Weakty 3 days ago

26/W15 - Project Hail Mary, Errands, Pens

The highlight of this week were a few social plans. I worked out with a friend and got lunch with another. I treated myself to a new Pilot Kakuno, a fine drawing implement, and of which my opinion has greatly raised since I last had one three or so years ago (and subsequently dropped it nib-first on the floor and ruined it). I also finished the audiobook of Project Hail Mary , which was excellent. I don’t usually watch movies, much less go to the theatre, but the idea of going to a movie on my own and seeing the adaptation is appealing.

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Weakty 3 weeks ago

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Back in March, I found this book at the back of my bookshelf. I don't know how it got there. I didn't remember ever buying it, much less reading it. It had the most ornate cover, as if someone had done an oil painting on an old hard-cover book. In fact, that seemed to be what it was exactly. Just like an oil painting, it had bumps and ridges, and if I had the heart to do it, I probably could have picked at it and flicked little chips of colour off with my fingers. The cover depicted several different images, but was sufficiently abstract to make me doubt my interpretation. It reminded me of a smouldering firepit set against a twisting whirlwind of leaves and strange debris: splinters of wood, the bits of plastic that connect 6-packs, old shoelaces, chunks of a gilded picture frame, and even something that looked like the severed legs of some poor creature. If you saw it, you’d probably see something else. I spent a fair bit of time staring at that cover. With the book splayed out it made for a beautiful but disturbing landscape. It was actually a few days before I even looked at the pages, I was so taken with the cover. When I finally got around to looking inside , I was surprised to find that the pages were blank. I flipped through them a few times, incredulous. My first thought was, this is a journal, or a sketchbook . But it wasn't. The book had an ISBN number, a bar code, and a bunch of information on the inside page. On the other side of the cover was the following: Of course, there were a few other things on the page. But the thing that shocked me, what made my stomach throw itself down into the basement of my body, was the line Thank you, Acton . It really struck me. Because my name is Acton. I've never met another Acton. What can I tell you about my name? It’s uncommon. It’s usually the first on any list of names. What else? People have a hard time making fun of it. Your standard school-yard bully wasn’t clever enough to come up with a quip for Acton . So, I was surprised to see my name, being thanked from this very personal, empty book. And as you might guess, my next move was to go over to the computer and look this thing up. I searched for the book's title online and plunged into reading all about it. Here's what I learned: That was about it. I found the regular stuff, you know, people sharing their reviews and ratings and whatnot. But here's what was odd. The photos I saw of the book's cover looked different than the one I had before me. And of course, the pages of mine were blank. I re-checked the cover of the book to make sure, yet again, that it wasn't just some kind of wrapper around another book. It wasn't. It was a hardcover book that someone had painted . I ran my fingers over the paint. It was paint, no doubt about it. And open the cover, and there was that first page with my name staring back at me. But I'm rambling at this point. That was back in March. Let’s fast-forward a few weeks to when the book started to talk to me. Things got weird in early April. I had the book open on my desk. I wasn't sure why I opened it. I think I had been admiring the cover in the morning sunlight coming through the wide window above my desk. When I opened the book, the pages smelled of a newness I hadn't noticed before: starchy and pleasingly rough to the touch, like the high-quality pages of paper in an artist's sketchbook. It seemed to hold the promise of possibility. I felt compelled to take a photo of the book. I reached into my pocket and pulled out my phone. Then, with the blank pages before me, in a rush, the book slurped up my phone. It slurped it right out of my hands and collected it onto the first empty page. Don't misunderstand me—this book very literally liquefied my phone, sucking it up and rearranging its physical form into a two-dimensional representation of my phone—right down to the small crack in the bottom-right corner. I stared at the miniature picture on the page: it was a rather painterly depiction, not unlike the cover of the book. I spent some time admiring the rendering. Entranced, I almost moved to take a photo of it but, of course, my phone was gone. That's when things got interesting. It was hard to operate without my phone. I knew I was addicted to it, sure, but I didn't realize how dependent I was on it. It immediately caused a fuss for my job. I worked part-time for a distress hotline for teenagers who are in a bad way. Employees of the hotline have a special application on their phone ensuring the calls can be encrypted and recorded safely while retaining anonymity. So, when I didn't "show-up" online for my job that day not only did I likely miss showing up for people who needed help, but I wasn't going to get my measly pay for the shift. I felt worse about not being there for the teens, of course. I had enough money to get by for the immediate future. But the thought of some youths calling the hotline and being on hold when I could have been there to answer made me feel terrible. But not terrible enough to tear myself away from the strange situation I found myself in. It was through the blank pages that Myriam was able to reach me. It happened a few days after my phone had been slurped up into a page of the book. That morning, I came back to the book at my desk with my morning tea in hand. I sat down, and stared once more at the painted cover, before slowly opening it to the page with the little image of my phone in the corner. Slowly, words began to appear on the left page of the book, beautifully typeset, as if punched in by a typewriter, one letter at a time. I knew in an instant that it was Myriam. In my shock of seeing this happen for the first time, I could barely register that as her writing got to the end of the page, the whole thing cleared and started again. I don't remember the exact words of our first conversation, but I think it went something like this: Then the words began to disappear. I grabbed a scrap of paper and wrote down Hoke Scripter and Able-Archive Pigmented Blue Ink . And then the words were gone. Now I had something else to do. A week passed before I found the ink. Right after I got that message from Myriam, I went online and looked up Able-Archive Pigmented Blue . I wasn't surprised to find that the ink was no longer in production. It would be too easy to click "Add to cart" on a bottle of ink, and wait a few days for it to show up at my door. Instead, I found myself on forums for pen-and-ink fanatics, reading, reading, reading about this ink. Often, I saw that people had inherited a bottle from an older relative (along with some old, fancy pens to boot). Other people wrote posts online to laud this ink as a workhorse ink and that not many people made them like this anymore . I found myself enjoying going through these posts. After a day or two of looking, I found a post of someone selling a bottle of Able-Archive Pigmented Blue . They were across the country but it seemed they would ship it my way. I sent them a direct message and inquired about purchasing the ink: And that was it. Soon I would have some Able-Archival Pigmented Blue ink, along with its contractual-binding-powers. Whatever that meant. Waiting for the ink made for a strange week. I had to pause work entirely. After missing my first shift, I sent an e-mail to my coordinator letting them know I would be taking some time off. I didn't tell them the part about my phone getting sucked into a book, of course. That would be too weird. Instead, I told them I needed to take a break from work—and in this line of work they get it. So I sent off that e-mail, apologizing again for the shift I missed, and saying I would reach out when I was ready to return to work. My schedule was full of empty slots. I almost felt like I had just finished school and was at the beginning of summer vacation. I had all the time in the world to hunt down stationery and whatever other obscure things I felt like searching for. Next up, of course, was a Hoke Scripter — the pen Myriam had requested I use. This turned out to be no trouble at all. There are a few stationary shops in town. I went out to three before I was able to track down the Hoke Scripter over at Infinite Inkwell . I had never been in before. The shop was basically a large stone room. Along the rounded walls were recessed cubbies of various sizes and shapes, holding all kinds of objects. There was one portion of the wall that held rows and rows of inks, while others had glass drawers that pulled out of the cubbies, displaying pens, pencils and other writing implements of all kinds. In the center of the room was a large round table where you could sit, perhaps for testing pens or paper. There was only one person at the table, hunched over. They had a huge stack of paper and they were furiously writing. After finishing a page they would, without looking, add it to the growing stack to their left before pulling a new page from a pile of crisp sheets to their right. I wasn’t sure if they were an employee, another customer, or something more random and bizarre. My staring was interrupted by a staff member, who offered me some assistance. They led me over to the cubbies with the glass drawers, specifically pointing out a row of pens in deep blue, green, and red hues. "These are the Hoke Scripters. They’ve got a classic appeal, perhaps you can see." "I do see a certain classic air to them," I agreed. "And what might you be looking for in a pen, may I ask?" "Oh well," I began, unsure what to say. "I’m looking for a pen that my grandmother mentioned she used to use in her youth. I think it was this one." I felt strange lying to the employee, who was just looking to help me. "Well, The Hoke Scripter is a model from Hoke that has existed for many years. It is likely that your grandmother could have used an earlier incarnation of one of these." "Cool," I said flatly. "Would you like to try it?" the staff asked. "Why not." I said, flatter than flat. Flatter than a pancake. Flat enough to write on. The staff member disappeared for a moment and reappeared with a tester Hoke Scripter. She passed me the pen. I held it in my hand, lifting and lowering it experimentally. It felt pretty sturdy. It certainly wasn’t cheap plastic. Too heavy, and too elegant for plastic. Aluminum? I would have to look it up later. The staff gestured for me to grab a seat at the large round table, to test the pen out. I joined the strange character, still writing furiously at the big table, and I did exactly that. I wrote a few lines. Then a few squiggles. What can I say? The Hoke Scripter moved like a pen does, leaving a trail of itself wherever my hand moved. I suppose I was perhaps expecting something more majestic from a pen with such a history. But there was nothing majestic about it. It was just a pen. It felt sturdy in my hands, and it did have a nice pattern on the barrel, and I supposed a person could customize it with whatever ink they liked. But what else was there to say? "What do you think?" The staff member reappeared after a few minutes of my scribbling and scratching with the pen. "Um, it’s nice." "The scripter can be a bit underwhelming, but there’s more to it than meets the eye. It’s not our most flashy or popular pen, but I think the people who come to buy this pen always have a certain, well, intentionality to them. Let me know if you need any other help or have any other questions." The staff member disappeared, leaving me to write some more. I didn’t spend much more time in the shop. I bought the pen, and it cost me a whopping $55. I could hardly believe it. That price included something called a converter which I was told I needed: it would hold the ink I wanted to use with the pen. I walked away from the shop to get into my car to go home. I grumbled under my breath. Oh, the intentionality of dropping $55 on a pen. The weekend arrived without much fanfare. I was feeling a bit naked and aimless. Without my phone, my fingers fidgeted with the accumulated bits and bobs of things around the kitchen counter and table: a magazine that had been sitting there for weeks, some dirty cutlery, a notepad from the dollar store, and a rubber band. I sat there, with the sun rising around me, spinning that rubber band about my index finger, waiting for life to wake up around me. Eventually, I got up and I poured some cereal into a bowl, made myself a coffee, and sat back down to eat. I grabbed a pen and flipped open the cheap notepad. One of the spiral ones that could fit in a shirt or pants pocket. It had already had a few pages ripped out of it. Then I remembered I had gotten it out when I had a few friends over to play cards last week. I briefly looked at the tally marks of our scores. I ripped out the page and noted that the tally marks had imprinted on the cheap paper below. I turned to my cereal. If I left it any longer it would get soggy. What would I do with my day? It would be another few days before the ink would arrive, and this strange episode in my life was on hiatus until it appeared. I poured myself another cup of coffee and threw myself down on the couch. I stared into the old fireplace in the corner of the room, long since used. Outside, cars were idling in the street, and traffic was already picking up. I could tell by the exhaust rising up to the window. The exhaust of a home fireplace had been replaced with the exhaust of cars. I moved closer to the window and looked at the traffic. They were stuck, too, waiting in line. All of us waiting for some kind of ink, something permanent to arrive. I stood there and took a sip of my coffee. Just watching. I didn’t want to open the book. If I did, there was a chance that Myriam would speak to me again. Perhaps I should say she would write to me again. And if I couldn’t write back without the correct ink, she might lose interest. Perhaps she only had so much strength with which to communicate with the outside world. I figured that if I didn’t open the book, she would stay in some kind of stasis; her life frozen in the permanency of the page. In that sense, I supposed I had time. I sighed, finished my breakfast and got up. I wasn’t going to get anywhere sitting around thinking. My hands reached for my phone, only to find it missing from my pocket for the fiftieth time today. I thought about e-mailing a friend and seeing if they wanted to get together over a coffee, or maybe go for a drink later tonight. I popped open my computer, opened my e-mail and stared at the empty draft. I started to write without addressing the message to anyone yet. I looked at the "To" field of the e-mail. I clicked the "plus" button and a pop-up appeared with a list of some of my most frequent e-mail recipients. I started adding all the people I thought might reach out. Before long I had sent the e-mail to some fourteen people. Some of them I had spoken with as recently as last week and some I had not seen in years. Then, I moved all the e-mail addresses into the BCC field so that the recipients wouldn’t know who else had been e-mailed. That’s the decent way to do it, in case you were wondering how e-mail works. I hit Send , shut the laptop, and started cleaning up. I decided that I should go for a walk. It was still early, and there wouldn’t be many people out. Never mind that it was the dead of winter. I watched the cars on the road from my apartment. They always seemed to be perpetually lined up, exhaust rising into my view. What a view. I always go back and forth in my mind whether I should have taken the apartment at the top of the building. When I moved into this place it was either this, the second floor where I am now, or the top floor. All the units on the first and third floor had been occupied. I eventually chose the second floor because I thought I wouldn’t want to move everything up four floors (there’s no elevator). But from here, I was a bit too close to the action. After having lived here for a year or so, I think being on the fourth floor would have been better. A bit more removed from the commotion, the exhaust, the closeness to the ground. Besides, I figure I could use the exercise of an extra two flights of stairs each day. I pulled on my hoodie and tossed a thin jacket over top, shoved on my boots and stepped into the hall. It would only be a short walk, so I wouldn’t need any more layers. I didn’t even have my gloves. Outside, I stepped between the idling cars with their anonymous drivers, and took the back alley behind Jason’s Grocer out toward Delmont Ave. It was still early and the alley was quiet, as I expected. I passed a few piles of garbage outside the backs of the commercial buildings and kept walking. The alley narrowed past the point cars could reach and I kept walking. I took a left at Montrain and walked the ten minutes to Gaston park. A few more minutes of walking, past the fountains, shut off for the winter, until I was on one of the trails. Despite its confusing mess of criss-crossing trails, it made for a great escape from the city. I walked through the park, listening to my feet occasionally deviate from their regular cadence, kicking and tripping over bits and pieces of trail. A few runners passed, and even one cross-country skiier, although it seemed the snow was a bit thin for it. All these people had headphones in, plugged into a world of their devising. I had nothing to listen to but the sounds of crunching snow, birds in the barren trees, and the far off sounds of cars starting and stopping and occasional honking. I reached the end of the trail and then turned around. I was growing restless and feeling disconnected. I had seen people IRL, sure, but I could feel myself growing increasingly uneasy. I knew this was likely due in part, if not entirely, to my phone being sucked into a book. I knew this because my hands still kept patting at my pants or jacket pocket, thinking my phone was there, within reach and ready to soothe whatever restless thought came my way. I walked back home in a funk. I had not anticipated that I would feel this sort of withdrawal. When my phone had been liquefied and sucked into the page of that book, well, you could say I was somewhere between amused and bemused. But now I was starting to feel agitated. I took a few deep breaths and tried to tune into the sounds of the world again, but, instead, my ears just pounded as if they were trying to tell me to plug something into them, shove anything in: a podcast, some music, anything but this overly-present, disgusting excuse-for-nature around me. I picked up my pace to a point where I was almost running. I exited the trail where I came in. There were more people now: some of them sledding down the large hill facing east, others with their dogs, families with kids running after each other. I walked a few more paces and then looked back at the entrance of the trail. It looked light and entreating. I found a bench to sit down on and looked over at the people in the park. I was sweating underneath my two layers. The sounds of the children laughing ricocheted through the air and slammed into my eardrums. Cars passed by with a roar I had hardly noticed before. I put my face in my hands and pulled at my skin, as if I had a tight mask on that needed to come off. No such luck. Instead, I rested my chin in the palm of my hand, my elbow on my knee. I looked down at the ground before me. There were a few spare bits of garbage before me, empty weed canisters, a pop bottle that someone had peeled the label off of, and a large ribbon that looked like it belonged on a kite. I just didn’t care enough to pick up any of it and throw it away. Why should I, I thought miserably, when I felt like this? When I got home, I immediately threw open my computer to see if anyone had responded to my email. Not a word. I shut it in frustration, slid it away from me on the coffee table, and slumped back into the couch until I was lying horizontally. I didn’t know what time it was, but it was probably close to lunch. My phone was also my watch, like for most people. Without a clock in the room, I resigned myself to not knowing what time it was. I simply closed my eyes and lay there. I imagined the fumes of the cars, still lined up outside waiting for their turn to go somewhere , rising up and lulling me into a noxious sleep. And I did fall asleep. And I started to dream. In my dream, I was walking with someone. Not in the park this time, and not in the city either, really. It seemed we were walking across a bridge. It was foggy all around us. I could not tell if the bridge was going over water, or if it was going over a highway, or something else entirely. Looking over the edge of the bridge, it could be spanning a valley full of turtles, or lava, or a great black emptiness. I walked on, my eyes periodically darting to the side of the bridge, wondering at the mist below. All this time, my walking partner had been talking, but I had not listened to a single word. I turned to look at them. It was Myriam. I knew it immediately, there in the dream. She was exactly as I had pictured her, based on our first conversation. She had a sad wilt to her, like flowers left in the sun on a kitchen table too long. She looked back at me, perhaps wondering if I had heard anything I had said. I said I was sorry, but this didn’t seem to reset anything between us. "Will you ever respond to me? I’ve been wondering this every day, Acton." "I will, I’m just not ready yet," I replied. My words clumsily escaped from me. I watched them tumble over the bridge into the mass of fog. "I hope you do," she said. "You have the ink and the pen, right?" "I do." I said, which was strange because I knew the ink had not yet arrived. We walked in silence for a few minutes. The bridge was the only concrete thing within the fog and seemed to go on forever, disappearing into the misty distance. "I just need some time to get my thoughts into place," I said, facing forward so my words would come out right in front of us, and not get swept away into the abyss. Myriam’s hair was a steely gray, and she wore it loose, down to her shoulders. Every now and then, a muggy breeze would come and push it beyond her shoulders, like the swinging doors of a saloon in an old Western film. I imagined foggy, unseen spectres passing through the doors of her shoulders into a place I couldn’t go. "Whenever you’re ready," I heard her say. We walked some more. Then she began to shrink, and I began to grow. With each step, she got smaller and I got larger. Before long, I was trying to avoid crushing her with my feet. I couldn’t continue walking beside her and instead had to step out of the bridge and into the unknown fog. My first step came down unsteadily, but with such grandiosity that the fog cleared and was swept away, the weight of my footstep pushing it outward. All around my foot, I saw a verdant greenness, twisting vines, lush ferns, and tall grasses. All this I saw for only a moment before the fog returned to surround my foot. I grew larger still, and the following step with my left foot required straddling the bridge. By now, Myriam was long gone, and I was so tall I couldn’t see what the displaced fog would reveal. Despite not being able to see that far down, I knew that my next step would not yield the previously lush green ground; for a hundred, or maybe a thousand years had passed since my previous step, and things had surely changed for the worse. So I stopped in my tracks, afraid of advancing time any farther or growing any larger, of stomping out any other life in my next movements. I knew the next movements I would make would decide the fate of all of life. My next step would be like a thousand atom bombs, and there would be nothing left of this world. I took a step, and I was right. It all ended. And then I woke up. I sat up on the couch and groggily mused over my dream. It was starting to fade already. I didn’t feel like writing it down, but I tried to remain with the feeling of being a giant. Of a being so large that they can’t even see what their giant steps are obliterating, the world so far below them. I made myself a coffee and lay down on the couch, the cup just within my reach. Periodically, I pulled it to my face, and carefully sipped it from my lying down position. A most precarious way of drinking a coffee. I looked at my laptop on the couch. It was calling to me. A silent notification, ringing in my ears. I wanted to hear from someone. Anyone. I set my coffee on the table next to the couch and pulled it onto my lap and opened my e-mail client. Before me was a single unread message in my e-mail inbox: I looked at the e-mail. It took me a moment to register the name. Casey. Casey was a friend from high school. We hadn’t talked in quite some time. The last time we had gotten together, she and I had indeed gone for dinner. It had been a patio brunch in the middle of summer. I looked over the list of people I had sent my original e-mail to. Casey was my oldest friend among the list. The two of us had met in the school wrestling club, two odd ducks who had picked the wrong club to join. We had bonded over discussing mechanical magazines, web forums for Arkendo’s Binding , a game we both loved, and the fact that neither of us actually wanted to be in wrestling club. All this talking we did over the slam of teenage bodies against thinly padded mats. I can almost hear it now. I responded quickly, and effortlessly—the kind of correspondence that happens with people you really just click with. Short and sweet. Save the questions for when we get together. I snapped my laptop closed and thought about this making of plans without a phone. I wouldn’t be able to check in with her leading up to the dinner. I felt a sweet anticipation already growing in me. I got up and busied myself with making some lunch. I chewed my food, staring out the kitchen window. I tidied up. I started putting away dishes that had piled up over the previous few days when the buzzer rang for my apartment. I pressed the intercom and asked who it was. In response I simply heard a muted thump . My apartment not having a camera to watch approaching people, I had no choice but to go see what it was. I clomped down the stairs to the lobby to where people leave packages outside the rickety, old door that served as the gateway to the lobby. I poked my head out and felt a blast of cold wind and snow hit me right in the face. I looked down. There was a small package, clumsily wrapped. I picked it up. It didn’t weigh much. My name was on it. There was no return address, but beside a simple "from:" label I saw a familiar name: NibTuner79. The ink was here. I took the package inside and brought it up to my apartment. I clumsily picked away at several layers of clear tape with my