isn’t there more of a conversation around these things?
Here I am, bemoaning the loss of the old ways in the face of an inevitable future. Sure. But at any juncture, humans have the ability to question the ethical implications of new technology and to not be held prisoner by its "inevitability."
Right?
To use an example the AI industry itself so often uses: nuclear weapons! We’ve seemed to reach consensus as a species that using them is too dangerous…after we tried them out…and used them on other humans twice…and keep them around as deterrent…for the last 80 years. (That's a lot of caveats!) And nukes, unlike AI, were not given to the masses.
While I’m privy to simmering conversations of how AI will change our lives, the nuances of the subject are nowhere near mainstream. And until it is, I’m unsure of how ethical it is to deploy this technology.
And now we’ve arrived at the very obvious: of course we’re going to release this technology upon the masses, consequences be damned. This is the very story of humanity! This is how progress and innovation happen.
Up until now, most people would argue this ‘progress’ has been a net positive. I have my doubts.
But my doubts aside, let’s presume that technological progress has been a net good for us all. Who’s to say there’s not some tipping point, some innovation that frays the fabric of society, that hot-wires our neurology so thoroughly that we can’t help but trigger a collapse? Things can be good…until they aren't. And to assume progress will always tend toward benefit is just as delusional, just as grounded in confirmation bias, as infinite economic growth.
When we won’t be able to agree on the veracity of a photo, of anything printed, of what we saw in a video, what then? When a shared truth can no longer be shared, then what? When we cannot agree on anything, how do we progress as a species?
I'm either a cynic or an optimist — I do not believe any future is inevitable.
You build yourself up. You think ‘look at how good I’ve been, so helpful and earnest.’ Then you wake up one morning and realize your head is a mess. This beautiful construction you’ve made isn’t as shiny as you thought, not nearly as stable. There are cracks in the walls. You have not been born anew, and you are not that good. You’re afraid, sad, dark. And the dark leaches into the ground, pulling you with it.
It strikes me as somewhat unbelievable that I should have such interesting, kind, intelligent, thoughtful friends.
If life were a lottery, I somehow hit the jackpot, and despite my numerous anxieties and gripes and fears about the future, I'm a remarkably lucky human being.
…I was about to start writing my second novel. It was about a wealthy family on Long Island who lose their money, the leakage of my frustrations at watching the middle class disappear and at the moneylessness of my own youth. (Let’s all agree, for the sake of this story, that relative moneylessness isn’t a dollar amount but a state of mind and stomach born of your own particular circumstance.) I was grappling with a question I had, which was this: Who was better off, people who were born with money and never had to worry about their survival, or people (like me) who didn’t feel they had the financial stability and who had to learn to be survivors on their own? Did having money doom you in a way?
I wanted to see the Teiches because I was embarrassed to report that, though the fictional family in my unfinished novel bore only rudimentary biographical resemblance to them, a kidnapping kept finding its way into the plot. There was something I couldn’t resist thematically about it, because it elucidated one of the many paradoxes of money: that money can put you in a kind of danger even as it brings you safety, too.
People (especially those who don’t read) so often assume that a writer is in control of a story, when it’s always the other way around.
I’ve long struggled with talking about my own writing, about the craft of it. I rarely-if-ever talk about it with non-writers, as they simply can’t understand. But I try at times to elucidate the process both here and elsewhere on the internet in hopes of discovering, well, what exactly?
As the adage goes, writers write what we know, and thus writing is extraordinarily revealing. We cannot hide who we are, not convincingly. And while something inside compels me to write “my truth” (groan), I’ve read enough Greek and Roman mythology to know a relentless pursuit of truth tends to become a lonely endeavor. Honesty tends not to win you friends or lovers.
So then how do I balance vulnerability and honesty? Where do I find the courage to reveal the ugly, anxious, embarrassing parts of my self in my work? How do I trust that I’ll be met with some measure of grace when I struggle mightily to give it to others?
As of late, understanding that a story writes itself is table stakes for any meaningful connection. Ideas come to us, they are not of us, and this is the foundation of every relationship, every personal interaction, every bit of writing in my life.
Perhaps because of this, I often feel alone and a bit adrift, looking out on the world with earnest curiosity.
To wake up early—earlier the dogs and cats—and sip my morning coffee. To sit quietly with friends, unafraid of the silence. Plenty of warm showers and hot springs. A few old Star Wars toys laying around—cheap pieces of plastic that bring me joy. Spirited conversation, sometimes political.
