Returning to Texas from the enchanting heights of Machu Picchu, my apartment is the mundanity of a corporate office. The reality is stark – withered plants, chaotic traffic, and concrete everywhere. I miss the aliveness that visited me in Peru and whispered in my ear. Where is that?

I had explored Cusco for one week but I wish I had a thousand more to be in the rapture of its ruins. 

On a train from Cusco to Machu Picchu, I met Nick, our guide. He was 6’0’’, tall for Peruvian standards causing him to slouch. He wore glasses, slicked his hair to the side, and tucked his shirt in cleanly. This marked his 1,020th trip to Machu Picchu. Nick knew many facts that would breathe life into the stones.

Beneath the brim of a brown fedora, I sat in the rear of the train where the last train car was open air. Outside the train weaved between mountains and a rushing river. At some point I was resting my eyes while listening to the rhythmic pulse of the railway when a freshness entered my nostrils. The mountain ranges were replaced with dense, wet foliage. We entered the rainforest. Machu Picchu whispered in my ear, "I look forward to meeting you."

The train ride ended in Aguascalientes. Two challenges remained: (1) a steep bus ride, along a cliffside inches from the tires, with a driver who drives like he’s an F1 racer. (2) a hike to the top at 8,000 ft of elevation. By the end, I smelled like a feral alpaca.

On the hike, Nick was our perceptive guide, sharing stories and facts that encouraged me to look closer.

He pointed at the stone trail beneath us – rugged, uneven, and disappearing under grass. “This is the Inca’s trail,” he said. “If you hike from Cusco to Machu Picchu, rather than bus, you walk this stoned-laid path for 8 hours.” Eight hours! Mesmerized, I stepped away, following the trail into the mountains. It snaked over the cliffside.

I was left imagining the encounters with the divine to those who walk this path. 

As we climbed the final steps before the lookout of Machu Picchu, Nick and the group went silent, except for the huff of one member and his oxygen tank. The anticipation heightened. Reaching the lookout, a perfectly manicured city existed, surrounded by at least a dozen mountain peaks. Everything was lush. We froze in awe. 

Machu Picchu spoke so loudly that I momentarily forgot my name and remembered god is kind.

For some, this rapture lasted 20 seconds before iPhones came out. I, however, was absorbed in the lost city. Every place I looked was greeted with a question of wonder. If I were king, where would I put my throne? What happened here under full moons? What kind of beautiful creatures are underground caring for the land? I welcomed this wonder that didn’t exist back in the modern world.

After a few minutes Nick spoke up and described Machu Picchu’s strategic location between the Andes mountains and the Amazon rainforest. “They went to the mountains for maize, potatoes, quinoa. And the jungle for fruits, plant medicines, fish." My ears tuned into a different frequency. 

Machu Picchu was suddenly bustling with city life. Incas carried sacks of potatoes. Families roasted meals. And more questions flooded my mind: What was it like to eat a meal with them? Was anyone a picky eater? I only eat my alpaca cooked well-done. Or did they bicker about who didn’t unload the dishwasher? On and on I played in awe.

When my spirit returned to my body, I found myself below, walking the paths of the village. Nick presented what looked like a pile of rocks, until he revealed that the gable of the structures once had thatched roofs. This entire city was roofed. I was awe-struck over a dozen times. 

Some ruins, I realized, looked like rocks that a teenager avoiding math homework piled on top of each other. Others breathed life -- they spoke to me, asked me questions, waved a hand to me, “come a little closer.” The difference often was Nick.

Nick was a shaman – a psychopomp into the spiritual world. His pointer finger brought me into a mystical connection with my surroundings. I felt small, full of wonder, and closer to humankind. With a slight change of context, ruins turn into rapture.

***

Days later, back in Texas, I am confronted with a modern day apartment. I wish I had packed Nick into my suitcase like a Jack in the Box. A Nick in a Case. On demand I could unzip my suitcase, Nick would pop out, and narrate the stories behind everyday objects.

“Hey, Nick,” I’d ask while preparing breakfast. “Tell me about this bowl of oats.” 

He presses his glasses to his face. 

He points out that the seeds were harvested in Minnesota, involving a generational family of farmers. A hundred hands participated in the process to turn the original seeds into this bowl from the truck drivers  to the factory workers.

How would one of those farmer’s react if I thanked him for harvesting my breakfast? I wonder.

Nick goes on… “The real magic is in the microwave. It uses a magnetron to excite water molecules in food. The molecules jiggle and crash into each other, generating friction and heat. The turntables inside rotate the water content within the food. Uneven cooking occurs due to varying water content. Set your food inside and watch it cook.”

Gratitude creeps in for everything that got it here – as I hit “Cook”. In rapture. Nick had turned oats into ecstasy. 

Objects around my apartment begin to speak. The bananas on my counter still ripe even though they were picked 3 weeks ago from Florida, a state 1,000 miles away. The mechanics of hot water flowing from Lake Travis out of my tap. My resilient plants, breathing oxygen into my space. I become my own perceptive guide.

With a close eye, everyday objects whisper echoes of mystical lands. 

Even if that’s bananas whispering, “I traveled so far to meet you. Please eat me.”

- Andrew

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Thank you , , for the Feedback. This would be unpublished if not for your suggestions both tactical and supportive.

She sways back and forth from my ceiling. A noose around her neck. Blood vessels have bursted causing her skin to turn purple and blue. It's my Muse. I hung her by her neck 15 months ago, and I haven't published since.

Fifteen months ago I had a great essay idea! The kind of essay where you’re on to something big. The idea was IKEA Words, an essay about cliched language. This phrase, IKEA Words, had potential as something that will stick in thousands of writers' minds – an idea that would be etched into my grave: RIP Andrew, the brilliant author of IKEA Words. I had to get the story perfect.

I grinded on the essay for 40-50 hours in a single month – thought on it a whole lot more. And, besides being a bit overwritten, I’m proud of it. It’s a great essay. Which came with a cost.

That month of July, I started to abuse my Muse. 

I slid the noose around her neck. With each peep from her, I tightened the knot. She was a distraction. I ignored paths that were creatively alive for me. Her plans felt all over the place. I already knew where the essay was going. Muse only throws out crazy ideas like a story about writers who stare at goats. 

By the end of the month, I had shamed her so much she kicked the stool out from underneath herself.

I replaced her with the grinder inside me. The problems that come with this are numerous. Perfectionist, over-thinking, neglecting intuition, losing the joy of writing – all psychological blocks. You name it. I championed it. 

After I published this essay, I didn't write again. It was too painful to write. It’s painful to grind when writing is a passion.

I get chills that she's still swaying after all this time. I thought she would be silent by now. Writing would be a pastime, a skill I attempted for a year and left by the wayside. 

Yet each morning I hear her from my bed. "Page… Come back to the page." 

And I hide under the covers. I tried writing. I committed 4 years to it! It’s not my calling. I no longer enjoy it. All it brings is psychological pain. 

Just as it hurts to write, it hurts to not write. 

I hear her everywhere: I hear her every time I enter a coffee shop. “Paaaage” I hear her every time I see a writer friend. “Paaaage.” I hear her in my dreams. “Paaaage.” No matter how much I abuse her. “Paaaage.” No matter how often I ignore her. “Paaaage.” She always beckons. “Paaaage.” 

She can’t be silenced. She’s immortal. I am called to write. 

I leap up from my desk, rush to my kitchen, and grab a butcher knife. Across my room, she hangs, her feet bumping against my desk. I hop onto my desk and grab the rope. Knife in one hand, rope in the other, my whole body shoots with nervous excitement. I’m going to cut her down!

I press the knife to the rope and the threads unfurl until the last slide of my knife. Out of the air she crashes to the ground. Holy ghost. 

Beside my desk, she vomits bright colors onto the ground, and whipping her hand in it, she splatters colors across the walls. It’s child-like, a finger painting. She just wants to create and play. She wants to spew essays out into the world -- write often, publish often.  

She stands and the paint begins to ascend like raindrops returning to the sky, before she twists like a tornado. I go blind in the middle of a hurricane of color.

“Ms. Muse,” I yell into the storm, “I’m sorry.” 

“I’m sorry I stopped listening to you. I’ve been more focused on impressing others with my writing craft or pretending like I don’t hear your call back to the page, instead of creating because it’s exciting to throw colors and words into the world.

“In truth I'm scared of what I will say. I’m scared my creative wanderings will be judged. My stories will be incomplete. They might not make sense. They might be vulnerable or resentful. They might be time wasted writing about my grandfather or my relationship to grass. These are close to my heart.

“I apologize for not showing up and trusting the world with what’s inside of me today.”

The storm stops. The colors fall. Every inch of my room and my body is covered in paint. She looks at me, smiles, and flies out my window and over the city. A trail of words are left behind her – each landing on roofs, and sinking through. 

I clear the wet paint from the screen, and I publish this imperfect story. In distant chimneys smoke arises. I smile imagining someone is enjoying a story of mine. Something I released into the world before my insecurities got involved. Something painted from my heart.

A few shoutouts to the writers who encouraged me, gave me feedback, and said, hey you are doing just great. , , ,

Andrew 💚

Pausing is Progress

This newsletter I'm pausing: to bring awareness to what all is going on.

Ninety percent of suicides are fatal wounds to the head. Although I don't know if that is true, it sounds right to me. I write that because when in my darkest, most sinister, most hate filled, it’s my head that isn’t serving me. My mind foams with confusion, and in those moments I'm severed from my body.

As a sensitive boy I upsetted easily. My older brother would do something wild like run in circles around me, and I would flee to the care of my mother. I silently nuzzled my face into her lap as she watched TV. When my mother would upset me, I went even further inside. I nuzzled my face into the corner carpet in the corner of my room where I bared the emotions until they subsided. Sometimes hours of gripping, cut off from my body.

As an adult, I used this to my advantage as a poker player. I learned to not upset at all. Poker is a game of rational, "un-emotional" thinking. Players who play emotionally are looked down upon. A player who loses a hand and begins to play angrily is targeted by every player at the table: blood is in the water. Robots are praised, and I considered myself one. I could lose for 8 hours straight and not feel a thing that's happening in my body. Like a good poker player. I was a professional at this cutting off my head from my body.

Nowadays, I no longer play poker, and I focus on creative pursuits: yoga, writing, dance. Each of these relies on the body. In yoga, we cultivate proprioception which is awareness of where your body is in space. In writing, well-written essays are consistent in a feeling and tone, unlike the mind’s jumpiness. And in dance, we want the body to move from the music, not the mind.

Weekly I attend a "dance pop-up" where a few of us get on camera and shake our bodies about. I know I want to move without thinking, so I tend to think how can I do that. While on zoom, listening to Taylor Swift 'Shake It Off' and what not, I'm trying to move into feeling, I’m trying to think less.

I try different prompts: how do you want to move right now? what does it feel like to be in your stomach and dance? how do you dance wrongly? how do you dance without guilt? how do you dance and stay connected to yourself and your friends? What... on and on and on, I prompt. My mind in a foamy confusion.

Meanwhile my body, the source of feeling, is lagging behind all this thinking.

Recently a friend told me sometimes she writes on her wall everything she wants to do, and she stares at it. "I let the body catch up."

Our minds race ahead of our bodies. Our minds while racing ahead juggle fifty thought-balls in the air. Our minds while racing ahead, while juggling thought-balls tries to be present with different prompts, try to recognize what's going on.

When I think about feeling, all I’m doing is adding momentum to the mind which is already ahead of the body.

I asked my friend to repeat what the hell she just said. It was profound, I said. "I let the body catch up."

The mind is racing. The body is lagging. And awareness of this brings the two together.1 When I try to feel the body, I picture my mind trying to hand my body the baton, but it's simply running too fast. In awareness it slows and the body catches up, and when they meet, they say screw the race, let's walk together.

That's what I want. To give awareness to everything that's going on inside and out. And literally just sit with that. Observe it.

I did this before I began typing this. I got some time to write but I didn't know what to write about. I also got a lot of options. Emails, Messages, Interview prep, Essay to Publish newsletter. WRITING. I opened every potential writing project that's on my mind and I just sat with them.

I meditated with this view. I began to feel something in my gut. Normally when I feel something, I also have thousands of prompts to try and go deeper. I want to go deeper. But this time, I got meta. I observed the prompts and thoughts. I gave them my awareness and sat with it. The feeling balloned, grew, and expanded. This was a first as normally with the prompts I sink into deep sobs, albiet restricted sobs. This wasn't so black/white, feeling/no feeling. It was stopping by for tea. And I realized this is compassion.

I felt deep compassion for myself. Look at all those writings. That's a lot. But also cool. And wow. And man, I'm hard on my body, screaming at it you suck, take the baton, we're going to lose. I don't give it space like this. Until today.

And even in my most sinister moments. I can write it all down. Observe it all, including the cloudy day outside and the rainfall. Life fucking sucks, observe that too. And within that, the body will take over. Goodness within will shine.

💚

Andrew

* New readers, hi. I promise you if you subscribe, I’ll send letters with compassion. *

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Pausing is Progress

This newsletter I'm pausing: to feel guilt and shame. It speaks loudly and often. I feel it after I text women overly detailed messages, I feel it after I eat Chipotle again, and I do my very best to *avoid* feeling it in yoga class by controlling the passing of gas from the digestive system.

Guilt disconnects me from the people in my life. The should’ves amplify and I judge my decided actions. I hide my face behind objects. When I notice that, I pause with it. I see this feeling and these thoughts as confused. They don’t actually want to disconnect. They want to reconnect.

I write you to reconnect. It’s been 5 months since I wrote. I'm sad I've isolated myself from this community of newsletterers. I read many of yours and they inspire me. I want to participate and play, and I’m sorry for abandoning this game of ours.

💚

Today's roll call:

• A date

• Procrastination

• Pseudonym

• IKEA Words

I went on a date and a second date and then she ended it.

So Saturday I went on a date, it went well, and actually we kissed. I like kissing.

Yesterday, she asked for a phone call, I didn't think much of it, we did have a good date after all. She even led with that fact. It was a lovely night, she said or something something. ... "But we are better off being friends."

I'm not heartbroken, just heartchipped. I agree with her, we are better off, we share a friend group and it's best not to complicate things at this moment, but sucks.

