It Was the Best of Reads, It Was the Worst of Reads

There is a very good chance that if you’re reading this right now, it’s because you followed a link from my Goodreads profile. That’s not a bad thing – I put the link there for a reason, and I also regularly post reviews to Goodreads for a reason. Which makes the rest of what I’m about to say sound a bit contradictory. 

So to get it out of the way, I do like the fact that there is a space where I can write up my dorky little blurbs about books I’ve recently read, and compare them to what others write about them if so inclined. I’m not an active user, per se. I don’t ever check my feed or seek out connections. Mostly, I just twitch in place like a whirligig.

Maybe that’s loyalty – after all, I joined very early on, one of the only circumstances where I’ve ever been an “early adopter” of anything, and that was thanks to an invite from my then-roommate’s then-girlfriend. Nearly 20 years ago, Jesus. But thanks for that push all the same, Amelia. I have diligently read and responded since, more for my own purposes than any sense of community. That being said, if someone reaches out to me, I try to respond, because if someone is paying me the courtesy of interacting with my thoughts on things, I owe them the courtesy of, at the very least, a thank you.

It was thus that I, against my own intentions, became a person who projects influence (not gonna use that word…). At present, I am the most followed user in the Kingdom of Thailand. For what it’s fucking worth.

Of course, this has led to strange interactions, both good and bad. I have gotten weird DMs from clearly autistic people who melt down when I fail to engage with their special interest in the same way they have (RIP DMs). I have gotten some horny responses to my 29 year old twinkself in my profile pic from men, women, and everything in between. And this is to say nothing of the trolls, whom I collect and delight in. According to the commentariat of Goodreads, I am a crypto-fascist right-wing troll myself, I am a godless communist hellbent and dismantling these blessed United States, I am a Trotskyist LARPer who fails to properly appreciate the Actually Existing Socialism of the USSR and PRC, I am shedding white tears, I am a typical performative reader performative male lit-bro, I have polluted my mind with postmodern neo-Marxism, I’m doing a problematic ableism, I have strayed from the One True Church of Rome (OK, that one’s pretty much true).

But as I said, I didn’t engage in the community, and so I don’t know if it was always shit, or whether it’s become shit, but I know that, at least for the past several years, Goodreads writ large has absolutely been shit.

That being said, I do like my own self-selecting land of the Sebald- and Duras- and Deleuze-reading lotus eaters. As with any large platform, Goodreads is divided into regions, and there’s no reason why I would wander over into the section of spicy romance readers, or vice versa. Yet it’s the spicy romance readers that set the tone, by and large, and on the rare occasion that I read a fairly well-known piece of contemporary fiction, I’m forced to see what the broader community has to say.

Thus it was after finishing Mariel Franklin’s Bonding, hardly the best novel, but also hardly the worst, but a book which I rather admired for its desire to capture the present moment (something so few literary novels seem willing to do in any serious sense), even as I regretted how poorly it would age. But let’s look at the literal top review on Goodreads…

“If coming across Zionist propaganda 15% in wasn't enough for me to dnf…”

It almost goes without saying that this person clearly has no idea what Zionist propaganda is, because I combed over the first few chapters to find anything remotely Zionist, and it also almost goes without saying that this person’s favorite books are all young adult, and that they’re currently reading is all queer romantasy. They’re still in their early 20s, so I’ll grant them some grace, but I get the feeling that she picked up Bonding noting its themes of queer romance and late capitalism, and reacted in much the same way a child fed on Count Chocula might respond to actual adult food.

I was going to give you a few examples of other top reviews that strike me as profoundly foolish, but I’ll pick out one representative example in particular. Again, let me emphasize that this is from the top fucking review of William Styron’s The Confessions of Nat Turner, a powerful roman-a-clef about the legendary slave rebellion:

“Does this really seem like the way a psychopathic uneducated slave would talk? Not to me it doesn't. What it sounds like is an overeducated middle-class 20th-century writer.”

Because maybe, just maybe, Styron was trying to convey the historical Nat Turner’s ferocious intelligence and clandestine education, and introducing a magical realist device to help us understand his common humanity with the presumedly educated readership, especially when counterpointed with the slave owners who have the same highfalutin rhetoric while committing barbarous crimes against their fellow man.

But if that’s what they fail to understand, what do they like?

Well, for the spooky season, they’ve got a massive (102 book long!) recommend list of witchy reads, including both fiction or nonfiction. So before looking, I thought of witchy reads from my perspective… but surprise, surprise, no The Witches of Eastwick, We Have Always Lived in the Castle, The Famished
Road, or The Master and Margarita. Hell, even the quality children’s fiction of Lloyd Alexander, Ray Bradbury, or Philip Pullman has no place here, my god, even the delightful Kiki’s Delivery Service (a rare example of a manga I genuinely adore) is deemed unworthy. The only book that I thought of that actually made it in was Anne Rice’s The Witching Hour, which would be hard to leave out, given Anne Rice’s prominent position in the Goth-girl canon, and that is an awful lot of their userbase (more on that later).

 

Really, very few of the books they mention have even crossed my radar. Of the few that does, one of the most prominent is Madeline Miller’s Circe, a book I have no desire to read because… I mean, that’s fanfic, really. Mostly, I get splashy covers, retellings of historical characters, starry-eyed YA, yass-queen witches who totally kick the patriarchy’s ass, nonfiction about how historical witches all were total yass queens who would totally kick the patriarchy’s ass, and frequent, frequent promises of prose you can rub your snatch to. I know – what the fuck do I expect from a list having to do with witches? – but I don’t think it’s unreasonable, in those 102 books, to expect some crossover with the serious literary canon. I was pretty surprised that Olga Tokarczuk’s Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead didn’t make the list, even though it would seem a natural fit.

But that’s the thing – there are plenty of analogous things that I would be fine with. There’s great historical fiction, there’s great YA fiction, there’s great feminist prose, both fiction and nonfiction, hell there’s even great erotica. But what makes them great is that they engage the reader rather than feeding them a pre-packaged message. Shirley Jackson is far too actually spooky and actually weird for this list.

And given how much effort is put into diversity in these sectors, this list seems remarkably un-diverse to me. Most writers about witches are women, as I would expect, and many seem to be in some way LGBTQ or women of color, but they are overwhelmingly, overwhelmingly from the English-speaking world. I haven’t combed through, but I don’t think there’s a single translation in here, actually. And to be quite frank, the experience of an upper middle-class daughter of a diaspora at a private school in California, for example, has far more in common with that of a white girl at the same private school than it does with that of a girl her own age in the land of her ancestors. Which is a shame, because there are so many witchy tales from Asia, Latin America, Eastern and Southern Europe, and Africa that are worth telling, and I’m sure are being told, and in fact I know are being told. Let’s expand a little bit beyond the witch category. These readers claim to want writers of color, but how many of them could stomach Eldridge Cleaver, Tayeb Salih, Sayaka Murata, or Young-Ha Kim? Queer writers please, but it’s not like they’re asking for Jean Genet, Gary Indiana, Kate Bornstein, or Camille Paglia.