A home in a quiet town, away from the noise of the culture. A place to retreat to retreat to when everything else becomes too much — the din of relations, the screeches of polity, the frantic need to make money.
A table, preferably in the garage, upon which to make models. Trains, ships, planes... little things to glue and paint while deep in thought. A garden with wild sprinklers.
Books, but not too many. Too many can erode my focus.
A home near the mountains, visible from my window. The promise of an adventure, of a journey into the great interior. Capable hiking boots — the kind that can take me anywhere. A mechanic or two as kind and thoughtful and thorough as those I now have.
Companionship, but not too much of it. Too much can erode my focus.
Neighbors that talk politics. Neighbors that bring over vegetables. Neighbors that play with my dogs.
Dogs. Many, many dogs.
A tent at the edge of things, from which I can look down and observe. Too close and my sanity frays, but from a tent on the edge of things, I can have space to make sense of it all.
What kind of memories could I have shared with my loved ones if I had known the difference between what I thought I wanted and what I didn’t want anymore?
I largely don’t feel lonely around my family anymore. In my twenties? Absolutely. In my early thirties? Yes. But now, I’ve come to appreciate my time spent with them, even if I know myself enough to want it in fits and starts.
Reading this piece, I’m struck by the plight of any writer in a relationship. Writing is an attempt to get at some truth, whether I arrive there or not. But how does one maintain relationships with people when doing so?
There are so many things I want to write, but don’t for fear of disrupting my relationships.
I once thought that all truths must be laid bare, the cards left to fall where they may. But now I’m not as sure. ‘Telling it like it is’ can feel both indulgent and crass. It can feel a little too good.
I still feel an insatiable need to write or say what’s real, but it’s tempered with, well, call it what you want: age, experience, cynicism, common sense, defeatism.
There is a peculiar desire to think profound thoughts on holidays. Christmas marks the emotional passage of a year, whereas new years is merely the changing of some numbers, so it's tempting to leave behind something of weight and heft. A list, a retrospective.
I have nothing like that to offer.
Merely: This is a strange and wonderful time to be alive, is it not?
There is a familiar pattern to my writing. To my actual writing.
I sit at my desk. I start to write. I build up momentum.
A few pages in, I start to think how people might respond to it. I think of the thousands of oh, that's easy for you to says and well, you've never had tos I've heard over the years and I slow down.
Then I stop. And I erase what I've written.
I have a lot of ideas, some of them good. I think I know the way things should be better than most people. I have a strong desire to change the world, to make this planet a better, kinder place for all creatures, not just humans.
But when you’ve had a life like mine, how can you tell anyone else how to live theirs? When I’ve been afforded so much, how can I tell others how it should be?
Thing is, all those that’s easy for you to says? They’re not wrong. It is easier for me to say certain things, to reach certain conclusions. But the irony remains: just because some conclusions are easier to reach, it doesn’t make those conclusions wrong.
When you’re a beneficiary of luck and capitalism as I have been, no one wants to hear your fucking opinion. Being born to two kind, loving people? Pure luck. I may not have a lot of power and I may not have a lot of money, but I don’t have any debt. I don’t need anything and I want very little. That is true freedom.
This is why I delete. It’s the same urge that drives me out into the woods or up into the mountains. Let’s face it together: I am not going to change this world. No matter how good my ideas, no matter how right my conclusions, no one wants to hear that shit from me. This culture loathes imperfect messengers, no matter how good a point they might have.
So rather than complain, rather than coming off as a spoiled brat, even if I’m not wrong… I keep my mouth shut and retreat.
I feel it acutely in the morning, right when I wake up. My dreams are pleasant and vivid and in them, I’m still me, just a slightly different version of myself. But I wake with the feeling that this person in my dreams is closer to the real me than the one I inhabit throughout the day.
Tomorrow afternoon, I have to put down one of my dogs. I'm heartbroken, which is no surprise. I've had him for sixteen months, though shortly after I adopted him, I was told that he had between two and six left. I had been volunteering at the shelter where the manager kept him behind the front desk — the spot for special animals that don't deserve the frazzled nerves of being back in the kennels. As we left for a walk, we stopped at my car for a leash and he propped his two front feet up on the runner. I knew then and there.
