A Ghost and A Storm

I am a ghost. I am a mirror. I am whatever you need me to be. Whatever you look for, that is what I am. Who I am. I am the furniture of a hundred people's homes, different in every iteration. I am a phantom, morphed into a new shape in every eye that beholds me. Look for me tomorrow, and you will find me transparent. Transformed. Melting through your things. Blown here and there by the winds of your fancy. I am whatever you need. And, when unneeded, you won't find me at all, will you?

I am natural phenomenon, like a storm or light breeze or lightning bolt. An event, moving things about. A fountain of molecules.  A thing that is happening as a result of a toppling of dominoes, cause and effect, stretching back to the dawn of time. A continuation of the explosion that started and continues and will someday stop. I began; there is no one to blame. Warm air from the gulf collided with a cold front sweeping over the mountains, generating an updraft, moving moisture, forming rain drops that are falling, falling, falling.

This is what began the event that is Me, and that is what will end Me. Death by Natural Causes.

On Forgetting

I forget things.

Faces. Names. Recipes. Locations. Dates. The date. Past events. What I was just doing. Entire events from only two days ago. What items are in what cabinets in my kitchen. What you said yesterday. What I said thirty seconds ago.

Events that happened five minutes ago are sent into the same overlapping jumble where my memories from 8 years ago reside. There’s a cloud in my head where events and impressions mix, creating stories that may or may not have happened, faces that may or may not exist, and places that aren’t quite arranged the way they are in reality. When I leave a task, expecting that my future self will come back to finish it in five minutes, it’s like pushing a raft out to sea, hoping it will float to a specific person on the other side. Sometimes it's infuriating. Sometimes it's scary.

This is part of who I am. It’s taken me a long time to balance accepting that while still not using it as an excuse to give up on improving my memory or a reason to hate myself for making so many mistakes. Maybe you're in the same boat in one way or another. There are methods for improving your memory (which maybe I'll write another post about later), but they don't work overnight, so in the meantime, here are some strategies I use to manage my forgetting. Maybe you'll find them helpful.

Methods for surviving with forgetfulness:

Leaving a physical reminder. Whenever you move away from a task-in-progress to do something else, leave a physical object in a place you will see it. For example, if you’re making pancakes and the doorbell rings, leave the spatula on the coffee table so you’ll see it when you set down the exciting package the post-person brought you and go flip the pancake before it burns.

Alarms. Pizza needs to cook for 15 minutes? Set an alarm. Plan to write for an hour and then go to the store? Set an alarm. Have an important job interview? Set four alarms. It might feel like coddling yourself, but often you'll find that the act of setting the alarm helps you remember, and you'll go back to that pizza seconds before the alarm goes off.

Signs. It’s stressful to look through every cabinet in your kitchen for the salt. It might feel childish to put little signs on your cabinet doors saying what’s inside, but if it works, do it. You’re home should be the least stressful place.

Apologies. Forgetting someone’s name is not polite. Leaving a task half-completed at work is inconsiderate. Most people assume that if you forget something, it’s because you didn’t care about it, or them. Use specific and detailed apologies that are more than just the word “sorry.” Make sure your facial expression shows that you’re not being sarcastic. It’s important that people don’t think you’re a jerk because you’ll also need…

A safety net of people who understand. Depending on others requires trust, and you’ll need a lot of it. You’ll need people you can trust to remind you of things, point out things you forgot, and fill in the gaps in your memories. For that last one, sometimes what they tell you will clash with what you remember; you’ll literally need to trust these people more than your own mind. Choose your friends carefully.

Self-forgiveness. Like I said earlier, it’s easy to feel useless when you burn your oatmeal literally every morning for two weeks. It’s easy to feel like you’re broken and incapable of functioning in society. Remember that all humans depend on other humans to survive. Remember that everyone makes their own kinds of mistakes and (hopefully) has coping mechanisms to compensate. Remember that modern society has insanely unrealistic expectations for functionality, so don’t use those expectations as the metric by which you judge yourself.

If you can remember that, forgetting won’t be so bad.