But that’s not comfy content, now is it?

And in this way, most of Goodreads seems to want one thing, above all else: to escape into another world in which all of their assumptions and the totality of their worldview assuaged, and as long as a book does so with enough aplomb, it is a Good Read. While most of these readers would recoil at being cast as conservative in any way, shape, or form, they are remarkably Victorian in their worldview. Good art reflects good morals, and vice versa. Aesthetic expression ought reflect virtue.

I had some trouble finding recent, concrete data about the userbase of Goodreads, but from what I can surmise, it’s about what I would expect – overwhelmingly female, overwhelmingly white, overwhelmingly found in the Anglosphere, mostly in the 25-40 age bracket, and despite my demographic commonality with most of those characteristics, it’s so, so, so not for me.

It’s not that it’s actively hostile at all, most of the women in kooky statement eyeglasses on there are actually pretty friendly. But the rose gold and corporate-Memphis illustrations quietly tell me that this isn’t exactly a space designed for me (is this what it’s like to look at Barstool if you’re a woman?). Even the explicitly conservative sections mostly seem to consist of tradwives with Regency illustrations as their avis, highlighting their favorite devotionals and bemoaning novels that don’t retread Jane Austen.

But even those are the exception as far as men go – let me temper any claims of misogyny with some very active misandry. Since the birth of the Western tradition of the novel as such in the 18th Century, fiction has been misogynistically denigrated as the realm of female fantasy. Real men read classical epic poetry and serious theology don’t you see, leaving the imagination to the weak feminine mind. And we’ve returned to that point, just in inverse. I’m amazed by the number of men who tell me, with a straight face, “I don’t read books.” They engage in fiction, but the fiction they engage in is anime, superhero movies, video games, and porn. And while there’s nothing 100 percent wrong with any of those three things, there’s also nothing 100 percent wrong with Butterfinger bars. When you have a pile of them for dinner, we have a problem.

So why do I care? No one’s making me read their bullshit, right?

First, because I am a reader, and it makes me terribly sad that this is what the supposed vanguard of readership is, and it explains why I so rarely read contemporary fiction. Because I can’t stomach this shit. And secondly, because I am a writer, and it reminds me how few people will give a fuck about the sort of things I write.

I’m already hearing another objection… “well, it’s always been that way.” And to a certain degree, the strawman I’ve erected has a point. Go look at any list of Pulitzer winners over the decades, or New York Times bestseller lists from any decade, and you’ll see an absolute ocean of mediocrities, long since lost to history. These were the people Dwight MacDonald mocked in Masscult and Midcult 70 years ago, and his satire fails to land now because no one remembers who the fuck James Gould Cozzens is. But even if the majority of writing has always been dreck, there was always at least space for more sophisticated work. Go watch old Dick Cavett interviews – he was on the air for ages, and he actually brought on serious, literary writers. There was big-name prose in Playboy. John Barth’s fucked up, experimental, violent, satirical, freewheelingly postmodernist Giles Goat-Boy made the NYT bestseller list for 12 straight weeks in 1966 – unthinkable now.

So then on to the final objection: then why stick around? Firstly, it’s been a great place for me to track my own reading for my own sake, and second, I have gotten some real insight from my tiny niche community – once again, I see you guys, what up! And third, it’s to bear witness. I think it’s telling that my most liked review is of Mishima’s Sun and Steel (speaking of queer writers of color who are unlikely to be featured…), and that says to me that there are people on Goodreads who care about something more. And a lot of them have reached out to me. They are, like the average Goodreads user, mostly women, mostly about my age or a bit younger (from what I can tell), but there the paths begin to diverge. They’re definitely not overwhelmingly white or from the Anglosphere. And beyond the demographics, they are people who have drank from the same wells, and who have experienced the same frustrations. And for that I love them with all brotherly affection I can muster.

And so I’ll close with the same mantra I always say to those around me in dire times, with dire circumstances all around, and I’m saying it to myself just as much as to you, the reader…

You are not crazy. You are not alone.

Whither Woke 1

 There’s this permanent inner tension I have, and that I think anyone who likes to think of themselves as thinking about things has. On the one hand, there’s a desire to wall myself off, to fully live a dreamy life of art and letters, focusing egoistically on the cultivation of the self, reading books, traveling to beautiful places, enjoying excellent food and drink, studying languages, writing fiction, working out, all the stuff that makes myself better, but does little for the world. On the other hand, there’s a desire to be, in some way, socially committed – to engage with current events, forge connections with others, participate in the polis writ large or at the very least my chosen community, participate in the grand discourse in whatever forms it may take. But then you look at the discourse, and…

“Woke 1 was crazy…”

No Alexandria, don’t say that! You just activated all the world’s most annoying people!

And they took Ms. Ocasio-Cortez's invite. As is to be expected, lots of online self-identified leftists immediately snarled at the betrayal of core principles, and variously chalked this up to her position of privilege, or even more annoyingly, for her “liberalism” and failure to properly lead the Long March. They were joined in by establishment liberals (at the New Republic, the Guardian, etc.) who secured their sinecures somewhere between 2012 and 2024 by being as annoying as possible, while ticking the right number of intersectional boxes. The right responded variously with a mix of histrionic demands that the Dems apologize for their countless misdeeds against the civic spirit, or darkly claiming (e.g. at Fox News, the Federalist) that this regrouping constitutes an attempt to usher in class war (if only…). Glenn Greenwald, a man whom I agree with on a great deal and who has done a great deal for American journalism, responded with his usual level of histrionics on Substack:

“The so-called ‘Woke 1’ period is not something to laugh off. It was a repressive and destructive mob rule which unjustly destroyed careers and requires a reckoning.”

(credit where credit’s due, his essay does have a number of very valid points and is worth reading, even if there’s also a lot that’s pretty questionable – “[AOC] wanted the NYPD defunded in full, and nothing short of that would be sufficient.” Got a source for that bud?)

But I’m still not sure what anyone means by Woke 1. I had thought it meant the liberal politics of the 2nd Obama Administration and the early Trump administration, the early rumblings of BLM in the wake of the murders of Michael Brown and Freddie Gray, the response to Gamergate, trans bathroom controversies, pussy hats, and all the rest. Back when they were called “SJW’s,” and they were blamed for Trump 1 in the same way “woke” was blamed for Trump 2. But apparently, we’ve memory-holed all of that. Because people seem to use it to refer to the évènements de Mai ’20, when the protests went mass starting next door to my old digs in South Minneapolis, and smug “we believe in science” yard signs showed up across liberal America, and the Biden years, when ugly corporate-Memphis infographics of fat disabled minorities told us about proper terminology. Wouldn’t that be Woke 2? Or wait, I’m lost, if that’s Woke 1, then are we in Woke 2 now? I’m so confused.