An elderly man with mobility issues, he could never jump, but he's done a damn good job of using his front legs to compensate. For much of our first year, he would pull himself up the steep stairs of my 130-year-old home, insistent on sleeping upstairs. (I didn't protest.) I would lift his front legs onto the bed, then run my hands along his sides and down his back legs, grabbing his back ankles and lifting those into bed, too.
Shortly before I adopted him, he had surgery to remove eight or so tumors growing in his body. Shortly after I brought him home, an x-ray showed a grapefruit-sized tumor growing under his intestine and the vet said he likely had only a few months left. Almost since the beginning, I've been preparing for death.
The last sixteen months haven't been easy. He's a 14-or-15-year-old dog with mobility issues, which means he wasn't able to come hiking with me and my other dog. The two of us would venture out only for the day, always sure to be home to hang out with Vito. He forced me to compromise, to grow up a little. It was brutally hot for several weeks last summer, and I did something I had long been morally opposed to: bought an air conditioner. Anything for that dog.
After many months of him being relatively mobile, his back hips started to get worse. I decided to let him sleep downstairs on his heated bed, and I put a gate up at the stairs to make sure my other kept him company. I did my best to cover my wood floors with something to make it easier for him to walk. I bought traction socks. He takes pain medication each night, usually wrapped in some lunch meat.
But time takes its toll. The grapefruit is now a football. He no longer stands at the window and barks at the neighbors as he once did incessantly. He can no longer control his bowels, so he goes when he needs to. (This hasn't be a problem as it's easy enough to clean up.) His back left leg goes out if he stands too long while eating or getting a drink. His dark skin is beginning to show as his soft winter undercoat has started shedding. A few days ago, I came home to him collapsed by the back door, unable to get up.
I know it's time, yet I'm unprepared. How am I unprepared?
I've been preparing for this for the last sixteen months. I've been emotionally on edge most of that time, if I'm honest, and I'm exhausted by it. My life has radically changed — my world gotten much smaller, more contained — because of him. In the literal sense, he's been a labor of love.
Now it's time to send him on his way. To put him down. To have him killed. To let him die.
I called the vet yesterday and scheduled it for tomorrow. Now that I have, I'm both relieved and anxious, sure that I'm doing the right thing punctuated by moments of doubt. His eyes haven't changed since the day we met and he's every bit as "in there" as he was 16 months ago. Yet his body is giving out, his breathing labored. He's tired.
I wonder what his life was like before me, all those 13 years. I was told a story about his past, though I presume much of it is apocryphal (as stories in small towns like these tend to be). Did he seem so thankful to be home with us because he had been neglected, abused? On the eve of our last day together, I want him to lay next to me and tell me his life story.
He has been such a good friend. I'm going to feel lost without him.
A few weeks ago, my only friend in this town died. Fifty-one years my senior, he was my neighbor across the street.
Four years ago, when we first met, I was wary. He would come to my fence as I was gardening, talking about immigrants coming over the southern border or something else he had seen on Fox News — but as our relationship matured and I learned to steer the conversation away from political issues (or, if I’m honest, indulge him a bit), we struck up a friendship.
Last summer, when his Android phone quit working, he walked over to my fence and asked me about “those iPhones you keep telling me about.” We bought a used SE on eBay. Within a few months, he had upgraded to a brand new iPhone, an Apple TV, an Apple Watch. He took to technology — well-designed, thoughtful technology — in a way I had never seen in someone his age. He loved learning about the capabilities of this incredible tool that fit in his pocket.
Long before he moved to this small town, he was a globe-trotter. He was born in Brooklyn in the 30s, became an Airborne Ranger in the Korean War, and went on to work at IBM, American Satellite, and other long-diminished-yet-bedrock tech companies. He told stories of setting up satellite uplinks in Alaska, of living in Rome, of business meetings with executives all over the world. He moved often — Missouri, Virginia, California, Italy, Minnesota — before settling in this small town in 2002. The tumult of 9/11 on the east coast caused him to re-assess where he wanted to be, and for some reason, he chose this tiny town.
Seventeen years later, I would move here, into a 130-year-old home across the street from his. We got to know each other over the next four years. I painted his garage as he told stories. I would help him with his new iPhone, or try my best to help him with his old Android. I mowed his lawn, shoveled his snow. Initially, he asked how much my services would cost, and when I told him to knock it off — he was a neighbor, after all — he took to me. I don’t think he was accustomed to people being decent without a price of some kind. It wasn’t long after his new phone that he’d start calling 2–3 times a day, asking about this or that, how to use the Find My app to share his location with his niece, or just to ask where I was hiking that day. Once, I FaceTimed him from the top of a mountain not far from our houses and he was amazed. Just that morning, I had been in his living room helping him with something or other, and now I was on a mountaintop? And we were videochatting? He relished those moments.