I don’t appreciate how soft I am. I knew this wasn’t going to work and yet I’ve been sad for 24 hours. I feel like a boy fussing about because his happy meal didn’t come with a toy that he would’ve just thrown on the floor. Lots of self-hatred too which has been surprising. You’re old and never going to find your partner, Women don’t like skinny men, Look at you trying so hard. Oof.

The self-hatred I’ve released firmly with my fist into a pillow. The sadness I’m living with.

Procrastination is a 15 letter word that in understanding made me want to write this newsletter.

This newsletter has to be perfect, I think. Ah, F IT, I’m just going to ship something and move on. But wait…

A few tools by Joe Hudson have been in dialogue in my mind.

1. I should send a newsletter!
   
   "I should do X" "I need do Y" "I want to do Z" -- all of these are an impulse to a behavior that wants to move. 'I should go to the gym' is an impulse for bodily movement. Instead of rising up and to do ten jumping jacks, we plan. I gotta change, I'm going to be in public so I gotta do my hair, I will surely have to stay at the gym for a full workout, oh I want to text my trainer friend for an updated workout plan, on and on and on I spin.

2. But I procrastinate writing this newsletter.
   
   Procrastination is often to avoid the stress of self-judgment. Other times we procrastinate simply to give yourself a break from a constant stream of shame for not doing something the right way. Most of my nights, I end the day with something mindless. I need a break from my own mind. I don’t like feeling judged and shamed.

When I try to perfect this newsletter, I feel shame for spending so much time and constantly trying to get it right. When I just ship it to ship it, I feel guilt for doing a poor job, and not respecting your attention space.

I learned from Joe that the trick is not to just do it, but to just do it without shame or judgement.

How can I just do this newsletter without shame? I intentionally want this to be bad by my standards. I don’t want to spend more than 3 hours on it. Still, I want it to have structure, be skimmable, and be on topics I genuinely care about.

During if I feel shame during, I’m trying to get it right. Afterwards if I feel guilt, I did a bad job of writing something shitty.

This strategy can be implemented with any desire, need, should. This confronts the voices in our head. Our actions begin to compound. In this iteration, we create freedom to make mistakes, write poorly, and in the aftermath feel what it's like to be ourselves again, free from guilt.

* Joe Hudson’s podcast, please listen: I pulled details from Shame Episode & Desire Episode *

Only half my name is now a lie.

Good news: my first name is now Andrew which is my real name

Bad news: my last name is Plainview which is still a crumby lie.

I changed my name from Arthur Plainview to Andrew Plainview.

Here's what've learned --

Pseudonyms are the best way to find your voice as a writer. You write without consequences which means you can play with language and topics without having anyone else’s voice whispering in your head. BUT that’s not vulnerable writing. Vulnerable writing is saying something despite any potential consequences. Under your own name, you are most tender and naked to the world. That’s where I want to get. So the change from full to half is my first step.

Someday when my voice is strong enough and I’m brave enough, I’ll write under my real name.

Side note: writing without consequences is the core problem of the internet. How much of the dialogue would change if every time we wanted to give our opinion to the world, we’d risk being hit with lettuce.

IKEA Words are prefabricated phrases.

*warning, you'll have a new sensitivity to writing after writing this essay. Writing will be painful for awhile. Thank goodness, it will be painful.*

I wrote an essay with the writing studio. It was a laborious piece of writing.

Having gone through this experience, my writing forever changed. I write quicker now. I write less edits now. My writing, my language, builds upon each other more than ever. All from understanding IKEA Words.

Read IKEA Words Here

I like the description by Michael Dean in Write of Passage’s newsletter —

We’re all guilty of using cheap language. Like IKEA furniture, it’s convenient. It’s quick, it works in a variety of situations, and everyone (kind of) knows what you mean. IKEA words are everywhere. However, once you notice them, you can’t unsee them. It’s quite possible that after you read this edition, you’ll find yourself in an existential crisis. “Am I a slang parrot?”

Don’t be too hard on yourself! You don’t have to sing in golden prose when you order breakfast at a diner. But when it comes to writing our essays, we want to be very intentional with our word choice. It doesn’t matter if we have Nobel-Prize-grade-ideas, if we render them through IKEA words, they’ll feel stale and below their potential. Fortunately when we write, our thinking is frozen on the page. We can investigate our words and imagine better alternatives. The power of text! The power of editing!

[…]

Nicolas Gomez Davila, a Colombian philosopher, distills this perfectly: “Words are the true adventures of the authentic writer.”

One love,

Andrew

P.S.1 Backlogged on ideas? Copy and paste the entire block of ideas into an essay and hit publish. This is how Lil Wayne did it. He had journals full of lyrics and he wanted a fresh start. He recorded a 35 min song of him rapping 10,000 bars.

P.S.2 I published an atomic essay about my coaching session with Joe.

P.S.3 I started yoga teacher training a few weeks ago to deepen my practice. It has taught me to hold a La Croix can with my entire palm and fingers grounded against the tin. No raised pinky

***

Just me excited to be back with ya’ll —

* New readers, hi. I promise you if you subscribe, you’ll see more smiles and waves. *

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Stepdad is the villain of my family, who I want to forgive.

In Minnesota, Stepdad has a four foot tall gun safe containing 52 loaded guns beside two bug-out bags, all protected with an 8 pin lock. His wardrobe fits neatly into a 7-day rotation, a different shirt each day, each stitched with the word America. And he has nine and a half fingers after a woodworking accident. A bandsaw blade divorced two bones on his right index finger.

In March, he, me, and my mom vacationed to Abbeville, Louisiana. This wasn’t for a Trump rally, although I’d enjoy the people watching; at least until the collective movement convinced me I needed more walls in my life. No. We traveled to Abbeville because that’s Stepdad’s hometown, where he was born and raised. This backwoods town of twelve thousand people was drenched with a glow, clues into Stepdad’s past, clues into the villian I knew in Minnesota.

At the airport, we are greeted by Stepdad's sister who I had never met before. She embraces me and introduces herself as Grace. Before we do anything civilized, we go to the butcher shop down the street from her home. Inside it is a poorly lit room. Raw meat of all kinds bleeds on the counter. Flies stop by at leisure. While a manager of a Whole Foods would be appalled, I find the rawness appealing and the Ma and Pa feel trustworthy, as if the cow who matured this meat still hung by his hind hooves in back. I wonder if locals could go in back and cleave a rump of meat themselves.

Back at Grace’s red-brick home, she disappears into the kitchen with fresh slabs of meat, and reappears in a puff of smoke with a pot of Gumbo: stewed, sliced up rope sausage with browned crispy ends, plucked rotisserie chicken, and fresh shrimp from the Gulf of Mexico, all in a roux with peppers and garlic and cajun seasoning. I have three servings.

Stepdad’s bowl of Gumbo sat in front of him untouched. He is content telling childhood stories. As I scarf down Gumbo, he leans back in the rickety wooden chair and tells of him and “Johnny Bass”, like how they used to drive around in his pick-up, shooting out their neighbor’s porch lights with a Smith & Wesson six-shooter from the moving truck. Swamp Cowboys, I thought.

Today Stepdad still shoots a Smith & Wesson, but now–ever since the bandsaw blade accident–he pulls the trigger with a nub.

On a Saturday, we went crawfishing. Today I dress like a Swamp Cowboy; I wear camouflage knee-high boots and a camouflage cap. All men wore camouflage caps. I blend right in so that Stepdad and I are indistinguishable – at least from the perspective of a crawfish who can’t count fingers.

I offer to route us to Crawfish Haven using GPS. Stepdad says he knows better. Although I’m certain he doesn’t, cowboys don’t use maps. We point. Stepdad with a nub.

I enjoyed him directing me down backroads where he recognizes old businesses and “Rick Radley’s” home who I guessed was a childhood friend. One of the old businesses is an abandoned car wash. He says once he found a dead shark in the parking lot; he knotted a rope around its tail and the hitch of his Chevy and dragged the shark through town. He yelled out the window, “Get your fruit, get your bread, get your shark meat.” I laugh and laugh and laugh. Stepdad can charm at times.

Twenty miles east on the county highway, we pull into an empty gravel parking lot, nothing around but a Bed & Breakfast, crawfishing ponds, and a few crushed budweiser cans. I imagine Stepdad–decades ago–under the stars–parked here–drinking beers & leaning against his Chevy–his foot propped up on the dead shark who he just dragged through town and who’s now covered in dust, gravel, and scars. A creaky door startles me back to the parking lot in 2022.

We were a group of seven, all family except the captain who is so jolly I’m okay to adopt him and call him Uncle Cap. Cap tells a joke, “Do you know the difference between a regular zoo and a cajun zoo? A regular zoo gotta plaque in front of the cage displaying the animal’s name, habitat, reproductive habits, and what not. A cajun zoo gotta recipe.” My belly growls, and so did Stepdad’s.

Hungry, we boarded an aluminum boat. Cap hands me a pair of thick rubber gloves. The pesky crawfish pinch and will break skin, especially with soft keyboard hands like mine. After Stepdad puts his gloves on, we have a common finger count – ten! In the boat we agreed on the enemy. Crawfish! (Also those who commonly lurk around to eat our crawfish – turtles and snakes and GATORS, oh my.)

The pond is shallow, 10 to 24 inches deep. Between rows of dried swamp grass, there are a dozen lanes with traps. The first trap comes quickly; its red top bobs six inches above the water. I grip it and haul the mesh cage out of the muddy pond. Five crawfish. I hand it to Stepdad who dumps them into a sorting tray.

Each cage traps three to a dozen crawfish. Many are babies, many others are dead and only their exoskeletons remain — eaten by their own family members, which makes me reflect on how violent we can be to our own kind. Humans can forgive, at least.

We drive up and down the lanes for about an hour dumping traps out, tossing back baby crawfish and turtles who aren’t on today’s menu. In four purple nets, crawfish writh and pinch each other. It's a violent exchange. We fished a hundred pounds of crawfish. Stepdad and I hold up the nets together for a picture.

That evening Cap exchanges his fisherman’s cap for a chef’s cap. Both are camouflage. The crawfish boil until their beady eyes cloud over and they’re motionless – or 15 minutes of time. Cap tips the pot and their bodies tumble into a plastic Tupperware bin. He sprinkles cayenne seasoning, and serves me a big red plate with 10 pounds of red crawfish, a single slice of corn cob, and two infant rustic potatoes. Within seconds our red plates clattered on the table.

Eating crawfish is a primal experience. Stepdad taught me: first you dismember the crustacean by twisting the tail off. You pinch and rip the guts out, which smear over your fingers before you pluck out the morsel of meat. The real apes among us wrap our lips around the crustacean’s head and suck, letting in all the juices from within. Stepdad slurps mouthfuls of crawfish brain. I did not, at first.. Stepdad was so damn happy that I caved. I slurped a mouthful of brain and became enlightened.

And when our bellies are full of crawfish, we all dance to Zydeco; here in this wooden shack in backwoods Louisiana, I didn’t care about finger count. I cared about Bob, the man I labeled Stepdad. He wasn’t a villain – up close.

In the morning, Grace fixes up some eggs, and Bob begins another story. I am excited – what adventure would I hear about this time? “I haven’t danced like last night for twenty years,” he says. “Back when I was younger, I danced nightly. That’s how I met my darling.” That’s my mom. He went on but I zoned out. I realized this was the moment that Stepdad smashed his Chevy into my family.

Twenty years ago, he and my mom met. Shortly after she left my father for him. It destroyed my family. My brother John got two DWIs. My brother Joseph became estranged from my mother; (my mom still grieves because her three grandkids do not know her name). And my dad and I cried together nightly on a burgundy couch.

I was 15 and utterly confused. I felt like I had been dragged through town, covered in dust, gravel, and scars.

Now at the dinner table, those scars peel open, as Stepdad and my mom reminisce about dancing. I poke my eggs and grab another biscuit which aren’t in my diet unless I’m anxious. My head, full of dust. I ruminate, My mom was married. My mom was married. My mom was married.

I build a wall between me and this menace. Fucking heartless, Trump thumping asshole. Look at this man. Go cut off another finger using a bandsaw blade!

I remember dancing together in the shack last night where finger count didn’t matter. I speak up, “I’m uncomfortable listening to this knowing my mom was married while you two danced.”

Stepdad stopped talking. He was speechless for the first time in my life, possibly his too. He said, “I’m sorry for that Andrew.” Everyone was silent until he got up, bumping the table and hurried away. I went after him. He was tearing up. I teared up. He apologized again. We hugged. And in that moment, I forgave him…

Except, it didn’t happen. I never spoke up. I never asked a question. We didn’t hug.

Instead, I sat still. I poked my eggs. And I criticized his finger count. He is the villain I knew he was.

In the afternoon I returned to Texas. He to Minnesota. I never brought it up. Behind my wall, I’m safe from the villain with nine and a half fingers. Behind my wall, I’m going to die.

Andrew 💚

In a google document, in digital chicken-scratch, I spew ideas onto a page, which is foolish because I don’t need more fragmented sentences, I need to write prose.

I want to write an essay but the topic isn’t clear. For forty-five minutes, I spread thoughts across a google doc, a word doc, and even physically in front of me on a paper doc. Dear lord, help me. Each rabbit chase was oddly pleasant until I realized I spent half my writing block — ¡half my writing block! — without even attempting the first sentence of the essay.

Paralyzed, I feel.

Any of these ideas could lead to a ride through the imagination, but instead I rest my chin on my hand as I decide which is best, like that matters.

From the hundred different chases on my mind, I commit to one and write my first un-fragmented sentence, one that would satisfy Mrs. Downey from my 9th grade English class. I’m pleased. Without thinking, I write a few more. A switch flicks and the stream of my mind flows into the river of my imagination.

Feeling the urgency of chicken-scratch but the patience of prose, I translate the image into words. And again. And again. Soon I’m engulfed in the experience, swiftly moving from mindful images to words to animations as sentences connect. I’m happy. Literally smiling. Which is silly since these animations, these worlds, aren’t even real.

And yet I smile. And yet I feel refreshed like I just took a nap.

Although that blissful creative state only lasts a dozen minutes, the sensation of sculpting paragraphs out of images from my mind draws me back to the page the next day. I know I’ll have to sit down and queue behind hundreds of fruitless ideas, but I will make it to the front of the line and strap in the rollercoaster, put my hands up, and joyishly trust where the car takes me. Unless at the front of the line I’m told I’m too short. I have those days too.