Apparently, the word “woke” has its origins from Lead Belly talking about the Scottsboro Boys, and has had purchase among black militants for decades, but I only became aware of it in 2016 or so – I had to look, I thought I learned it from that Meek Mill song, but that was in 2018, and by then it had already become a familiar pejorative among the right.

But, really, it’s something of a floating signifier, having transmogrified from its original meaning as a call to stay aware of injustice and inequality – a completely unobjectionable stance, essentially that of Clark Kent – to mean anything and everything. You could say that it’s grounded in identity politics, but then again, the conservative criticism is just as grounded in identity politics, just of a different sort. An old friend and I had a bit of a game. Look in the Daily Mail, and see what they’re calling “woke madness” this week. Zero-percent alcohol Heineken was a particular favorite.

“Political correctness gone mad.” – Alan Partridge upon being told he can’t smoke at the petrol pump, 2002, because this was called PC culture in the ‘90s, and the more things change the more they stay the same

At most, you can call it a vibe, a stance towards the world. You know the slogans and phraseology – black lives matter, love is love, queer joy, Pride is a riot, check your privilege, defund the police, prison abolition, no human is illegal, unhoused, birthing persons, defund the police, intersectionality, time’s up, believe all women, trans rights are human rights, lived experience, land back, problematic, cultural appropriation, microaggression, toxic masculinity, black bodies, abolish ICE, decolonize (X), cancel (X), (X) spaces, (X) voices…

Tedious to even type out.

And yet there is a common political thread, of a sort. When I typed up that list, I noticed that the only concrete calls to action are so far outside legislative possibility that they can be glommed onto with absolutely no risk of buy-in, making them, like the other terms, mere vibes, reduced to a rhetorical style and lacking in substance. Everything boils down to individual identity, individual style, individual choice, what you buy and what you post, and this applies to the opposite just as much (more on that later). Meaning that the vibe found its most purchase in marketing and advertising – I’m hardly the first to point this out, but if a brand can say that black lives do indeed matter to sell sneakers, the term’s efficacy as a tool for liberation into question is called into question to say the least. Never mind the fact that these terms were easy to weaponize by bad-faith actors. Israelis saying that comparisons of Israeli actions to the Holocaust “appropriated Jewish trauma” and defining themselves as “indigenous” – yeah all of you can go fuck yourselves.

Even if there were policy changes outside of the legislative sphere, the only place where commitment to identity politics really took any form was in the places in which rhetoric is placed front and center – the arts, academia, and the media.

However, I have to say… Woke 1? These are places I have the misfortune to hang out in, and identity politics remains a central concern, and the verbiage remains a first principle. I am occasionally asked by a publisher what categories of marginalized identity I belong to. When these things carry such currency, it’s not at all surprising when the remarkably frequent Rachel Dolezal type comes to light. Even if the “vibe shift” that happened around Trump 2 tamped down these tendencies in marketing materials, culturally elite spaces remain beholden to a discursive style that claims the progressive mantle.

So if this rhetorical style is what… I guess?... constituted Woke 1, there’s the question of what Woke 2 is (if anything). And as far as I can tell, such a thing exists even less than Woke 1 did, and is constituted by some as a revitalization of identity politics and coded language after said ostensible vibe shift, to which I say, if you think Badbunny performing at the Superbowl constitutes social justice, you have no fucking business talking about culture, and I doubt you have any fucking business talking about social justice. Others seem to claim that Woke 2 is a focus on issues like housing affordability, Medicare for all, and ending material support for the genocide in Gaza, to which I say… wait those are actual policy proposals, the kind that require sustained effort, but which are fortunately also broadly popular, in which case… why saddle yourself with that now-toxic adjective?

All of which is to say I’m mostly lost in the mudfight. The more present I am, the more demands there are upon me to take up a culture-war position, and frankly, that all kinda sucks. I’m sure that for me, there were lousy opportunities lost, and lousy friendships not made, for failing to properly defer to whatever normative discursive style. Sorry I disagreed with your claim that criticism of labor practices in Dubai was racism, and also sorry I didn’t laugh at your attack-helicopter joke.

Because Woke 1 also has an Anti-Woke 1, who likewise have their rhetorical style… are you triggered, snowflake? I was going to list them out, but it’s just as tedious as the Woke 1 list. I don’t want to be too both sides-y – after all, the self-styled anti-woke camp are worse, and were always and unfortunately likely shall remain absolute fucking cretins, and I hope all of their sons wind up on HRT – but I can say that both sides alienate. In addition to the same obnoxious rhetorical style, they are just as online, and just as oversensitive – look at the pearl-clutching they did around Charlie Kirk’s assassination, or the way they responded to NFL players taking a knee… for a bunch of stoic alphas, they sure get their panties in a twist.

Because at its heart, these are just two rhetorical styles, and while their inspirations are political, their actions are not. The actual political operators quietly push forth their agendas – slashing taxes and finding yet more things to somehow privatize, and otherwise enacting the will of Silicon Valley oligarchs, removing any roadblocks that might prevent Peter Thiel from building a pederasty-based special economic zone. The rest is noise.

My solution? Absent myself entirely. Not from real politics, that’s genuinely important – and Abdul El-Sayed needs all the help he can, so get on that, folks – but absolutely from the silly BS. I will, occasionally, observe them as I would any other operetta. And AOC, I suppose, delivered that final aria, now that we can all look back. And yet from somewhere, I still hear Tamino playing his magic flute.

Quiet Days in Vientiane

For reasons largely beyond my control, I had to fly to Vientiane – not really for work, not really for travel, although kinda sorta for both of those things. I figured it would be good to get out of the city for a bit. My stay would be open-ended, but I booked a cheapish hotel and figured that even if it sucked, I’d be back in Bangkok on the weekend, just in time to see friends, have a nice night out. And I didn’t think it would suck – I’d been to Vientiane a few times before, and remembered it as a sleepy riverside town, someplace that might not be the most exciting, but had the advantage of good local beer, some nice crusty old French restaurants run by sweating Depardieu clones, a few nice little used bookstores – one of the mellower stops on the backpacker trail through Southeast Asia. It didn’t have the spiritual sublimity of Luang Prabang, with its ancient temples and streams of monks with their alms bowls in the morning, nor the party vibe of Vang Viang – the attractions of which, back in my day, were tubing down the river and doing shots of cobra-infused rice wine in the day, and magic mushrooms and DVDs of Friends at night – but it was a nice little small city. 