(To be Read to the Rhythm of Your Own Breathing)

We’re all dying
Every day is ten thousand
breaths
we can't take back in
Each moment another flake of dead skin
fallen
to the ground alone
Your organs can only stay together for so long
and you can’t
expect
that electricity in your head to keep firing forever
So I’m going to
take
another deep breath
cash in a few more fleeting seconds from
old bones
I’m not sure why we keep doing this to ourselves
but here we go again
Living

Judge People

“Don’t judge a book by it’s cover” is not advice I would give to anyone. But there is a lot of judgement-based advice that I would give. So I will. Right now. Prepare to be advised.

Do judge books by their cover. Judge people. Think about their appearance. Judge your surroundings. Think about everything you perceive. Don’t ignore things. Don’t assume you can’t come to valid conclusions. Don’t turn off your brain. People with their brains turned off are husks.

Judge. But remember, what happens next is essential. What do you do with the judgments you’ve made, the information you’ve gathered? (Of course, if the title you judge on their book cover is I'm Probably Gonna Murder Ya, yeah, better start running, but for the other cases...)

Don’t give up. Don’t give up on a person after only judging their initial outward appearance. Don’t assume you understand them completely from the beginning. That’s arrogance. That’s bad information gathering. That’s bad science. Widen your sample size. Keep looking. Keep judging. Let them show you a few dimensions of who they are. Judge those too.

So I guess the advice is, you can judge so long as you don't stop judging. Keep judging. Keep your mind open to each new dimension of the people and things that you encounter. Don't stop moving forward until either (1) you discover them to be harmful or so deplorable that they aren't worth your attention any longer, or (2) you don't, and you keep going, further up and further in, learning and expanding from what they offer you, on and on, judging each other.

To a Stranger and All Future Strangers

I have nothing to offer you

stranger walking ahead of me

Shuffle on in your intrepid garb

I am no longer so arrogant as to think
that we are somehow unequal

that I should have spoken to you
that you need me
more than I need you
A silent compulsion given up

The end of guilt, arrogance
responsibility for strangers

and the illusion of my own importance

I have nothing to offer you

so here we walk

sharing the same pavement

All I have is myself

A shape in your peripheral vision

A simple piece of scenery

An ant in your garden

Background in the humongous story

that you tell yourself

everyday

That is all I have to offer you

only what you've asked for

And for once I am

happy

to play my part

Humans and Their Ways: Know Where Your Towel Is

The following is an excerpt from a book called Of Humans and Their Ways, written by the observant and insightful Robot 3000-22. Both the book and its author and totally made up and don't actually exist outside of my head.
Carry on.

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *

Chapter 14: Humans and Their Appearance

The following is a quote from a novel named The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, by Douglas Addams, a human:

"A towel...is about the most massively useful thing an interstellar hitchhiker can have. For some reason, if a strag (strag: nonhitchhiker) discovers that a hitchhiker has his towel with him, he will automatically assume that he is also in possession of a toothbrush, washcloth, soap, tin of biscuits, flask, compass, map, ball of string, gnat spray, wet-weather gear, space suit etc., etc. Furthermore, the strag will then happily lend the hitchhiker any of these or a dozen other items that the hitchhiker might accidentally have 'lost.'"

I'm going to expand on this understanding of towels to explore how humans interact using their appearance (what they look like to other humans). From extremely simple visual cues, like a towel, humans conclude a gigabyte's worth of information about the humans they observe.

EXAMPLES: Long hair on one's head or face takes a lot of time and effort to care for, so others might assume that Jane, who possesses the former, also possesses patience, self-awareness, or concern about their appearance. (Unless Jane's hair appears unkempt, in which case the reverse is more likely.) High-heels are not practical for walking long distances, so an observer might assume that Sally's black stilettos mean they possess the resources to get from place to place without much walking. Dave's fancy clothing could suggest a significant amount of expendable income. Casey's large muscles could suggest that they have the fortitude and focus to exercise regularly. In all these examples, the human's appearance generates an identity in the eyes of others.