Too, days I get to the front, the carny straps me in, but on the first drop, as soon as those negative g-forces lift me off my computer chair, I panic and stand up. What will the others think if I start screaming?

And without the enjoyment of the ride, writing becomes a job I can’t sustain. I will quit.

Later that day, I write an email and every word feels parroted. I type, “This warms my…” and Gmail smart-compose autofills my sentence, “heart”. How many others have said that exact phrase!? I delete everything and restart. The first words appear on the page followed by an image. Suddenly my hair blows back and I scream

My fledgling voice awkward and shameful, yet… I. Don’t. Care.

THIS is the essence of writing. Screaming until your voice cracks, that’s what’s worth cultivating and practicing.

But when writing an essay, it takes so long to turn on… so much time shaping ideas into the essay, that my afternoon at the theme park is spent with my hand on my chin watching the roller coasters zip by.

What if there never was a queue of ideas before the ride, before the exciting and playful writing. Nor a carny whispering negativity in your ear?

Michael Dean, a writer skilled at exclaiming whoo-hoos, has found a way to cut the line; he writes short bursts of prose outside the context of an essay in a live journal on his website.

This page is an all-inclusive pass to the theme park of the mind at any moment of the day. It’s a place to familiarize myself with self-expression and playful writing.

It’s similar to a note-taking system, but because it’s public on my website, it encourages me to write in prose, not the chicken scratch that most of my private notes are in.

It welcomes me with a question: “What’s on your mind?” No pressure to choose a topic to write about. No need to structure an argument. No reason to commit to an idea for weeks. With a thought on my mind, my fingers touch the keyboard and I’m teleported onto the ride.

Commitment to an entry is low, no carnys in sight to yell, “You can’t write about that!”, “Who do you think you are?”

This page is like an online diary. Unlike Twitter, there is no character count, all writing is editable, and none of it is launched to a feed to be publicly ranked. In my diary, there is no resting my chin on my hand, no decisions on what to write nor who for. Whatever is top of mind is ready to be played with. I’m free to write for myself. And because I practice that daily, when I sit down to write essays, I feel more comfortable – less filtered.

Four or five times a day, I open up my diary and I strap in. Through this practice, I become familiar with which queues of fruitless ideas are shortest. I befriend the carnys who scream obscenities. And I become comfortable shouting whoo-hoos to the world.

Soon I’m writing an essay in a way that only I can write. I’m texting in a way that only I can text. And, with time and practice, I’m speaking in a way that only I can speak.

Andrew 💚

Austin, TX, February 24, 2022: I was in my living room dribbling toothpaste on my sweatshirt when Vladimir Putin started the second Cold War. In the window on my computer screen, Vlad in a crimson tie stared into the camera and when we met eyes, he convulsed. It seemed he was having a seizure, his face turned heavenly white, and I thought he was going to collapse.

But instead he stood erect and the seizing swelled into a vibration. Suddenly from his bald head, lime green hair sprouted, reaching down to his shoulders. Vlad’s features were mutating in front of me, like out of a superhero comic. Until it stilled, a new man wore the same crimson tie. Red lipstick smeared across his lips and up his cheeks.

He mouthed into the camera at me, “I’m gonna get you Arthur”.

I slammed my laptop closed. The pandemic encouraged me to quarantine, isolate myself from my neighbors, but even that was no longer safe. Now a monster aims nukes. It is time to isolate myself from humanity. I will move into the country.

I grabbed my backpack, and tossed in 4 cans of beans, 32 wooden penny matches, and 2 bottles of merlot wishing they were 2 bottles of bourbon. I also tried to cram in a pack of 6 Pilot gel pens and a ream of light green engineering paper, before realizing they didn’t fit. I unzipped the front pouch. A journal! It was labeled: Mexico ———> Minnesota, 2020.

In my mind the streets of Mexico, lined with ceramic tiles, appeared. I opened the journal to the page when I first saw a monster.

Mexico, March 13th 2020: The pandemic frightens me. Government officials had summoned me and my friends back to our home country. Mexico wasn't safe, my president said. And today in a group chat, many friends are saying goodbye, something never considered two weeks ago.

At the start of the pandemic, life had been beachy in Mexico. I lived in a community with friends and strangers and in a home with a girlfriend and neighbors. When I worried, I talked with a friend, or my girlfriend, or simply sat next to a coworker as we worked with headphones on. Being close made the worries go away.

But now tourists no longer arrive, their money no longer feeding the locals. I see people struggling.

This morning while walking around the city, a man runs up on me and whispers in a stabbing voice, “cocaine or ‘chicas’?” Looking at this man, black mascara paints his sunken eyes and I feel the crazed energy of a drug addict. He smiles and the corners of his mouth parse in two, curving up towards his temples, showcasing sharp teeth. I run.

I heard a voice, “I’m gonna get you Arthur”.

I can’t go back outside. Monsters, like this man, lurk in my community. Unfed.

Starting today I will lunch at home, sadly no longer with my nomads. I will workout in house, tragically no longer mingling at the basketball court with locals. When worries arise, I still have Maria, my lovely girlfriend.

Back in my apartment I licked my finger and pressed it to the page. Why did I lost trust in her? I leafed ahead to the page when I left Maria.

Mexico, September 25th 2020: Day #196 of Quarantine. Maria and I are struggling. She craves other people. I crave isolation. Out my window I have mapped the cars in the parking lot. Presently one car I don’t recognize. This is concerning, as it would be for anyone of course. It’s a truck. It has ominous tinted windows and enough room in the cab to shovel a body into.

As I study the truck, someone knocks at the door. Out of the peep-hole, I see Antonio, my neighbor, his eyes sunken. He knocks again, tapping to the tune of a children's lullaby, I swear it, that sounded like “I’m gonna get you Arthur”. Am I losing my mind? Again the tune played, “I’m gonna get you Arthur”. I silence my breath and plug my ears until I eye him walk away as a tail slithers out the back of his shirt, gliding across the street tiles.

Maria from the other room shouts “who was it”? Although I have never lied to her, I did today. “Someone I didn’t recognize,” I told her. I’m ashamed I said that. She’s my girlfriend. I trust her. Don’t I? I can’t tell her these fears. Can’t I? No, if you tell her you hear a voice that someone’s out to get you, she’ll call you paranoid and think you're un-spiritual, someone who doesn’t trust God. I have no one here.

I need to fly home. Back to my people. Back to Minnesota.

Angrily, I closed the journal, slid it behind the ream of paper, and slung the pack over my shoulder. Vlad confirmed my suspicion, people are not to be trusted. Unfed monsters. I hiked due west where I knew of an abandoned cabin on the Pedernales river.

It was 30 degrees outside. No Texan steps out when it’s below 50, so I was surprised when I heard a basketball bouncing on the other side of a church. Around the corner, in the church parking lot, a man bounced a ball. He wore a crimson tie, his face was – painted. I hid behind the church corner. The monster is back.

The basketball stopped bouncing. I’m gonna get you Arthur.

I need to fly away. I hugged my body against the church wall, preparing to spring off and escape down a different street, when an image flashed in my mind of my last day in Mexico.

I stand in my apartment doorway. I just said bye to Maria. My innocent girlfriend hides behind the corner of a wall, unable to watch me leave. I peek my blurry and teary eyes through the crack until she pops her head out. Our eyes meet and between them I close the door.

Onto the church wall, my head falls back in resignation. I didn’t want to run from Maria, I wanted to talk. I wanted to move in close.

I faced the man. He stood in the parking lot with the ball at his hip. Although the voice told me to flee, I approached. After a step, he seemed to shrink in stature. Another step closer, his green hair colored black. Another, his face softened and his crimson tie and black jacket became a hoodie.

When I stepped onto the court, he had mutated into a young lady with the basketball at her hip. It was just a young lady.

"Hi," I said, my voice shaking.

"Hi," she said. "I'm Nissa."

Nissa is a kind name. I asked if it is hard to shoot basketball with cold hands and she told me yes, but “I gotta shoot if I want to make the boys team.” We played PIG. In between shots we talked about the new high school and the guys/girls team and our damn cold fingers.

After our game ended, I picked up my pack and left, eastward I went – back to my apartment.

A block down the road, I put my cold hands into my jacket and remembered a silver lining from Mexico.

Minnesota, November 15th 2020: Back here in the cold my Mom and I walk together daily – no matter the weather. It’s below zero degrees outside? Okay, one extra layer of gloves. We shove our hands into gloves and the gloves into our jacket pockets, and we walk. Our heads down watching for ice. And the only thing that warms us up is to talk.

Talking makes monsters evaporate.

I close my journal. From my pack I pull out a pen, and on the cover, I write a reminder for myself:

War – of the fist and of the mind – isn’t a time to isolate. War is a time to move in closer.

Andrew 💚

Hi friends,

Last you heard from me, I said “Covid invades my body,” then disappeared for a month. Sorry. Over the next week, my immune system produced a whole lot of antibodies, sent them flowing and circulating through my blood, and instructed them to swarm the virus and latch on for dear life before the virus effects other cells. Covid was eradicated.

All healthy now. Besides a cookie addiction.

Try these, Tate’s Bake Shop Chocolate Chip Cookies. Buttery cookies that don’t leave you feeling lethargic. Dangerous.

This week, I paused for the imagination. I wrote an essay on this.

After reading it, my friend Melissa said in a recent published essay of hers, she noticed a perfect situation to use her imagination.

In the essay, she describes a situation, the action, “crossing the table from start-up founder to investor” and the corresponding feeling, “breath of fresh air”. Breath of fresh air is cliched and quickly written. Upon noticing this, paused and let the imagination play.

For me, when I let the imagination play, first I see a boardroom filled with the freshest air. Second I see bottled water from an aquifer in Fiji. And then the scene animates in my mind, Melissa walks around the elongated table to sit next to the other investors; she’s handed bottled air, flown in from a boreal forest in Finland. She cracks it open and the air fills her lungs. She’s flying.

The essay I wrote is called, Ready-made Phrases

It begins —
A friend emailed me this photo. I typed in to reply, “This photo warms m...” and some gmail robot, energized by 1s and 0s, not a drop of emotion in his system, completed my sentence, “warms my heart.”

THE BASTARD DOESN’T EVEN HAVE A HEART. How the hell could he, COULD IT feel the same as me towards these elephants snuggling together, dozing the afternoon away?

[…]

Read Full Essay Here

Melissa also said I ought to run a live workshop. Would anyone be interested in that?

Pausing in Conversations

Conversations can flow in two ways. The first: I say something about an island, you say something about sand, I say something about small rocks, you about palm trees, and so on. The conversation remains in the same context. The second, we jump contexts: island, sand, then hourglass, grim reaper, A Christmas Carol, and so on.

The upright Citizens Brigade calls this A to C. "When you 'go A to C', you have moved beyond saying the obvious or the expected."

In improv this is used for generating specific and interesting information for a scene. We can too generate interesting information in conversations.

When someone asks how the movie was, "It was great" is my reaction. A little better is I saw Dune. The popcorn was great, the movie felt Game-of-Thronish, amazing visuals throughout. But how many other people said the game thing after watching Dune?

Let's get under that ready-made language into your experience.

Movie ⇒ great ⇒ 'popcorn', butter, buttery-fingers.

"The movie was great, I had the butteriest popcorn. It coated my fingers. I went to grab my sparkling water and it damn near slipped out of my fingers." NOW we have an image. I see YOU sitting in the movie theater enjoying the movie.

Many immune systems are battling covid, so maybe cookies weren’t the best recommendation. How about this.

Try these, Fresh Nutrition Liposomal Vitamin C. Small pills that boost immunity by strengthening white blood cells.

<3

Arthur

The woman in front of me, slides out a blanket from the cubbyhole and stacks the two blocks on top along with a strap. I try to walk around when she turns and says, "here you go", handing me her stack. I pause, how kind, and I mouth thank you before scurrying to my mat.

For the next hour, I followed the instructor's lead, in movement and breath, synchronizing with my 10 classmates. With each pose, my nervous system fired, and repeatedly instead of being overwhelmed, I inhaled deeply and exhaled broadly. My shoulders eased down my back. My hips loosened and my mind found comfort in my classmates and the grueling hour we conquered together.

"Namaste," the instructor says in the dimly lit yoga studio. In unison, we bow our chin to our chests. My head lifts and my eyes flutter open.

In the mirror ahead, all sit cross legged. A few friends with a resting smile. I take one last inhale while soaking in the atmosphere. The feeling of my relaxed eyes. My neighbor with the same Nalgene water bottle as me. My friend who handed me the blanket and blocks. How kind.

As soon as I exhale fully, I spring to my feet, quickly roll up my mat, and with my head down buzz past the classmates, into the entryway. The instructor relaxes against the counter, a restful smile under her eyes. I want to linger. But out the class windows, people busy to and fro, and I'm reminded how much I have to do today. Other times the following class's students enter and I feel in the way. It's too easy to default to not connecting. I glance her way, blurt out thank you, and head out the door.

HONK!

Suddenly I'm behind the wheel, traffic stopped in front of me. My mind ruminates about this new woman in my life, desperately I try not to feel so alone.

Why do we do this? It's like going to the gym, running a mile on the treadmill, and as you exit, you pull out a brownie from your bag and smash it into your face. In the yoga studio, before we give the practice a chance to take root, we're already on the next checkbox. Instead of rushing past these opportunities for connection, why don't we linger until they arise?

How the Body Keeps Score, by Bessel van der Kolk, a book on trauma, sheds some light on how this space after class heals¹, this space where we are connected to those around us and trust them.

He says, we overcome trauma (big and small) of our past "by allowing the body to have experiences that deeply and viscerally contradict the helplessness, rage, or collapse that result from trauma."

As soon as a class ends, we're in a state of relaxation and trust where we can redefine our meaning of interacting with others. It's a space where it's "easy" to practice new ways of being in the world², and through experimentation, our eyes open to the possibilities. We act instead of react. And all we have to do is linger.

If I paused life for a few minutes, I could have viscerally contradicted that depressing feeling this woman is causing in my life. And I would have walked out knowing, I'm not alone.

YET I don't pause. WHY?