And if you don’t understand the appeal of a hammer-and-sickle flag flying outside a crumbling French colonial villa as the tropical foliage grows ever thicker, you and I will never truly understand one another.

So I arrived in the evening rain looking forward to the getaway.

 

I spent the first few days getting to re-know the place. I’d seen the sights – the temples, the Haw Phra Kaew where there’s a sign pointing out where the jade buddha statue known as the Phra Kaew used to be before the Siamese looted it and brought it to Bangkok, where it remains a popular tourist attraction. I had gone to the National History Museum, to see the Lahu fabrics embroidered with images of bombs and helicopters, Buddha statuettes forged from the aluminum of downed American planes, pictures of fenceposts made from casings, the maps of the unspeakable UXO problem, my country’s attempt to annihilate the Ho Chi Minh Trail by ensuring that generations of children in Xiangkhouang Province would risk blowing their legs off on their way to school, the poorly reproduced photographs of jeunes communistes holding up signs saying “Là-bas Monsieur McNamara!” I figured I could just wander and see what was good.

I walked around, I went out. I went to a coffee tasting, as Lao coffees from the Bolaven Plateau are often quite fine. I befriended locals and expats alike, I ate with them and drank grotesque quantities of Beerlao and, if we were feeling fancy, a bit of the delightful Laodi rum, and had some damn good conversations.

The food of Laos remains a bit of a question mark. A walk down the downtown streets of Vientiane reveals far more Thai and Indian and Chinese and Italian and Korean and Vietnamese places and generic burger joints than Lao restaurants. Unfortunate, since the same people, speaking the same language, across the river in the Isan region of Thailand, make some of the best fucking food on earth. At the street stalls, most dishes, indeed, seem to be identical to their Thai versions, pad see iw and rat na and ubiquitous laap seem indistinguishable from what’s available in Thailand. The tam mak hung, their version of papaya salad, seems to be awfully similar to any som tam in Thailand. The jaew are indistinguishable from Thai nam phrik, the only major difference being that they’re still by necessity made by hand rather than industrially. And the backpacker’s favorite, the khao jee pa te, is really just a banh mi. The noodles are called pho and seem indistinguishable from the perfectly OK noodle soups found on streets throughout Southeast Asia.

So what is uniquely Lao? One oft-cited example is or lam, the rich herbal stew flavored with the slightly numbing sakhan vine and thickened with buffalo skin. Unfortunately, it’s a gloopy, under-spiced swamp of a dish. Goy pa, the famed freshwater ceviche, has an unfortunate tendency to be lousy with liver flukes. I took my chances anyway (worth it, yum). I ate mok pa, the fatty fish and fragrant herbs wrapped in banana leaf, and salt-grilled pa yon, an impossibly buttery river fish that I still can’t find an English name for (Thai speakers, it’s ปลายอน in Thai, and I can’t find an English name – Thai Wikipedia refers me to pangasius, and it’s definitely not that). I ate grilled pork udders (chewy) and stewed beef lungs (intensely gamey and metallic), lake weeds and water bugs. The herbs – dill and cilantro and Thai basil and phak phaew and phak khayaeng and even the vile khao thong, or “fish mint” – are beautifully fresh.

And there’s a certain Lao-French restaurant that I was politely told not to tell the world about, where I ate buffalo tartare and crayfish dumplings and drank pastis as the monsoon rain pounded down on the roof. The French clientele gently mocked my silly accent and occasional misgendering of a noun. No air conditioning, Simone Weil books on the shelves, Can and Stereolab and Taeko Ohnuki on the soundsystem – this, too, is a thing of consummate beauty.

But the days went on, and on. Four days turned into a week. And then a week and a half.

I moved from hotel to hotel, each perfectly comfortable and reasonably priced, each feeling immensely temporary. I didn’t even bother to unpack.

As with the food, nothing seems original. The music is either Thai city pop or the standard Asian mix of contemporary K-pop and 2014-era Western pop music, The Chainsmokers and 1989-era Taylor Swift. The products in the stores are all Thai. Even half the shit at the duty free at the airport is Thai. With an adjacent culture with that much purchase and relative wealth, and with a mutually intelligible language, the media is all Thai television and Thai music videos. At the nicer cocktail bars, which varied from awful to perfectly OK, I could understand the highly Thaified Lao of the clientele with perfect clarity. I go to the mall, and the chain restaurants and coffee shops are all Thai. I try to buy clothes, and all the brands seem to be the sort of Chinese and Vietnamese brands you see on Shein that seem English-adjacent but are not English. Wow, a genuine Besor. And is that a real Mouve?

Because it was, after all, an accident of the great game of European colonialism that this country even exists in its present form. The Lao-speaking territories to the south remained vassal states of the Kingdom of Siam, ready to be exploited by Bangkok, while the French chomped away at what they could, resulting in an even more exploited colony that never made a profit, a forgotten landlocked kingdom away in the hills.

And now it feels like time has forgotten the place.

Even the backpackers who passed through seemed to live on a different planet than my peers and I had, and spent their time smoking weed or Beerlao in clannish little small groups or couples rather than effusively making friends with other young and interested and interesting people. Maybe I’m just old.

But the bookstores are gone, of course. As are the crusty old French restaurants… L’Alsace where the elderly owner sneered at me as he poured my Gewurztraminer and plated my choucroute with Alsatian sausages, La Côte d’Azur, where the adorable little Lao girl giggled as she took my order in French… “il veut le ROSÉ!” Barely even the signs remain.

I walked past the site of the old White Rose club, the most notorious nightclub of old Vientiane, when it was a wild town crawling with both American and Soviet spies, French madams still managing the bordelles, past the old Lane Xang Hotel where Hunter S. Thompson frantically typed up his notes for Rolling Stone on the Fall of Saigon, When I first passed this way, the building had still been there, next to the Hotel Douangdeuane… a name which, if we’re being a bit creative, can translate to Astral Weeks…

To lay me down / In silence easy / To be born again / From the far side of the ocean.

In happier days.

Circa 2014.

And as I walk past, a nowadays hooker, a tattoo on her shoulder in this conservative country the only outwardly obvious sign of her profession. She’s wearing a gaudy dress of tiered pink tulle, Vientiane copying Seoul copying Harajuku copying some European princess fantasy. She calls out “hello hansum.” She can’t be having a good time if that’s her agenda at 1 PM on a Sunday.

This really does feel like the end of the world.

I remember when the Mekong came almost all the way up to the Quai Fa Ngoum – it was, after all called the quay. Now, where the Mekong once flowed, wild grasses grow. The dams in China have taken their toll, and let us say kaddish for the pla beuk, the giant catfish threatened by an increasingly low river. I remember when fishwives fanned away the flies from the hunks of yellowing flesh for sale at what were, for Laos, sky-high prices. There’s not much left.

I sit by the river and watch the sunset. The Lamborghini passes, Chinese dark money behind the wheel.