But remember, the hitchhiker in Addams' quote does not actually possess any of the things that the nonhitchhiker assumes they have. The purpose of the towel is to manipulate, to provide the dishonest appearance of already possessing those things, for the benefit of the hitchhiker. And this is exactly what humans do. Most humans know about their appearance's power to generate assumptions, so they alter their appearance to generate a particular assumption in others that they desire. EXAMPLE: Sally might walk a long distance in sport's shoes and then switch to high heels at the destination to provide the appearance of having more resources than they have.

Unfortunately, others often notice this manipulation, and so they instead make their assumptions based on the human's failed manipulation. EXAMPLE: Leo wears ripped jeans in an attempt to generate the assumption in others that they are independent and therefore flippant about what others think of them (i.e. "too cool to care"). However, the others might perceive that Leo's ripped-jeans-wearing is intentional and instead conclude (accurately) that Leo actually cares a great deal about what others think of them. And so, a complex and silent interaction takes place whenever humans behold other humans.

One might conclude that the human species is hopeless because of all their focus on others' opinions rather than the mysteries of the universe outside their imaginary social world. They seem quite trapped in their battleground of social combat, vying their whole lives for control of their own identity in others' eyes.

However, as we've seen in other chapters, all human communication can be used for beneficial or destructive purposes, and appearance is no exception. I believe that, in healthy cases, more functional humans use appearance interaction to explore who they are, examine the disparity or agreement between their outer and inner selves, and make progress towards self-actualization. Also, they can use their appearance for practical purposes, like asserting a counter-cultural identity, surviving in a hostile environment, or providing a soothing demeanor to others. Therefore, I believe, if you want to thrive as a human, it's best to know where your towel is.

Kamikaze

Diving
A 6,000 foot suicide
Birth to death
at terminal velocity
Falling
from the start
to the end
the impact
Explosion
viscera thrown about in a perfect ring
Like a halo
about the grave
of the raindrop
on the sidewalk

Sitting on a Concrete Wall in Toronto Late at Night

If I sit still enough, I can feel the blood humming through my capillaries.

I'm learning to mind my locations, like a child does. Here is the place. Here are the objects. If I sit very still, I can imagine they are constants, like rivers or mountains, and so am I. Topographical features that change only imperceptibly.

As an adult, I have this sense of everything in the city being in flux; it's rearranged each time I see it. But late at night, it's easier to find the foundations and imagine the constants, the coral that remains when all the flitting fish have hidden from the night. When everything else washes away, here is what remains: dormant vehicles, buildings like canyon walls, engine smells, glowing signs calling to illiterate moths, concrete barriers, street lamps shining on empty pavement, lunatics, and an orchestra of unspecified machines all buzzing and vibrating in a song that plays all day long, but can only be heard at night. 

Death to the Commander

The commander lived in a rest home, and he never had a single visitor until the day he died, probably because he smelled like ash and spoke only of the joys of killing.

He was known by all the staff as "commander" because that is the only name he would answer to. The name on his file met with no reaction. There was nothing in his file to indicate which war, if any, he had fought in or which military, if any, he had belonged to. In conversation he spoke of the glories of battle without enough specifics to clarify one way or another. The other patients avoided him, as they would rather drink tea and play backgammon than listen to him explain, for the thousandth time, how much he missed the taste of blood. When his health took a turn for the worst, they breathed a sigh of relief now that he was bedridden.

One cold winter day, after the first frost but before the first snow, the commander received his first visitor at the rest home. The woman stood a head taller than even the tallest nurse, and she wore a simple white robe with a red border along the bottom hem that looked startlingly like a dark blood stain. She smelled like an electrical fire. Her face was like a burnt log. She strode down the pastel corridors of the rest home like a battleship in human form.

When she arrived at the commander's room, he started in his bed. "Who are you? I don't know you. Get out!" She marched to his bedside, leaned over him until her mouth was beside his ear, and spoke. No one heard the words but the commander. His squinted eyes widened, and he gazed upon her like a long-lost child. "Yes. Yes, please," he rasped, reaching out to her like a child himself. "I agree. Take it, just give me that taste once more!"

A half-breath later, she had thrown him into a wheelchair and was rocketing down the pristinely carpeted halls with him bouncing before her. The nurses who tried to bar her path were smothered beneath her vicious stare. One particularly strong-willed orderly grasped the woman's arm, but no matter how much he tugged, her trajectory was unaffected, and he ended up with rug-burns on his knees.