While living in Mexico, I often attended another activity which provided a safe environment. Monthly I used to attend a Mexican temazcal³, which is a traditional sauna, similar to a Native American sweat lodge. The lodge is a compact dome, covered in colorful Mexican serape blankets. Inside, ten of us sit knee to knee around a fire pit where scolding volcanic rocks pyramid up. The shaman, a grey bearded, shirtless man, pours water on the rocks, and the steam fills the lodge. He pours water again and again. Cautiously you inhale, questioning if the steam will burn the inside of your lungs. And when past grievances and future desires dissolve in the struggle to take a full breath the music begins.

Led by the shaman, we chant and sing and drum and celebrate. AND SWEAT. Oh god do we sweat. After an hour inside, surrounded by the ordered chaos of fire and music, we crawl out on our hands and knees; earth clings to our sweat and saliva covered bodies. And we lay down, just us, the jungle, the stars above.⁴

After "class", deep in the jungle, it's difficult to tuck your head down and rush out. When we catch our breath, we float down a path into a one room house. In the hut, everyone relaxes, sharing our experience, playing games, and eating the juiciest watermelon of our lives. In the jungle we’re encouraged to linger.

I dream of a yoga studio like this!

What if I walk out of the class and the instructor relaxes at a table, a bowl of fruit in front of her, as she waves me over. We play games and talk about class and the complexities of new relationships, as I shake my fist at the heavens.

After we chit chat and play each other our favorite songs, I stroll to my car. Behind the steering wheel, instead of ruminating about my relationship, I’m thinking about my friend who gave me the blanket stack and about the game of Uno I won. In an effortless state, I wave a pedestrian across, then another, when behind me the angry taxi driver leans on the horn — I wave to him too. I know I'm not alone. . . after lingering.

On our last day together, a girlfriend gifted me a rosebush. She set it onto a corner of sunlight, on top of my dirtied red Persian rug, and knelt down to it. Leaning in, she whispered something in its ear; it seemed to flutter its leaves back to her, as if winking a thousand eyes. Her words were magic, and I would be under their spell for more than a month after this.

THE BREAKUP

At the time of our break, our relationship was a fledgling at two months old. We still were getting to know each other and still falling in love, when a family member who was under her care entered the hospital. She — no longer with time nor energy for a relationship — asked for a break. “We can stay in touch. Then in a month, maybe we try again.” I didn’t know what to make of this nor what I wanted. I knew I wanted her, and I knew I didn’t want to wait. If I can’t have that, I need to look out for myself, don’t I?

“Also I know your birthday is in a few days,” she said, “I would like to spend it with you — if you allow me to.” Although I felt confused, I wanted that. Besides still falling in love with her, it would be my first birthday in seven years with a date.

My previous seven, I spent overseas, many in countries where I was unable to speak the local language and many where the only place I felt warm was in my stone walled bathroom, laying down in a tub as the shower dropped water on top of my naked body. But not this night!

A few days later, my birthday, and our last day together, we met.

THE BIRTHDAY

In front of me, she was kneeling beside the rosebush that she had just gifted me. Out the window rain clouds moved in, and wanting to share my favorite lookout in Austin, I grabbed her warm hand and rushed us out the door. At the top of a bridge, we looked down the Colorado river. Ahead a gorgeous, rusty train line that's covered in vibrant graffiti bridged the river. As the clouds gathered, we squeezed our bodies tightly into each other. Lightning flashed in the sky. It wasn’t rain clouds. It was a lightning storm igniting! Under the flashes, feeling her warm cheek against my collarbone, I knew we would see each other again. Until then, I will support her through her stay in the hospital.

THE ROSEBUSH

Over the next month, I would ask her how she’s doing, how’s the hospital going, but the conversations always rerouted to the rosebush. “How is she?,” she would ask, “Lots of flowers?” Even one time, she sent me a screenshot of an instagram post of a wild rosebush she saw in public, with the caption, “Love”. This rosebush was important to her, and maybe if it thrives, we’ll thrive.

THE CARE

Each morning, my alarm went off and I staggered to the rosebush. I opened the blinds, and checked the dryness of the soil. When the soil didn’t stick to my finger, I watered it. Yet in my air conditioned apartment and without direct sunlight, it struggled to absorb enough nutrients, and each day, it yellowed and dropped more leaves. It needed a miracle to survive. I didn’t tell my girlfriend ANY of that. I wanted to see her again. Trying to salvage what I could, I looked to the internet for advice.

Days later, my apartment was a medical center. My desk was covered in notes with difficult to read handwriting explaining how to care for the rosebush. Next to my plant, a white-light lamp shined direct sunlight onto it. I unrolled my toolkit. Inside were the sharpest pruners money could buy, a plastic bag of broken egg shells, chamomile tea bags, and aspirin tablets. I opened the window, and grabbed the bucket hanging from the railing. It was filled with fresh rain water. I would revive this plant’s life.

THE DEATH

A week later, with crushed up aspirin beneath the soil, egg shells on the top soil, and tea bags hanging from its limbs, it had died. And subsequently, so too did our texting.

Why wasn’t she asking about the rosebush anymore? Did she know? Maybe she’s posting about it on her instagram, just not sharing it with me. And maybe if she’s posting more pictures, we’ll see each other again soon. And we’ll hug and dance and lighting will strike. But if I check her instagram, that’s bad vibes, that’s putting creeper energy out there. How would I feel lurking in her background? I can’t check. I want to check. Ahhhh.

I went to her page, just to see. Her profile picture was highlighted by a red circle. A new photo! But, no! Bad vibes. If you check, she WILL NOT be back in your life. By checking, all your patience and love will go to waste. I closed the app and I forced my attention elsewhere — I try to write, to draw, to watch a movie, or for god's sake to play 52 card pickup — anything but check her god damn instagram. Still I had to. I had to find evidence she was thinking of me.

AHHHHH, I toss my phone onto the kitchen counter, strip off my clothes, and manically scramble to the shower where I could escape.

In the shower my legs weakened and I gradually lowered myself to the bottom of the tub where water dropped down onto me. And for the first time in a month, I was warm again. My eyes closed.

THE REBIRTH

An hour later, midnight: Bing! My phone chimed. I leaped out of the tub. She texted me. I opened the message.

“🌹”

Blood climbed into my cheeks. A knock at my door. I freeze. “Boom-boom.” The front door? Boom-boom. Boom-boom. That's not my door. What is it?

Poking my head back in my bathroom, the sound muffled. I stepped into my living room. BOOM, BOOM. My chest tingled. The blood in my cheeks swirled down into the center of my palms. Over in the corner, potted in a lime green bucket, sat the rosebush. The sound came from there.

I sat cross-legged beside it. Its branches bare and its topsoil covered in dried, fallen yellow leaves and petals. Spiders had taken over with elaborate schemes of cobwebs covering from branch to branch. I leaned my ear closer, boom, boom, boom, boom.

Moving my hands towards the cobwebs, the air chilled the surface of my palms. With both hands, I slowly dove my pointer fingers into the cobwebs and peeled them back.

Warm air released from the hole and I jerked back before easing closer. In the crevasse, I saw a tiny bud, pushing its red head out a stem. With each pulse, boom-boom, it blinked a fleshy red.

It was alive! It is alive.

Seeing the red bud through the cobwebs, I leapt to my feet and snatched something to hold water in, a glass cup, filled it under the kitchen faucet, and hurried back. Tilting her head back supporting her lime green neck, I poured the water into her base. Swallow after swallow, she quenched her thirst. I grabbed my pruners and chopped off her dead weight. With each snip, her spine erected.

"You can make it!" I said.

"We can make it!" she responded. And before my eyes, she grew to five foot, six inches. Her trunk thickened as it climbed into the sky. Her branches twisted and weaved like muscle fibers stretching into two long arms; her bark toned into a glossy brown. She lifted her arms up and out the tips twigs emerged, forming fingers, the freshly pruned ends sparkled in gold polish. Her gold nails gathered the branches around her trunk and slicked them back — revealing dark green eyes.

Lighting struck. I saw my birthday, that night when she warmed me by making me a steamy fish taco, by the fiery kiss in the middle of the bar, by her face blushing when I interrupted her to tell her I adore her, by her warm lips pressing against my neck, by my foot resting against her warm leg as I closed my eyes to sleep. Ach.

Over the next week, you couldn't separate her and I.

In the mornings, with breakfast, we would wrap our limbs around each other, her branches encircling me many times over, as I recited a morning prayer. "Thank you god for the food in front of me and this warm company to share it with. Amen."

In the afternoons, while I wrote, her freshly pruned fingers scratched my head, always leaving a smell lingering in my hair. A fruity rose.

In the evenings, we laid down, my foot resting upon her leg, resting against her hairy thorns, invigorating blood to the surface of my skin.

I had the relationship I dreamed of.

THE MEETUP

Quickly a week passed and I realized I hadn’t texted the girlfriend. My rosebush was so beautiful and flourishing, I had to share her with her.

I texted a photo, and instantly she replied, “WOW, look at her. I have something I want to give you.” Three dots rolled on my phone; she wasn’t finished typing. My palms sweat. “Let’s meet up.”

My eyes widened. I laughed maniacally. And took a deep breath. Finally. It was over. “Yes please.”

Later that day she came over. She told me she's still not ready to start dating, but in the meantime, she had something for me. Another gift! Out of a little pouch, she strung out a silver necklace, with a silver plate on it. I lunged at it, seized it from her hand.

He’s beautiful, I said.

THE DREAM

That night, with the necklace around my neck, I drifted into my dreams, feeling the metal against my chest and wondering, how do I take care of this necklace?

A few dreams later, I sat at my kitchen counter, breakfast in front of me. To my right, a five foot, six inch silver saucer. It wrapped its chain around me and recited, "Gracias a Dios por la comida que tengo frente a mí y esta cálida compañía con la que compartirla. Amén."

A moment later, I saw the rosebush, nearby I saw myself sitting cross-legged. The blinds were open yet the room was dark. The pruners were cold against my palm. The rosebush lifeless. No warm puffs of air. No encircling branches. No one to talk to. Just me, pouring the love and care that I had been bottling for this woman, pouring it all into this still bush.

I awoke. Lying in bed, the silver plate was cold against my chest — and I wept — for I wished it was a warm cheek.

I paused this week — to move like water.

I rate high in conscientiousness, meaning more than most, I tend to be organized, determined, and goal-oriented. When an obstacle arises in route to my goal, my plan of action detours. The goal doesn’t change.

This week, however, I made an effort to recognize when I’m stuck in a one-track mind, and instead of detouring, I changed.

A few days ago, I sent an endearing photo to a friend. She laughed, thought I was making a joke. I went on to explain how much I adore this photo of her. “Your freckles, ugh!” After sending my explanation, it didn’t sit right. I felt myself resisting. And I changed course by making a joke of it all.

What are you resisting in life? How can you change your desires to flow through life?

This newsletter, I don’t have an essay. Instead, inspired by Simone Silverstein’s fun newsletter, I am letting you in on my past week.

Friday - December 10, 2021

For a dance social, I wore a suit. Dark blue suit, black tshirt, black Converses. I was told I look dapper. In the mirror I confirmed that.

I danced until 2am. I don't dance after 11pm. I hardly move after 11pm because I'm dead under a 20 lb blanket. The uniform brought out the right amount of macho, style, and play.

I ordered a brown suit. I'll wear it next Friday. With cream Converses. Dapper.

Saturday

I applied to be a big brother with Big Brothers, Big Sisters. I checked the box, declaring I speak Spanish. I miss stumbling through Spanish.

My ideal little brother: speaks Spanish, loves Zines (mini magazines), and dances Cumbia.

I just want to help someone.

A decade of my life was spent gaining money from people who had gambling problems. They bet against me. And they lost. They lost money which was for books to get out of a menial job or a lunchbox with an extra sandwich or epsom salts so his wife can relax after a stressful day of work.

It’s my time to give back.

Sunday

Carrots with hair are attractive.

Monday

Gmail smart-compose angers me so much I write an essay about it. [soon to be publish]

Michael Sklar emailed me a picture

I responded "That picture warms m...". A robot interrupted. A robot made up of 1s and 0s incapable of emotion offered to complete my sentence: "warms my heart." THE BASTARD DOESNT EVEN HAVE A HEART. How the hell could he feel the same way I feel about this picture of elephants snuggling together as they doze the afternoon away? I HAVE A HEART, GOD DAMMIT. . . don't I?

To confirm I have a heart, I had to rewrite. Here are some prompts that helped me —

1. In the photo, what do you see, specifically? Wait until a memory arises.

2. In the memory, what do you see, specifically?

3. How does that make you feel?

4. What does that make you want to do?

I rewrote my response into, “Ugh, do you think this family ever returns to sleeping standing up? I just see the elephant’s foot resting against his companion’s prickly back and think he’ll never want it any other way. I wouldn’t.”

Next step: start a software company. Imagine-Compose. AI-assisted imagination software. When you write something predictable or cliche, it prompts you with a question to rewrite it.

Tuesday

A friend asked a group chat for someone's HBO Max log-in info. I purchased an account and sent it to him. He broke down. Said he has needed a win. Said his aggressive German Shepard had a few incidents lately. Said he can't stop thinking about his ex-girlfriend. And more sadness. I didn't know any of this.

That night he messaged, "I'm enjoying my show tonight, thanks to you."

Wednesday

I struggled, ruminated all god damn day long.

I found this mediation helpful.

Also looking up. Looking up always helps.

Thursday

I met a friend for coffee. She's the Chilean who I write about a lot.

The face she presents to me changes faster than lightning. We are friends. We used to date. We have been enemies. Each stage, her face changes.

Thursday she wore a giant smile. Dawning that mask, she grabbed my hand. I enjoyed it, briefly. I let go. We are friends.

I again tasted her touch. And I let it go. We are friends.

And on and on…

Friday, Saturday, Sunday, Monday

Covid invades my body.

Happy Holidays, ya’ll. Thank you for the support. It impacts me.

Sent from bed,

Arthur

A friend emailed me this photo. I typed in to reply, “This photo warms m...” and some gmail robot, energized by 1s and 0s, not a drop of emotion in his system, completed my sentence, “warms my heart.”

THE BASTARD DOESN’T EVEN HAVE A HEART. How the hell could he, COULD IT feel the same as me towards these elephants snuggling together, dozing the afternoon away?