And as I trudge back towards town, I pass the dodgy bar on the ground floor of the abandoned building. The owner tries to summon me in, presumably thinking I looked like I’d be willing to buy some H from them. The evil skulking shirtless tweaker hippies sneer at me. I quickly move on.

And in my darker moments, I think about what Paul Theroux said about the place:

“Laos, a river bank, had been overrun and ransacked; it was one of America’s expensive practical jokes, a motiveless place where nothing was made, everything imported… What was surprising was that it existed at all, and the more I thought of it, the more it seemed like a lower form of life, like the cross-eyed planarian or squishy amoeba, the sort of creature that can’t die even when it is cut to ribbons.”

Deeply unfair, I know, “a lower form of life”… but it resonates on some level, because this is what happens when a country is so thoroughly spit-roasted by the cruel 20th Century, and now here it is. Yet people try to move forward. Chinese mining companies buy billboards informing the public how many schools they’re building and how their open-pit mines are totally not death traps for some of the poorest and most exploitable people in Asia. A new rooftop bar opens, and I’ll be drinking a Negroni there. Protests among the young and conscientious elite of Bangkok mean that new dam probably won’t be built. They start selling the grilled blood sausage with cold beer at the night market. The traffickers of Chongqing park their money in a new hotel project on the edge of town. The music plays in the evening twilight. A child is born, and his life will be 20 times better than his parents, because places like this are the last places where there is hope, real hope.

And I get the email saying my new visa is approved, two weeks later. I book my flight back. Finally.

And yet the river flows on.

Bear Market

Do you remember when The Sopranos dropped? I mean, I don’t really, I was pretty freakin’ young, and I’m not even sure if my family had HBO at that point. But the general consensus at the time was that American television would never be the same. Liberated from the strictures of FCC content rules – can’t have the smol beans seeing the dangly bits, now can we? – Matthew Weiner’s often wickedly funny Greek tragedy set in hideous and tasteless Jersey suburbia reset what television was. There was Before Tony Soprano and After Tony Soprano.

This was what was called “prestige” television, i.e. something theoretically better than laugh-tracked man-children whom we the audience are supposed to both identify with and pity, the machinations of cruel heiresses dripping in Swarovski, or the avatars of a masculine ideal we failed to meet, whether embodied as cowboys back then or cops now. This was something that was supposed to use its lengthened timeline to reach the novelistic depth that movies couldn’t, that eschewed the clean Aristotelian endings of procedural TV in favor of uncertainty, complexity, and depth. And I was all in, at least for a time.

A few weeks ago, The Bear launched the long-form episode “Gary,” as an interim between its seasons. And it was godawful.

I’m not the first to comment on the decline of The Bear, and a lot of ink has been spilled over the past couple of years on the show’s wasted potential. “Aimless” seems to be a term that gets thrown around a lot, but I’m OK with aimless, at least certain kinds of aimless. “Self-indulgent” is another, but I think good art is almost definitionally self-indulgent to a certain degree, because it takes itself and its vision seriously, rather than trying to pander to a preexisting set of sensibilities. However, my qualms with the more recent seasons of the show are really just reflections of my qualms with the overall decline of prestige TV in general.

When The Bear dropped in 2022, it was a breath of fresh air in a prestige landscape that had gone stale. The shows that had defined it – The Sopranos, The Wire, Breaking Bad, Mad Men, Six Feet Under, Deadwood – were all distant memories, and most of the shows that had emerged in the interim had nowhere near the kind of cultural impact. There were a few, sure (Succession, The White Lotus, and The Boys stood out in terms of their contribution to the discourse), but on the whole, each new show seemed to have less and less staying power.

To a certain degree this was inevitable. The idea of high-quality television was no longer a peculiarity, and as glossier, more highbrow programming proved itself to be a bankable asset, more and more media outlets were willing to put forth the effort. Furthermore, audiovisual content was quickly moving online, and countless streaming services and platforms emerged, each with their own suite of shows. Apple, Amazon, Hulu, Netflix, Disney, HBO, and Paramount all attempted to woo their subscribers with flagship series featuring A-list actors. However, this necessarily curtailed the potential viewership, and if a show was on a platform you didn’t subscribe to, you probably didn’t watch it. Game of Thrones, it seems, was the last series that you could reasonably assume the guy at the water cooler to have at least a passing familiarity with.

Furthermore, as part of this boom, many of these shows seemed to carry the form of prestige TV – the production values, the top-tier talent, the sense of profundity – but ultimately rang hollow. A show like Westworld, for instance, was basically mediocre pulp sci-fi. But it had Anthony Hopkins and Ed Harris and beautiful art direction, so it was deemed prestigious. And so for every groundbreaking Breaking Bad, there were 10 woodenheaded Ozarks.

So when The Bear dropped in 2022, it felt like a breath of fresh air. Like so many of the best shows about working life, it balanced humor and pathos in a way that really, really worked. OK, not early-seasons Simpsons level, little reaches those heights, but pretty damn good! The setting was pleasantly intimate and small-scale, Carmy had demons to slay, and had to get his ragtag band of outsiders on his side and lead them to success, with the daily dramas of kitchen life – health inspections, rush orders, emergency repairs, and the like – providing the drama and tension and challenge. And, in the post-Bourdain world in which the kitchen is deemed a “cool” setting, audiences were hooked along with the critics.

And yet, as so often happens in serial media, Flanderization was inevitable. And when a media landscape is utterly ruled by metrics and engagement, this becomes a feature rather than a bug. You like the family dramas and inability to process trauma? Yeah, have some more of that. You need those heartwarming moments in which said trauma is finally resolved through the power of listening? Sure, have some more of that, you fuckers. We’ve focus-grouped the shit out of this show, so have some of that slop you like, you fucking piggies.

 

The real turning point, the shark-fin soup jump, is at the end of season 2, with Carmy having finally opened his dream restaurant to suitable fanfare, and then loudly declaring his uncertainties and inability to have a relationship to no one in particular while locked in the walk-in. It’s not only an utterly lame and pointless monologue about how sad and insecure he feels that no one would actually say out loud when locked in a room by themselves, so even that premise is ridiculous… but of course his new gf is on the other side of the walk-in door, and she hears everything, and decides to just leave the fucker. If this was on a 1980s midday soap, you’d call it camp, but here it is on the prestige teevee.