When they reached the locked front door, she kicked it open without hesitation and brought the wheelchair out across the parking lot. All the nurses and patients, entranced now by the woman and her power, filed out the wrecked door and stood shivering in the flower beds, watching silently whatever happened next.

Beyond the parking lot stood a grove of trees, and within it the woman stopped. From within her robe, the tall woman produced a saber a half meter long with a golden hilt. She lowered it into the commander's lap and took a step back, bowing as she did so. The commander considered the weapon, turning it over, letting the dull winter light glitter along its blade. He took a breath so long and so deep that he nearly doubled in size. Then, quivering, he leaned forward until he slid out of the wheelchair and put his weight on his own feet. The sword nearly slipped from his hands, but then he gripped the handle, and from that grip his whole body seemed to draw strength

His back and legs straightened. His arms spread wide. He threw his head back with all the vigor of a warrior facing his enemy. With a wild scream, he kicked back the wheelchair, which clattered backwards into the parking lot and tipped over, and he held the sword over his head, the point aimed at the sky. At that moment, the sun reached through the clouds and golden light poured down on him like water from a basin. Every nurse and patient felt their eyes water with awe and terror.

The commander hit the ground like a tangled classroom skeleton. The sword bounced away. "There is your taste, commander," said the woman. "Now, for mine." As the woman stood over him, his body cracked apart and crumbled into ash. Even as he wasted away, he reached out towards where the sword had fallen, but not even the ashes of his hand touched it as they fell to the earth.

The goddess of war waved her hand, and the ash that had once been the commander rose from the ground and was drawn into her open mouth. When the last of him was gone, the light from the sun again passed behind the clouds, and the woman was nowhere to be seen.

The nurses and patients shuffled back inside where it was warm, and never spoke again of goddess of war or the commander, and they were better off for it.

Morse Code

Everyone is lonely. People with close friends are lonely. People with intact nuclear families are lonely. Married people are lonely. Siamese twins are lonely. No amount of contact with humans can change this fundamental part of human existence. It is the presence of others that creates this lonesomeness. The fact is, we float suspended in an ocean of our own sensations and thoughts and history, reaching out to each other across the incomprehensible distances between us.

We treasure the fleeting, luminous moments when we feel like we've touched something, someone, anyone. The obstacles between us are empty space, holding us aloft, alone. We look across space and interpret blinking stars in Morse code, wondering if the messages are real or just random space dust passing in between.

Is there anyone out there?

What are these “other people” but imagined futures and a million versions of memories, with questions tacked to each one, imaginings about their experience. What are they feeling and thinking? What do they see from where they sit, on some far off plateau built of memories and impressions and beliefs unknown to me, untouchable by me? They are all fictional. Stories I tell myself. Perhaps they tell stories about me too.

But.

Perhaps the stories are what matter. Tell me the story of myself, and I will tell you yours. In Morse code, across vast distances, blinking stars. If we're describing what we see, and what we describe is each other, we must both See. We must both have telescopes. We must both exist. We must not be alone. This is an act, not a state-of-being.

So polish your telescopic lenses, friend, for the only momentary relief from the pervasive alone we all feel because of each other is each other.

Luke Skywalker: Like My Father Before Me

Everyone knows, at the end of the Star Wars original trilogy, the end of Return of the Jedi, Luke Skywalker defeats Darth Vader in a lightsaber duel. The Emperor, who’s just been watching this whole thing like a parent at their child’s baseball game, laughs and tells Luke to kill Vader and “take you father’s place at my side.” But instead Luke throws away his lightsaber and announces,

“Never. I'll never turn to the Dark Side. You have failed, Your Highness. I am a jedi, like my father before me.”

Isn’t that a strange thing to say? “Like my father before me.” This is Luke’s crowning moment, his great defiance, proof that he is too strong, at least too morally strong, to be pulled to the dark side. And he chooses to say, “Like my father before me?” His father is currently laying at his feet, minus one arm. Even before that, his father was a sith lord, half machine, and a total jerk who had turned to the dark side and been mean for literally decades. Yes, Vader was once a jedi, but he totally failed at it. So, Luke Skywalker, I ask you, seriously ol' buddy, why associate yourself with Vader in your moment of triumph?