In George Orwell’s pamphlet Politics and English Language, Orwell called these “ready-made phrases”, a phrase which countless others have said. It’s pre-packaged language that we utter without adding our own creativity to it. Nothing uniquely us lives within these phrases. The words are predictable and cliche and lack heart.

Ready-made phrases are parasites to good writing.

In the 21st century, as we compose an email, we see these phrases appear in real-time. And tragically, we’re encouraged to use them. Simply hit tab and AI will write the sentence for you. You’ll save a microsecond! And you’ll save all that brain power! The beauty of optimization.

How many other emails of mine could’ve been written by AI? “Sounds good”, “Hope you’re well”, “Just checking in,” HECK, just yesterday I wrote “All that glitters isn’t gold.” Omg, this isn’t me.

Screw this! I scream and push my chair away from my desk. This robot cannot express how I feel. I declare, “When something warms — or breaks or angers or you name the damn emotion — warms my heart like these elephants do, I vow to write it in a way that only I can! I will find my unique voice behind these phrases!”

But I’m unsure where to find my voice. If it’s not the tab key...

I grab a paperclip and pop off the tab key from my keyboard. Underneath I see arm hairs and cookie crumbs and dust mites. I tilt the keyboard up, flip it over and tap the crumbs out. My voice isn’t there. I swipe them onto the floor. And after I take a sip of coffee and vacuum my floor and tap a few more crumbs out and vacuum again, my eyes land back on the elephants.

What do they inspire? I close my eyes.

Behind my eye-lids, I pause, until an asteroid appears followed by a famished lion, then bright, green nickelodeon goo pouring on some white man. My eyes snap open. Images! Images are authentically me. Yet, pfff, these have nothing to do with the photo. Where do I find images related to this photo?

What matters to me?

When I first saw this photo, I looked at it without patience and I responded before I saw anything that mattered to me. All I saw was a pack, a family of elephants. Seven elephants. Dead. Maybe tranquilized. Actually they’re sleeping. They’re cuddling. It's a nice photo, warming, I thought. And so I wrote —

“This photo warms my heart.” (Response Version 1)

All of that feels like I’m tapping crumbs out onto the desk. There’s nothing of substance. What specifically in this photo moves me? What arrests my attention?

The foot of the upper left elephant resting against his companion's back. I dearly miss that feeling, resting my foot against a lover's leg while asleep.

“Ugh, the elephant’s foot resting against his companion’s back warms my heart.” (Response Version 2)

Although this feels closer to my voice, still something about it feels inauthentic. But this revealed a passage, a passage into my imagination!

Behind this foot, I feel a lot of emotion. E-motion, energy in motion. My imagination stirs. What does this foot remind me of? What memories are swirling about behind this door? What emotions? And what actions are these emotions wanting me to take?

I’m going to go where these parasites cannot survive. To rewrite this email response into something only I can say. I will go deeper into my imagination than I’ve ever gone before.

I look and see the elephant’s foot again, and I step through the door, by closing my eyes, into the land of emotions and desires and memories... a dream world.

Why does it matter? What memories arise?

Behind my eyelids, I vaguely see my ex-girlfriend and I, laying in our California king bed in Mexico.

We are enduring a three-month long stint in the relationship. She struggles to love me for fear of being hurt, I struggle to love her for fear of hurting her. After a conversation about our future, our unknown future, we fall asleep, opposite sides of the bed, an ocean of blankets separating our backs. In the middle of the night, I wake up. We had faced each other. My ankle rests on her leg. I feel the prickles of her unshaven leg, from weeks of her feeling too lethargic to care for herself. I eased back into dreams.

When I reopen my eyes, on my computer screen in front of me, I see the elephants and this resting foot. I see them differently.

“Ugh, the elephant’s foot resting against his companion’s prickly back warms my heart.”

It warms my heart! NO. That’s the cliche, that’s the enemy to my unique voice. Instead —

“Just think, probably days before this journey, he and his companion were having marital problems, she bickering about him not returning before sundown, out philandering with other cows, while he would return to their tree and to drown her out by drinking copious amounts of dirty water. Yet they stuck together, embarking on a long journey. Together, they laid.” (Response Version 3)

A smile had lifted onto my face. How fun.

I close my eyes again, returning to where I see my girlfriend’s prickly leg. A swirl of emotion barrels right into me.

What does it make you feel and want to do?

Seeing her prickly leg, I feel love and care. I want to wake her up and tell her I'm sorry and how I miss falling asleep together. I want to grab her hand and run us outside, run us barefoot across the dirtied street, to the beach where we watch the sunrise over the calming ocean. And while we give thanks to papa sol for rising again, I want to protect us from the coolness of the night by wrapping a blanket around us.

Yet I also feel anger towards her, why do we let ourselves fall asleep back to back? I like when we face each other and reach across the blankets to hold hands. I want that.

I reopen my eyes. The photo has changed again. I also, as the father elephant, feel anger at my companion. Why do we ever sleep standing up?

“Here’s a story. Once upon a time there was a family of elephants. Every day, they slept standing up, like every other elephant in the history of the world. One day they migrated across the country, hundreds of kilometers. Because of that, out of pure exhaustion, they slept laying down. The father felt in a position of care and protection and from this day forward, decided his family would always sleep laying down. And eventually ALL elephants evolved to sleep laying down.” (Response Version 4)

That’s my raw experience!

From behind my eyelids, exists another form of auto-fill, one of images. Instead of pre-package phrases, emergent-images. Instead of cliches, raw sensations. Instead of reacting and rushing, we pause and wait. Instead of computer-generated artificial-intelligence, biological-generated natural-intelligence!

Coming out of my dream world, I proudly state, “I am ready to write a new email response!”

In the gmail browser, I delete, “This photo warms my heart,” and I type —

“Oh wow! Do you think this family will ever sleep standing up again? I just see the elephant’s foot resting against his companion’s prickly back and think he’ll never want it any other way. I wouldn’t.” (Response Version 5)

I smile rereading that response. It could not be auto-filled by any AI in the world. Even in hundreds of years!

And I’m sure, I feel it, I found my unique voice.

When we pause and wait for our imagination to ignite, we burn every parasite that’s near. And in the ash, we’re left with writing that is more us. Writing in our voice. I don’t have to worry about saying something unique, because how I say it will be unique. Writing that I’ll feel proud of and want to share. Hey, look, this is me! I wrote this.

Hey, dear reader.

New writers feel they are rephrasing and repeating information that's already out there. But it’s less about the information and it’s more about these ready-made phrases. Instead of entering their imagination, they write the first thing that comes to mind, pre-package and automated language.

Instead of looking for something unique in the world, look for what's unique in you.

I still have A LOT to say, but I’m no longer mad at my AI counterpart. I now feel pity for him. After I’m done here, he’ll have no one to vicariously live through.

Two practical ways to use imagination while writing

1. Line Editing A Shitty First Draft

Write fast, then go back and edit in visuals.

Here’s a draft paragraph I wrote for my newsletter which lacks fresh imagery —

“A decade of my life was spent gaining money from people who had gambling problems. They bet against me. And they lost. They lost money which could have been spent improving their life.”

The last sentence lacks emotional punch. I feel sad writing it but not reading it. How could I add visuals to make the reader feel that sad?

I want to show how they are losing money and how that affects their lives. “Improving their life” is the first phrase that came to me. It’s pre-packaged. To imagine the effects of their life, I linger on three different topics, (1) education, (2) food, (3) gifts for a spouse — I hold these in my mind, until a specific image emerges.

1. Education — I see books. Then I see a father, working a menial job, which books could be his way out. I see a father, under candle light, wife asleep next to him, reading a book which will unfetter him from his menial job. I see a father, reading a passage in a book that motivates him to start his own business, unfettering him from a menial job.

2. Food...

3. Gifts...

Version 1: They lost money which could have been spent improving their life.

Version 2: They lost money which was for education or food or gifts.

Version 3: They lost money which was for a book that contains a passage which rescues him from his menial job or for epsom salts for his wife so she can relax after a stressful day or for a lunchbox with an extra sandwich.

With a few iterations, a bland sentence becomes a heartache. Instead of telling the reader how to feel, we show them. That’s the power of the imagination!

Patiently look until you see. It’s a skill.

2. Write slow! While writing, look for opportunities to ignite the imagination.

A friend told me he can’t run the zoom call. I could say, Okay. But I feel an opportunity for me to take the steering wheel. So I respond, Okay, I’ll take the wheel.

I pause to wonder, what type of wheel am I grabbing? A boat? A car? A bus. When we started these zoom-calls a team of people showed up, all eager to be around the writing coach. So I picture him a driving football bus. Yet lately it’s often just me and him. Our bus has shrunk, into a short one. I’m the only student left. He picks me up and is patient and kind to my grade school level reading and writing.

I write, Okay, I’ll take the wheel, albeit lonely driving a big bus by myself.

The images informed my words.

“When you think of a concrete object, you think wordlessly, and then, if you want to describe the thing you have been visualising you probably hunt about until you find the exact words that seem to fit it. When you think of something abstract you are more inclined to use words from the start, and unless you make a conscious effort to prevent it, the existing dialect will come rushing in and do the job for you, at the expense of blurring or even changing your meaning.” — George Orwell

Writing doesn’t need to be a process that we CRUSH and SLAY. It can be a meditation, one where we pause and wait for images to bubble up and animate before we reach out and capture them.

Table-side Questions

Here are some questions that rest on my desk —

• Looking patiently, what do you see? What sentences are meaningful? What image is underneath the sentence?

• Why are they meaningful? What do they remind you of? What memories arise?

• How does it make you feel? What do those feelings make you want to do?

Orwell says, "A scrupulous writer, in every sentence that he writes, will ask himself [...]”

• What am I trying to say?

• What words will express it?

• What image or idiom will make it clearer?

• Is this image fresh enough to have an effect?

• Could I put it more shortly?

• Have I said anything that is avoidably ugly?

Andrew 💚

Dec 8, 2021

I paused this week — in conversations.

I have been practicing slowing conversations down by asking questions. Reading into things is bad. Our minds are story producing machines. If we don’t understand, we will figure out a story (or many stories) that “makes sense”. The way out is to pause and notice, and THEN to ask, ask questions.

Recently someone gifted me a necklace. The following day, I ruminated about why she gave it to me… until I caught myself and I paused and I asked her, “I feel unsettled about this necklace, can we talk about it?” We talked. I felt great.

Other times, we read into our partner’s actions.

The event that started my therapy journey was 3 years ago. I lived in Vancouver at the time. A woman I dated was showing me pictures on her phone of a hike she went on. In the pictures, I saw another guy, and my mind created a story about her and him on a date. I got so lost in this story that she noticed something was wrong. I was silent the rest of the night. Ruminating.

I needed to ask a question, but I didn’t have a bridge to do so.

Brené Brown has a tool to break out of patterns like this. When you catching yourself thinking over and over about something, pause and tell your partner, “The story I am telling myself is… you were on a date with this guy. Is that true?”

Let our partner tell you the truth so you don’t have to guess it.

Healthy Hope

I published this essay. It was easiest to write, the hardest to share. 💔

A few blocks from my house, surrounded by a stonewall is an enormous Texas cemetery. A quarter of the land is a confederate graveyard, populated with hundreds of white, unmarked, stone tablets. The rest of the graveyard lies prominent Texans, whose headstones claim the same amount of land as a dozen confederate soldiers. At the head of a giant unmarked red granite tombstone, I stand, reflecting. Across the tombstone, words slowly etch themselves in front of me, "Can we just be friends?"

[…]

Read Full Essay Here

Musings

I'm fascinated by the writing process, specifically going from zero => a working essay.

This week’s essay, I broke through when a certain image took over the story. The essay is based in a graveyard. Someone I love stands over an endless grave about to free fall in.

I have a decision. Do I say goodbye even though I'm madly in love with her? Or do I support her as a friend even though I'm madly in love with her?

I wrap my arms around her as we fall

Creatively this image came to mind while recalling a Joseph Campbell story, (see image).

With that story in mind and myself in a graveyard, the image of my love standing over a bottom-less grave emerged.

Once I had that, combined with the graveyard imagery, I had my essay.

So partner, the story I tell myself is no one wants to read more essays and hear me go on and on and on about this difficult, painful relationship. Is this true?

Arthur

P.S. Same too when giving feedback on someone else’s writing. One thing I learned from Simon Silverstein’s feedback is when you don’t understand, just plainly ask, what are you saying here?

Readers want to read, not read into.

A few blocks from my house, surrounded by a stonewall is an enormous Texas cemetery. A quarter of the land is a confederate graveyard, populated with hundreds of white, unmarked, stone tablets. The rest of the graveyard lies prominent Texans, whose headstones claim the same amount of land as a dozen confederate soldiers. At the head of a giant unmarked red granite tombstone, I stand, reflecting. Across the tombstone, words slowly etch themselves in front of me, "Can we just be friends?"

Two months before, I had met a woman at a salsa event. From behind our face masks, our eyes lingered together. Dinner followed, and soon we were dancing in public squares without a care in the world.

But in her life, our romance was contrasted with heavy responsibilities. At 28 years old, she parented many family members, alone, and soon two of the members would be admitted into the hospital. During the day she burdened the real-world challenges. At night we got lost in each other's stories and vulnerable truths.

And so I hoped we could make it through these challenges.

After sleepless nights by the hospital bedside, she was tired. "I'm not emotionally available right now," she said, "but I don't want to lose you." The words that followed haunted me, "I want you in my life as a friend."

I had a decision. Do I say goodbye and move on even though I'm madly in love with her? Or do I support her as a friend even though I'm madly in love with her? I arrived at the cemetery, reflecting on this decision.

I reread the question on the granite tombstone. Between me and the tombstone, the thick graveyard grass begins to quake, until a slab, a grave 6 feet by 3 collapsed inwards, revealing a rectangular pit. I lean over. Darkness descends as far as I can see.

To my left, she appears, looking into its depths. Wind blows through her hair as if she was standing on the ledge of a bridge. "You don't want to do this," I plead. She puts her arms out at her sides and starts falling forward into the never-ending pit.

What do I do!? If I grab her, stay by her side, we both fall to our demise and enter the next life. If I don't grab her, if I say goodbye, this life becomes a place I don't want to live.

Instinctually I wrap my arms around her and shut my eyes tightly.