fingernails before giving up and cutting open the brown parcel paper to reveal the ink. The inkwell was round with a square neck, ice blue. It was filled 3/4 full with the ink. I turned it in my hands, taking in its shape and the rich blue colour swirling with the movement of the inkwell. I stopped so that the label faced me: a simple white label with a black border and the serif text: Able-Archive Pigmented Blue. There was no logo, no insignia, no brand to speak of. For all I knew, NibTuner79 could have filled any old empty bottle of ink with some random, cheap blue ink. But it seemed unlikely. I wasn’t exactly a collector of these sorts of things, but as far as I could tell, honesty went fairly far in the world of nerds and gearheads. I chuckled to myself, because I felt quite honest thinking that. I was on my way to becoming one of them. I put the ink down on the desk next to Myriam's Codebreakers and the Hoke Scripter. I had all three. The trifecta. I could crack open the book and write something. I stared down at the book and its painted cover. To my right was a freshly inked pen. To my left, a quickly cooling cup of tea. I drummed my ink-stained fingers on my desk—I had quickly learned that filling a pen could be a very messy job. I wondered how staining archival ink was. I would find out soon enough, I supposed. I picked up the inked pen in my hand. Despite now having just a few millilitres of ink in it, it seemed to feel heavier. Potent. No longer an inert stick, but a poised snake. I could feel my hesitation mounting, but I knew it was time to act. I opened the book with the fingers that had remained unstained by the act of filling the pen. I flipped to the page where Myriam’s text had first appeared and where there was still the image of my phone on the page. I wrote underneath the depiction of my phone: I could feel myself running out of things to say. I looked down at the pen in my hand. I looked down at my writing. It was messy and seemed to switch between cursive and printing at random. I had hoped I would have come up with something more meaningful or interesting to say. I leaned back in my chair. I was uninteresting. I was offline. Were the two interchangeable for me? I was a spectator of myself, watching my events unfold in a terrible synchronicity that had me simultaneously bored and amused. Despite all the separation anxiety of being without my phone, of not working my regular shifts, of what felt like just wandering around aimlessly, I was becoming a subject of my own life. My old life, my digital life, was in the hands of Myriam, a woman, I presumed, in a book by an author named Solah J. Trek. I rotated and twirled the Hoke Scripter in my fingers and stared at my paragraph, re-reading it for the second time. As I read, the words began to disappear into the page. It seemed that as soon as I finished reading a sentence, one by one, the words of it would sink into the nothingness of the page. By the time I got to the end of my second paragraph it was all but gone. I stared in astonishment at the empty page. The painted image of my phone was still there in the corner. I shifted uneasily in my chair, breaking a silence that had settled in the room. Then, a voice appeared in my head, and I realized it was from myself reading words on the page—Myriam was responding. I pounded down the apartment stairs, my messenger bag banging against my back. Every moment an eternity . Every step, the thump of my bag against me—muffled and extinguished by the muted stairwell. I threw open the front door, nearly hitting another resident of the apartment on the way in. I took hardly any notice of them. I was back outside again. I was to meet Casey at 7pm at Deep Blue, a gastrobar about a fifteen minute walk from my apartment. On my wrist: an old watch I had found in my bedside table. In my bag: a strange book, slung on my back. I walked quickly, trying to make sense of things. After seeing Myriam’s message I had stared blankly at it, shut the book, and got up in a daze. At first I felt unsafe, the target of some kind of operation that was beyond my comprehension, beyond my plane of existence, even. The message in the book had disappeared within minutes, maybe seconds after my reading it, and had left me staring at an empty page. Somehow, Myriam had known about my rendezvous with Casey. At first, I was confounded. I walked and mulled. The questions in my mind turned over and over, scratching at an imagined blank page. I turned onto Range Ave and crossed over to the other side, stepping around parked cars and stopped at the curb. I stood on the cobblestone walk that marked the beginning of the old downtown. I studied my shoes against the unevenly placed stones. I stood hunched there, losing my gaze to the ground while the world spun around me. I wasn’t sure why I had stopped. It was as if I was frozen—I couldn’t move my body save for the clenching and unclenching of my hands. All the while that I stood like this, I felt an eerie sixth sense, as if a great wave was going to crash over me. I stood wanting to look back but resolving not to. Eventually, I broke free. I could move again. I didn’t look back. Everything clicked in that first footstep out of that immobile state. My questions answered: Myriam had read the message from Casey through my phone—my phone that was still somehow working in another ethereal realm. It was clear to me now. Myriam was reading my e-mails. She was in a real-time lock-step with me. She was stuck in her own eternity, watching the stream of data of my life move past her, watching and absorbing it as she liked. I continued down the cobblestone path at a reasonable rate, minding my step for the occasional uneven stone, until the sign of Deep Blue came into view. The downtown was bustling with people, despite the cold weather and snow. Half of them could well be tourists, periodically stopping to find their way with maps on their phones, or to send a message to someone out of view, out of picture, someone who might be at the other end of the world—and it seemed they had to do this in the middle of the sidewalk. I found myself grumbling. I had become moodier in the preceding days. I reached the door to Deep Blue and stopped, feeling an impulse to message Casey and say I had arrived. I couldn’t, of course. Instead, one of us would have to go into the restaurant and be there waiting for the other. We hadn’t agreed to stand outside and wait to go in together. But there I was, standing outside, surveying the landscape of downtown, searching for a familiar face in a crowd of strangers. I stood staring for a minute. I wanted to shake myself out of this slump I was sliding into. I hadn’t seen Casey in years and this wasn’t the disposition I wanted to show up with. I had nothing to prove to her, of course, but it would have been nice to let her know that I wasn’t losing my mind. Which I might have been. I headed into Deep Blue. "Acton!" I was stomping through Deep Blue when I heard my name called out. Casey’s voice pulled me out of the mud. You might even say my heart soared at the sound of her voice. That’s what the voice of an old friend can do to you. I had been in my own head too much—and it was only her voice cutting through the bog of my thoughts that made me realize it. I made my way to her table. She had gotten a small booth at the back of the restaurant. I looked at my watch. It was 7:02. The restaurant was bustling. She jumped up, arms outstretched for a hug as I approached. She was wearing a colourful knit sweater, loose and baggy. I sank into her arms and found myself breathing in deeply. In her arms, I felt something stirring in me. In a friend, even one you hadn’t seen in some time: support, meaning, connection, a feeling of being grounded. I could have stood in her arms, in the way of the staff and the customers in the middle of that restaurant for the rest of the night. Instead, I grew self-conscious that I would be the one holding on longer than her. I let go. I sat down, tossing my bag haphazardly (forgetting what was in it) into the corner of my side of the booth. As soon as I sat down we were immediately swarmed by the staff. We both held our tongues, not wishing to begin the business of our catching-up in the immediate presence of others. We put in an order for some appetizers. As promised, Casey put in an order for two drinks, the same for the both of us. Then, we were left to ourselves. I checked my watch again, expecting it to be 8pm already. It was 7:09. "This is a pleasant surprise," I found myself saying. Between us, there was a small center-piece with a lit candle. The flame of it danced under the whims of my opening remarks. "Agreed." Casey took a sip of her water and I watched her. "You’re the only person who e-mailed me back. I didn’t expect anything from anyone, I suppose, but I was surprised that you were up for it." "Why’s that?" "I don’t know, it’s been some time since we got together. People get in their head about that sort of thing," I said. "Which is funny, don’t you think? Maybe you were surprised I was interested, when most people would think old friends from the past make for awkward communications. But I’ve never really felt that way. People weave in and out of each others lives over the years. It’s normal. Something to be grateful for, really." "That’s insightful," I said, pausing to sip my water, "I suppose I’m also a little surprised—I would have thought that the people I had been messaging with over my phone just weeks ago would get back to me when I e-mailed them, but instead it was the opposite." "How many people did you send your message to?" "Thirteen or fourteen," I said. "E-mail is old, now. It’s a dumping ground." "I guess." "So the phone is gone. And it pushed you to reach out to some old friends." I tasted my drink, which had appeared moments ago. I had already forgotten what she had ordered. It definitely had some gin in it, but maybe some lemon and honey, too. "Gone…" I echoed back to her. "Yes, temporarily." "What do you mean?" She asked. "Well, it’s a bit of an odd story," I said. My eyes shot to my bag in the corner. Casey’s look followed my eyes to the bag, slumping in its seat of the booth. "This is a really good drink." I said. "Acton, quit being so vague. What happened to your phone? What’s in your bag?" This is what I liked about Casey. She was to the point, and she sometimes made herself laugh in that way. She wasn’t laughing now, though. "Well, my phone…" I said, trailing off again. How much did I actually want to share about this? I looked at my bag again and reached for it. "Well, it would be easier to just show you." Out of the corner of my eyes, I could see Casey watching me as I opened my messenger bag, and pulled out the book that had started all of this. "What’s that?" "Well, it’s supposed to be a novel, but look—" I opened the page to where the image of my phone resided and passed it over to her. "When I opened this book—" Casey received the book in her hands, when I realized what I had just done. I lurched across the table to take it back, but it was already too late. Myriam, the book, whatever it was in there, had slurped up Casey’s phone too. Before Casey could even cry out, her phone appeared next to mine in the corner of the page in the very same painterly style as mine. "Fuck." Casey looked up at me in disbelief, while simultaneously patting the table where her phone had been seconds ago. "It’s gone," I said flatly. "What the hell, Acton! What just happened?" "I’m sorry, I didn’t realize it was going to happen again. I—I was going to show you. Look—that’s my phone. It slurped up my phone." I paused, "And there’s yours," I pointed dumbly. "I can see that, Acton, now show me the trick to return them back!" "Ah-ha," I laughed weakly. "There isn’t one." Casey lifted herself out of her seat and looked around the restaurant wildly, as if she was expecting to see cameras from a reality TV show pop out of nowhere. She sat back down and took a deep breath, followed by a large gulp of her drink. "Explain yourself." I figured this was not going to turn out to be the dinner I had hoped for. Casey looked at me for a good minute before she spoke. I had just finished explaining everything: from the moment I had picked up the book to right before I had left my apartment after communicating with Myriam for the second time. I hadn’t told her about the dream I had had, though. "This is insane." "It is insane," I confirmed. Her eyes drilled into me. Mostly, she looked furious. But eventually, that fury gave way to an uneasy look. "So, if I were to take this book, walk over to that table over there," she nodded to her right, "and plop it in front of that bald dude, it would slurp up his phone." "I’m pretty sure," I said. "It has only happened twice, and there might be other conditions necessary for it to happen. Maybe the phone needs to be within a certain distance from the page, or maybe the person had to be holding the book open. I don’t know." "Well, I don’t know, either," Casey sounded exasperated. "But I’m really tempted to try." "He might not take it as well as you did," I said uneasily. I looked over at the guy Casey had gestured to. He didn’t look like the thumping type, but who knows, he could probably beat us to kingdom come. "This is fucked up. What about this bitch in the book?" "Hey, I don’t know that you need to call her a bitch." "She certainly seems like a manipulative bitch! She used you to steal all my information. By what you told me, right now she’s scanning all my messages, pictures, and e-mails." "She could be," I said, putting my head into my hands. "Sounds like a real bi–" "—Look, call her what you want," I said, cutting off Casey, "but I believe what she said about being stuck in the book." Casey picked up the book and nervously opened it, as if it might suck her entire self right into its empty pages. Hey, it might as well have. It turned out that the impossible was possible. Or maybe I should say, the very strange and unreal had been made real. "Solah J. Trek," Casey muttered. "That’s the author," I said, just catching Casey’s words. "I know," Casey said, her eyes widening in annoyance. "I’d look her up if I had my phone, " Casey said curtly. "Look—you can be mad about this all you want, but like it or not—huh," I paused. "What?" "I never looked up the author. And she told me to. 'Take it up with my author,' Myriam had said, or something like that. I never did. I must have been too shocked by what had happened." "Or were you too busy cooing over your new love Myriam, " Casey snapped at me. Underneath the anger I could see she was still able to tease me. Maybe she was feeling a bit better. I blushed, thinking about the dream I had in which I had walked, shoulders side by side, with Myriam—until I had grown too big, and her too small. "She’s too old for me," I muttered. "From 1955, by the looks of it," Casey said smartly, and snapped the book shut. She paused and looked at me again. I could see her fingers moving absently across the painted cover of the book. "Let’s go back to your place. You’re still on Hatchet Ave, yeah?" "Yeah." "Well, let’s go look her up. I’m not leaving until we get to the bottom of this. After all, I use my phone to unlock the door to my apartment." "You do?" "And guess what else," she said, tapping the table. "The bill?" "That’s right." "Well, I owed you a dinner anyway, didn’t I?" I asked, as I waved the waiter down to order. We trudged back through the snow to my place. With Casey there, there was none of that walking and stopping to feel like I was about to get hit by an invisible wave. Sure, I felt uneasy, but at least with Casey beside me I had someone to shoot the breeze with. We ended up catching up more on the walk home than we did over dinner. I was surprised she didn’t want to drill me with more questions about Myriam. I patted the book, tucked away in my messenger bag at my side as we walked. It was still there. My compulsive checking to make sure my phone was in my pocket had been replaced by something else. I learned plenty about Casey as we walked. In the years since we had last gotten together, she had gone through some life changes that made my life look as plain and untroubled as a bulletin board in an elementary school. Her Mom had died just months after we had last met up. She had had a terrible job during that time that had treated her like shit while her mother was in the hospital. I had only met her Mom twice—both times at school. I remember her watching in the bleachers at one of our painful intracity wrestling competitions. Her mom actually saw me and called me over to watch Casey wrestle in her first match in the girls tournament. I remember there weren’t many girls into wrestling and so there were only a few matches to get to the top of the ladder. Casey’s mom and I had talked about that a little. I hadn’t stayed to watch Casey’s match to the end. I had come up with some excuse about having to talk to my coach, or something, when really, I was avoiding having to be next to her if Casey lost the match. Something about that had been too painful to imagine, and so I politely excused myself after our brief conversation. With this memory before me, I felt ashamed of my behaviour, hearing that Casey’s mom had since died. I know neither of them would have held it against me, but when you find out someone’s gone, sometimes the first thing your mind does is think about the last dumb thing you did in front of them. It wasn’t just that Casey’s mom had died. She shared a little about trying out a secondary community college program that was a complete miss. Then she went on to say that her high school boyfriend had broken up with her while she was trying to make sense of all these huge life changes. I vaguely remembered the guy. He was one of the quiet, inconspicuous types in high school. I know the type because I had been the type. I probably still was. We walked and talked, though it was more me listening. I hesitate to say much about my life, because it didn’t feel like I had really had a life in comparison to what Casey had been through. On top of that, I was realizing that for me, what was almost a farcical experience of having my phone sucked up into a book, was probably not the same for this other person walking beside me. We stepped through the snow together abreast. I was half-listening now, because I was reminded of my dream where I walked beside Myriam. In it, I had seen myself grow bigger and bigger. But now, beside Casey, that was the last thing I felt. I felt like I wanted to shrink into non-existence with each step. It was with that sense of shame that we arrived at my apartment entry. By this time we had been walking in, what I hoped was, a comfortable silence. We walked up the stairs, gripping the railing: the apartment super still hadn’t set up any anti-slip devices for the winter, and the stairs were as slippery as wet marble (I assure you, there wasn’t a lick of marble anywhere in this dingy old apartment building). We entered my apartment and I put my bag on the kitchen table. I went to the fridge. "Tea? Beer?" "A beer would be great," said Casey’s voice from around the corner. I heard the distinct sounds of my messenger bag’s buckles unbuckling. I leaned around the corner: Casey throwing herself down on the couch with the book. I turned back to the fridge and grabbed the last two beers. I joined Casey on the couch, handing her one. "Thanks," she said absentmindedly. "I hope no one needed to get in touch with you tonight," I said glumly, looking over at the page with our phones on it. Casey was running her thumb over the images. "No, but we’ll solve this tonight." "How do you figure." "Well, you’re going to give me a pen, and I’m going to tear Myriam a new one." I shrugged. I got up and got the pen and the ink and showed them to Casey. She glared at them. "You spent how much on this hokum?" "Don’t worry about it," I said gruffly. I had spent over $50, was the answer, and I wasn’t working right now, thank you very much. Casey pulled the table in front of the couch closer and put the book, the ink, and the pen down in front of her. She took out the pen, and hovered it over the page. "Wait—what are you going to write?" "I don’t think you get to ask me that. Your little book here sucked up my phone without asking, and now I’m going to write. Either get out of the way, or watch quietly." I sighed. She had every right to say that. I inched closer to her on the couch. I could smell the pub on both of us. I watched as she wrote. Her handwriting was far nicer than mine. And that was what Casey wrote. We both sat back on the couch, as if we had done a workout. Then, the words began to slowly disappear in to the page as before. We watched, expectantly. We paused waiting for more words to appear but there were none. "The audacity!" Casey crowed. "This bitch barely acknowledged me!" "Wow," I said, dumbly. "Well, you better write something. At least she’ll talk to you ," Casey pushed the pen into my hands and I received it clumsily. I began to write. "I was thinking more, give us back our phones ," Casey said. My eyes bulged and I held my palms up defensively. "It’s fine it’s fine, she’s writing back," Casey said hurriedly. We both stared dumbly at this response, until it faded away into the page. "We are dealing with a very strange entity, here, Acton." "I know," I said. "What do we do?" "I don’t know." " Know , don’t know , whatever state we’re in, we can’t keep continuing like this. I think she’s on a mission to absorb more information—she probably wants us to expose this book to other people so that it sucks up their phones too." "I suppose," I said slowly. "We need to destroy it!" "Destroy it!" I gasped. "What about our phones?" I cried out feebly. "They’re gone, and everything in them. There’s no way she’s going to give it back," Casey snorted, eyeing the book. I grabbed at the book automatically and clasped it to my chest. "We can’t destroy it!" My heart was racing. I felt the invisible wave about to crash over me again. What had changed in me to make me this way? Why did I want to protect this book, protect Myriam? Casey wanted to destroy her. Burn the book, or rip it to shreds. But she was inside it. I knew I couldn’t let her do it. It was true that something had changed in me the moment Myriam had sucked up my phone. My life had slowed down considerably, but I also was seeing things differently. I looked at the world differently. Everyone around me appeared less real than Myriam! All of them were sucked into their phones, while mine had been sucked away. My relationships with the people of this world were hardly meaningful, I saw that now. They were facile and fragile things—like something a child had made with glue and popsicle sticks: sloppy, brittle, ready to break at a moment’s notice. I felt a warmth in my chest where the book was. Across from me, Casey appeared venemous, her face angular and snake-like—ready to strike. I inched back on the couch. "Acton," my name floated out of her mouth, wrapped in a warning tone. Her lips hardly seemed to move. She moved toward me slowly, her eyes locked on mine. I was stuck, caught in her gaze. She moved closer still, her upper body hovering over the couch where we sat. Then, she pounced. I couldn’t help but release the book: she pounced on me, not it . She struck me like a shot from a cannon and together we fell back into the couch. I heard the book fall from the couch to the floor with a muffled thump. My face was awash in her hair. Behind the smell of the pub was a fragrance from earlier in her day. She reached for the book. I writhed underneath her and rolled off the couch, hitting the floor—slap against the mats. I got up onto my hands and knees and grabbed for the book but she was already behind me. I knew I was done for. Wrestling between boys and girls in high school was forbidden, but it all came back to me the same—and evidently for Casey too. I felt her arm cross under my chin and her other arm snake through my legs. Click , went the padlock of her hands. She pulled me back and we both rolled backward. It was over before it started. "You still wrestle?" I gasped out. "No," she laughed, "but a champion doesn’t forget her moves." A champion doesn’t forget her moves. I had never actually watched Casey’s matches, that day I sat with her Mom. Now it was sounding like she had taken home the trophy. I lay there, pinned by her, her hair brushing into my face. She smelled nice. The promise of spring. She must have sensed that I was giving up whatever fight was in me because I felt her grip loosen. I relaxed into her body, my head unlocked and leaning back into her shoulder. "I thought you hated wrestling." "I did, sometimes," she said distantly. I couldn’t look at her face from where I lay. "Now are you going to stand in the way of burning this book or not?" "No," I sighed. "Get some kindling, then." I wandered through my apartment, grabbing a newspaper from my recycling. I had a wooden box that a few clementines had come in. I moved them to the fridge. I found some matches and brought some rubbing alcohol from the bathroom. I returned to Casey and picked the book off the floor. It felt heavier. I walked over to the fireplace and kneeled down. I looked back at Casey. She stared back at me. My fingers ran back and forth absentmindedly along the strange impasto cover. I turned back to the book, looked at it once more, and then ripped off the cover. I poured the alcohol on it, tossed it in the fireplace, and threw the small crate on top. I lit a match, stepped back, and threw it in. The alcohol burned off quickly with a whoof but the book still caught. It did not take long to burn. There was not much smoke, and what little there was sent some creature who had taken up residence in the chimney scuttling up and out into the night air. I returned to the couch and we watched the book burn until it was no more than a blackened crisp. Neither of us said anything. Finally, when it was over, Casey turned to me. "I still won’t be able to get into my apartment, at least until I can get ahold of the Super." "Right," I said tiredly, "take my bed. I’ll sleep on the couch." "Thanks," she patted me on the leg as she stood up. I remained on the couch to watch the last few embers in the fireplace. I listened as Casey roamed around my apartment, finding whatever she needed to get situated to sleep over. I pulled the couch blanket over me, a comfortable weariness settling over me. I lay there listening to the apartment and the neighbourhood. I imagined Casey pressed against me. She had pinned me fair and square, not that I had had much fight in me in the first place. It had all happened in a matter of seconds. In light of that, I felt a competitive spark growing within me. Something tonight had lit it, and I imagined it would grow just as the embers in the fireplace would diminish into nothing. I fell asleep hoping to dream about a bridge. The book was originally published in 1955 The author had written several books Myriam's Codebreakers was the last book that Solah J. Trek wrote; she died shortly after it was published A plot summary online told me the book was mostly a love story that involved a woman in a post-World-War-Two workplace early computers feature prominently in the book, specifically, ones that were developed based on the machines built and used for war-time decryption.