“She loves him and he loves her, but to quote RuPaul, ‘If you can’t love yourself, how the hell are you gonna love somebody else?’ Let’s please get Carmy a therapist for season three because he very much needs one.” – Marah Eakin, Vulture, who managed to close a review in a manner almost tailor-made to piss me off

And the rest of the show has seemed an extension of that moment. By season 4, it was bordering on parody. Nonstop maudlin emotion punctuated by quietly simmering resentment, all revolving around their shitty narcissistic mom (Jamie Lee Curtis, who really does play her part awfully well), and the lingering effects of the suicide of Carmy’s substance-abusing brother Mikey, as played by Jon Bernthal in flashback after flashback. And yet despite the high-pitched melodrama, no difficulty was insurmountable. Bros came in from around the world to pitch in, and the former janitor can become a wine expert in a matter of a few weeks with just a lil’ heart! Maybe this is what some viewers were looking for from the beginning. But what I was looking for was honesty, and there is nothing more dishonest than this level of sentimental pap.

And “Gary” continued in this vein. What we see is a flashback of an assignment to pick up unknown product in Gary, Indiana, by Jon Bernthal’s Mikey and Ebon Moss-Bachrach’s Richie. And eventually they get bored and sidetracked by the allure of substances and loose women (at a working-class bar in 80 percent black Gary that is somehow 100 percent white). Over the course of the hour of David Mamet-aping dialogue and phony confessionalism, the contempt for the audience is palpable, especially as the snarling dialogue paves the way for the required emotional breakdown monologue. Oh, and there’s a twist ending where they get in a car crash or some shit. I stopped caring.

But what sucks is that this didn’t need to be the case. There are echoes of things better. The Mametian Chicago tough guy talk could have actually been captivating, as anyone who has seen Glengarry Glen Ross or American Buffalo can testify. The liberal use of “Heart of the Sunrise” by Yes seems a direct reference to Vincent Gallo’s nightmarish journey in the famed Buffalo 66 trailer. And the cinematography is, as is the case in even many shitty prestige shows, truly beautiful. And for this prodigal Midwesterner, the strip mall lights and the flash of hopper cars through the naked winter trees are transcendence itself.

And we can extrapolate that deficiency to the series itself. It could have been the next great show. It wasn’t.

The Pilgrimage Road

In a general sense, things weren’t going well. Components were falling off the mainframe more rapidly than before. Shit seemed to be going down, in both personal and global terms, and so I did what I normally do. Before the oil prices got truly atrocious, I booked a round-trip ticket to someplace unfamiliar, and decided to spend two weeks amid smoking craters and fragrant citrus orchards, and tried to find some equanimitous sense of things. 

Of Japan’s five most prominent islands, Shikoku is the forgotten one. Neither connected by Shinkansen to the Japanese heartland like Hokkaido and Kyushu, nor a verdant tropical paradise like Okinawa, it exists off to the left side, without major cities. And despite numerous trips, I’d never gotten there, and so clearly it was time.

What did I know? Well, Kafka on the Shore was set there, and I know that young Kafuka Tamura makes sure to eat the udon for which Shikoku is famous, and I know that I don’t much care for udon. And I knew it as being ringed by a pilgrimage road, a sort of Japanese Santiago de Compostela in which 88 temples of historic note around the island were connected. But that was it. I’d barely even heard of the island’s largest cities (Matsuyama, Takamatsu, Tokushima, Kochi). I knew no national parks, no particular loci of the tourist industry. But I had time, and the weather was getting feverish around the Thai New Year, when I used to joke that I always summered abroad.

After a brief stopover in Kyoto mon amour – cherry blossoms over the canals, a few visits to old haunts, a few hisses towards the more uncouth tourists – and it was time to take the Shinkansen west to Okayama, sunny land of peaches and grapes, and then take a local express southwards, crossing the long causeway over the turquoise waters of the Seto Inland Sea.

 There is a pattern that sets in when one travels in Japan. It’s part of a larger pattern – the novel becoming the staid. Upon arrival in the city of Takamatsu, it’s not that different from anywhere else. Japanese provincial cities are hard to distinguish from one another. Little houses, shopping arcades, blaringly loud pachinko parlors, the inevitable foundations of a long-since destroyed castle, and even the local quirks seem standardized. The localized manhole covers simply seem to all be a variation on the same theme.

Maybe I’d made a mistake. Maybe the innate cynicism of the weary traveler – the place changes, but it seems the same – was setting in. And in the case… what the fuck was I doing here?

I liked the rhythm of things, I really did. I find my preferred hangouts, those little institutions of the sort only found in Japan – little café-bars run by solitary men (and the occasional woman), where they can express their curatorial taste in food, drink, music, cinema, and books. I met elegant lady sommeliers, I met grumpy old men who only looked happy when they were perfecting the grind on their Yirgacheffe coffee beans. There are cozy corners. There is tea.

There are the many varieties of citrus that grow on this coast, familiar and unfamiliar. Sure, this is the land of the tangerine and the blood orange and the yuzu, but I came to also know the kanpei and the iyokan, the amakusa and the hyuganatsu.

And every day, I made my way to temple or shrine, temple or shrine, whatever that might be. I climbed up mountain after mountain. Lacking in context, failing to identify the difference between Mahavairocana and Bhaisajyaguru, I simply gawked. I was unable to read the script, and while Google Lens is very good at getting across the meanings of menus at yakitori joints, it is less good at conveying the subtleties of Medieval Shingon Buddhist religious poetry. Again, what the fuck was I doing here?

Natsume Soseki, the father of realist fiction in Japan, lived here for a time as a teacher. He was abjectly miserable, and the only means of coping he found was to relax at Dogo Onsen, a hot spring resort since at least the 6th Century AD. I went there, and it was pretty nice. I had a good soak. I guess he didn’t know what the fuck he was doing there either.

The sign says “Kokoro,” the same as his famous novel. Turns out it’s a hair salon.

I take the ferry to little Naoshima, the best known of the Inland Sea’s “art islands,” the whole turned into a major art installation, save the belching smokestacks of the Mitsubishi smelter at the north end of the island, thoughtfully tucked away lest the crowd of late middle-aged French aesthetes in stylish round glasses actually have to confront the livelihoods of working people. And yet I can’t hate. Because the installations are some of the smartest, most effective pieces of contemporary art I’ve ever seen, absolute masterworks by Lee Ufan, Tadao Ando, and Hiroshi Sugimoto. They pierced the void. Sure there were plenty of works by masturbators like Yves Klein, Jenny Holzer, and David Hockney, but what do I care? I am being given a little contemporary wagashi and a glass of sencha as I look out over the ships beyond Sugimoto’s pristine landscape architecture. Rocks and trees, sea and ships. Here at least, I am happy. Even if the veil is quickly pierced.

 

 

Throughout, I ran into a dismal number of loudmouthed American tech bros, i.e. the people I literally moved to Asia to get away from. Many of them were fascinated by my culinary journalism gig, but it quickly became apparent that they viewed visiting top-tier restaurants a bit like unlocking video game achievements. Hungry ghosts in the antique sense, beings of pure consumption that can never be satisfied. To be fair, I encountered a greater number of the lovelier of my countrymen, some of whom may be reading this right now, but a single bad vibe could take me out of my element.  I’m sitting here with an antique cocktail and trying to enjoy the cherry blossoms, and this mustache-and-Carhartt Brooklynite hiding his bald spot under a fitted Knicks cap is coked to the gills and telling me about sick business opportunities.