And so I hope.

I open my eyes, and I am back in my apartment, lying in my bed underneath a weighted blanket, arms crossed on my chest like an Egyptian mummy. It is day 1 of being her friend.

Over the next three weeks, I feel so much emotion and have so much to say, with only one person who could truly relate and understand. Yet constantly, I keep that struggle in, I try to be strong for her, to not add more stress to her life. Instead, I would text her supportive messages, like "Have a great day :D :D".

And so I hope.

But during these three weeks, our relationship went numb. Whereas before texts, even if delayed, always showed care and warmth and engagement, an effort to reconnect, now they feel superficial. "I'm glad you had a great Friday," she says. But my Friday was filled with pain.

Feeling angry and sad, I want to share that with her, and I ask, "hey tomorrow can we talk?" The afternoon passes, no response. Late at night, in my bed, I check my phone, no response. Waking up at 4am, no response. The next morning, no response.

I'm tumbling through the dark pit, but now it's different. I'm alone.

I try everything to move on, to have the courage to take back my life. How can I process these pent-up emotions towards a ghost? I attend 7am yoga. I meditate. I walk down the boardwalk in Austin where the sun shines and the people socialize and the puppies beg to play. Yet my mind goes on. And on. And on. And on.

In the afternoon I find myself walking down a noisy road. People don't walk down this road. There are no shops and the sidewalks are dirty. I only walk down it in order to get somewhere. And the last time, I remember, was when I went to the cemetery. That's where my ghost lives! That's where I can talk to her.

And so I hope.

Standing on the thick grass in front of the red granite tombstone, I reread the question, "Can we just be friends?" I no longer know the answer. All I know is this isn't working. I forgot how to show her love and she forgot how to accept it. All I am doing is hurting her and myself. And the only loving act left is to climb back to the surface. To climb out of the pit, back to the present moment and enjoy the sunshine overhead.

Below land, while tumbling through the air, through the darkness, I throw my hand into the passing soil like a pick-ax, and I hold on as the soil crumbles and cracks until I jerk to a stop. Above land, I take out a knife and begin engraving the granite tombstone. I swing the pick-ax, I etch a word. With each word etched, I climb closer to the sunlight.

Until my fingertips claw the surface, feeling the lush grass above. I pause and look at the tombstone. I look at my response. It feels right.

Etched in stone reads — Although I love and care for you, this relationship has changed into something I don't want.I wanted to support you as a friend, but my love blinded me from doing that. Eventually I found myself no longer knowing how to show you my love without it bothering you. And with that it is time to bury this stage of the relationship.Goodbye. If you are ever emotionally available, tell me and if I am also available, I'll respond.

And so I hope.

***

Dear reader, thank you for reading.

"Hope is the last to die." - Russian Proverb

But I learned hope isn't the problem. Rather hope becomes a problem when you are unable to bury something as you transition into a new stage of the relationship. It's gripping on.

We can find healthy hope by taking time to let go and to bury parts of our lives. That doesn't mean making them disappear. That doesn't mean never seeing them again. No one knows what the universe will bring.

It's a healthy letting go.

And so I hope.

Andrew 💚

22 Nov 2021

You thirteen subscribers, my first subscribers,

You always have a place to sleep in my house.

Thank you for your support.

Fictionalizing The World

Lately my writing focused on an essay about fabricating details. While talking to another writer, she wondered about a personal story of hers; at the time she had been in London and she questioned if she could alter a details about someone she came across. She asked is that lying to the reader? I had an answer I firmly believed and wanted to express that in writing.

The essay begins —
In the distance, in this little nook just off the bike path, a clearing where a bench faced the Colorado River, trash is littered everywhere. It's a peaceful day, people jogging, walking dogs, and taking strolls in company. But as my bike rolls closer, the wind lunges at the surrounding trees and they begin to wrestle.

Ahead, hundreds of sheets of paper strewn about. Pages in the bushes, pages around the bench, and braking at the foot of the scene, pages in the water too. I hop off and lean my bike against the bench. What's going on?

[…]

Read Full Essay Here

Musings

The Job of an Artist

Something I realized while writing this essay, Artists pause and poke around in places where everyone else pass by, too busy to stop. It's in those places that we discover the life behind "piles of trash".

On the streets, people are busy, don't have time to pause and poke around. As too in the digital streets. People while reading online, don't have time to poke around articles. They want the message quickly and easily.

My essay is one way writers must leverage this.

Motivations and Perception

One of my favorite ideas is how our motivations shape what we see in the world. I remember this Tony Robbins exercise. Try it: For the next 15 seconds, look around the room for anything blue. Then, do the same with red. Our motivations, such as "find all blue objects", dictate what we literally see in the world.

As too with characters in stories, their motivations dictate what they see. This is why, I believe, in movies when characters are in a dark place internally, it's always fucking raining. The world is colored through a melancholy lens.

In my own life, I've had sad days when it's sunny, and I hear people outside my house happy and socializing about, say, a cute puppy, yet all I hear is the woman's shrill voice and her loud talking distracting me from writing. Because of my mood (and motivations) I can't share that sunshine with her. And clouds rolling in with buckets of rain would make my life soooo much easier.

How this looks in drafting stories. In my essay, in the initial draft, my character was enjoying a peaceful bike ride through nature. So when he saw the trees blowing with the wind, "the trees danced with the wind." In later drafts, my character was angry (from his struggle to write a story) so now, "the trees wrestled the wind".

Depending on our character's motivations, our descriptions of their world change as they perceive it differently, at times through a blue tint, other times a red tint.

The pillows are fluffed, the blankets are warm.

Talk soon,

Arthur

In the distance, in this little nook just off the bike path, a clearing where a bench faced the Colorado River, trash is littered everywhere. It's a peaceful day, people jogging, walking dogs, and taking strolls in company. But as my bike rolls closer, the wind lunges at the surrounding trees and they begin to wrestle.¹

Ahead, hundreds of sheets of paper strewn about. Pages in the bushes, pages around the bench, and braking at the foot of the scene, pages in the water too. I hop off and lean my bike against the bench. What's going on?

Resting in the middle of the scattering, this poor Bible. It is a red and white bible, on the cover KJV in giant letters. Its binding has gaps where the pages were torn out. Someone is alone, I thought.

Behind me, I check to see if others care. People busying about, just thinking, "another pile of trash in Austin," move on with their Starbucks coffees. I try to hint to a woman in eyeglasses, try to connect eyes with her and gesture like what the hell is going on here, but she scurries by. Screw it. No one has time to stop and explore — unlike this lonely soul.

Underneath a bush, a page catches my attention; it has scribbles in blue ink. The text is circled which reads, "God, Please Help Me." My heart sinks.

Hearing the footsteps of the people passing by without a second thought, my heart further plummets.

I catch eyes with a man who's walking a terrier, I ask, "You see this?"

"Wow, looks like a mess," he says and keeps walking.

IT'S MORE THAN A MESS. How can I make someone stop their day to see what I see?

The bible. I crouch down to the bush, pluck the blue inked page out, and carry it past dirty pages strewn about towards the poor bible. I position it next to the bible so that they create a focal point, the shredded bible and GOD PLEASE HELP ME, surrounded by hundreds of pages, verses scattered about the land.

"Oh gosh," a voice rings out from behind me, "How sad."

I swivel and stand. From under her visor, her eyes soften into a melancholic shape, little crescent moons.

"Right, how sad," I say.

"Makes my heart sink," she says. And walks on.

Looking back at the page, I wonder. A deep closeness settles, as my eyes crescently bend.

The page! My eyes widen and dart back to the bush where I found it. If I hadn’t moved this page, she would have never felt what I feel. The life behind the pile of trash.² A smile rises over the melancholy.

I swing my leg back onto my bike. And although I'm tempted to bunch all the pages up into the bible and take the chaotic mess back home with me, something tells me it's best left be. Perhaps my fabrication will make someone else pause and reflect. As I bike home, I smile knowing my world is in the world.

***

Hey Dear Reader

As a writer, how could I alter details of my stories and scenes so that my feelings are easily felt by busy people?

Let's say, you're writing a story about that time you found a dead rat on the side of a busy street and about your desire to move him to the grass. Your message is love and care for something that hundreds of people pass by without a second thought. You want to change the way they feel about this rat specifically. But before anyone gives your feeling a chance, they all just think you're some peace and love hippie who doesn’t understand the world and they won't read on.So instead, let’s tell it as if you found a dog, a dog others could care for. What breed and age of a dog?Well a Goldendoodle puppy is actually unbelievable since no one could pass her by, all would see her tiny, famished spine concaving against the curb as articles of trash tumble across her and they would tear up, (and so your message won't land). Something mangier but less diseased than a rat. You decide on an adult muddied terrier mix of some sorts, one of those who when you try and pick him up, your fingers catch in his knotted scruffy hair.That'll drive the message home! And that will make my message easy to consume so that people busying by with their Starbucks can understand my message without doing much work.

Is that lying to the reader?

I passionately believe it's not — if it doesn't matter to YOU.

We can't know what matters to the reader (and thus what the reader would consider a lie). But I do know what matters to me and that isn't whether it's a rat or a dog nor the location of the bible page, none of that matters to me. In this rat story (and the bible story), what matters to me is the feeling that I want to share. THIS ISN'T TRASH TO STEP OVER, IT'S SO MUCH MORE. A desire to help this poor rat. The desire to rest its body on a soft bedding and prop its head up with a rock. The desire to curl it into a fetal position as it moves into its next life, no matter if that's darkness or the king of another world.

Fictionalizing the world brings others into my world.

Andrew💚

11 Nov 2021

Footnotes

¹ One of my favorite ideas is how our motivations shape what we see in the world. I remember this Tony Robbins exercise. Try it: For the next 15 seconds, look around the room for anything blue. Then, do the same with red. Our motivations, such as "find all blue objects", dictate what we literally see in the world.As too with characters in stories, their motivations dictate what they see. This is why, I believe, in movies when characters are in a dark place internally, it's always fucking raining. The world is colored through a melancholy lens.In my own life, I've had sad days when it's sunny, and I hear people outside my house happy and socializing about, say, a cute puppy, yet I hear is the woman's shrill voice and her loud talking distracting me from writing. Because of my mood (and motivations) I can't share that sunshine with her. And clouds rolling in with buckets of rain would make my life soooo much easier.How this looks in drafting stories. In my initial draft, my character when enjoying nature and the peaceful bike path. So when he saw the trees blowing with the wind, "the trees danced with the wind." In later drafts, my character was angry (from his struggle to write a story) so now, "the trees wrestled the wind".These subtle changes in descriptions show us our character's internal workings.

² Something I realized while writing this. Artists pause and poke around in places where most people to too caught up in life to poke around. And while doing so, they discover hidden meaning that passers-by are too busy to see. "The life behind a pile of trash". It reminds me of The Plastic Bag scene, dancing in the wind, in American Beauty. Most people have too much on their mind and their focus too much on life problems to even see a bag of trash blowing in the wind — let alone see it as a dance, a dance with a benevolent force behind all things. Meaning in the unseen.It's the same in writing. People are busy. When they read, they skim and they gloss over; they have a lot on their mind. They don't want to hear about all of our time poking around and discovering the life behind things. They want all that distilled into a message. By fictionalizing unimportant details, we make that message easy for even the busiest and more distracted of people to consume.

³ I ALMOST included a preface. Previously I tried combining the fictional rat/dog story and the real-life bible/bike story. I thought my character could be struggling to write this story about the rat and through this experience with the bible, realizes his solution. He must change the rat to a dog. BUT for the life of me I couldn't figure it out. I finally decided, okay let's include a preface that says after a week of trying to make this story work, I want to move on. I’ve worked hard. But it's only good with the proper context. And I struggled to weave that context in. As Mark Twain once said, “I didn't have time to write you a short letter, so I wrote you a long one.” Sorry reader, I didn't have time to make this work so I will commit a writing sin and tell you the context.(Instead I spilt the stories apart and the essay was shorter and truer for it.)

The van drives WAY too fast across the rocky terrain, towards the Grand Canyon. The bobblehead on the dashboard keeps smiling at me even though with each bump his neck is about to snap. My companion, Xi, doesn't seem concerned. Rather he's in his own world, going on and on about how great people never pause in pursuit of progress.

For a while I lose myself in Xi's rhetoric until the van stops. Ahead a red rocky surface leads into an abyss. I step out, in front of me, the Canyon. I'm astonished. Staggering a few steps closer, the great Canyon's silhouette takes shape, DEEP in the distance. For a moment I forget where I am and what I'm looking at, lost in its expansiveness. At peace.

"PHOTO!" Xi demands. I rip out my camera and take a photo. "MORE!" Xi screams. "SHARE NOW!" And on and on. And so he goes.

For fear of punishment, I miss my moment of pause.

After I've captured the Canyon from every angle, I sit down on a dusty sandstone brick and close my eyes. The wind whistling up through the canyon ascends the great wall and greets the back of my eyelids softly. At peace.

"MENACE!" My eyes sling open. In the distance Xi stares at me. I must do something, for I fear if I meditate, Xi will barrel over here, grab my hair, and toss me into the abyss.

This fear follows me everywhere, one that urges me to take out the camera instead of soaking in the view. A fear that won’t allow me to take a walk without a podcast playing. A fear that defaults to saying no to lingering with others because, you know, that hasn't been scheduled. On and on. Pause and into the abyss I go. A constant feeling.

PUNISH-THE-PAUSE!

***

A few days later, I'm back home, at work. Although Xi swaps his sweatsuit for a tailored suit and slicks back his hair, his game is the same. Optimize! And under this fear, he's winning.

Over zoom, my boss strategizes with our team. On camera I look withered even though I just returned from a vacation. Xi never gave me a chance to recoup.

We exhaust business until the meeting ends, and everyone disappears, vanishes from my screen, except Carl, a colleague of mine who I used to go to happy hour with after work. It'd be nice to catch up. We see each other; approaching a linger, Xi’s warm breath alerts the back of my neck as he whispers — DONT YOU DARE PAUSE — threatening me towards the next task, towards "progress". Carl vanishes.

What happened to the days when I would walk out the glass doors with a colleague and for these great four to five minutes, we had time 'in-between-things'. All there was to do was to discuss each other; how's the family? We lingered together. Those days, like my people, vanished.