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Weakty 2 months ago

Lights of the cistern

Pid, pid, pad, pit, pad . In the dark went the sound of the cup. Pid, pid, pat, pad, pit, tup, tip, tap There went the cup, bumping into the bag. Rid, tid, pid, tid, pad, bump . shhhhap , went the bag, adjusted on Joanna's shoulders. She pulled it up, levitated by her thumbs alone and, thmp , dropped it back onto herself. Thp went the cup, clipped to the bag. In the mine, as in every mine, there is a minimum requisite echo; these sounds swirled behind her as she walked until they dropped to the ground like litter. Some sounds traversed ahead of her, like a light making way for her. They never came back. Never told her what way to actually go. tid, pid, pat . goes the sound of the small, dented cup of hers, hanging, forever rebounding off her pack, more audible than her own footsteps. By now, with all the time in and out of the mines, Joanna never noticed the sound of the cup, much less the other noises her or her gear might make. At the beginning, there was concern that it might betray her presence to unwelcome ears, but she had long ago dropped that fear. People were few and far between. Even more so, in the mines. Her last contact had been in spring. It was summer now. Her favourite time to be in the mines. Temperature perfect, she adored the darkness against the long days of summer overhead and out of sight, and of course, the sounds that her little tin cup made as she walked on, through the summer mine-air. tip, pid, pad, thp, baht . She came to a fork in the mine and looked at the two descending tunnels. No signage that she could discern, as usual. A cool draft coming from the path on the right and no sense of smell, wind or anything else from the left. She mostly walked in the dark. It was something she was so accustomed to that revealing any source of light in a place like this not only felt wasteful, but cruel to the space, to her eyes. She stood still in her silence and considered her choices. With no decision revealing itself (like it sometimes did), she made up her mind. Went the match. And the light of it exploded into the darkness. At junctures like this, though, some light, garish as it was, was worth it. Joanna walked closer to the wooden scaffolding bordering the two tunnels and slid her fingers along it gently. Her eyes traced the blinding light of her single match. There were no signs that carts had been employed in either of the tunnels, but she couldn't be sure of that from the entry alone. She saw no signs of tracks or other infrastructure. These were likely walking mines. They could be connected, circling an underground lake. They could both surface to the above world. They could squirrel off in completely different directions. Anything was possible. Standing back now and eyeing both, Joanna knew the left was the correct choice. Despite the draft, which was always compelling in its promise of movement and circulation, she knew the path to the right would not work. The movement of air usually promised a path out, back up, to the world. That was not in the plan. She stared to the right, as if she could see the patterns of the air itself. She willed it to come meet her and sure enough it did: with an invisible snap, it struck down her light. If there was a sound for a match being blown out by a dark wind, that would be it. But there isn't, and instead this is what Joanna imagines, now back in the comfortable darkness, her decision made for her. Joanna walked the left tunnel for several hours before she decided it was time to stop. Her trek remained uneventful, yielding nothing right up until she set down her pack and made camp. Now she sat, cross-legged and eyes closed. She took several deep breaths, not waiting or wanting for anything, but a breath to take and release. Here, she felt the ground under her bottom. It was cooler than earlier in the day. This confirmed her suspicion that she had been walking on a nearly unnoticed decline. Joanna's body was adept at noticing the barely noticeable. She felt the decline in every part of her foot. She could perceive sensory information from each toe, her heels, her soles. Tiny muscles taut, balanced perceptively, always feeling out the rope of her path: tightrope-walker of darkness. There was no need to set up a tent in the mines, other than to provide some semblance of psychological safety. Some measure of inside in contrast to that outer world. At this point, the darkness was the same everywhere. The only time she would set up a tent in a mine was if harmful particulate was migrating from one part of the mine to the other. Of course, sometimes it felt cozy just to set up the tent for tent's sake, but like most days, it wasn't worth the effort. She unrolled her sleeping mat, grabbed her quilt and lay in the darkness. Did she even have to close her eyes to sleep, dark as it was? Yes, it sent the signal to her body that it was time to rest, but as far as she (or the darkness) was concerned, she may as well lie wide-eyed through the night. Joanna snuggled under her quilt and kicked her feet together a few times. With this movement, the thrill of sleep always rattled up through her body to the top of her head (and, surely, then went rattling off into the depths of the mine in search of other life to lay its sleepy hands upon). The movement was a signal to say the day was over—her feet could rest. They were now free of their duty of carrying her and her pack along, along, along. Joanna closed her eyes. She thought about the right tunnel, and the subtle draft that had emanated from deep within it. Then, she fell asleep. "Joanna, catch!" yelled Theo. He lobbed the fizzing rock high into the sky, its geometry flashing as it rotated under the blinding sun. Joanna took a couple steps back and received it in her arms with a soft thump . She swore she could feel the warmth of the rock right through her wool sweater. Her fingers warmed up immediately as she turned the rock in her hands. Simultaneously brilliant and modest flashes of yellow, white, even blue. The rock was a snake, hissing loudly, ready to strike, in her hands. "Now, now!" she heard Theo yell. Joanna squatted down, deftly swung the rock between her legs, and then launched it as high as she could. The rock sailed back into the air, the fizzing, hissing sound of it receding into a vibrant, blue sky. Reaching its zenith, and about to fall, it exploded into thousands of pieces and rained down on them. Joanna and Theo watched in silence as the puff of smoke, timeless particulate, dispersed high above them. Dust and smaller rock particles rained down on them, the larger pieces glittering in the same way as the rock in its whole form. "Well done!" Theo laughed. He walked over to her, crunching on some of the debris. "Want to do another?" Joanna listened to the sound of his steps and looked at him. She said nothing, then smiled, turned around, and started walking toward her gear. She picked it up and continued. There was still a certain warmth on her hands, maybe even in her stomach, where she had held the rock for that moment. It would be cold in the Wastes and there would be no such sources to heat them come nightfall. In the distance: a hazy line of a dead forest ahead, some five or six kilometres. Theo started after, quickly picking up his gear. He watched her as he threw his sack over his shoulder and shoved his boots on. Her head turned over her shoulder as if to say something, but no words came out. She simply moved: onward. Joanna woke up. She propped herself up on her locked arms. Another dream with Theo in it. She sighed into the darkness of the mine. A dream, or maybe a memory. When she was in the mines, it was never really clear: memories and dreams became intermingled. You became a different person when you were in the mines. Your history disappeared. Your dreams blossomed. One could just as well be the other. Either way, she was alone. There was no Theo. Joanna packed up quickly and continued walking. As usual, she was in absolute darkness. The path into the mine was well-trod and caused no need for concern. She wouldn’t trip over anything. Thp, Tip, Bip, Thp went the cup. Joanna fell into a reverie, walking, listening to her little cup bopping along against her rucksack. Her feet told her when the path curved, and she would reach out with her hands, fingers glancing off the curving tunnel of the mine as it descended deeper into the earth. Walking in the dark could just as well be sleeping and dreaming. Her thoughts returned to her dream. It had been a pleasant one—to see Theo again—to be near his liveliness. Playing hot potato with Hollow Rocks. When she looked at life, it seemed like the insides of most everything had been carved out, including rocks. It was like Theo to find a way to blow things up and have a good time of it. Joanna continued walking, wondering where he was now. They had met in the Spring, in Eris, a growing collective, a fledgling little anarchist town. But then again, every town across the Wastes was a fledgling anarchist town. Too small for power to be drained from the communal pool into the hands and homes of a select few. Still, their governance was strange. They had sought help from outsiders in digging a well and looking for underground resources—which, Joanna felt, was her specialty. But helping out only meant having a bed and a meal. The people who called their little group "Eris" were reluctant to welcome stragglers into the group without them putting in a certain amount of dues . Joanna and Theo had met there serendipitously, her coming from the south after an extended stretch in the Loest Mines—about a month she had guessed—and Theo coming from a mine in the East. Neither had expected to stay long in Eris, but they had found each other, both mine-wanderers that they were, and had connected at the communal meal. Joanna stopped and placed a hand on the mine wall. It was refreshingly cool, not that she was overheating. She stood for a moment in the darkness, straining her ears and eyes. Had there been a sound, a moment of light, just then? Or had she been conflating her memories with the present moment? With the accumulated time that she had spent underground in utter darkness, Joanna had developed a vivid mind’s eye: dreams came to life, memories could be pulled up, aired out, inspected, folded neatly, held up to a light that existed inside her. In the stillness, she realized she had fallen for the liveliness of a memory. Most of the time that’s what it was. But she wouldn’t—couldn’t— let herself cry wolf on her memories when there could well be a real danger in the mine. And yet, as days and weeks went by, the solitude of being in a mine lengthened out like an infinite thread woven underneath the Wastes. She didn’t have to search the cabinets of her memories to know that she had never encountered anyone, any living thing down in the mines; it was an embedded reality. The scattered populations of earth were only driven into such dark places out of necessity: to scavenge some crucial tech-waste, to find water, or, more bleakly, in seeking an infinite blackness they could no longer run from: death. It was true, she had come across the dead in the mines. Some had thrown themselves down mine shafts, others had wandered deep in the mines until they could walk no further. Joanna shuddered. She was no stranger to such bleak realities, but losing her empathy was a far greater fear than an encounter with the Lifeless. So she intentionally practiced letting such tremors of sadness and despair ripple through her. Occasionally. "We could work together," Theo said. "They aren’t going to find water in that sad attempt of a well, and we both know there will be some in Cambor." "To what end?" Joanna responded. He didn’t respond. They were perched like vultures in the Eris Tree —a magnificent tree, stripped and dead, marking the center of Eris. Joanna looked over at him, up one branch from her, lying on his stomach, his limbs dangling on either side of the large branch. And while he looked uncomfortable, he lay there with his eyes closed looking peaceful. "If you fall asleep and fall out of this tree, I’m not going to catch you," Joanna said, waving her arm at him from her branch to show the distance between them. "Even if you were on my branch, I wouldn’t expect you to," Theo replied with his eyes closed. He still hadn’t answered her question. Work together to go to Cambor, map their way to some kind of water source, return and what—become members of this little town? Get roped into leading a construction crew into the Cambor mines to establish a primitive aqueduct? Joanna shifted her weight on her branch uneasily and huffed. Theo was under no obligation to explain himself or make his intentions known. That wasn’t the kind of world they lived in. Or maybe he just didn’t feel like saying more in the proximity of others—there were a few people in the tree and some walking idly by. Joanna surveyed Eris in its shambling infancy. One or two people eyed her warily in return. Any burgeoning community would be wise to be suspicious of newcomers; they were only just learning to trust one another. She turned to say something to Theo and he was, most certainly, asleep. Joanna walked beside this memory, hearing Theo’s voice clear as day. Remembering him draped over the tree branch. It was almost as if she was still with him—that she had agreed to his proposition. A proposition with as yet unexplained intentions. She couldn’t help her wariness. That was something that built up over time. But so too did a certain kind of loneliness. Previously, Joanna may have subconsciously told herself that this sort of living memory she walked with was enough company here in the dark. Deep down, she knew this was not true. But she kept walking. Several days passed of the same sort. All the while, Joanna steadily descended deeper underground. She had been in the Cambor mines for eleven "days" at this point. A "day" was marked by an internal rhythm she had developed from walking mines in the dark. For all she knew, she could be walking through the night above ground, and sleeping during the day, but she was still following roughly a 16-hour day to 8-hour sleep schedule. After every sleep, Joanna placed a small pebble in her left pocket to mark another day. She fingered her pocket full of tiny pebbles now, probing from stone to stone, as if she could remember the day each pebble represented. There had been times when her pocket had grown heavy with the number of days it had accumulated. Her longest stretch in a mine had been forty-one days. Joanna was still undecided on what was a healthy amount of time away from the surface of the planet. It probably wasn’t doing her any good to be in the dark so long—messing with her circadian rhythms, depriving her of the warmth of sunlight and so on. But being underground was sometimes the safest place to be. She didn’t understand why more people didn’t do it—the surface of earth wasn’t inhospitable. Yes, it was barren, but more in a soul-crushing, apathetic way. At least in Ri. Entire cities destroyed by earthquakes and floods of the subaquatic bombs. There were surely other cities unaffected outside of Ri, but they were as unknown to her as the moon. The world had become smaller, closer, more immediate, when everything had gotten turned upside down. But she supposed that maybe fear kept people out of the mines. They only entered out of necessity. This is what the people of Eris had wanted—what Theo had offered to help her do. And she had declined. And here she was in the dark, doing it anyway. She had effectively declined to help the town. Joanna wondered what her real motivations were. She often felt she was operating like a wind-up toy—something charged her up and she went off to do her task without really having a purpose behind that. She had left Eris in the middle of the night to depart without being seen. The people had asked her twice to help, to build the well, and she had given them a non-answer. Then she slipped away, evading them, evading Theo. Not a good character trait, Joanna thought. The world was full of characters and their not-so-good-traits. Joanna didn’t feel particularly bad. In many ways, today’s world was freer, albeit far, far more dangerous. There was the implicit understanding of survivorship and any pretences, all masks, had evaporated during the collapse. Joanna continued walking, chewing on the changes she was seeing in her lifetime. A lifetime with a far shorter life expectancy, too, she thought to herself. Before she could contemplate how many more steps she would have on this earth, she noticed a change in the air—water was close. She stopped on the path and listened. There was little chance she would run into anyone down here. But being careful only cost a little time, a little energy. She listened intently. At first, with her eyes closed, she heard nothing. Then, a slow swell, nearly inaudible. There was a white noise in the distance. The sound grew louder. It was the sound of waves. Then, a blinding light. She staggered backward, the sound of her footsteps lost in the swell. She opened her eyes to a dazzling sun, a cerulean sky, and crashing green and indigo waves on a beach. People were running up and down the sand, some diving headfirst into the water. A few stray boats drifted up and down the coast. An image from another time. Joanna opened her eyes again—really opened her eyes, uninhibited, untricked by an illustrious memory. She was still in the mine. But there was a sound: footsteps, approaching. It was Theo, in the dark. "A little farther this way. The water is here." They walked in silence. Joanna let her thoughts swirl in her head. Days in the darkness, days of silence and not speaking—it all made it harder to speak up now. And the surprise—what was he doing down here? How long had he been down here? How did he get here before me? Joanna had left Eris in the middle of the night. Theo had still been there when she left. Theo didn’t seem to mind the silence. He probably even expected it. He must have been down here long enough to experience that same binding spell that makes it difficult to speak. His voice had certainly croaked when it had spoken. A little farther this way. The water is here. So they walked on for a few more minutes. Then, the sound of their steps began to widen and fan out with a subtle echo. Neither of them could see in the darkness, but Joanna knew the sound: the widening of a passage into a cistern. How could she describe it? It was like opening the door from the inside of a cluttered closet and stepping into an open field and a swelling blue sky. It was still dark, but the breadth of difference in the sound of their walking alone seemed to balloon up infinitely. Joanna stopped. Theo stopped a step ahead of her. He looked back at her. "It’s huge." In the dark he may have nodded, but didn’t say anything. "Do you have a light?" "Yes." "Here:" There was some rustling in a bag and Theo pulled something out, and held it toward her. She felt for it with her hands, fumbling, until she felt the lantern. Joanna nodded to herself. She felt for her matches and dug them out of her pocket and lit one. The light that sprang to life overwhelmed them in its furious charge into being. Neither Joanna nor Theo looked at one another. Both focused on the lantern between them: held at an arm’s length by Theo, Joanna close up to it to understand how it would open, unlatch, light, before her match went out, wasted. She quickly unlatched the window, found the wick and lit it. She fumbled around for the fuel release valve and couldn’t find it, touching gently but quickly, all surfaces of the lantern seeking a knob, a switch, a lever. Theo’s hand grazed hers, a foreign touch in the darkness of the mine, the darkness of a body that hadn’t had contact in some time. He moved his hand up and twisted a knob at the top of the lantern underneath the handle. The flame blossomed, doubling, tripling in size, until he readjusted it to a steady glow, a bit brighter than the now extinguished match. Joanna stepped back and breathed out a held breath. The flame had seemed huge for a moment, engulfing. The sun on a beach, the sound of crashing waves. She listened now. There was no sound of movement of water. They continued their walk in silence. Now, with the lantern, each footstep was lightened. Step by step. Soon the forbidding silence that had them cowering and hiding was lifted. "How did you get ahead of me?" "I took the right path." The right path! Joanna laughed to herself. What she had mistaken for a path leading up out of the mine—toward a clear blowing air—had been a ruse. A mistake. She had been fooled. Whatever it was, she had taken the long way, and her intuition had been wrong this time. "Wasn’t pretty," Theo said. Or perhaps, her intuition wasn’t wrong after all. "Dangerous?" Theo nodded, visible this time, by the light of the lantern. She watched the shadows dip and bounce back with the movement of his head. "Definitely not pretty." Not Pretty . He had said that phrase before, she remembered now. He had spoken that way in describing any number of changes that appeared after the floods that had wiped away the old world. "Do you see it?" He asked, changing the subject. He held out the lantern. She could make out the edge of the cistern. There was movement. What had once been a deep, underground blast-mine was now an underground lake. They continued their approach, and soon the lantern appeared as a ghostly reflection in the water—rippling." "How is the water moving?" "Beats me," Theo said. They got right up to the edge and stopped. The water was only a foot or two below the rock ledge where they stood. Joanna crouched and dipped first one hand, swirling the water, feeling the bounds of it move up her arm as she reached farther in, and then bringing both hands up to her mouth as a cup. She drank. "I would have had to turn back tomorrow if I hadn’t found this." "How long have you been down here?" "Eleven days. But you knew that didn’t you? How long have you been waiting for me?" "Four days." "The right tunnel was that much faster." A statement, not a question. "Yes. And that much more dangerous, too." "And you’ve just been camping down here?" "Yes. Finding ways to keep busy. I didn’t know how much longer I would stay." "Running low on food?" "A little," Theo admitted. "And matches." Theo and Joanna fell into another silence. The lantern burned between them, now set at their feet on the edge of the cistern. The flame stood steady, hardly flickering at all. Its reflection in the water moved more, due to some strange eddies of unknown origin: the water moving more than the flame. Joanna stood in the silence, then slowly crouched down again by the water. Sit in the silence, lay in the silence. All of it felt good. Lifted her up. Finally, she was ready to speak again. "What are we doing here?" "I know. It’s stupid." "Neither of us came here to help Eris, right?" "No." "So what does that make us?" Joanna’s voice felt hollow, felt like it was disappearing into the darkness and swallowed up by the water. "I don’t know. Explorers?" "There is no other way of being than to keep moving, it feels." "I know that feeling," Theo said. He sounded sad. Sad and tired. "It’s not that there is anything wrong with us, I don’t think. But more than anything, it is becoming clear to me that most of us are just ghosts roaming across the landscape. Looking for a solution to a problem. Maybe looking for a place to call home, a place to rest." "How long?" "Probably years now. This is the sixth mine I’ve gone into." "Tenth for me." "Why do you think more people don’t do it?" "Plenty do," Theo said, "but you don’t see them. You don’t run into them. I think we make it so that we don’t run into each other." "But surely it is just a fraction of the population." "You are correct about that. I think we come down here for signs of life. Because that’s where water is. It’s trouble to get to it, that’s for sure, but there’s something unrelentingly pure about it. Not just the water itself, but something like this existing, far way, untouched." "You’re saying it’s like a vacation? A stay at the beach." "No." The tone of his voice betrayed a furrowed brow, maybe even annoyance. "People get by with the water on the surface, but, but I don’t know, I guess a select few are drawn to the cisterns and the underground reservoirs. The ones who don’t mind the dark, at least." "I guess that’s me," Joanna sighed, "I don’t mind the dark. Some days I even prefer it, I think." "Soon the people will come en masse to seek it out, I suspect. Who knows how many of these mines exist, natural or unnatural. But I don’t think the water on the surface can sustain the aggregating peoples." "I hadn’t really thought about that. I think maybe I’ve been avoiding thinking about it," Joanna said. "Is that why you disappeared from Eris?" "I don’t know. Maybe," Joanna said uneasily. She didn’t like that Theo seemed to be getting into her head, poking around, analyzing her decisions, drawing possible conclusions that existed in his mind before he even asked a question. Maybe he was trying to connect with her—she could deal with that. But it was that his questions and probing seemed to get closer to answers she wasn’t even aware of. Joanna didn’t like that. "I think I’ll retire for the night. Let’s talk more tomorrow." She splashed water in her face. She pulled herself up and went about setting up her tent, the water fighting through days of grime to touch her skin. Joanna couldn’t fall asleep. Theo wasn’t making any sound, but just knowing that he was there made sleep elusive. Lying in her tent, she enumerated her thoughts, trying to get to the root of what was preventing her from drifting off, like searching around in a pool to pull a plug and drain the water that was the tiredness of her body and mind. It