“This was not the Paris that good Americans went to when they died.” – W. Somerset Maugham, The Razor’s Edge

I often describe my nature as “peregrine.” But this isn’t quite accurate. Because the term peregrine refers to a pilgrim, and I’m not a pilgrim, carefully making my way down the ordained path in search of transcendence. I’m a wanderer.

And yet I followed the pilgrimage road, diligently, even if I was sad and sick and fucked up and my life was thrown into upheaval. I had no idea what I was looking for, but I looked all the same.

At the Ishite-ji, Temple 51 on the pilgrim’s path, in the outskirts of Matsuyama, I arrived despondent. Horrible dreams woke me up early, haunted by ghosts of the present. Again, I didn’t know what the fuck I was doing there, but it found me.

After wandering the grounds, I see a sign. “Pure Cave.”

The sign warns you. No light. No photos.

The corridor is barely big enough for one person. I barely fit, and someone actually fat, it would have been impossible.

It twists and turns in the dark. Steps you have to feel for, walls to guide you, low overhangs that threaten to hit you in the head. You have no choice. You can only feel around in the dark.

And you almost immediately lose any sense of time, of the larger world. You are here in this dark space, and you are trying to negotiate it. It does not yield to you. The only sounds come from you. You are reduced to what you are, mind harnessed to body, alone, confronting an impassive reality.

Until you see the strobing light at the end, and the little statue of Kannon, boddhisatva of mercy.

Her light is fleeting. You crawl back through the dark into the daylight. I have never been so happy to see sunlight.

And I knew I needed to climb the mountain.

I found my way up through the abandoned cemetery, all that citrus rotting on the ground the whole way up, the perfume of the petitgrain blending with the reek of rotting oranges.

At the top, the little donation box amid the little statues is rusted. Whether the corners are curled up in accordance with the dictums of classical Japanese temple architecture or whether that’s just the metal rusting and curling, I cannot say. But I don’t think it matters, does it?

I throw myself onto the gravel and stare up at the tips of the cedars and cypresses, where the forest ends and the sky begins.

I have been here many times. The mountain itself is almost irrelevant. The point is getting here, to this apogee, because I can.

This is what the fuck I’m doing here.

And Then It Fell Down

 Sometimes, in writing, there’s this horrible sense that one is birthing demon children.

The most bitter of ironies – less than 24 hours after reposting my paean to Falling Down, my entire department (a horrifically jargonistic name, which I won’t provide here lest I get noticed), too, got the axe. At 9:00 a.m., we had jobs. At 11:00 a.m., we did not. Not unpredictable (half of my team getting fired two years ago, and the panicked colleague who told me “trust no one” a few weeks prior) and entirely unsurprising, given economic and technological trends, as well as my bosses’ and all bosses’ general disregard for knowledge workers, but still… this year, this job market.

’26 really is a motherfucker, isn’t it?

To a certain degree, we were waiting for the other shoe to drop, and it finally dropped. No more trying to curry favor or suck dick. The truth is revealed. My fellow editor – after having had two gin and tonics, most of the bottle of Vinho Verde we ordered with lunch, and a couple Port Charlottes courtesy of my home decanter – stretched on my couch and loudly exhaled how glad he was our Graeberian bullshit job was finally fucking over. That he finally didn’t need to give a fuck about his KPIs anymore.

He would go home and tells his wife and two daughters that their family would be on one income for a time. For me? It’s easier. I have a strong savings base, and no mouths to feed, other than the occasional cat.

But still, am I bitter? How could I not be? In a complete lack of ceremony, 10 years’ efforts are up in smoke. I threw the last bit of their coffee from my travel mug out into the bougainvilleas.

The reason given for our termination was not AI explicitly, although it would be foolish to say that that didn’t play a role, even if only implicitly. My bosses have, over the past couple years, demonstrated their radical misunderstanding of the technology and its capabilities, and while I would like to think they will face their comeuppance, I am confident that that will not be the case. They will, in all likelihood, continue to fail upward, and my only hope is that their failsons will do their best to humiliate their fathers and squander any familial wealth.

It’s a strange sort of life I’ve cultivated. I’ve somehow managed through a mix of increasingly irrelevant writing skillset and bohemian finagling to wind up standing in front of the money hose to write and edit things that I don’t care about very much so as to fund the writing and editing of those things I actually care about – something of a necessity in which the world of art and letters is increasingly the province of those with inherited money. Sure, it was bullshit, but I know precious few office workers in 2026 whose jobs aren’t bullshit in some meaningful way. If you’re an EMT, cool, your work contributes to the wellbeing of those around you and society writ large, es verdad. However, if you’re, say, an insurance underwriter, you’ve just found the sort of not-quite-parasitism that biologists call commensalism – remoras, enjoy your ride down the Gulf Stream.

But all remoras – self included – must fall off eventually, and try to find new cetaceans to guide us to happier waters.

And I woke up in the morning, a bit worse for wear after the sheer amount of wine and negronis in the awful afterglow. I look down at every little bit I’ve acquired over those 10 years. Burmese lacquerware cigarette box. Gin bottles filled with dried flowers. Coffee table books published by the government of the Georgian SSR to celebrate 50 years of Sovetskaya Gruzhiya. These are things I care about. There are also the things I don’t care about. Tonight, I’m finally using up the last of the paper towels I stole from the office.

And it’s not all bad – I’ve been given four full months’ paid leave, to be followed by a severance package that would make most of my fellow Yanks blush. So fuck ‘em, let’s move on.

There are things to do. Job hunting and networking, sure, but also the many freelance assignments I have to complete – enough to cover my rent, I’m happy to report – as well as the infinite little tasks and vaguely autistic fixations that constitute living. Is dinner made? Is the floor swept? And while we’re at it, when was the last time you really took a long hard look at your reading list?

But then, for every step forward, a step back, I look at my daily Business Insider email. In happier times, I enjoyed their catty, gossipy approach to the world of business and finance, but reading the reports in this context – spiraling costs, spiraling unemployment, professionals taking on jobs for a fraction of their former sinecure, it feels a bit like looking at WebMD, and then back at the mole that has emerged on your calf.

Yesterday there was what looked rather like a run on a gold shop in my neighborhood, with record one-week losses on gold in decades prompting panic among the Chinese aunties fanning themselves outside in the summer heat.

Meanwhile, one blocked strait is sending the entire world’s energy economy into a tailspin, because a bunch of fat chomos in Washington and Jerusalem had a very involved temper tantrum.