On a very snowy night a few weeks ago, I walked across the street to shovel his back porch. He heard the shovel on cement and cracked the back door. His voice sounding weak, he asked me to come inside. “I’ve got a question for you.” I walked in a few minutes later to him sitting on his couch. His hair was disheveled, his voice thin. He was clearly not feeling well. He had been vomiting for nearly 24 hours and asked if these were symptoms of covid. “I don’t think so,” I replied, “but I have some tests across the street.” I walked across the street, grabbed some covid tests and Thera-Flu, and walked back to his place. He didn’t want to take a test yet, so I put them on the counter. I asked if he wanted anything, if I could take him to the hospital, told him that I was worried about dehydration. He insisted on staying put, but if in the morning he wasn’t feeling better, he’d let me drive him to the hospital.
“Call me if you need anything. I mean that. Anything.” I told him as I got ready to leave.
“Thanks, buddy,” he said. He thanked me that way often, but this time his voice sounded different. Resigned. I heard both gratitude and finality. I walked across the street and messaged a friend of mine, telling her I was unsure he would survive the night.
I say this as a native son, born & raised in the Midwest heartland in a rural town not that far from a big city. I now live in an another rural town, this one far more remote than the one where I was raised, in another part of the country. On a political map, my life has been inverted: where I once lived in a blue part of a red state, I now live in the reddest part of a blue state. I spent much of my twenties moving from city to city across the country, from the South to the Pacific Northwest, always looking for something I never quite found: community. Being the child of a small town, cities felt too unaccountable, too anonymous. While I once craved the liberation of anonymity, that same anonymity came to feel hollow and detached.
Being gay, this anonymity initially felt freeing. Away from the confines of my childhood town, I could be whoever I wanted to be. I explored my sexuality without guilt or shame. I inadvertently became a different person every couple of years. I was a die-hard liberal, crystallizing into something more critical of the Left with age. I used to look to the political Right with suspicion: when you’re gay and raised in a conservative town, you learn not to trust conservatives. But with age, I can see these people as what they are: all too often afraid of change, and full of guilt and shame about who and what they are. The most difficult lessons are ones in which you realize the world isn’t as black-and-white as you thought. People that hate others for what they are merely hate themselves. I wish humans were more complicated than this, but we’re not. We’re predictable and obvious.
After years in the city, I became bored with the homogeneity of thought: almost everyone thought like me. We were all educated, liberal, and financially somewhat comfortable. Sure, most fellow millennials had very little money, but they never seemed to lack a purpose, always jetting off to work a third job giving books to the homeless or working long hours at a fancy restaurant with some prestige. But alarmingly, none of my friends seemed to want to travel too far from the city. There was a profound lack of curiosity about people that live in the spaces between cities, which is precisely how rural spaces have come—both understandably and somewhat condescendingly—to be defined. Worse still, during the rise of Trump and the rural populism that fueled it, there was a profound and sharp animosity that became palpable. My urban, liberal friends could not understand why Trump appealed to so many rural people, and my friends on the Left started to think of rural people as ignorant, racist, and dumb.
Let’s pause for a moment.
I am a gay man living in rural America because, plainly, I love it. I love the landscape, the general absence of people, the fact I can get in my car and be hiking with my dogs in ten minutes and not see another human all day. I love many of the values of small-town America: accountability between neighbors, the sense that kindness counts for something. I love waving hello to people whether I know them or not—and having them wave back.
But I’m a gay man living in rural America. Many of the values I don’t share with the people I’m surrounded by, first and foremost religiosity. I was not raised religious. Growing up, the people, both adults and fellow kids, that insisted, explicitly or implicitly, that I should feel bad about myself were the religious ones. As an adult, armed with the knowledge that they were merely trying to make me feel as insecure as they did themselves, I have some compassion for what they must go through. No wonder so many religious people believe in hell: they put themselves through it on a regular basis.
And then there is the poverty of rural places, which is unique in some of its causes and effects, from urban poverty. (Though it is just as unjust.) Desperation fills the vacuum left when a sense of purpose is taken from someone. For most rural people, this was a decently-paying job that has been automated or shipped overseas in the last four decades.