wasn’t that she felt unsafe in his proximity. She didn’t trust him, that much was true, but that didn’t mean she found him to be a threat. Maybe it was just that she didn’t know how to share this massive yet intimate space: the darkness that surrounded them, the water discovered and novel, the swirling sound of it tugging and releasing at her thoughts. The swirling water? That shouldn’t be. She lay, holding her breath. The water was certainly moving. It lapped against itself, eddying like a lost traveller. Every now and then, the water would slap up against itself with the sound of a tiny clap. She had noticed some slight movement before, hadn’t she? Earlier, the lantern’s flame had not moved but its reflection in the water had. She let out her breath slowly, and breathed in deeply. Held it. Held it and listened to the water roar into life. A deep, guttural, gurgling echoed all throughout the cistern, the sounds swelling and bouncing to such a volume that Joanna realized the cavern they were in was even larger than it had seemed. Then, a great, gnarling sawing sound reared up over the gurgling, seized it and wrestled it into submission. Joanna tore out of her tent. Theo was already there, standing, staring up into the darkness. She felt her way over to him. "What the hell is going on? Where’s the lantern?" "I don’t dare light it," he replied. She could hardly hear him over the sounds. "What? Why not?" "Something’s out there." It was obvious something was out there, but the way he said this scared Joanna. His voice was empty, hollow, like a soldier surrendering, his will to fight gone, a bland readiness for execution. "Someone’s siphoning off the cistern. They’re just getting started. They’ve been here this whole time. Longer than me. I should have known. That would explain the right mine-tunnel, it was rife with signs of life. What do you think we should do?" "What do I think? You talk like you’ve got a plan most of the time." "No plan," his arms may well have been spread, palms open helplessly to the cavernous ceiling. But this she could not see in the darkness. "It’s funny," he said. "Did either of us know we would find water down here? No. And yet, at least for me, having been here a few days, I feel like it is mine. My cistern. And someone is stealing from me. Draining away my property." "Are you sure it’s being drained?" "What else could it be? Have you not seen this happen before? Not stumbled upon the drained cisterns of other mines?" "No," Joanna admitted. "Tell me." "It’s what you’d expect. Someone is hoarding the water. There is a mine in what was once Mistra, about a two hour walk outside of the ruins of the city. I checked it out a few years ago. When I arrived the whole cistern had been sucked dry. They even had set up electricity in the mine, somehow. Had lights bordering the cistern. Of course, by the time I arrived all the lights were off and the people gone. The whole cistern was drained and was being stored underground in their little town outside the mine." "Why are they draining it instead of just setting up piping to establish an aqueduct?" "Some people have done that, but I suspect the people outside the Mistra mine didn’t like the idea of sharing. Rather than have to guard the cistern, they drain it and then store the water in huge underground containers that are the foundation for the towns they build." "That seems like a lot of work when they could just live above the mine, or hell, in the mine." "You and I are down here. Maybe we could imagine a life in the dark. But most people don’t seem so keen. And besides, they have their huge machines that do the work for them." Joanna had not seen the machines that Theo was referring to. She assumed the grinding, sawing and deep rumbling surrounding them were from the very same machines. And what of the people behind them? People with machines so large that they could route and direct massive underground cisterns—these were not the kind of people she was used to dealing with. She remained silent. Even shouting at the top of her lungs would be like remaining silent against the noise that surrounded them now. Something deep in the water was churning up the cistern enough to make waves on the surface. She could hardly imagine what nefarious mechanisms were being put to work. "I don’t think I can take the noise." Theo said, breaking the noise-filled silence between them. "I’ve never heard anything like it," Joanna replied. "I certainly won’t be able to get back to sleep." "I wouldn’t want to be caught sleeping here," Theo said. "Hmm," Joanna assented. Theo’s mind seemed intent on issuing these sorts of warnings. He often spoke with a foreboding tone. She wasn’t sure what his angle was. If he wasn’t offering these low-grade warnings, then he was taking an edifying tone with her. It was beginning to get annoying. She was seeing now that her hunch to leave him behind in Eris had been correct, and yet here he was: an overprotective brother, a macho show-off, or some awful combination of both. In her mind, she did not allow for the possibility that perhaps he was seeking a simple, platonic companionship. She was already giving him more of a benefit of the doubt than most of the people she encountered in the world. It had been outside of her playbook to talk with him the first time they met, and yet she had. But the continual gut checks were starting to tire her out. Building trust was too exhausting. "Well, I guess I’ll fill up, and head out." "It sounds like you want to go alone." At least he was perceptive enough. "I’m not going to stay either, but if you want to set off on your own, don’t feel you have to wait on me." Joanna sighed inwardly. What was she going to do, tell him to walk a hundred paces behind her? She supposed she could take the right tunnel—the one that had gotten him here faster. "The right tunnel, you said something about it," she asked. "I wouldn’t take it out of here." "Why not? You said you’d gotten down here four days faster than me." An uneasy silence (despite the roaring of the machines). "Well, there were a few people in there." "A few people?" Joanna asked, surprised. "I think most of them would be goners by now. But I got attacked by one. A desperate last stand by someone who had been either left behind or had been cut down, probably by whoever is running these machines." Joanna blanched in the darkness. She felt for the long knife at her belt. It wasn’t that she couldn’t handle herself if things got ugly. But the kind of ugly she was willing to put herself through was more the desperation of the living, not the desperation of the near-dead. "Alright, we’ll take the left tunnel." Joanna and Theo fell into a comfortable rhythm by day three. By then, Theo had exhausted his seemingly inexhaustible reserve of questions. After that, Joanna finally felt herself begin to unwind. At the end of the first day they had left the noise of the machines behind, save for a deep rumbling that was more felt than heard. Now, in their silence, they would periodically feel tremors moving the ground beneath them. Vibrations of an unnatural frequency and cause. Joanna found she had to move slower for Theo. She listened to his footsteps now. Sometimes, he would walk a few paces behind her, either in a narrow passageway, or perhaps when he was feeling less confident in his footing. She liked this, not that she enjoyed seeing herself as the leader per se. But after plenty of solo expeditions, having someone who was sort-of-there-but-not-there was something she realized she appreciated. She listened to the quiet echo of her walk that he was—the sounds of his steps fitting in with the imprints of hers. By day five they were both humming. Joanna wasn’t sure who had started it, but it became regular. Both of them seemed to appreciate it in the other, and the resonant sounds expanded from within them, out into the mine air, buzzing and sawing about. It was a much preferred vibration to the still occurring vibration of the machines deep in the tunnels behind them. Sometimes, they would lapse into a silence, only for one of them to emit a wavy melody hum, let it drift into place, a thread in a current, ready to be picked up by the other. And so it was that a thread of melody could float between the two, be picked up, put down, shared. Sometimes, although not often, they would both hold that thread and harmonize. Neither spoke about the humming. It seemed sacred. It would only be disdained by words. Neither of them ever sang. The resonant buzzing within them never escaped through open lips, into the shape of words or otherwise. At night they would speak again, though not much. The days were silent save for humming, the nights were quiet save for a few words: how to make use of their dwindling rations, speculations on the fate of the cistern. No discussion of their respective pasts. On the seventh day of walking they reached the juncture of the two tunnels. It was nearing the end of the day when they reached it. "Well here we are, two paths diverged in a wood, and so on." Theo said. Joanna looked quizzically at him in the dark, but did not say anything. By now, none of the workings down in the cistern could be heard. Occasionally, Joanna felt a tremor in the ground when she wasn’t walking, but she could well have been imagining that. "We could go another hour or two or we could stop here, if you like." "Let’s stop here," Theo responded assuredly. They set up camp. "What about a fire, tonight?" Joanna said, surprising herself. "A fire? What do you propose to burn?" "The struts. Most of them are wood." "Couldn’t that make the mine collapse?" "Do you ever want to come back here?" "You’re not serious!" Theo exclaimed. Joanna shrugged in the dark, knowing full well that Theo couldn’t see her. "One strut would be enough for a fire. It won’t make the whole tunnel collapse. I suggest we take one from the right tunnel. Based on your description of it, I figure if one were to collapse, it should be that one." "Ah, why not," Theo responded after a moment of silence. "I have a saw and some rope. If we’re not going to walk for another hour or two, we might as well do something productive." Joanna set her bag down and pulled out a foldable saw, always in the side pocket behind the zipper. She flipped it open in the dark until it clicked into place, locking securely. She pulled her medium rope out of the main enclosure of her bag. "Light the lantern," she commanded, walking over toward the right tunnel. As she approached, she remembered the match she had lit, the one blown out by the faintest wind emitting from the tunnel. Walking over now, she felt that same wind approaching. She heard the striking of a match behind her. Facing away, the illumination of it wasn't so bright that she had to turn her eyes away. Instead, she saw her shadow cast toward the right tunnel. Behind her, she heard Theo light the lantern and then a greater flame casting larger shadows followed. She stood before the entrance to the right tunnel watching as her shadow morphed and shifted as Theo walked up behind her. "Ok, let’s find the closest wooden strut." Together they walked a few steps into the right tunnel, inspecting each strut as they went. Several of them seemed to be made of an alloy metal. The first wood one was only a few paces in on the left. "Perfect." Joanna said. She set about tying her rope around the middle of the strut and then began sawing at the top. This took several minutes and Theo just watched as she did this. After breaking through, she crouched down and began sawing at the bottom of the strut. It was about 6 inches wide. Both cuts took a matter of minutes. Her saw was in great shape, fine-toothed and sharp. "Careful," Theo said uneasily. "I'm going to finish sawing all the way through and I want you to stabilize the strut so that when I kick through the end of it, it doesn't move." Theo stood over her, placing all his weight into stabilizing the strut while he looked down at Joanna sawing intently. The lantern, despite only showing the smallest flame, was a spotlight upon them. Theo, having never seen her this close in the light, watched her closely. Like turning over a quartz and seeing its sides, he took in the shapes of her face. "Almost there," Joanna said, as if aware of his lack of focus. Theo tightened his grip on the strut as the saw came through to the other side. The strut moved imperceptibly. Theo was sweating. "Okay, let's let go in a moment and we're gonna back away slowly. Make sure you grab the lantern." They did this, Joanna grabbing the rope, uncurling it as they walked backwards carefully. Eventually they retreated to the open area before the two tunnels. Joanna held the rope in her hand as if it was the trigger of a trap. Theo held the lantern and watched the light recede into the darkness before them. "I’ll pull on three , okay?" Theo nodded. Joanna yanked at the rope with both hands. And the strut came loose, clattering with a bang onto the ground and echoing down the corridors of the tunnel. Both of them waited, listening to the garish echoes dissipate. In the silence that followed, they both may have imagined the possibilities of a mine collapsing in on them. But, in the naïvety of their evident safety, the idea of sitting before a fire was both energizing and worthy of the risk. Joanna set about pulling out her hatchet and chopping the strut into pieces. The wood was dry and thick and took some time to break apart. She splintered a quarter of it into kindling and then quickly started a fire in the center of the ground facing the two tunnels before returning to chop larger pieces to burn. She added to the fire as she went, stacking the larger pieces of wood close by. The fire danced and flicked, painting the mine walls with light, and fired off pops and cracks, sending little echoes of life down the tunnels like rolling stones. "I guess the tunnel isn’t going to collapse." Theo said timidly. He seemed different in the light; less bold, or perhaps just more self-conscious. Joanna watched him curiously. "It’s not that I knew it wouldn’t," Joanna said slowly. "I think it’s more that I didn’t care. That sounds bad. I didn’t think I was putting ourselves in danger, but maybe I was. You spend so long in a mine, needing to be cautious every which way, that sometimes a reckless feeling comes over you. I need to do something care-free." "It’s not far from here, I think." "To the surface," Joanna said. "Yes." Their shadows never quite stayed the same on the walls behind them. Theo watched Joanna’s and Joanna watched Theo’s. "Should we cook up something extravagant?" "Ooo," said Theo. "I have some dehydrated soup. We could have warm soup." "I have some dehydrated black lentil I’ve been saving, as well as a bit of dessert." "Dessert!" Theo nearly shouted. "Dehydrated cake." "No such thing," Theo said. "I guess you won’t have any, then." "Well, maybe there is such a thing." The two prepared their first hot meal over a fire in weeks. Their thoughts of cisterns, siphoned water, huge machines, collapsing mine-tunnels—all of it disappeared behind steaming bowls of soup. "This is the cake," Joanna said, after rummaging in her bag and pulling out a small dense brick, wrapped in brown paper. "You just add a bit of water. Having warm water will make it taste even better, I think." Theo watched her closely as she grabbed her cup, downed the last dregs of it and dipped it in the pot of water over the fire. Joanna flicked open a small knife and pressed it through the dense cake, cutting it in half. Carefully, she poured the contents of her cup over both pieces. "We have to let it sit for some time so the water can absorb and it can cool." "Warm cake," said Theo, in disbelief. "In the depths of an abandoned mine." "Special occasion," Joanna said flatly. Not something for every day, she thought to herself, especially sharing with someone else. When the cake was ready. she pushed the package over to Theo, that he might have first pick. He took the smaller piece. They both ate the cake with little noises of delight and wonder. Its taste was perhaps amplified by the strange circumstances it was being consumed in. This had actually been the first time that Joanna had tried this cake—she had picked it up from a vendor while travelling before she reached Eris. She had nearly forgotten she had it, stuffed away in a pocket of her pack. "I wish I had some milk," Theo said. "It was good." "It was so good!" Theo exclaimed. He sighed and rolled from a sitting position to lay down on the ground, resting with his hands supporting his head. Joanna watched him. In the firelight she could see the days in the mine on him: oily skin, pale of daylight, his face dirty and unwashed. She felt much the same. Unconsciously, she took a swig of her water as if it could cleanse her. They stayed in this restful way until the fire burnt low. The strut had served them well and provided more than enough wood, a shame really, Joanna decided—she had no intention of carrying it around. Still, they should be exiting the mine soon, she figured. Maybe three or four more days. After a night like this, though, the other days of walking and nights of rest would feel bland and uninspired. Joanna stared into the fire, thinking. Her expedition had been a success, in a sense. But I’m just a wanderer, and that’s the truth isn’t it, she thought. There had been no greater goal than to explore the mine. She would not be helping anybody with what she had learned, having decided not to help the people in Eris. Though, she supposed she could go back to the town to tell them about the excavation that was happening in the cistern. Joanna felt restless, her days of wandering and meandering were strange in this landscape. She needed some kind of purpose. Wandering from place to place, exploring mines and caves had given her some semblance of satisfaction and motivation over the last few years, but that was growing thin. All the while, violence and conflict was springing up more across the region. Factions seemed to be growing and cobbling together stockpiles as they could: land, water, weapons. If the world got more and more hostile she couldn’t keep doing this. She had been lucky already, avoiding most of it, moving solo through the world. Joanna looked at Theo. He was asleep on his back. She set up her tent quietly, hoping not to wake him, but failed. "Jo?" No one called her that. "What?" "Thanks for the fire, and the cake." he mumbled sleepily. "It’s nothing." She got into her tent, and went to bed. They reached the entrance of the mine without incident after four more days of walking. They did not have any more fires. They did not speak much of anything. Their relationship had shifted since the fire. It had made real the private and the public in Joanna’s life. She slept in her tent after the fire every night from then on. For the light of the fire had brought each other’s faces into view. Even though they had no more fires, lit no more matches, even though they continued marching in darkness, the light stayed with Joanna, and she felt continually seen. So the tent made for an escape, even in the pitch darkness of the mine, at the end of the day. Theo made no comment about this, and occasionally set up his tent, too. Despite this renewed need for privacy, Joanna enjoyed falling asleep in the presence of someone else. It was comforting, and she realized as she approached the opening of the mine—the splash of light marking the entrance—that she would miss it. "What now?" she wished to say, as the light of the entrance drew closer. In some respects, she could have marched through the mine with Theo forever, if they had had the provisions for it. This was the tone of her life, in this world, now. A companion with these sorts of comforts was far more rare than the most precious of stones. And yet, she couldn’t help but feel their separation was both imminent and necessary. Above ground, things were different. In the light of day, even the not-dark-enough of night, she was unsure she could stand to be continually seen so visibly. As if he could sense Joanna’s rumination on the topic of himself, Theo did not speak. Joanna listened to the familiar sounds of his footsteps, now right beside her rather than behind her. The light of the entrance illuminated enough of the path that they could walk two abreast. The sound of his footsteps stopped. Joanna took a few paces and then stopped. She turned and looked back. "What’s next?" his voice rang out. Nearly exactly what she had wanted to say. Joanna sighed, lifting her pack by her thumbs and settling it back down. Thmp , went her cup. Familiar. "Sometimes I get these glimpses of a life where I can bear to wonder of what’s more," Joanna said. "Of hunting down some purpose. But instead, it all feels like purposeless wandering. No wonder. Just wandering. Wandering and surviving." Theo nodded at this. "I’ve been wondering the same thing." "You’d like something bigger." "Yes, and you too, I suppose." "Yes," Joanna said plaintively. "This is most of what I’ve known, though my past feels far away, inaccessible." "How well do you remember the path to the cistern?" Theo asked. "Well enough." "You could map it?" Joanna furrowed her brow at this. Theo could see her reaction now. "To make something—to provide what others can’t do?" "Theo, it was just two tunnels. Follow them to the water. Anyone with an affinity for walking about in the pitch black could do it." "I don’t think that’s entirely true. But I mean, you know, to do something greater. Make a map, provide people with a path." "The water is just going to be siphoned off, anyway. We’re helpless at that. They have machines, electricity, they have power, and they’ll have more of it—the ability to sustain it—after they do whatever they’re going to do with the water." "Maybe they’re not bad people." "That’s good of you to think that." Theo sighed audibly and started walking. "Good of me to think that," he echoed. Then they were outside. The stark difference silenced them in a new way. No more discussion of maps, of greater purposes. They were subjects under the sun—albeit, one that was hiding behind the clouds. Subjects of a brazen wind. The still air of the mine left them feeling raw and exposed to even the slightest moving particulate. Joanna surveyed the descent from the mine. She could see Eris in the distance—like blocks of a child’s toys—clustered in a seemingly illogical fashion. The wind buffeted about any clear thought she might have had about what was next. Joanna felt a rising anxiousness in her body, a vibration—at having to decide what to do. Theo stood beside her. She felt like she had to make a decision for the next step—whether to sever ties, or stick together. Despite all her wasteland wanderings, this sort of thing still never came easy. The awkwardness of connection—not their connection—of any connection, any fragment of a person has with another fragment. They were all fragments now, and the vibrating was turning to tremors and she felt herself growing unsteady— "Run!" Theo shouted, grabbing Joanna’s arm and pulling her from her spiral. She found herself involuntarily running, yanked along, the tremors in her body multiplying with each step contacting the ground. Or was it the ground that was shaking? Theo shouted again, something about the tunnels. She couldn’t hear him over the noise. His grip on her arm was painful as he pulled her up toward the rocky hills surrounding the mine. Joanna’s body ached and complained with each pounding step, being used to walking at a steady clip, not running with a loaded bag, in the blinding daylight. They were halfway up the crag flanking the mine when the earth exploded upward behind them. In a moment, Joanna was in her dream with Theo, of playing with the Hollow Rocks, watching them explode. Blink twice, between reality and dream: rocks of all shapes and sizes were soaring upward, arcing in all directions. More explosions. Theo pulling Joanna to the ground out of the way of falling debris. Then, the water of the cistern exploding out of the mine. Spraying into the sky, rushing out of all the mine’s orifices, rushing downhill, an unstoppable force, toward Eris. Joanna uncovered her head, pushed herself up, and kneeled to watch through the haze of rock dust: the water had already reached Eris, and while it had dispersed to some degree in its rampage, the path to the town may as well have been a cutout valley, and the water crashed through it. Within seconds, the child’s blocks had been knocked down, the town washed out. They stood in a stunned silence. The dust of the exploded rock was quickly carried away on the wind, out into the wastes. "There was more water in that cistern than we thought." "We never could have seen the full size of it," Joanna said reattaching herself to reality. They watched as the water eventually diminished. Most of the homes of Eris, weak structures that they were, were knocked over. In the distance, they could see the small figures of people milling about in the now diminishing water. To the right, the mine had become an open crater. "It’s a miracle we didn’t get squashed." "Or drowned," Theo added. "What do you think happened?" "Some kind of machinery malfunction, I suppose. Or something went wrong with an explosive." "They must be huge, powerful machines." Theo nodded. They stood in the wind and looked at the landscape. It was desolate. Joanna found herself wishing for the sound of her cup again, thumping along on its string attached to her pack. "Well, we know what happened to Eris," Joanna said, stretching out her arm at the decimated town. "Why don’t we go see what happened to the other party?" "I suspect that they are somewhere around the north or east side of the mine, since we’re westward right now, though I don’t see any signs of life." "And there may not be any," Joanna said blankly, and began walking. thmp, pid, pad, pt , went the cup. Theo followed.