Staring at my lifeless yet demanding email box, I question what have I lost from all this optimization? What is the tradeoff? We gain time, at the cost of what?

Suddenly inspired, I write. Not for a pursuit, not for an email. I write for myself. Minimizing my browser, I open a blank document.

Here's a story. Once upon a time there was a generational farmer. Every day, he labored in the field, tilling and seeding and harvesting in the same fashion as his father, who did it in the same fashion as his father, and on and on. One day he gets an offer from a corporation that he cannot refuse. Suddenly it takes him one tenth the time to farm. Still each day, after a few hours on machinery that runs itself, before walking into his house, he bends down and rolls the soil through his palms, and remembers, what it was like, to work with his hands. Although his pockets are full and his belly fat — he misses the old days. He misses working without the crack of Xi's whip.

Blinking at my screen, I'm wondering what just came through me. My chest expands as air climbs high up into my lungs. Briefly I turn my head away before my eyes rest back on the story. A story. I wrote.

Xi's breath... the back of my neck heats up as my tiny hairs stand erect soaking in his moisture.

No! To do anything meaningful in my life — I must risk a lashing.

Shoving my desk away, I roll my chair backwards, knocking into him as he topples to the ground. His face reddens like a tomato about to pop, juices leaking from his eyes and ears and mouth. Climbing to his feet, his hair disheveled, one greasy curl hanging down, he grows in size and stature.

What have I done? How will I be punished? A whip cracks. I cower away, underneath his shadow. He will toss me into a labor camp where while the rest of the world improves their mind and body, my energy depletes and my ribs protrude. Why did I pause!?

His whip cracks, I peek up at him, and he inflames —

"THE CHINESE PEOPLE ARE A GREAT PEOPLE; THEY ARE INDUSTRIOUS AND BRAVE, AND THEY NEVER PAUSE IN PURSUIT OF PROGRESS."

The Chinese people? I lift my head. In front of me he changed outfits, wearing an all black Mao suit, every button perfectly fastened up to his collarbone. His hair perfectly slicked back. His eyes crimson red.

I will not be ruled! Let me live my life!

He raises arms above his head; in his hands he dawns a hammer and a sickle and swings at me. I lunge at him; we bust through my bedroom door as I tackle him to the ground. He rapidly beats my back with the butt end of the hammer and the sickle. We tumble, rolling across my carpet until...we bump into my meditation cushion.

The cushion! With all my might, I kick him off me, he flies into the wall and I plop down onto my cushion. Red-faced, he races towards me. I close my eyes.

In the pause, he too vanishes.

***

Hello Dear Reader

The Chinese leader, Xi Jinping, once said — "The Chinese people are a great people; they are industrious and brave, and they never pause in pursuit of progress." PUBLIC ENEMY NUMBER ONE IS PAUSING, he says. Great people pursue, Menacing people pause!

Optimization has its place in this world and our lives. Its value is easy to grasp.

Yet if we obsess over it, it blinds us from a richer life; we miss moments of awe, to soak something in; moments to connect in-between meetings; moments to do meaningful work albeit dirtying our hands; and moments to sit down, check in with our emotions and clarity of thought; times in our lives where we need to process rather than pursue. To protect that, I will amend this fear, with a reminder — PRIVATE ENEMY NUMBER ONE IS PUNISH-THE-PAUSE.

Andrew 💚

24 Oct 2021

We must learn to think in moments, to spot the occasions that are worthy of investment. - Chip & Dan Heath, The Power of Moments

Tomorrow, thirty-five years ago, when the sun was in the same position of the sky 35 cycles ago, I was born into this world. My eyes mucky, the cold air on my skin frightening. I was alive and in my own body. Tomorrow will be my birthday. A special day. A prideful day.

In the past I let birthdays happen, let them unfold. At times this means I stumble into a half-assed birthday dinner. Other times, since I love my daily routine and see no reason to break it, I work. But recently after a conversation with a friend, I realized I have changed and this year I want something different.

A week ago he told me, "I just signed a contract for a house."

"Whoa! How do you feel?" I asked.

He snickered. "Not much. Years of playing poker have done damage to my emotional system."

I relate, I struggle to feel these meaningful moments. A year ago, I would not have even thought to ask that question to him, instead I would've cut to the chase, where, when, how much? But over the years of therapy, my therapist has shown me the value of it.

One time I had said to her "Ever since I was 16, if anyone asked me about my parent’s divorce I just told them, 'My parents weren't happy and now they are happy, so I'm happy.' But I realize..."

"Hold on," she interrupted, "How does that make you feel Arthur?" Suddenly instead of being irked by this question, thinking not this bullshit again, like the hundreds of times before — the question forced me to pause and see what just happened. My admission of self-harming behavior, something I've never admitted to another person before.

A wave of tears crashed on top of me as I slunk into my chair and hid my face.

Because of my therapist's ruthlessness with this irking question — over time my reaction to it shifted from snickering, to annoyance, to finally hearing it. And only in that space, do I recognize and feel the meaning of the moment.

I realized meaningful emotional moments don't arise from the big, extravagant trips or buying your dream home. Meaningful moments emerge from five-second moments where you pause and feel the significance of what's unfolding. It's not the act of buying a house, but rather it's standing over the contract, with a pen in hand, as you pause to look up at your wife who lifts one hand off her stomach, places it from feeling the kicks of your unborn daughter to the heartbeat of your back, and you return to the contract where you sign the dotted line.

That's the creation of a memory, a moment in your life you'll never forget.

How tragic is it — that I am — without one clear memory like this of my birthday.

NO MORE! I DECLARE. TOMORROW I WILL CREATE A MEMORABLE BIRTHDAY.

Recalling a book filled with practical advice to spot these moments — I stand up from my desk and rush to my bookcase. I pluck out 'The Power of Moments' by Chip & Dan Heath. A life is built from these moments, all of your memories come from these single moments in time, I remember the author saying. I fling it open as the golden white pages twist around the spine, whacking against my desk.

Four categories of memorable moments. (paraphrased)

1. Moments of Elevation¹, when we're struck with delight that you'll remember for a long time after, like a first kiss or a stranger buying you a coffee. 2. Moments of Connection², when we attend a social ritual, be that a wedding, graduation, or the Pittsburgh Steelers football game. 3. Moments of Insight, when we discover something new about ourselves and our places in this universe, like a man learning he's never processed his parent’s divorce and the consequence of that. 4. Moments of Pride, when we achieve something above the crowd and are honored for it; awards or genuine thank-yous or notes of recognition.

Not only does this book help us recognize five-second moments in our lives but with a little bit of planning, we can heighten the emotion of that moment.

Defining moments shape our lives, but we don't have to wait for them to happen. We can be the authors of them. - Chip & Dan Heath

I can author a moment for my birthday!

Tomorrow — on my birthday — I will take my partner down a light, easy nature trail, fairly secluded with lots of resting points and running waters and trees and critters. And to spice it up, to make a moment out of it, I will bring my speaker, filled with music we love and we will dance bachata in nature. Two things we both love.

And I will pause. And feel that moment. I will hug her. As we breathe together, present, with the memory as it animates in front of us. No matter what the following days bring, I will never forget my 35th birthday.

Hello Dear Reader,

From my therapy practice, I have begun to recognize what a meaningful moment feels like, but that journey isn't for all of us. So here's another interesting path towards that skill and awareness, from the book Storyworthy, by Mathew Dicks.

It's a habit that if you commit to on a daily basis, you will start to recognize moments. He says, at the end of each day ask yourself if you have to tell a story at dinner about the day, what moment would you tell?

If need you can even prompt yourself to find the most emotional moments by checking in with what prideful moments did you have today? What moments of insight, elevation, or connection? Then you 'stretch for insight', a term coined by Chip & Dan Heath, by looking for the five-second moment and asking, why was that moment important to me? What inside me changed?

If you do this as a daily habit — over time you learn to recognize these moments in the moment. And then you can push into it. And you can pause afterwards and feel how that makes you feel. Your life will change.

Andrew 💚

10 Oct 2021

¹ when designing my birthday moment, an elevated moment, I used the author’s three criteria. First, Boost sensory appeal, add meaning to an event, like a wedding filled with flowers from your grandma’s wild garden or in my case listening to music in nature. Second, raise the stakes, add pressure to success and potential rejection. Creates nerves and discomfort so that the payoff will be so tasty. Third, break the script, add the unexpected.

² moments of connection I see as moments of awe and wonder, moments when you transcend yourself. The book focuses on the connection on mass groups of people, like-minded people such as attending a Pittsburgh Steelers game as a fan or a Trump rally as a supporter or a concert of your favorite band. But I believe these moments of connection also happen when you look out into something so vast you can't comprehend like the grand canyon or the ocean. At that moment, you lose yourself and connect with the world.

"God, it feels good to speak like this to the world," I wrote in my journal. "I'm mad and I'm sad and I'm glad." emphatically, I stamped the period onto the page; after years of therapy I proudly expressed myself.

Suddenly billowing gusts of wind slapped against the house, the windows shook, and the gale squeezed underneath the front door, scattering my stacks of paper from the desk. Tossing the pen down, I threw my chest and forearms on top of the ruffling papers. The wind poured in wave after wave until THUD. What in God's name? A knock at the door.

"Hello?" The wind calmed, soared back overhead. Timidly I stood. No one visited for months.

"Who goes there?" No response. My heart sped up.

I leaned to the door's peephole. On the other side, standing 3-feet tall, a boy. I froze in terror. His chin lowered to his chest, his eyes flicked up at me, while he rested his middle finger on his mouth saying “Fuck You”. He looked so innocent in his tie-dye shorts, batman tee, and a head full of blond hair, but it was clear inside him hell throbbed. I recognized this boy.

My eyes closed, my head sunk until my forehead rested against the door.

This mute boy, who yearned to reach out to another and say what he was feeling but didn’t feel safe to do so, instead bottling it all up inside, his anger and his sadness and his thoughts all corked up, this mute boy who had so much to say, so much he wanted to cry out but only wept it in secret, this mute boy was me.

Urgently before the world saw his helplessness, I flung the door open and ushered him inside. In the middle of the living room, he stared at me, catatonically, his eyes still flicked and his middle finger still rested. My jaw clenched. "That's no longer me!," I declared. Look at this child unable to speak up, unable to be vulnerable. And I've outgrown that! I meditate. I attend therapy. I write! Grabbing him by the arm, I tossed him into the basement and locked the door.

From the basement, I could control him, I thought. Yet every time I journaled, the little brat rattled the basement door. I'd marched over and opened the door. Standing at the bottom of the staircase, his eyes flicked up at me and his finger rested on his mouth. I reminded him "We don't need you anymore," "You're bad at expressing yourself," "You want to go outside? How do you expect to go out and share yourself with strangers when you can't even trust your guardians? You can't," and on and on until he returned to his dormant state on the cold basement floor.

Eventually the rattling became so common, so distracting from my journaling that I put him in a cage. My control no longer was enough to keep him down. I needed my counselor's help. I phoned her and asked "What do I do with this boy?"

"Rarely do I talk to him," I told her, and a strange memory appeared. The last time my family sat at the dinner table together; mom had asked dad how his day was and he never responded, just teethed another piece of steak from his fork. Then a few nights ago, I told her how the boy was cold on the basement floor without the comfort of a blanket or a parent's hug, and another strange memory appeared. One time as a baby I remember crying all night long, unattended.

After that call, I brought the boy a blanket and a glass of milk, handing him the glass through the cage bars. He held the glass with two hands. His eyes grew as the milk poured into his mouth. His tongue gathered the droplets from his upper lip. After he finished, his chin lowered and his eyes flicked and his finger raised. And I realized he's just a boy. This is all he knows.

"I see you're trying," I said. "You're trying to say something." "Keep trying." And I handed him the blanket and would return the next day with his milk. And although previously he used to frighten me, I started to like him, so much so that I invited my counselor over to meet him in person.

The next day she arrived, we descended into the basement. I pointed towards him and told her his story, a boy who's unable to express himself. "I don't see that," she said.

"I see someone," she went on, "who is expressing himself and in a damn shrewd way. He's giving the world his opinion." Ahead of me, on the floor, he stood behind bars, his blanket around his shoulders, scratching his cheek with his middle finger — and I smiled.

I'm mad and I'm sad and I'm glad.

You crafty devil. He's saying exactly what's on his mind, knowing that for the rest of his life I could deprive him of food or of a hug. And yet he flicks on.

I'm mad and I'm sad and I'm glad.

I awed over his strength, while thoughts of all the times I didn't speak up for fear of rejection cycled through my head. I will free him.

My hand shook, clanging the keys together. We caught eyes and I unlocked it. He bolted up the stairs towards the light. I chased him. Out the front door he ran and trusting his lead, I followed, trusting that in the light my paled skin wouldn't be burnt and my darkened eyes wouldn't be blinded. Outside, he vanished, and I was left standing, in a town square, hundreds of people passing by.

For some time, watching them relaxed me. Until a black haired man stopped, gestured towards a bench, and asked, "what do you have to say?" My throat knotted. My mind busied like the bustling people in the courtyard. And I retreated to the basement, where I saw the flicked eyes and rested middle finger, and everything softened.

In front of hundreds of people, I stepped up onto the bench. I shouted, "I'm mad and I'm sad and I'm glad."

Hello Dear Reader

The photo below inspired this essay. I'm the boy in front. My mom and dad and sister and brothers, the whole family smiling and laughing, enjoying the picnic afternoon while hell boils inside of me.

My relationship to this boy changed over the course of a few years. I used to be frightened of this actual picture, so much so that I hid it from a past partner of mine, afraid she'd see this "weakness" inside of me. But over time I befriended him.

“It’s hard not to like someone once you know their story.” - Mr. Rogers

I challenge you. Bust out the photo album. What childhood photos are you critical of? What stories do you tell about what's going on in that photo? Find a difficult one and sit with it. Let time do its magic.

“Change your story, change your life.” - Unknown

Andrew 💚

Another cardboard box arrived. I slide out an IKEA table – a black plank tightly wrapped in plastic, unassembled, containing a 3’ x 3’ top beside four black legs. $14.99, arrived in 48 hours. Genius!

This plank is a modern marvel.