It is no wonder why alcoholism and opioid use and drug addiction and suicide are on the rise in rural places. When a person no longer has purpose, they look for meaning wherever they can. If that’s in the momentary solace provided by painkillers, so be it. This is not a mystery.
I’ll be candid: this poverty and the afflictions that stem from it make me very uncomfortable. I have a hard time trusting some of my neighbors because I know they struggle with heroin addiction. Some of them are religious. Many of them own high-powered guns. They are no different than the people I grew up around, my neighbors back in the Midwest. As someone who was bullied and ridiculed by many of those people, it’s hard not to pre-emptively judge rural people, to not assume they are bigots who hate me merely because I’m gay.
This is where I find myself: alive with the memories of growing up in a rural place, both good and bad. I have lost many friendships over the last few years with my more educated, urban friends because I do not tolerate the bigotry and condescension of rural people, even though I understand it. At times, I too am filled with that condescension.
And at times I am filled with doubt. Will I ever feel truly at home in a rural place, where I’m often the only gay person around? Will I ever feel at home around my neighbors, some of whom are addicts? Will I ever be able to be free of the judgment I feel for those religious neighbors that attend a church I know preaches against the sins of homosexuality?
I don’t have any answers. But this is where I am: trying to find a place in America where I do feel at home.
In this era of Substack and Medium and every conceivable lit magazine out there, I spend a lot of time wondering, “what’s the fucking point?” Why write at all, when there’s so much of it out there? The era of the internet means everyone is a writer, and while not everyone is a good writer, everyone feels entitled to put their work out there. Writing should be democratic, after all.
But as writing becomes ever-more commodified, this enshittification of writing has me looking around at my contemporaries and having second thoughts on this whole endeavor.
What’s the goal, anyway? To make money? To get attention? To process some long-held insecurity about not getting enough love as a child? None really feel like my reasons.
I started writing at a young age, encouraged by both teachers and my parents. I would race home from school to write in my LiveJournal about the minutiae of my day with such urgency. Looking back, it reads like something Gawker would’ve published, full of real names and banal, catty details. It was the dawn of the second decade of the internet and I wasn’t sure how this newfound reach could or should be used.
I took composition in high school and excelled. I wrote and wrote, again encouraged by my teachers. Senior year, we crafted one essay each week in AP Lit, and those essays were formative to my style. I’ve made a living from cutting and carving and cleaving the writing of others, yet I’ve spent the last fifteen years thinking that I am, underneath it all, a writer.
…because I can’t conceive of doing anything else. At this point, I doubt I could do much else. I’m terrible at compromising, working with others, and keeping a schedule. I’ve lived alone and worked for myself for so long now that I doubt I can pull off a relationship, let alone a “real job.”
Yet I have strong and lasting hesitations about writing. I’ve watched—and participated in—the rise of the internet since the late 90s. uJournal, LiveJournal, MySpace, Facebook, Twitter… I’ve played around with all. I watch how these platforms corrupt and destroy. Social media makes people petty and rude and brash in ways they’d never be in real life, and it’s corroded the social fabric. (It has done some good, too, but that’s another post.) Discourse and connection has been so thoroughly commodified that people no longer seem to remember the Before Times.
I write because I love the challenge. The goal is the same as therapy or mediation or solitude or exploration. To write is to think, to learn to think in new ways. To write is to uncover the truth, both internal and external.
It’s here where I’m cowed into silence. I see how people react when you write truthfully. Write honestly about a sports team or economic model or favorite actor and people, well, those that don’t agree don’t handle it well. Not in the era of the internet.
This seems especially true in America. We are a unique kind of unhinged: individualistic, tightly wound, very litigious. Being honest here will inevitably piss someone off, and they will have no compunctions doing whatever they can to make my life hell.
This is why I choose to write anonymously.
The opposite, though, must be true: to be a writer, you must be able to hear the truth from others. If I’m honest with you, dear reader, I don’t know that I’ve wanted to be honest with myself thus far. I’ve had a quiet little life, and the older I grow the more I want it to stay that way. All it takes is one post to become the internet’s Main Character and your life is turned upside down.
Yet what I aim to do here is be honest with you: as honest with you as I know how. And to be as honest with myself, for better and worse. I have a lot to say, but I’m just looking for a little courage to say it.