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Weakty 2 months ago

The Referral

"When did the pain start?" "I don’t know. I guess, like, a few months ago." "And it’s as if there’s a tapping on your eardrum?" "No, it’s like, it’s more like it’s a drum being hit." "The eardrum is… a sort of drum," the doctor said slowly, perhaps trying not to insult me. "I know, but it’s like, how do I describe this…" I paused. I looked around the room. I realized that I seemed to have been put in one of the rooms for kids. There were—I was pretty sure—hand-painted versions of the Winnie-the-Pooh ensemble on the walls. My mind wandered. Who hand-paints a doctor’s office ? The characters looked creepier than charming. "Oh, sorry, it’s like—loud noises sorta cause a 'click' in my right ear," I said, coming back to reality. "And that hurts?" "Well, I mean, it’s not like I’m being stabbed," I said acidly. The doctor didn’t seem to mind. "No, you’re not being stabbed in the eardrum, but it is uncomfortable." "Yes. Thank you." "And you’d like it to stop." "Well, I’d like to at least know what is going on." What was up with this doctor, I wondered. "Ok, let me take a look." He began by looking in my mouth and my nose, and then finally, my ears. I suppose they were all connected. There were ear-nose-throat doctors. But still—it was my eardrum that was the issue. "Huh," the doctor said. "Huh, what? See anything out of the norm?" "No. Bog-standard everything. Your ears seem normal. A beautiful, healthy ear canal and eardrum". The doctor snapped off the little thing on the end of the device he had just shoved in my ear. I winced. "There! But, even the sound of you taking off that little plastic thing—it kind of hits the drum harder." "From the otoscope? Hmm. What about this," he said, reaching over and snapping next to my ear. I flinched more than winced. "Not really," I admitted. "I don’t know what to tell you, but that you have healthy ears. Maybe higher-pitched sounds—" he paused to re-attach the piece of plastic to the otoscope and take it off. "Yeah, that did it again." "Higher-pitched sounds, could be it. But really, there’s not much else we can do for you. If you’d like, I could send you to an ENT ." "An ear-nose-throat specialist?" I asked to confirm I wasn’t going somewhere else. "That’s right. I know one, an old colleague. She’s up at Park and Lawrence in Boison." "Ok, sure, set me up. Thanks for taking a look." "Sure thing, see you next time." And like that, he was gone, and I was left alone in the room. Winnie-The-Pooh stared at me from the wall, his eyes slightly askew, his fur a faded yellow. I arrived fifteen minutes early for my ENT appointment with Dr. Abtan . I’d had to take the morning off from work to drive forty-five minutes to Boison where their hospital was bigger and had facilities and doctors that were for inspecting ears, noses, and throats, it seemed. The drive over was uneventful. Thankfully, I hadn’t been bothered much by my ear for the past two weeks since my last appointment. Life had proceeded as usual, with my occasional wincing and frustration at sounds that tapped a little too hard on my eardrum. Some sounds had pickaxes, and they wanted to break through into my skull. I pulled into the parking lot and paid $15 to park my car. I wasn’t even going to bother to circle trying to find something that didn’t charge exorbitant prices for parking; I never came to Boison, except maybe to see a concert or a sports game, and well, a doctor, apparently. I navigated my way up into the hospital, up some elevators, through some maze-like corridors, until I found myself in the ears, nose, and throat section . It was empty. Not a soul in sight. I registered at the reception and then took a seat in one of the nine empty chairs that bordered the waiting room. On the walls were diagrams and pictures of parts of the body I hadn’t ever bothered to consider. The insides of the ear. A diagnostic image of a deviated septum. Microscopic images of the hair cells inside your ears. Needless to say, I didn’t see any images of tiny miners with pickaxes and sledgehammers chipping away at anybody’s eardrums. I stood considering my imagination, overlaying it onto the images on the walls when my name was called. I stepped into the specialist's office and shook her hand. Dr. Abtan was probably a foot taller than me. She looked at me with a curious pity, as if she already knew that I would receive no help from her, and that I had wasted fifteen dollars and an hour and a half of my time coming here today. "I understand Dr. Elpa sent you my way. I took a look at your chart, and I think the best thing to do is just let me take a look here. I’m afraid from what he’s describing that there might not be much we can do." It seems I had read her expression correctly. Still, she sat me across from her, and put me through the wringer. Out came the otoscope (I had looked up the name of some of these ear-related tools) and went into both ears. Dr. Abtan made little clicking noises with her tongue as if she were in conversation with my ear ("mhmm, click, yep, hmmm"). Then she stuck something else in my ear for a Tympanometry test. That was checking the pressure in my ear, or something like that. She did a few other things, periodically turning back to her computer and inputting some notes, always humming along in this sort of under-her-breath conversation (which definitely wasn’t intended for me to hear). After all that, she turned to me, no tools in her hands, no stethoscope, no otoscope. "You seem fine." "I seem fine," I said back to her. "I honestly don’t see any serious problems with you. Maybe a bit of wax buildup." "Should I—" "Don’t go digging in there. I can remove some wax, but I doubt that’s going to make a difference." "So, the certain sounds that hurt my ear, like, what might that be then?" Dr. Abtan sighed and turned back to her computer. She didn’t say anything for a moment. Instead, I watched her finger scroll the wheel on her computer mouse, as (presumably) my chart scrolled down on her screen. She clicked a few boxes and then closed the window before turning back to me. "You could be experiencing something called TTTS." "T-T-T-S?" I asked. "It stands for Tonic Tensor Tympani Syndrome. Also known as stapedial myoclonus. To be honest, it’s both rare and not really understood. Some professionals question whether it really exists. Basically, it involves muscles in your middle ear contracting involuntarily. The tympanometry test yielded some good results for your middle ear, so I’d be hesitant to say anything is wrong there. We could maybe do an angiogram, but you’re not listing any other symptoms that are usually found alongside TTTS, and I’m not sure if that would be worth it. "What’s more, and I don’t mean this in any offensive way, but often treatment tends to skew toward more holistic measures." "Like what?" I was starting to feel frustrated, and I wondered if that was coming through in my tone. "Well, exploring relaxation techniques—meditation, yoga, or something like sound therapy." "Sound therapy?" "Yeah. That could be sound desensitization, exposure therapy, music therapy, that sort of thing." "Like, this is all in my head?" "Well, it is all in your head." I was starting to see that Dr. Abtan had quite a dry sense of humour. She stared at me, challenging me to either laugh or snap back at her. I did neither. "We’re talking about muscles here. Muscle spasms, contractions. Muscles that are perhaps too tense. I would recommend that you pursue a treatment that has a foundation in intentional relaxation. I know a sound therapist, if you are interested. We went to school together, but she pivoted from becoming an ENT into sound therapy to incorporate her more artistic endeavours into her work." "Does she make ear-shaped art?" "No, but she incorporates her music into her treatment," Dr. Abtan said, ignoring my amateur attempt at meeting her wit. She turned back to her computer, clacked away at her keyboard and clicked on her mouse. "There, I’ve set you up with an appointment for next Wednesday at 2pm. She’s just up the road in Petonia Hills, about thirty-five minutes from here." Dr. Abtan clicked a few more buttons on her computer, and then logged off, as if to say our appointment is now over . I stared at her computer, which now displayed a serene wallpaper of a beach at night. She stood up. I stood up to meet her, holding out my hand, for some reason, to shake hers, but she had already turned away and left the office. I sat in my $15 parking spot and asked myself what had just happened. I had seen an ENT specialist, was the answer, but Dr. Abtan had been a whirlwind of mystery, and I wasn’t sure if I felt disappointed, frustrated, or amused. I sat for a moment in the car staring into the middle distance. Then, a loud splat of a raindrop fell onto my windshield and the sound kicked off whatever dumb, miraculous mechanism that was in my ear to trigger a short but painful attack on my eardrum. Well, my middle ear , apparently. A few more drops. I started the car, pulled out of the parking lot, and started on the 45-minute drive home. I arrived at The Sound Collage in Petonia fifteen minutes early. Petonia Hills was a lot smaller than Boison. I didn’t have to drive through Boison to get there. Instead, I found myself on back-country roads, splashing through potholes, staring down a straight track that converged into a single point for about ten minutes. Then things had gotten a bit more interesting: a house here or there, a cloud in the sky now and then, a stretch without a pothole every few minutes. I parked at the Petonia library—the only library in town. With some spare time, I walked over to a café, got a coffee and sat by the window. Petonia was mostly a one-street town. Quite a difference from home, or from Boison. I watched a few cars come and go. I saw some kids run to the bridge past the library and throw debris over it into a river. It was quiet in the coffee shop, and I was unbothered. I felt at peace, to my surprise. Periodically, I checked my watch. My fifteen minutes were ticking away, and soon I would need to head over to The Sound Collage . I realized I was dreading it, somewhat. I was comfortable in my avoidance. But before long, my cup was empty. I popped a mint into my mouth, placed my mug in a tray marked Dirty , and walked out. I stepped into The Sound Collage . It was as if I had walked into an aquarium. Everything was cast in blue by what looked like antique Fresnel lights with tints on them. One light was on a rotating gyro of some sort that mixed in abstract shapes of white light, as if to simulate reflections in shallow water. The room was lined with shelves on each side of the door, supporting bowls of various sizes and small musical instruments. "Hello, there. How can I help you today?" "Oh," I said, gathering myself and my gaze, "I’ve got an appointment." "Ah, yes, from Dr. Abtan, correct?" "Correct." "Follow me," I followed her. "I’m Liz, by the way. I hope I can help you out today," she said from ahead of me. I followed her into another room, which seemed more focused on her practice than the storefront, judging by the massage table and the assortment of speakers and instruments before me. Already, I heard the gentle sound of white noise coming and going through several of the speakers. "Grab a seat on the table and tell me about what you’d like to work on today." I took a seat and looked around while I told her the story of the trouble with my ear. This room was a much warmer colour, with various salt lamps glowing at different placements around the room. Speakers were set up seemingly randomly on stands in a 360-degree radius around the massage table I was currently perched upon. "From what you’re telling me and what Dr. Abtan said, it sounds as though you may need to take up some kind of ongoing practice that helps with muscle relaxation for TTTS. That’s something we can try today." "Can you describe your practice for me before we start?" "Of course. A good question. Some people just dive in with no idea what this is about, or have a set of preconceived notions that end up closing them off from the healing powers of sound. "Sessions can be any length, really, but on average, they are thirty minutes. Usually, I conduct music through the speakers to cocoon my patients in calming sounds. These sounds can help the body relax, or in your case, especially the ear. "When I focus on the ear, a lot can happen, and we generally need to proceed with caution. Take a patient who has tinnitus—their sensitivity to sound, the ongoing presence of ringing in their ears, can bring about all kinds of challenges. In those cases, we work together to identify frequencies, tones, and sounds that are pleasant and stimulating, or even counteracting, to the ringing. "And to be quite honest with you, I haven’t worked with anyone who has TTTS. It’s pretty rare, and I have a fairly small clientele. So, in this situation, I suggest we begin with doing some sound exploration and then consider a bit of exposure therapy." "Like, you’ll create the same sorts of sounds that bother me?" "Yes. Ideally, we might even begin with that. I want to simulate the stimulus, as I like to say. We’d start with quiet sounds and find at what threshold the issue is triggered. What kinds of sounds are causing the discomfort?" "Usually higher-pitched sounds with a short duration. Like a pen lid snapping on, but louder, or, I don’t know, a hi-hat strike on a drum kit or another sort of sharp percussive instrument might cause it." "Are you comfortable proceeding with that? I can play out a few notes on some instruments here. You lie back on the table and simply raise your hand if the sound disturbs you." "Ok, let’s start with that," I agreed, although I suddenly felt powerless in making any decisions. Then Liz proceeded to cycle through various instruments. The sound of white noise was still washing in and out of various speakers around me, and I found that comforting. The massage table was comfortable as well, and once I got positioned, she laid a thin but warm blanket over me. "This is a cabasa. It probably doesn’t have the high attack transient that will trigger your ear, but let’s try it." I nodded. She played out a few sounds on the cabasa, and I enjoyed the sound of it. With my eyes closed, I tried to picture the shape and size of the instrument. I ended up picturing a strange conveyor belt being swept back and forth with steel brushes. "You like this sound?" I tried not to laugh at the question. It was true that I liked it. But I had never been asked something so pointedly and specific about a sound before. "Yes, I suppose I do," I said slowly and quietly, unsure if Liz could hear me over the white noise. "No problem there," she hummed. I listened as she rummaged around and then became still. Pop! went a hollow sound. I winced, but not in the way that my ear usually troubled me. She pounced. "Was that the TTTS?" "No," I said, "it was just loud." "My apologies. Let me decrease my strike." Several pop sounds followed in varying pitches and hollowness. I turned my head and looked. Liz was in her element, closing her eyes, and striking a set of woodblocks at different velocities and pitches. She opened her eyes, already staring at me. "Anything?" "No," I said, turning my head back and looking up from the massage table. I found something about the office ceiling panels to be a bit sad. Underneath all this warm lighting and custom detailing was a sterile office environment. "Let’s try claves," Liz said, interrupting my thoughts. A high-pitched, cutting sound. I flinched. That was it. Like a tiny soccer ball had been fired at my eardrum. "That was it, wasn’t it?" "Yes, that tone and frequency do it. But others do too." "Well, let’s begin with that. I’m going to