Investors are expected to put approximately USD 700 million in AI this year, despite the actual economic returns being thus far negligible. The job market is wrecked, the air and water are fouled, and all I got was this lousy t-shirt.

It’s not a t-shirt – it’s a way of life. It’s not a t-shirt – it’s a cry for help. It’s not a t-shirt – it’s a manifesto. Too meta?

I look out on the spot by my house, where Charles Sobhraj lured backpackers into his tropical death cult. A song plays from my living room speakers. Just like Topanga, it’s hot today, and it might as well be Manson in the air. All my friends are gone. I want to leave, but I’ll probably stay another year. It really is hard to leave when absolutely nothing’s clear.

And then I wake up in the sweltering hot season morning, and see the spot on my desk where my work laptop used to be, and I realize that the empty day stretches out before me. And the sun is only getting higher.

I’ve left the cards on the table. They make as much sense as anything else at this juncture.

The nine of pentacles, reversed.

The eight of pentacles, obverse.

Judgment. Three people in the lifeboat, beseeching the archangel.

And thusly I stare heavenward. Are we all gonna make it?

The School Shooter I Wasn't (But Wasn't That Far from Being)

 Last week’s school shooting in British Columbia would have probably been minimally remarked upon if it had occurred south of the 49th Parallel. The main reason is simple – we have a lot more school shootings. I’ll leave the politics of gun control aside here, except to mention one thing, which is to say that America has had lax gun laws for a very long time, but frequent school shootings have only been a standard feature of American life for 30 years or so, which suggests to me that while gun availability might be a catalyst for the spike in school shootings, it is not a cause. Causes, it seem, run far deeper than these sorts of technocratic issues. And I think that’s one of the reasons I’ve been so morbidly fascinated with the events in the remote Peace River Country of Northern BC, both in terms of the events themselves and the ways in which the media responded.

Firstly, this is the largest school shooting in Canada since the 1989 École Polytechnique massacre, perpetrated by célibataire involontaire avant la lettre Marc Lépine, who, product of a very 1960s pairing of a former Catholic nun and a largely absent Algerian businessman, who then failed out of multiple technical fields and blaming feminism for his failures and seeking salvation through a Ruger Mini-14, really was decades ahead of his time. That alone makes it distinctive, but even more interestingly, this shooting was carried out by a woman. Not that it’s completely unique – Alina Afanaskina, age 14, shot up her school in Bryansk – but it’s certainly an oddity. But I would say neither of those things would make this stand out in my mind.

What first fascinated me was the media treatment – they were awfully cagey about the specifics, which, to a certain degree, should be expected from an ongoing investigation. The shooter was reported to be a “female in a dress,” which immediately led to speculation among the hardworking bottomfeeders of the internet that the shooter was trans. This turned out to be true, which had the unfortunate effect of confirming the preconceptions of said bottomfeeders – both in their preconception of trans people as socially maladjusted freaks, but also in their presumption that all trans women are actually men, because, y’know, it’s not like feeeeeeemales can shoot up a school this efficiently. To belabor the point, they posted pictures of the presumed shooter, which emphatically were not photos of the shooter themselves – rather, they just found pics of a sufficiently fat and unpassable Canadian trans woman who could reaffirm their disgust.

To which the response from the more gender-accommodating left was that the shooter was a “literal Nazi,” precluding them from any membership in their own community. As far as I know, there’s no evidence for this claim either. What’s the worst thing one can be? A Nazi. Therefore, the shooter must be a Nazi, because they had bad vibes and stuff.

For their part, our friends at the Anti-Defamation League claimed that the shooter was antisemitic and anti-Zionist, ensuring that their own political agenda was confirmed. This, of course, was also bullshit.

In other words, everyone projected their neuroses onto this person at a time of terrible tragedy, because we needed an explanation, we needed some order in this disordered world. We needed to know that whatever the bad guys were, this bad guy was a member of Team Bad Guy, and could function as an avatar for all the Bads. We wanted to ignore the entropy that was building until the final heat death of the universe.

And when more was found out about actual shooter Jesse Van Rootselaar, she seemed almost too perfect an avatar for the horror of life in the present moment.

This is her, at some point in her transition – a transition that will be called into question, but I’ll take her at her word for now – amid what is presumably the gorgeous lichen-spattered granite of the far north.

What photos of me were taken, wearing a hoodie, somewhere in the outdoor spaces in which I found refuge? The reindeer lichen, Cladonia rangiferina, grows in only a handful of places below the boreal forests, one of which is Ledges State Park in Boone County, Iowa, where I’ve been photographed countless times between the rocks.

If I look for anything about Tumbler Ridge, BC, before the shooting, I’m confronted with this sort of duality. On the one hand, it’s treated like a sort of golly-gee Twin Peaks PNW community, right down to news articles about beavers chewing through data cables, and on the other, it’s a company town built around coal extraction, subject to the vicissitudes of mineral-based economies.

I didn’t grow up in a faltering coal town in the taiga. I grew up in a larger small town that remains relatively prosperous compared to the nearby towns, which is to say that it’s still something of a dump, but less of a dump. I still found it alienating. The railroad sidings of Dakota quartzite gravel, the big box stores, the cul-de-sacs… they all seemed so haunted.  A slug of gin and Sprite brings back instant memories of empty lots and 2 a.m. gas stations and low winter sunsets traced with smokestack plumes. Strange that, more than 20 years after I left for good, it still chills me.

She had an affinity for violent fantasies, creating a mall shooting game on Roblox (a concept I only vaguely understand) and having signed up for a gore website. She fetishized guns. You get the idea. Other than the technology involved, is there any qualitative difference between these reports and those on school shooters past?

I came of age in an era when something was awful and ebaum had a world. In our Target cargo shorts, murder and rape were abstract concepts, and therefore quite likely to be hilarious. The printouts of, say, someone with half their head lopped off by industrial equipment, or for that matter John Bobbitt’s severed penis, were distributed among the playground boys as early as elementary school. And when I finally first fired a measly .22 as a youth, and when the hot shell casing burned my exposed forearm, I could only think… I could get used to this. This story is hardly even remotely unique.

This all, honestly, feels kinda standard, but then I realize for a lot of people it doesn't. I thought about going on into detail, but at a certain point it stops being forensic and starts being lurid. 

All of this is to say that there were a few critical switches that were set better for me, no propensity for outward violence certainly being one of them. I can’t say how many of those critical junctures were contingent upon my own decisions.

I don’t want to rely on the many-worlds hypothesis here – I hate it as a plot device, and don’t know enough to know if I even ascribe validity to it – and instead I’ll rely on the idea of ghosts that we’re among. I mentioned avatars earlier – that’s more a symbol of a set of conditions, but I think of ghosts as more a product of a set of conditions.

And it’s discomforting to see those ghosts, whatever their form, all around.