Literally everyone has parents. And all parents, being human and fallible, screw up in lots of ways. And their children share their DNA and were (if the parents stuck around) influenced by their parents’ screw ups. So every child eventually asks themselves: am I my father’s/mother’s son/daughter, doomed to fall to the dark side like they did?

When Luke refers to his father, the jedi, he is referring to the aspects of his father that he, at that moment, has successfully embodied. He learned the pitfalls that destroyed Vader, and he now has faced those same pitfalls in himself and succeeded.

Literally everyone can do this. We cannot run from our own DNA, but we can all learn from our parents’ mistakes, succeed where they faltered, and become what they failed to be. Once we’ve achieved that, we can proudly declare our association with them, with the parts of them we have chosen, with their jedi selves. Even though they totally failed at being jedi, we can become what they were meant to be: a jedi, like my father before me.

What If

What if something terrible happens?

I have never been in a fight, not a real one anyway. But in my head I've met my end in a plethora of ways: sword fights, fist fights, bottle fights. Just like the eight thousand and one times I've been stabbed in the back while out for a walk (in my head). Just like the six hundred times I've been abducted by aliens or monstrous beings from other dimensions (in my head). I do this on a moment to moment basis. I wake up doing this. I fall asleep literally to a lullaby of this. This is the soundtrack of my life constantly playing, sometimes louder, sometimes softer, but always playing.

I brush my teeth imagining what it would be like if I were arrested for someone else's crime. I floss daydreaming about the apocalypse. I shave to the melody of “what if,” “what if,” “what if.” What if the subway derails while we're going over a bridge? What if my permit to live in Canada is revoked? What if my wife gets sick and we don't have the money to heal her? What if one of the friends I've shown my novel to betrays me and somehow steals the copyright to it, leaving me so depressed that I can never write again? What if robbers? What if cockroaches? What if disease? What if an accident? What if storms or hail or war? What if mind-reading paratrooper shapeshifter alien vampires?

There are people who prepare for unfortunate situations. They do this by recognizing likely scenarios, planning accordingly, and not thinking about the millions of extremely unlikely possibilities that there is no way to actually prevent except by locking yourself in your house (and even that won't prevent all of them). These people innately know a basic truth: no amount of mental questioning can ready you for the unpredictable, unlikely madness of what actually happens. Not even for vampires. When the apocalypse comes, it will be bizarre and unimaginable. When calamity strikes, it will always be a fresh wound. I've never, ever, readied myself for a real event using 'what if.' I’ve never realized a fatal flaw in a plan using 'what if.' I’ve never soothed myself regarding something scary using 'what if.' All that 'what if' does is multiply anxiety a thousand-fold in an infinite loop of mental creation. I create planets in my own mind, filled with nothing but anxiety. I’ve tossed aside basic physics to make room for more worry and fear amongst the limited neurons in my brain. And I know that this massive construction project is never going to be worth the effort.

But it’s habit now. Years of practice. Decades of teaching myself that literally anything can be a prompt for 'what if.' By the time life taught me that this habit was useless, I had already become an expert. So, what now? Is all this space in my brain permanently wasted? Maybe not. What if an expert in making bombs used his skills to defuse explosives? What if an expert in robbery used his knowledge to thief-proof people's houses? If those things can happen, maybe an expert in 'what if' can turn a method for creating anxiety into a tool for producing hope.

What if something good happens?

The Coming of An Accountant to the Great Plains of Merna

The great plains of Merna, though they were, as their name implied, great, and had held that title since before human language had been invented, had never in their long career seen the likes of Rayfield the accountant.

A thousand years before Rayfield was born, a herd of centaurs from Tafril came through the forests of Ern into the wide, rolling hills of the great plains of Merna. Their armor and spears glittered in the bright morning sun as they marched, crushing the grass and the dirt into a road of mud in their wake. Their captain, the largest centaur ever born, galloped in the lead, standing nearly four meters tall. They marched the length of the plains, shaking the earth as the went, and then continued onwards to some horrible war where they all died.