compose a bed-track of gentle harmonies and then introduce the claves again at increasing volumes. I want you to do your best to welcome all the sounds into your ears. You are welcome to close your eyes, sleep if it comes, and of course, stop me at any moment if you grow uncomfortable." I reclined my head fully on the massage table. I looked at the tiled ceiling and then closed my eyes. Liz did as she said. Occasionally, I would hear her get up and move around the room to interact with another sound source. As she did, the bed-tracks would receive another layer on top of the loop of sound she was building. All her movements were graceful, part of the harmonies and melodies swirling through the speakers. I lay there for who knows how long. Loops came and went, while the white noise, like gentle waves, stayed present. Eventually, the claves entered. Their sound appeared as the call of a far-off, unknown animal in the woods. My mind was transported to a not unfriendly trail. I was surrounded by trees, the light coloured green by spring foliage. In my mind, I walked along this trail, listening for the sound of the animal that I could not picture. It moved through the woods, sometimes near, sometimes far. I could feel my feet twitch on the table, as I imagined myself walking. Someone was in the forest with me, alongside the animal. They were walking along the trail and I could hear them plucking a few notes on an instrument. They strummed a few chords and hummed a little ditty. It seemed that I was walking in circles—I could hear them ahead of me one moment, and then, later, behind me. But eventually, I caught up with them. It was a small man, with a large hat, nearly half the size of his torso. Hair spilled out on either side of the hat. He looked like something from a Renaissance painting, from the time before artists really understood perspective or anatomy. He had a puffy jacket on that was patched together with earthy colours, and a dark zipper up the front. In his olive green arms was an instrument. It was a kind of lute, I realized. As I walked toward him, he snapped out of his musical reverie and looked up at me in shock. "What are you doing here?" he asked. I couldn’t tell if there was anger in his voice, or if perhaps he just had that sort of thin, reedy voice that seemed like it could slap you across the wrist. "I’m on a healing journey," I said. My voice sounded hollow and strange here. I hoped I didn’t sound angry or out of place. The man looked at me, now with an imperturbability. His face relaxed, and he closed his eyes as he now spoke. "You can follow me, but we must not face. We may march, but if it is music you seek from me, from this space, then you, too, must perform." And with that, he did an about-face and started marching while playing. Now he fingerpicked a sad melody that rebounded off the trees, and seemed to come at me from all angles. I began to march and hum in time with the music. I couldn’t tell from the back of this man in front of me if he was even hearing my contributions. He simply marched on, plucking and strumming away, and even occasionally singing out in a strong, clear voice, as he did now: On and off, the man sang these lines over and over and nothing else. The first few times, I couldn’t quite hear the words, but as he repeated himself, I began to piece together the refrain. I followed the man without hesitation. His words struck me with a profound heaviness. With each step in my march, I clung to a new part of the refrain. I wrapped myself in the song. Soon, the surrounding music grew. The instrument he strummed on took on an electric energy. The lights of the sky bloomed in colours of orange, yellow, and green. Then, I heard new instruments join us, with each phrase of the man’s song. I dared not look back, lest I break the spell I was so happily under. First, I heard the additions of a rhythm section. A small marching band, perhaps, with multiple cracking snares and resounding bass drums. On the next section came the woodwinds, sailing over the rhythmic punching of the drums. Then, the horns came—but instead of appearing behind me in our formative marching band, they came from all directions around the woods, announcing themselves in the gaps of the trees. More instruments and sounds appeared, and I could not catalogue them all. I was enthralled by the man, still singing, still heard, marching in front of me. I wished to walk in step with him, but I knew to do so would cause all of this to come to an end. And so I continued marching. The music grew and soon a swell of crackling noise, deep in frequency, appeared underground. It grew faster than the music had, and soon I felt the earth trembling. Now was my chance, before it all fell apart—to step beside the bandleader, to ask his song to be sung into me, that I might take it deep into my soul. The ground was rumbling. I stepped ahead, faster, out of line. The noise grew in response to my move, and with it the rumbling, now thunderous. The ground cracked. I tried to take another step, but the earth itself split open, and the ground underneath us cracked and broke apart. I fell into an abyss of swirling colour. My body turned and twisted, hopeful to catch a glimpse of the man, his instrument, his voice. When I was able to look up as I fell, I saw that they were all still there, marching farther and farther above me. I could still hear the music, but it was fading out of earshot, and now only the noise remained, swelling, swelling, swelling… I sat bolt-upright. Liz looked at me in alarm. In her hands, the claves, having just been struck, drifted slowly apart from each other like two lovers who had just said goodbye. "Are you okay?" she asked. I looked at her, confused. I didn’t know where I was. I felt a lingering sensation of falling, and steadied myself with my arms on the table. The table—a massage table. I looked around the room at the speakers, the instruments, and finally at Liz. "I’m fine. I think I fell asleep. I had a dream." Liz’s eyes widened, and an energetic glow seemed to light her face. "Tell me about it." I shook my head involuntarily. I couldn’t say no out loud. All I could do was shake my head, prop myself further up, and swing my legs over the table to dangle a few inches above the floor. "That’s all for me for today," was all I could say. Liz looked at me questioningly, but said nothing. I felt awkward as she tidied up the instruments and tools she had gotten out while I lay asleep, and tucked them out of the way, clearing a path for us out of the room. I got up and marched after her, out into the front of the store. There I returned to the walls bathed in blue light, and I felt refreshed by them. Liz took up her spot behind the counter, as I had seen her when I first came in. She punched in the cost of the treatment and then told me my fee. I looked at her and then down at the register. Next to the payment terminal were some CDs. They were in handmade cases, shrink-wrapped. I picked one up. It had Liz’s name on it. "I’ll buy one of these, too." I stepped out of the store into a cold, cloudy afternoon. I got into my car, passing the café I had been sitting in not long ago. And yet, it felt like days, or even months had passed since then. What had happened in my sound-fuelled dream? I started the car. I pulled the shrink-wrap off the CD and tossed the garbage absentmindedly to the passenger-side floor before feeding the CD into the slot. I put the car in drive, and left for home. Over the sound of the engine and the rural road around me, grew the sound of a washing white noise, swelling, swelling, swelling.

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Weakty 3 months ago

Define: Sardonic

"Do you think being sardonic is a requisite of getting older?" "What the hell does sardonic mean?" Jeremy asked. He picked at the grass on the hillside and threw it into the air. "I think it means sarcastic . Or no, maybe just like cynical . Sometimes those two things go hand-in-hand. It’s like, the opposite of earnest ." "I haven’t seen an earnest person in a lifetime," Jeremy said, "'cept for you, of course." "What makes me earnest?" I asked earnestly. "Probably that you’re pretty open? I don’t know the definition of earnest, either." "We don’t know anything, do we?" "Maybe that’s part of being earnest—you’re eager and ok with your dumbness." "If we look up the definition does that make us less earnest?" "No, you can be earnest and educated," Jeremy postulated. This time he ripped up a whole chunk of grass with a clod of dirt attached to it and threw it down the hillside. We both watched it roll until it crumbled to pieces, and the grass, once detached again, blew away in the wind. "People don’t like earnest people, I think." Jeremy said. "You still like me?" "Most people, I mean. I think most people get so chucked around by life that earnest people come across as naïve, or someone who hasn’t had a hard go. Most people are too impatient or bitter for that, I suspect." "You mean the people who are sardonic, cynical, negative, or complain a lot?" "Hey, be nice to them. They’ve earned it. By their reckoning." I didn’t say anything. I just pulled a clump of earth from the ground and threw it in mimicry of Jeremy. I felt like an ass. The field we were in was practically pristine. It got mowed every Sunday. Even the steep hills we were sitting on—somehow a mower got up and down them. When we would leave today, we’d be leaving a bunch of holes, like gophers on a golf course. "Did you hear that Nicky and Jen hit it off?" "No! Jen hasn’t spoken to me since before the date. I’d say Nicky is pretty earnest, though." "Jen, too." Jeremy said. "What made you want to set them up?" Jeremy shrugged and stared out at the people using the park below. "When you introduced me to Jen, it just clicked, like a puzzle piece snapped into the right spot," he said finally. At this, Jeremy stopped plucking at the grass and leaned back on the hill and closed his eyes. I followed suit, nestling my head into his shoulder. I took a deep breath in. I smelled the grass and pretended it was his cologne. L’eau de Terre , it would be called. "Maybe we can all double-date someday, if things continue going well." "Between you and me?" Jeremy blinked. "No, between them, you goon." He laughed and settled back into his reverie. The sun was directly upon us. "We’ll build an enclave of earnest people," I said. "You’re halfway to starting a cult." Jeremy murmured. With the sun on my face and my eyes closed, my mind began to wander. I thought about Jeremy’s theory. By his reasoning, I was likely to be perceived as someone who had not faced adversity, or was naïve. A real softy, perhaps. Definitions of words floated through my head. Did any of it matter? To my surprise, these days I didn’t care much what people thought of me. Everyone already had plenty of assumptions about me. The people I ended up wanting to be around proved that they didn’t live by their assumptions. But the people I was around—what was happening to them? Jeremy seemed fine, but old friends, co-workers—they were accreting a sort of bitter residue. Their words were all coated with a cynicism that, at first, I had failed to notice. But it wasn’t already there. It was seeming like so many people I knew had had a switch flipped in their brain and seemed quite different now. I pictured that while I might be on a sun-covered grassy slope, picking at grass, they might be underground trying to dig to the surface—but every movement they made had them going deeper still. These thoughts made me uncomfortable. Maybe I did care more than I realized about what other people thought of me. Clearly, I was feeling an uneasiness toward my own earnestness—that it should float so freely while it seemed that others were held down by forces either in or outside their control. The more I saw this bitterness in the lives around me the more I realized I wasn’t conforming to the same sort of discourse and dialogue, and once again that feeling of fear of being different, long rooted deep in my past, surfaced. I opened my eyes and looked at Jeremy. His eyes were closed. He seemed perfectly at peace, lying in the sun. The sounds of the park drifted up the slope, mostly children playing, unencumbered by this sort of rumination. Time passed, the sun moved. Eventually we were in the shade. I woke up. Jeremy was propped up on one elbow watching something in the distance. "Are you ready to head home?" he asked, not turning to me. His voice tumbled down the hill and my ears tumbled after to catch it. Without saying a word, I grabbed my knapsack, got up, and extended my hand to help him up. As I pulled him up, there was a moment where, due to the slope of the hill, we both could have easily overshot our momentum and gone tumbling down (after his voice, after my ears). Instead, Jeremy righted himself, and we started walking down the slope toward the other side of the park. We passed his voice and my ears, talking and listening at the bottom of the hill. I looked back over my shoulder as we walked. There were no signs of uprooted grass. No holes in the hill. It was as if we had never been there.

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Weakty 3 months ago

The other side of distraction

I love the energy of New Years. Resolutions and intentions thread through my day-to-day thoughts in the days and sometimes even weeks leading up to a new year. That has toned down quite a bit since having a kid, but I’m still holding on to this meaningless date that we attribute meaning to and I am looking forward to some fresh-starts. More than anything, this coming year, I’d like to steal back my attention, even more. Focus might be an apt theme for the year. As I work to continue to eradicate unwelcome, manipulative distractions from my life and redirect that stolen time and attention back to more important matters, I find myself thinking about what it means to be on the other side of distraction; that is, imagining what kind of person I am after "arriving" (he said, trying not sound extremely obnoxious). Arriving back at having my attention belong to me takes me to thinking about my post on priorities, and spending time—namely, what do you do with that new time that you have? One thing I’ve realized, is that what is on the other side of a doomscroll, is another kind of doom: facing up to what you actually want to do, and how uncomfortable that is. For me, it’s an abundant backlog of several creative art projects, idly standing by for me to just start (and keep going) . It is altogether scary to have even gotten to a point where I’ve realized I could actually just do these things once I’ve taken command of my attention. I don’t know what to call this petrifying position beyond analysis paralysis . But what I find interesting about it is that it exists at all. I would have thought that just having gotten at least some of my attention back would mean I’d be free and clear and the actual directing of this newfound time/energy/focus would be immediately put to use. Not so, of course. I expect that as this year progresses, I’ll be whittling down more and more things. I look forward to this, as hard as it can be to let go. But the things you love, and you want to love, are out there waiting for you—you have to drop a few of the heavier things to make it out there, though. I don’t know what shape writing on this site will have for me this year. I’ve enjoyed writing here in this all-too-non-fiction-way, and I hope to continue doing it. But really, it is a stand in for more important writing I want to do. I expect my writing here to be whittled down or change shape in some way or other, too. Everything is an experiment, everything is exploration. May you have peace, happiness, love, joy, and continued experiments in your own way this year.