Home designers stripped away everything non-essential to a table, and chose, likely after hundreds of studies, the most inoffensive shade of black. Packaging engineers must have calculated that shortening the table legs by ½ inch will save 20% on the cost. Chemists combined adhesives, formaldehyde, and veneers so that it resembles wood – engineered to mimic the life of a dead tree. After the first table was printed, the CEO of IKEA greeted it at the end of the assembly line and named it LACK – as if that would give it life.

But I don’t care if Pope Francis baptizes the table and it prances around like a Great Dane… this table is lifeless.

As David Perell writes in the Microwave Economy, “When you strip away too much of the non-essential, you lose the kind of craftsmanship that endows an object with soul and makes the world feel alive.”

A year ago, I moved into this apartment with a single Osprey backpack and 1,000 sq ft of white space. A blank apartment. A canvas. I wondered what it would be like to build my own furniture. I even googled lumber at one point; I felt beckoned to go into the hills and fell a tree myself, but the closest source I found was a local lumberyard in Austin. I would put on a checkered flannel, smoke a cigarette, and build a table board by board, paint it, glue it, and on and on.

But instead, my apartment is filled with cheap furniture. It mimics the minimal templates designed by a Swedish man whose favorite color is blue. Ready-made, mainstream, modular junk.

I’ve been snared by the Microwave Economy, a trap of convenience. As David writes, “We’ve overwhelmingly used our wealth to make the world cheaper instead of more beautiful, more functional instead of more meaningful.”

The modern impulse for instant, cheap, functional things has infiltrated society. I see it in microwave meals, twelve million different products on Amazon, modern apartment complexes built to attract the masses of people who say “good enough,” car maintenance, plastic containers with orange slices at the grocery store (since peeling is for apes), digital greeting cards, thank you Facebook messages — and worst of all, I see writers plagued with cliches and other ready-made phrases.

Even if my apartment is out of a Swedish magazine, I promise you, my dear reader, I will resist this impulse in my writing.

It’s becoming common to settle for generic language, imprecise words, and stale imagery. We can trace the origin of ‘ready-made language’ back to 1946, in George Orwell’s “Politics and the English Language.”

In the 40s, an author approached Orwell and handed him an essay he wrote on the war in Germany. The author said he felt impelled to write it, as if he had a life changing experience and a muse spoke through him. Here’s the first line Orwell read,

“[The Allies] have an opportunity not only of achieving a radical transformation of Germany's social and political structure in such a way as to avoid a nationalistic reaction in Germany itself, but at the same time of laying the foundations of a co-operative and unified Europe.”

These phrases are ready-made, as if they were pre-packaged in a cardboard box. ‘Laying the foundations’ is stale imagery. ‘Nationalistic reaction’, what the hell does that mean? Most of this sounds parroted from a politician. Rather than hearing a singular voice, I hear a journalist who’s name I do not know. Orwell says:

“You see, [the author] ‘feels impelled’ to write — feels, presumably, that he has something new to say — and yet his words, like cavalry horses answering the bugle, group themselves automatically into the familiar dreary pattern.”

Ready-made phrases require little effort. They represent convenience at the cost of craftsmanship that endows an essay with soul. I could find these soulless words on scaffolding in a cold warehouse at IKEA — aisle 18, bin 38. These are IKEA Words.

IKEA Words are efficient, modular, and mainstream. Sometimes I order jargon or conceptual language, like “the deprecated products are phased out”. So often I order cliches like “Tomorrow is another day” or idioms like “tip of the tongue” or euphemisms like “he broke wind”. And unless I edit them, they furnish the page and cheapen my digital home.

IKEA Words strip away personality from my writing by:

• Reducing my process down to an assembly line

• Summarizing my emotions into cliched phrases

• Abstracting my opinions into conceptual statements

They strip away the soul of a writer.

But even though I’m aware of IKEA words, I find myself using them all the time. They’re convenient. They’re top of mind. What draws me to IKEA Words? How do they strip personality from my writing, and how can I fix my bad habits?

Efficiency strips away our voice.

At the moment of writing this sentence, this page is blank, this essay is overdue, and my writing coach is texting me about the deadline. I don’t have time to be creative and play with words. In the next hour I need to furnish the page with thousands of words. Shit. So help me IKEA.

IKEA Words help me get a blurry first draft out. It’s efficient. $0.00, they ship within seconds. Genius! And with content calendars, they’re required.

An hour from now, I’ll skim through the essay as quickly as I pass by an IKEA showcase bedroom. The words are "good-enough." It’s functional, the ideas ready to share. I’ll paste into Grammarly, accept dozens of suggestions, publish, and scream to the world, I feel impelled to educate you on this!

I feel accomplished, but I’m deceiving myself. In reality, all I’ve done is twist together prefabricated phrases.

There’s a cognitive basis called the IKEA Effect, which says consumers place a disproportionately high value on products they partially created. When I twist four legs into a table, it feels like I poured blood, sweat, and tears into it, all because an Allen Wrench left some grime on my fingers.

Assembling IKEA furniture or words gives you the illusion of being a craftsman, without the labor that scars your hands forever.

Although my first draft feels original to me – I’m biased since I created it. The Microwave Economy also alludes to this, “If you search their website for 6 foot x 8 foot high pile rugs, you’ll see 31 options. At first, their selection feels abundant. But then you remember that IKEA earns more than $45 billion in revenue per year, which means that there are tens of thousands of other people with the same rug you bought because it ‘expressed your individuality.’ So by trying to be different, we end up becoming the same.”

Quickly written essays lack voice because tens of thousands of others screamed to the world in the exact same tone. A nameless reporter. When I write to the world with IKEA Words, I say nothing new.

Orwell’s solution is to slow down, wait for an image to arise, and then put it into words. David describes this mindstate as, “Slow… deliberate… contemplative. A chance to withdraw from the Hydra of digital life — to-do lists, Twitter feeds, read-it-later apps, group chats, Instagram DMs [...]. Distanced from social demands, you can simply follow the wishes of your heart.”

Instead of rushing towards completion, you can learn to love the craft, like an old man who owns a Dodge truck from the 80s. Every 500 miles the truck breaks down. Each time it’s a chance to pause, to slide underneath its cab, and to tinker with its engine. A rag coated in decades of grease hangs from his back pocket.

The old man is in a dialogue with his truck. There’s no tomfoolery. No deceit. A genuine relationship.

When I edited this draft, initially polluted with IKEA Words, I slid under it and opened a dialogue with it. What does this mean? What memories does that bring up? What does this look like? In that conversation, the writing becomes personal, playful, and full of wonder.

We need to rebel against the voice in our head that yells, PUNISH THE PAUSE! I dare you, take a week to write a first draft. Take a month to edit it, identifying IKEA Words and wondering about them. Rebel! Rediscover the joy of the writing process.

Modularity strips away our emotions.

A friend emailed me a picture of a pack of elephants napping together, and I instantly replied, “this warms my heart”. Although this is cliche (and a prepackaged phrase from IKEA) – it approximated my feelings towards the picture – in seconds!

Meanwhile my brother texted me a picture of his seedling of a baby, and I replied, “this warms my heart.” Too, this phrase is convenient for when republicans and democrats shake hands over NASA's Ingenuity helicopter. And on and on – all in seconds!

If you type “This warms m,” in Gmail, artificial intelligence will auto-complete “my heart.” Hit tab and autofill your emotions.

IKEA Words that are cliches, idioms, and euphemisms are modular emotions. They are relatable and capture some common, typical feeling. I pluck a feeling from a bin and I fit it in. In each case, I don’t get bogged down wondering about the nuances of what I feel. I insert the modular emotion and move on with my life.

The problem with modular emotions is that they lack the context that makes each situation unique. Even though the emotions around cuddling elephants, a newborn, and bi-partisan support are very different, we use the same words to describe them.

Modular emotion gives the illusion of emotion, without needing to be vulnerable.

“That was a cheap shot” signals being hurt without being exposed. I don’t know what is painful about it, unless you say, “Ouch. That feels dirty when you joke about my wife's anxiety.” Now, you’re bare to the world.

‘Cheap shot’ has all the non-essential details stripped away. It captures the essence of the emotion. But those missing details endow our emotions with a soul that makes them feel alive.

Mental pictures can be uncomfortable, Orwell said.

George Carlin has a great standup bit about how Euphemisms mask our discomfort. He talks about how Post Traumatic Stress Disorder in the first world war originally was called Shell Shock. “Simple, honest, direct language. Over time, the same combat condition was called operational exhaustion. [...] The phrase is completely sterile, there's no humanity left in it.” [...] “The pain is completely covered by jargon now.”

As a result, we act like robots running auto-complete scripts, sharing modular emotions back and forth without having a real impact. I text my mother countless cliches. In seconds. And if I paused and sat with that, it would break my fucking heart. But I don’t. I hit tab.

Maybe we can’t stop our mind from defaulting to cliches, but we can learn to recognize when we write them. Once we catch ourselves, we can twist, alter, modify, and revive old cliches.

I found a wonky sub-culture of IKEA: IKEA hackers. People buy IKEA furniture, because it’s minimal and multi-functional, and they transform it into something new. Someone bought a closet and converted it into a Murphy bed. Another person converted a coffee table into a hidden cat litter box. Each consumer adds their own creativity.

They modulate furniture and it becomes alive! What if we can make cliches our own by adding details?

Since our culture is so primed to hear a cliche like “think outside the box,” you can say “think outside the cabinet,” and people will know what you mean.

Instead of scrapping “this warms my heart,” I can pluck images from the cliche and re-purpose them:

• Elephants: “Warm bodies cuddling, oh I miss that feeling.”

• Brother’s baby: “Oh my, his little heart feels so big.”

• Political hand shaking: “God, thank you for encouraging us towards the stars.”

Modular emotions already have great imagery. (It’s just often dead, from a different time and place.) But because we say them so quickly, we hardly recognize them on the page. Blind as a hat.

It’s our job as writers to wake up! Pay attention, identify cliches on the page, and make them our own.

Mainstream strips away our opinions.

IKEA’s main job is to people-please the masses. The furniture is minimal, has an ability to adapt to different homes, and it never offends.

Niche furniture has a different job. There’s a store in Austin called Uncommon Objects. Inside you’ll find skulls, five foot tall buddha statues, and may even find a coffee table with wooden goose engravings. If you buy something there, some of your house guests will hate it, like a 4 foot tall Coyote, standing erect in women’s clothing. Some will love it. It puts a stake in the ground that will disturb some people and enliven others. Furniture with a personality.

This begs the question: do we go the safe route, or do we take a risk?

I’m on the fence… I feel like I’m being impaled by a chain link fence because I can’t make a decision.

I carry this pain as I write this essay. This will be published on Write of Passage’s website. I must appeal to the masses. My plan? I will avoid words that only my superfans know, I’ll muzzle any controversial opinions, and I’ll write objectively, to cover all sides of this issue. In other words, I’ll write a lot of IKEA Words.

IKEA Words that are generalizations, concepts, and jargon construct safe opinions. They state general ideas which you can’t poke holes in. They never offend.

I often see coaches advertise themselves to an amorphous reader or an entire community, “I coach strategies to achieve peak performance.” This captures the essence of what the coach offers. And it is conceptually true and is digestible to the largest set of people. But it doesn’t resonate. I want to know what it would look like to work with him – specifically.

As Jacqueline Woodson says, “The more specific we are the more universal something can become. Life is in the details. If you generalize, it doesn't resonate.” By speaking to everyone, we speak to no one.

Vague statements give the illusion of truth, without saying something that resonates.

I used to work with a coach, Lisa Cron, who beat my head with a baton every time I made general statements. So many headaches. Lisa’s rule of the imagination was “the ‘eyes wide shut’ test—if you can’t close your eyes and envision it, it’s not there yet.”

When I began this practice, I tended to “zoom in” to my generalizations by adding a qualifier. “He was sad” becomes “He was sad after his dog ran away”. I can’t see either. However: “In the grass, he twisted Ralph’s broken leash in between his fingers. God I pray, bring him back.” Zoom in so that it becomes personified, like a Coyote wearing a woman’s dress.

Images may offend, like me describing an IKEA hotdog in detail. Here’s the pleasure you get for $1: The hotdog is pale. Bread stale. Skin encasing – likely collagen based and derived from animal hides – is tightly sealed on one end and on the other looks like an uncircumcised wiener. I enjoy every inch of it. And strangely enough, after I finished, I could speak Swedish.

Life is in the details.

I love people who are down to earth. They don’t live in the clouds where abstract ideas and generic language condense and dissipate. Instead they dance around their stake in the ground – talking about the grass between their toes or the bottle of wine they ordered on a recent date. If you offend them, their dance stutters and they look you in the eye to say they’ve been hurt or they disagree. They are loud, clear, and true.

In the same manner, I’m going to claim my part of the internet. That takes courage. Especially when it’s about pale hotdogs.

Your Digital Home

Our website is the digital home for our most precious ideas. How do we want to furnish it?

There’s no escaping the temptation of IKEA. We are naturally drawn towards speed, re-usability, and being liked. Even after we become aware of these forces, our minds are still wired to use IKEA words. We need to be constantly mindful of them.

Or as David concludes, “The pernicious thing about the Microwave Economy is that even after writing this essay, I will still fall prey to it. Knowing about it won’t make me immune to it.”

Be aware of the temptation to fill a blank page and to ship it without reflecting on it. Be aware of the temptation to use emotional modules to express how you feel. Be aware of the temptation to write generalizations in order to not offend.

Instead of rushing – pause, slide underneath your essays and tinker with their words. Instead of taking shortcuts – pay attention, look for opportunities to revive cliches. Instead of safe, conceptual language – personalize, zoom-in until your paragraph comes alive.

Becoming a better writer is less about finding better ideas, and more about unlearning your bad habits around IKEA words. Have patience, look for language to play with, and hold the courage to dance around a stake in the page.

Pause, Pay attention, Personalize.

***

Another cardboard box arrived. I slide out an IKEA Word tightly wrapped in plastic. $0.00, arrived in seconds. Genius! It's a modern marvel. Grammarly stripped away its voice. Google’s auto-compose guessed my emotion. And it’s guaranteed to steer clear of Cancel Cultural. At the end of the assembly line, the CEO in blue greeted it, and it reads: save your soul.

Thank you to

• Michael Dean who coached me as I wrote this essay in the Writing Studio.

Andrew 💚