But still, nothing quite like Rayfield the accountant had ever come to the great plains of Merna.

A thousand years before the centaurs’ march, a meteorite plummeted through the atmosphere with a tail of fire crackling behind it, and by the time it touched the ground of the great plains of Merna, it had burned away until only a crumb remained. But it was a fiery crumb, and rain had not fallen on the plains for nearly a year, so the grass was easily lit. The fire burned away six square miles of dry yellow grass before it stopped.

In the fresh ash, strange new plants grew up, for the meteorite had brought more than fire down with it from the outer reaches. These new plants grew quickly, and their leaves glittered like diamonds. Their shining refractions of light drew flies and men alike amongst the fields of otherworldly plants. None ever returned.

The king of the nearby kingdom of Brendal lost seventy of his best knights and his only son to those fields. He wept a single tear for the knights, but for his son he mumbled two words to his most trusted sorcerer: "Burn them." The sorcerer, who had been beside the king since the day he was born and had never spoken a single word to any other man, knew what the king meant. He hurried away and locked himself in a secret room in the tallest tower of the castle. Heart-rending melodies floated from this tower for three days and nights. Then, an expendable scout was sent to check the great plains of Merna and the fields of glittering plants from which no man or fly had yet returned. But return the scout did, reporting that he had found nothing of the shining plants but ash on the bare soil. Normal grasses soon grew up again, and no one ever spoke of the glittering otherworldly plants, the seventy knights, or the king's son ever again.

An unfathomable number of beautiful, horrible, and somewhat-impossible things had happened in the great plains of Merna. And so many other, mundane things had happened as well. Nearly every eventually had taken place there at least twice. But nothing even slightly similar to the coming of Rayfield, the accountant, had ever happened.

To his credit, Rayfield was no ordinary accountant. He was the most skilled of his firm, and for that reason he, and he alone, had been entrusted by his jealous colleagues with the prestigious and usually deadly task of confronting Valentino the gangster about his back taxes. However, the blunt honest fact was this: nothing like Rayfield the accountant had every happened there because nothing as mundane as a shortish man in an overpriced suit had ever gotten lost enough to be able to arrive at the great plains of Merna.

Charming: Our First Evening in Cairo

In Canada, you need to be polite. In Egypt, you need to be charming.

My wife and I moved to Cairo in the heat of July, without a single friend in the country, any knowledge of the language, or the slightest idea where we were going to live. We had four boxes of possessions, acceptance letters to the American University in Cairo, and a reservation at a hostel downtown.

Our first evening staying in the hostel, we headed out to find food. Being unfamiliar with any local food and knowing that the next day would be hectic, we found a Macdonald's (yes, there are Macdonalds' in Egypt) and ordered a pile of hamburgers to last us several meals. Then my wife went back to the hostel with the food while I looked for a grocer which might have bread and jam for breakfast.

When I went back to the hostel, I passed through the front room, which, like all Egyptian businesses, was manned by one employee and two of his friends. When they saw me, they chuckled and patted each other on the back. I asked if there was something on my face, and they replied by saying that they were not expecting to ever see me again.

With this mysterious conversation still playing in my head, I went to our room and found my wife happily munching on a hamburger. "Why are the people in the front room laughing at me?" I asked.

"Oh," she smirked and raised her eyebrows glibly.  "When I came back, they asked me 'What happened to your husband? You left together, but only you came back.' So I said, 'I sold him.'"

"You sold me?"

"Yes, sold you. And they laughed and asked, 'What was the price?' And all I did was hold up the bag of Macdonald's."

"What did they say to that?"

"They said that I got a good price."

It was then that I realized that I had chosen the best traveling companion in the world. And that realization was proven right, over and over, as we found a flat, bought furniture, and arranged our new lives. There was no heart in the country that she could not charm or strike fear into. I optimistically believe that some of these powers have rubbed off on me, via her and the Egyptians I befriended, but honestly I will always be an apprentice in the subtle ways of the Egyptian wit.