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Weakty 4 months ago

Advice columnist for one

As I've been pushing myself to write more intimately about creative processes, slice of life experiences, and vulnerability, I've started to see my own writing as sounding like thinly-veiled advice columnist writing. I did not see that coming. And not coincidentally, I'm starting to see some of the writing I've been keeping up with on the internet as in a similar vein. I’ve heard creative people advocate that you should put out what you want to see in the world. That when you write, you create the world you want to be in (not sure how this applies to horror writers, though, ha). When you make music, you make the music you wish to hear. And so on. After having written for a few weeks straight in this fashion, I see now that I’m writing for my past self. I’m writing the things I wish someone had told me. And while the idea of being seen this way is mostly abhorrent to me, I’m also quite surprised and delighted by this. I'm pleased that I am now writing publicly the sorts of things that I wish I had been able to come across at a previous time in my life (often not long ago). But of course having this in the public sphere makes it strangely feel like I'm writing an advice column. Fundamentally, I think this is also totally fine (if a bit bewildering and amusing). But it takes me to yet another piece of advice shared with me a long time ago—that even when you're having a hard time going through something, it can bring you a lot of peace to remember that other people are experiencing this too. Simple yes, but it’s altogether easy to cling to what can feel like a problem unique to us (arguably entirely for the worse, whatever your reasons may be). I wouldn't dare to extrapolate these thoughts to greater theories of a utopia based in wide-spread vulnerability and openness, and so I’ll simply sign off for now. Ann Landers Weakty

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Weakty 4 months ago

Never from scratch

I've long been inspired, fascinated, and curious about artists who can create, create, create, but never return to obscure or bury their past. For myself, and I think for many other aspiring creative minds, lurks the temptation to start fresh in our self-presentation. As we progress in our creative endeavours, as our skills improve, looking back on our work can often be an embarrassing act. Every so often we want to remove all pointers to our earlier work, as if to say, "I've always been this way, my work has always looked like this." How many times have I started even this little site of mine over, thrown away the content, tried to find a more cohesive narrative, image or brand and then started again? As we progress along, it becomes increasingly uncomfortable to live with your previous existences, especially if you're prone to looking back. It may seem easier to wipe your old selves from the face of the map entirely. (Aside: ironically, It's very rare for something on the internet to actually be scrubbed away and entirely disappear. Our earlier, naive attempts are just an archive.org link away. If not that difficult for a passerby to trace your attempts of becoming the public persona that you have presented.) (Further aside: I would argue that most good-natured folks don't dwell on our clumsy attempts to find and present ourselves, and we need not have such main character energy to feel so embarrassed at our previous attempts at creating and being creative.) When thinking about this, I turn to some of my favourite musicians, with their long-running discographies and careers. Listening to interviews with them, my ears always perk up when asked about their older works. Sometimes the Subject might just smile, laugh off something from the past, or sometimes make a harmless self-deprecatory remark. But all of these acknowledgements, at least to me, seem to be saying, "that was then, and this is now." And beyond that, some of the most prolific creators I admire don't even seem to be thinking, "this is now"—they're already thinking: "here's what's next." I'd like to think that being forward-facing like this is a choice. But in our battles with perfectionism and acceptance of our own work (and by extension, ourselves), I'm not sure that it always is. Take that thing you've always wanted to do but constantly put it off. Learning an instrument. A sport. Learning math from the course you dropped out of. Regardless of what it is, now an adult, you might not have the confidence that comes with your younger years, or the encouragement that came from peers watching you learn your thing . All that stands beside (and against) you are the long-standing desire to do what you want, coupled with the thoughts that have stopped you again and again. When I sit down and think about these reluctances, I am somewhat embarrassed at how much I care. I'll read quotes like "You’ll stop worrying what others think about you when you realize how seldom they do." (David Foster Wallace) and hope that it will unblock me, destroy the ego, etc. And yet, the struggle remains (of course it does! Even a pithy quote doesn't have the power to do all the work for you). These days, I tell myself that what may have the power to help with this corner is a continued mindfulness coupled with repeat exposure in being uncomfortable. Continue making the work, continue putting it out. The muscle grows stronger, but you may never actually feel strong . Self-acceptance is something broader and greater than the creative work that we do. Indeed, our creative work can help us with it, but it is something that lives outside our work: it is in every waking and sleeping moment. It is part of each breath we take. It is part of our automatic thoughts before we really even know what we're going to say. You can reinvent yourself and your image as many times as you want. You can take work down—you're allowed to do that. I don't mean to imply that there is any harm in making what was once public private. But I think that the act of doing so, when done without intent and care, risks leaving something important behind—the missteps, the growth, the evidence that none of this, of us, of our attempts—feeble, bold or somewhere in between—is from scratch.

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Weakty 4 months ago

Counting Priorities

Take a moment and ask yourself: what are my priorities ? Perhaps, like me, you’ve walked decades on this earth and never really asked yourself this sort of pointed question. But let’s not dwell on why we aren’t asking such questions, and try to answer the question itself. (I refuse to answer the question). I’ve often struggled with trying to do too much at once. Not knowing what my priorities are makes making the decision of what to do harder. In this context, I’m talking of priorities of the privileged sort—the ones that live way at the top of Maslow's hierarchy of needs: priorities of expression, artistic or otherwise—I’m talking about Priority and Self-actualization. I suspect many people have a long-standing ache, a desire for meaningfulness in their lives, and I think conceptually, priority, and the difficulty of prioritizing, has a lot to do with that. Perhaps that is why the quote at the beginning of this post struck me. A priority represents how you spend your precious time. I see it as a chain: with the time that you have, you make decisions about how you want to spend it, which leads to actions, those actions lead to results and hopefully, those results (and hopefully, the act of acting) are fulfilling and meaningful. Pretty simple, when you write it out. But if it’s so simple, why did the quote hit me so hard? Mann’s words can get you to stop and think about what a priority is. A very abrupt stop. The kind where you might actually wonder about the very definition of a word, and how you apply it from your lexicon. With that stopping, you might have clarity. In this case, perhaps it is clarity on when to say “no”. Clarity to assess what really matters. Clarity to slow down and think about things. In a search of meaning and fulfillment, I think we need fairly constant and repetitive deliberation on what our priorities are. I don’t think I’ve been doing that repetitive deliberation. What can make this more difficult is experiencing priority-envy. Sometimes, we might come across someone who has convictions and priorities so strong and apparent that we can’t help but feel jealous; they are on a path that seems so obvious to them that it makes us wonder what it will take to find our own path. Where does their passion come from? we might ask, how did they know , or even more importantly in today’s age, how do they remain focused on it? I can only speak for myself here, but I suspect others might feel the same sometimes: an overwhelming feeling that one must narrow in and specialize on something that yields—what, exactly? The answer may vary from person to person. To have recognition in your field? Perhaps to be the self-same person that others envy for how convicted we are in our walking life. Or more insidiously, to feel like we’re going somewhere ? At the root of this wondering are plenty of uncomfortable questions. It can be overwhelming, simply crushing to even stop and think: what does one do with a life? Or to add even more pressure: what does one do with the non-contiguous slivers of life existing between one’s obligations? . So, I spent some time taking Mann’s quote very literally—why not? What are my two priorities? But I wouldn’t even let myself answer the question, Instead, I looked for a way out, a way to take a branch, and subdivide it into smaller branches. I jumped straight to bargaining. I told myself that there are given and chosen priorities. Taking care of yourself, your family, maintaining a roof over your head—those are all given priorities. Chosen priorities are based on how you prioritized your discretionary time. I could come up with two priorities in that sense, couldn’t I? I started asking myself some questions. Was writing one of my two priorities? Painting? Reading and self-educating? Community-involvement? I ended up combing through a field littered with passing (and some staying) interests. But trying to find a priority in an interest or a hobby wouldn’t do it. I needed to zoom out. That meant asking myself what these existing things had in common. Using this very literal lens did yield me this: I thought about values behind all of this—the driving factor behind my priorities, and subsequently, my behaviour. A few years ago, a friend of mine asked me a simple question: what motivates you? Until then, no one had ever asked me a question like that. I had not asked myself a question like that. The question isn’t so different than asking yourself what your priorities are. And to zoom-out again, I think both questions, again, are about values. Perhaps like me, you have a feeling of what your values are, but you haven’t really expressed them before. Surely, I was living them, no? and the lens into that landscape was most easily seen by my behaviour (and so we return back to priorities, back to how we spend our time). So, like me, perhaps you’ve never asked yourself this whole line of destabilizing questions. But if it is true that some of the answers lie in how we spend our time, then it stands we should talk about and assess automatic behaviour. Looking at my default actions and how I spend my time provides a fairly visible trail of breadcrumbs to work back up to identifying motivations, priorities and perhaps most importantly, values. While many of our automatic behaviours have been co-opted by attention-stealing-devices, I remain optimistic that looking at what we default to doing can give us a hand in coming up with some answers. Unfortunately, some of those answers might not be so glamorous (or might be downright toxic and scary). Let me self-pathologize to see if we can work something out for one "part" (in the IFS-sense) of me. When I look at my inability to sit still and rest, I see a creeping feeling that I should be working on something. My spare moments should be spent creating, producing and improving . Hmmm—ok, I see that work might be broad enough of a category to qualify as a priority, here. Now, what might be the value that is driving that behaviour? It might be Security (securing future work, financial stability etc). But it might also be valuing Expression, or Creativity. So it seems values can be conflate, connect and co-depend. Taking a very literal approach to assessing priorities can be helpful if a bit constraining. But the act of writing this post out, felt altogether gratuitous and indulgent—even more so than my normal writing. Perhaps priorities aren’t always things that need to be identified with words. Maybe they are a unstated presence that manifest in our behaviour and is directly linked to our values. Stopping and asking ourselves about these sorts of things can provide useful pauses and opportunities for recalibration in our lives. And yet, I’m not sure I believe that. Because why else would this quote have struck me as it did? I do not end this post with any conclusive thoughts, but more questions than I had before. So, I will leave you with another quote that have been floating in my mind, and I find sufficiently calming in these existential waters:

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Weakty 5 months ago

Phone Crossed Lovers

They sat on the stones marking the entry of the park. Some three feet off the ground. They sat facing each other, like pawns on a chessboard, yet they stared downward, a familiar stare, into their phones. I didn’t notice it at first, but their arms were crossed, loosely touching, their hands holding their phones and bent back unto their faces. I felt judgement ooze out of me. A sick sadness writhing out of what this casually sculpted pose appeared to be. So barely connected, both of their eyes cast in a vacant gaze, or rather, their gaze pulled viciously into some other torpid void. How fair of me, to pass this critical eye over this moment! What are these two people—what narrative had I made for them? Phone-crossed lovers, apparently, uninterested in the person sitting across from them—physically touching them—but on other worlds. But surely, I could be more gracious? Two independent souls exploring the cosmos of "the web" — supporting each other with gentle presence? Two people that just happened to need to send a few respective messages, maybe check e-mail, while arm-in-arm? No, clearly my mind is made up—another moment of alienation for myself, another moment where I find myself increasingly judgemental about the time we spend on our phones, rather than connecting with each other. Here I was, yet again, dropping the gavel of my judgement on two strangers, touching but not connecting, according to me. Some days, I feel sad about this. Other days, I don’t care. Occasionally, I feel I’m blaming something far bigger and incomprehensible for a specific lack in my life—and I’m just taking it out on society, man . Does it matter? The days tick by. I wake up in the mornings, having told myself I won’t look at my phone until the sun rises, until 9, until, oh wait, I just did it. None of this is new. Yet, I continually find myself thinking and writing about this topic. And I suppose I will, so long as I feel that mixture of frustration, and judgement nestled in my own hypocritical addiction, and quiet loneliness: a single lily pad in a stagnant pond. What of it? Clearly, parts of me are triggered by an image so simple as two people sitting together, yet seemingly miles far apart, each of their gazes respectively absorbing some content that will soon be a distance memory, if at all. In a moment’s tableau, I see a strong representation of a longing for something so far its inverse, that I’m here trying to write my way toward it. Part of getting older is having to grieve that the world is no longer the one you grew up in; the familiarities of the known, the environment that shaped you, the moments that marked you indelibly—you can’t go back. There is no turning back the clock. I might wish for it, but that's a futile desire. If you aren’t the one wishing for it, you’ll hear no shortage of others griping, and under that bemoaning, an unutterable longing. Inversely, there is an acceptance, and within that , a relieving feeling I'm still making out the shape of: I’m wondering if there is some hope — hope in two linked arms.

Writing Culture Programming

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Weakty 6 months ago

Just call

Just pick up the phone and call a loved one. Just call, don’t bandy messages back and forth about when a good time is. Pick up your phone, hit the little phone icon, and say "hello, I was thinking about you and wanted to say hello, is now a good time to chat?" If the person picks up and says, "sorry, now’s not a good time", that’s fine. You called. Maybe they’ll say I’ll call you back . In the end, you heard their voice and they heard yours. If the person doesn’t pick up, you can leave a voicemail. Maybe they don’t check their voicemail. Maybe they don’t know how. But you can still do it. When you call unannounced and your call is missed, that recipient might think it’s an emergency. Who would call unless it was an emergency? They might think. They might text you back and say, "is everything alright? I saw you called." As I continue the practice of "just call" I know to follow up a missed call with a message that says: "hey, I was just thinking of you and wanted to catch up and hear your voice! No need to call back, I’ll try again another time." A few years ago, I started my year with a resolution that if I thought of someone, I would send them a message . I did that. It yielded more connection in my life. But a text message was easy, though, and I think it is a poor stand-in for hearing a loved one’s voice. The point of all this, though, was to reach out when the feeling of being able to reach out was present in me . Then, I changed messages to phone calls for the closest people in my life. But it’s not easy. There are many things that stand in the way of calling. It feels more vulnerable and intimate and when it doesn’t go the way we want, it’s uncomfortable. So we might tell ourselves that people’s lives are so busy . We don’t want to interrupt. It might hurt, even just a little, to reach out and hear that a person can’t talk right now, or when they don’t pick up. I’m still learning to practice empathy and understanding when someone isn’t available, and you are; when you want human connection, but the other side can’t meet that need in the moment. If that moment hurts, acknowledge and feel that hurt, and then move on with the day. It can be difficult to feel feelings, of course, so we can also reassure ourselves rationally (if we must). By calling and experiencing a missed connection, you can know that you’ve shown up for the people you love, by trying to reach out. And, yes, the true reality is that people are indeed often busy— you weren’t when you called, but that was you , and this is them . Sometimes, you might try and try and try again, only for the pile of missed connections to grow, like loose threads coming off an old sweater. Sometimes the person won’t hit the ball back. Maybe you’ll need to try scheduling your calls. Maybe even that doesn’t work out so great. This is something we fear to experience — a connection we value growing weaker, or the other party simply is not able or willing to meet you where you are at. Sometimes that’s just life. Sometimes we grow apart. Sometimes we grow back again. But wouldn’t you be grateful to say you tried when you were able? Not many people call these days.

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Weakty 6 months ago

Our efforts, in part, define us

What happens when something we enjoy doing that took effort becomes effortless? And what happens if that original effort was a foundation on which we saw value in ourselves? If our efforts, in part, define us, then our efforts have intrinsic value. Our efforts may help us understand a position we want to occupy, an identity we carry, or an outlook we present. This value contributes to an internal economy of joy, self-respect, fulfillment, happiness. When effortful things become effortless, what becomes of our position in these economies? As you can see, I have a few questions here. I know someone who spent a part of their adult life taking beautiful photographs, developing them by hand, framing them, cataloging them. Along came the ubiquity of digital cameras and smartphones, and "film" became infinitely available. Offhandedly, one day, this person mentioned that with the proliferation of smart phone cameras, and the ease with which one can take photos, they had found that some days their desire to continue was diminishing, and their work had lost meaning. Technology has a history of making effortful things effortless, and there is sometimes a hidden loss in that advancement. I figure people are continually being left behind in a similar manner day-to-day. Technology continues advancing (for the most part), and more things that remain effortful will become effortless. And "we" (ie, the populations who can afford to sit around and have crises of identity on these topics) will be further pushed to re-evaluate certain parts of our definitions of self. For myself, in the last 10 years, my work of writing code has largely defined what I do with my working time. Now I experience large swaths of that work being created and done by AI (sometimes amazingly well, sometimes poorly), and I find myself thinking of the photographer above. It's not my wish that people can't have access to a more effortless way to write code, but I feel a strange sadness that there is less left to the act of the craft. I have had this note in a draft state for several weeks now because I still can’t quite come to terms with how I’m feeling about things. There are so many nuances and unclear thoughts rolling around in my head about this shift. I think the only thing that is vaguely clear is that none of this would matter if making money wasn’t at play. If I was just writing code, (or taking film photographs) for fun in my free time because I enjoyed it, well, I don’t think I’d be feeling so conflicted. Being paid to work and presenting my capacities through my craft is an exchange that I have been able to derive value from in its effortful-ness. Often times I've worked on utterly boring tasks that I would have loved to have a tool that could automate. But I didn't. And even in those menial moments I did derive some pleasure in my capacities. Of course, when it came to the real challenges, that was where I felt a pleasure and value in putting forth effort. As a consultant, I work in a lot of different places, often for brief stints of time. And at many of these places, I see a large push, top-down, to encourage people to use AI. These employees, previously having entered an employment agreement where their capacities and experience would be exchanged for money, are now being asked that their abilities be augmented. In this way, the level continues to skew toward privileging production, often without understanding and people using their own perspectives. When I see sentiments similar to mine, I often see reactions where people say that AI is simply a tool and that you must learn to use it and incorporate it into your toolbox. That's fine. That's well and good. But all I'm trying to say here is that I feel a lack and a loss for something. I don't understand it yet. The title of this post, our efforts, in part, define us , is just a phrase that popped into my head. I'm not really sure if I even believe it or if I've fully fleshed out this single statement. But some part of it rings true to me. I wonder what will happen to us and our efforts. Will we be driven into further niches that are effortful, that we can derive value from? Will we become vague blobs that are formless, ill-defined, and despondent? All of this presupposes a few things —that one can (and/or should ) aim to derive value from work, that a meaningful identity is constructed by doing effortful things, that people generally are happier when they can use their skills and experiences to make something. And what’s more, there is a fine-line here between glorifying people with experience deriving value, and sounding like a shitty gatekeeper. I will continue working for various clients. I suspect I will continue hearing leadership push AI on employees. And I will continue observing how people respond to this. Of course, for many people a job is just a job , as they say, and they'll do whatever they can to get it done more quickly (or work several jobs at once). Those very same people might find more value from their efforts now that AI is making their jobs easier. They can turn to better supporting their family, following other interests outside of work, finding other meaningful things, etc. But at this time, I don't really see how this won’t further trample people’s spirits in the realm of work, unless we also reshape our expectations of work itself. Is it worth the effort?

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Weakty 6 months ago

Limitless Encouragement

You were born with a limitless supply of encouragements. Use every one of them. Last winter I noticed this small innocuous bit of paper taped to a neighbourhood post-board. On it were the words I have quoted above. It sticks with me to this day and comes to mind frequently. Are the people around you encouraging? Do conversations you have even get to a point where there is space for encouragement to surface? I don’t think encouragement from others comes about unless you are being vulnerable to some degree: you share something you’re shyly interested in, you admit that things aren’t going the way you’d like in some situation, you tell someone about a hope or a dream you have for something you’d like to create. Occasionally, I’m surprised when I put forward a bid of something I’d like encouragement on, and it floats on by unnoticed, my partner in conversation not picking up on the fact that I’d indeed like someone to root for me. In those moments, I feel like a boring houseplant that will go another day unwatered. It’s quite uncomfortable to even write about: this reality where so much of our interactions can seem to come down to an economy of attention: will I be heard, let alone encouraged? When I stop and think about it, it seems silly to hope for encouragement, when just getting someone’s attention can be difficult enough. But on the act of encouraging: I have been doing this for what feels like quite some time. I think I am an encouraging person. I can hear myself when I say encouraging things. There are many things I don’t do well in life, but being encouraging isn’t one of them. I don’t believe it is entirely altruistic. Sometimes I give in hopes of getting back a return on my investment—I too, would like some encouragement. Other times, I give and I give freely. Whether genuine, or conflated with ulterior motives, I hold on to hope for encouragement . I keep giving it, because the pool is right next to me. It is a pool that goes deep, deeper than I can plunge, it descendes farther than I can hold my breath. For a long time I have taken from the pool and shared it with others, and now at this stage in my life, I’m slowly learning to restore myself from it on my own accord. To sit by it, in the sun and lounge, and to be encouraged at my own leisure. We may be born with a limitless supply of encouragement to give, but how many have we deigned to share with ourselves?

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Weakty 7 months ago

Bad Sleep Scores and Good Sleep Aids

I’ve been sick for a couple of days now, and so the "sleep scores" presented by my watch are abysmal. My first night, I was feverish. I dreamt that I had to relearn the alphabet, but I had to do it through my dreams, one letter per dream at a time. Peppered in with this delusional thinking were various facts about the Roman Empire, from an audiobook I was listening to help me fall asleep. As I pondered over my abysmal sleep scores (23/100!), I wondered about how the Garmin watch can calculate how well you sleep. So I looked it up. Garmin uses a third party called First Beat Analytics, which seems to be some kind of heartbeat analytics software. Then it uses that data to rate your sleep on a scale of 0 to 100. Generally, the data that’s mostly used is heart data, but Garmin also has data related to how much exercise you got, and that obviously plays a part in how well you sleep and how much sleep you need to recover. But I didn’t write this post to dive into how Garmin watches work. I was only partially interested in that. What I have been thinking about is how I am at the mere beginning of a life with less sleep due to having children. Of course, I was warned. [1] . I might even be one of those lucky people that can function with a bit less sleep than others. Moreover, I’m a morning person. So you might say that the odds are stacked in my favour at this time. That being said, I’ve already encountered several delirious, sleep-deprived middle-of-the-night moments that I will treasure in my weird way. Aside from the possible perils of adjudicating one’s own sleep, I’ve been adjudicating the definition of sleep in itself. And I’ve been wondering about the term rest. Sleep with children in your life becomes a zone beyond just rest . It’s a moment of being able to drop all responsibilities. Maybe that’s what rest is by definition, or that’s what it’s partially being redefined to now. It’s a shame I can’t be conscious during it. [2] . Another fun fact, I love falling asleep to nonfiction stuff about space. I go through waves of being fascinated by space and the cosmos. For the first two months of our kids’ lives, I was listening to the book "The Universe in Your Hand" over and over. I listened to the whole book and then backtracked to different parts trying to find the interesting parts. It’s a particularly good book because it uses the second-person narrative, placing you in the proverbial driver’s seat as you explore different facets of space, quantum physics, and other theoretical things. That plug aside, if anybody knows any other space or scientific non-fiction audiobooks they’d recommend, send them my way. I think what I’m looking for are more comprehensive versions of what I got to study in elementary school. You know when you would spend a unit on space and just learn about planets and stuff like that? Basically, I want the version of that that’s a bit more advanced, almost like a textbook being read to me that I fall asleep to every night. Another thing that lulls me to sleep is planning the next move on a project. It’s part exciting, part menial, but it seems to drop me like a stone into a still pond: once the ripples fade — I’m gone. Or occasionally, I’ll think about putting together a perfectly packed stationary kit for going out to draw or paint: just the right number of different-sized pens, a few select colours for a limited palette, and the right paper. I’ve done things like this since I was a kid—try to set myself up to have vibrant, adventurous dreams—I don’t think about the painting I would make, but the steps I would take to go paint it. I’ve often thought I could set myself up to dream something incredible. Does it work? Maybe. Most days I don’t remember my dreams. But perhaps I still have them, then in that illusory, invisible rest—then, I wake up restored. When I mentioned our expecting to someone, they said: "prepare not to sleep for 10 years". Here’s MY TIP: don’t say things like that to people, even if you think you’re being funny. They know they’re not going to sleep. You don’t need to make it even more dramatic or scary than it already seems. ↩ I think when I was 18, I devoured everything I could about lucid dreaming. Never worked. ↩ When I mentioned our expecting to someone, they said: "prepare not to sleep for 10 years". Here’s MY TIP: don’t say things like that to people, even if you think you’re being funny. They know they’re not going to sleep. You don’t need to make it even more dramatic or scary than it already seems. ↩ I think when I was 18, I devoured everything I could about lucid dreaming. Never worked. ↩

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Weakty 7 months ago

Spark Joy, throw everything out

A few weeks ago I was visiting some family in Guelph. After, I went for a short bike ride in the evening. I found myself at a Little Library in a corner of the city that I hadn’t explored before. Inside it, I found Spark Joy , a book by Marie Kondo. While I know a bit about her writing and methodology, I’ve never really dug into her work. This book seems to be a follow up to The Life Changing Magic of Tidying Up. The first half of the book provides case studies, methodologies and suggestions for approaching tidying. The second half features illustrated step by step guides on how to actually take on specific tidying tasks. As I flipped through the pages, I found a surging excitement in me at the possibility of clearing out some junk. For me, clutter tends to just accumulate slowly, accreting in corners and under beds and desks until it becomes a noticeable burden. At that point, I go through bouts of rapid cleaning, and skew towards getting rid of things with a manic energy. Regardless of the technique you’re using to clear clutter, for me, the act of discarding things out brings up thoughts on wastefulness, reuse, and abundance. I feel like this comic below aptly summarizes some of my thoughts on this. Of course, discarding stuff and clearing clutter doesn’t mean you are a rich minimalist. Yet this comic strikes a chord for me, it resonates in my mind, transporting me to memories of physical spaces owned by wealthy people that I’ve found myself in. There’s a kernel of truth, there. And of course, conversely, people with less wealth often need to keep things around for reuse, resale, and repairs—you can't carelessly throw away things that allow you to continue to be resourceful. There are no two ways about it. I can’t go through bouts of throwing clutter and junk away without feeling like we live in a bizarre, absurd world, especially in comparison to other times and places in our world. How do we get to a place where I am literally throwing away or donating unused things? Rich minimalist or not, the ability for clutter to accumulate in a hyper-capitalist, consumerist culture is altogether too easy. How many times have I bought something just because it was on sale? Or because it was in good condition at a second-hand store? I don’t exactly exhibit presence of mind when making decisions about accepting new items into my home. The default has often just been: yes, I will take that, thank you. I’m thinking about this more, as our apartment will soon fill up with possessions that belong to our new child. I’ve been finding myself asking myself: how can I encourage having a respectful appreciation for the things we have in our life, and model a healthy relationship with acquiring and letting go of objects? I recently brought up this topic with a friend on a long ride home. He told me that for him, getting an object means that the object sort of carries a weight—a set of responsibilities behind it. There are implicit requirements in ownership. Our objects need to be taken care of, used appropriately, and have their maximum potential engaged. If you aren't doing all those things then you will be worn down just by the mere presence of this object. You shouldn’t feel any obligation to objects. They should bring light, not dread. I think this is the idea behind an object "sparking joy". My project list is long, but tidying is quickly bubbling up past many of the other things I want to do. I need to know where things are, now that we’re a family. It’s not exactly the fun I might have chosen for myself in the past, but the methodological approach that Spark Joy brings turns what might have been a chore into something that actually yields autonomy and makes way for a healthy sense of control (and at least knowing where the sunscreen is). Each person has to find their own method for sorting through the detritus we accumulate. But the more I read about mechanisms for taking care of clutter, the more I wonder about what drives our capacity to collect—is it fear-based? comparison-oriented? opportunity oriented? Or are we just as the Magpie? I’d like to imagine there is a way to break the cycle of over-consumption and thoughtless accumulation. I know there is a way to say "no thank you" to new items that appear at our door. Maybe it requires being mindful in the moment, and monitoring impulses. Or maybe I should shut the door, find the goddamn key amongst the clutter, and lock it.

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Weakty 7 months ago

Returning to Anki

Recently, I brought the spaced repetition system software Anki back into my life. For a while, between 2019 and 2023, I was using it frequently to practice learning French. Anki is a remarkable tool and allowed me to learn 5,000 French words (and a few other things too). What brought me back to Anki was learning that there have been some updates to the " algorithm " used to determine when cards should be shown to users. If you browse some top posts on the Anki subreddit, you'll see that several contributors have been working on refining this memory algorithm to offer the most results for the least work—I suppose that's what an algorithm is, after all. Needless to say, my ears perked up when I read about people trying to optimize human memory and recall. So I reinstalled Anki and decided to purchase the iOS version for my phone. Having Anki on my phone makes a much bigger difference than having just the desktop application. Now, when I'm stealing slivers of time from my day, I'm able to do a little recall practice and work towards improving my memory about various things. I've even gone searching for the French decks I used to use, which have since been updated, and have reinstalled them. It's been fun and impressive to see that even the older algorithm was working quite well—I've been able to recall words that were probably set to only be seen after years had passed. I also picked up a deck for learning geography. I never thought to do this before! I have a good friend who can name just about any capital of any country, recognize flags, or identify the shapes of countries easily. I was impressed when I learned this about him and decided I want to try to do the same. As I've gone about learning these different capitals, flags, and countries, I've realized the extent of my ignorance when it comes to geography. I've learned so much about different countries already. Just out of natural curiosity about these places, I've gone on Wikipedia to read more about them, and that's been very satisfying. I also found a tool (built with web assembly!) that converts multi-line poetry into Anki cards for memorization. The intent expressed as an example on the website is to memorize Hamlet, but I've been using it to memorize song lyrics and it's pretty effective. What I’ve been most surprised to (re)learn, is how flash cards and engaging my memory is pushing my curiousity. I think this is one of the better parts of school — seeing what your mind can do with new information, and following your mind going to new places: Did you know the capital of Vanuatu is Port Vila? I didn’t even know Vanuatu existed.

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Weakty 8 months ago

I don't look back much as a rule

I was thinking about journalling and the lyric "I don't look back much as a rule" came to me. It’s from the song " Pink Bullets " by The Shins. Go ahead, take a listen while I write up the rest of this post. I’ve been wanting to reduce clutter lately, both physically and digitally. I was looking through my journals and daily notes and marvelling at how much I’ve captured over the years. Journaling is something I’ve done so much, yet I still don’t seem to have a strong, opinionated system in place, which occasionally bothers me at how scattered it can feel. Here’s what I’m working with right now: I’ve kept a physical journal on and off for several years. My favourite things about keeping a paper journal are: I’ve accumulated about nine or ten journals, probably. They don’t take up much more space than a single crate (which is also packed with a few sketchbooks). Somewhere down the line, I’ll consider scanning them and putting them through OCR, but that’s an activity for later. I’ve been using Obsidian for a few years now and it offers a very pragmatic and useful way to keep notes. The best features of a system like Obsidian are: Note embeds are a feature of obsidian where you can embed one part of a note into another. I got this idea from this blog post . The idea is fairly simple in practice: By the end of this setup, I’m able to go see what happened in a month at a glance, or even all the super important things that happened in a year. [1] The important thing, is that this is a low-friction system. The bulk of the work is done daily, taking 2 minutes, with some additional work done to create a week, month and year template. The song lyrics that popped into my head that inspired writing this made me realize that I really don’t look back that often. Journalling and capturing what’s happened in a day, a week, a month, all seem to be things that I write but rarely read. Every now and then I’ll go back and look at what happened in a month in one of the Obsidian "roll-up" notes. Even more rarely, will I go back and read one of my paper journals. Sometimes I feel a bit self-absorbed in that I’m so particular about the notes I keep. It can be feel a bit naval-gazey. But, I also have to remind myself that more than anything, this is a cathartic, messy process, and that’s fine. Being interested in the how of things is also totally fine. If I’m trying to rule out feeling like a narccisus, at least I can feel at ease that I don’t lull myself to sleep reading my own journal entries. I think my ideal system would look like this: That would give me the best of both worlds, albeit with the monotony of scanning things. Down the line, I’m sure I’ll find a balance of what’s excessive and what works for me. Who knows, though, maybe someday I will do none of this! I must say, having this sort of overview of time passing is existentially unpleasant at times. ↩ It’s a screen-free activity I can draw as well as write It’s more enjoyable to pick a favourite pen and ink to write with Flipping through a journal both brings back memories faster, and is more pleasant to look back on. It’s searchable Note embeds ("rolling up notes") Using Dataview to query your vault Every day, create a daily note (Obsidian does this automatically for me, with a template). In that template, fill out what happened in the day under the heading. At the beginning of a week, I create a week template that embeds every day for that week. By the end of the week, I have a summary view of what happened in a week. Once the week is over, I write up a of that week, which will then get pulled into the monthly note’s template. And then do this for a year! I write everything into a paper journal with lovely crisp paper, and my favourite pen. I can add doodles and drawings, and spend time releasing what happened in a day onto paper, without having to look at a screen Maybe once a month, I scan a month’s worth of notes, run them through a handwriting recognition script and send the contents into each day note in obsidian to keep that system running smoothly too. I must say, having this sort of overview of time passing is existentially unpleasant at times. ↩

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Weakty 9 months ago

Pushing my design sensibilities

I have been thinking about the evolution (or lack thereof) of my design sensibilities—mostly in my job, but also writ large. Sometimes it feels like I've gotten "this far" with a set of design sensibilities that are built on what you shouldn't do rather than what you can do (what can be done but the infinite?). If you have the opportunity to hang around with a few passionate designers for months or even years, it doesn't take too long to absorb what you should really avoid. It seems that I sometimes hear people who work in design discuss bad design just as often as, if not more than, good design. As a result, I know about some of the nuances of typography and layout, colour, imagery, iconography. But I don't know what the next steps are to take my skills beyond that. When I think of design, I think of art. The lines between the two can be fuzzy. I've been content to think (read: trick myself) that as I continue to expose myself to new art as well as to continually practice drawing that I'll also passively improve as a designer. What a nice idea. But I've neglected to actually go looking for texts and other resources that could inform me both academically and experientially in terms of the world of design. A part of me believes that design is something that you build through experience, both by creating lots of bad designs, but also by observing things. Just like getting better at drawing faces requires observation from life. You can study these things from a book all you like but until you get mileage, you’re just working with a set of thoughts that float around in the ether of your mind. The best designers I know are extremely observant. Like being a good listener, being a good observer takes nuance, practice, and patience. It means being present and making note of things whether they are pleasant or unpleasant as you interact with them both actively and passively. Sure, you can read books like Don't Make Me Think or The Design of Everyday Things , among others. And that will inform you. But, like most skills, practice, I think, comes first. More often than not, design shows up in the form of redesigning my website. It’s fun and a stress-reliever for me. And yet every time I do this, it kind of comes out the same. I'm not sure what boundary I need to push to get farther, here. It leads me to believe that I need to not just try to redesign my website over and over and over again, but actually pick something new that is far different from that and make mistakes there. I recently purchased Affinity Publisher to start to branch into book and print design. I think that will push me in a good direction. Despite what I said about resources vs garnering experience, if you have some favourite design resources, don’t hesitate to share them with me.

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Weakty 9 months ago

Signs of Positivity in Toronto

Signs of positivity have been hiding in plain sight around a few neighbourhoods in Toronto. I've been seeing these signs for at least a year, perhaps longer. Now that I'm back in the season of running and training for a race in the fall, I've started to re-notice these signs and have decided to document them, snapping photos of them whenever I pass them on my runs. When you get up close the signs depict a series of images that feel very positive to me. Some of them visually sound out their message. Some of the pieces are more abstract and leave me wondering. What are "eyes + ears"? Does it mean, Look and Listen ?. I'm particularly fond of the rendering of the moon (middle photo of the collage above). Look at the moon. Gaze in awe at it. It's a taste of wonder and intrigue, bolted up and waiting for those passing by slowly enough to notice. I extracted the GPS data from the photos and plotted the locations with yellow diamonds on the map below. By the end of my running training I hope to find a few more.

Data Visualization

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Weakty 9 months ago

The Manga of Taiyo Matsumoto

When I was a kid, someone in my family rented Spirited Away . I loved it. I hadn’t even known the name of the movie when I sat down to watch it. I was mesmerized. Afterward, I don’t think I ever asked, or thought to ask, if there were other movies by the same director. Years and years passed before I was able to put a name to that magical movie I had seen, but the story, the animation, everything about it sat waiting in my mind to be rediscovered. It wasn't until some 10 or 15 years later that I saw Spirited Away for the second time and it all came back to me in a rush. There was an indelible impression it had left on me and my childhood memory. It was an amazing feeling, and I followed that up by watching every single Studio Ghibli film I could get my hands on one christmas break during university. A similar thing has since happened with Taiyō Matsumoto's work. When I was probably 15 or 16, I watched Tekkonkinkreet with a friend. I remember her excitedly showing me the DVD case and me feeling somewhat skeptical. The drawings on it looked not as polished as other cartoons or as-of-yet-unnamed-magic-films I had seen somewhere in my distant past. Still, we watched it and I was stunned. I never followed up on it. I didn’t even know that movies like Tekkonkinkreet were based on manga . 
Needless to say, here I am, again, more than ten years later, diving deep into the oevre of Matsumoto, reading pretty much every comic I can get my hands on. Thankfully, the library where I live is well stocked with his works, and in the past year, I've read Ping Pong, Gogo Monster, No. 5, Sunny, Cats of the Louvre, Tokyo these days , and I’m saving a re-read of Tekkonkinkreet for last. There's something unique about Matsumoto’s work that is inspiring and engaging for me. His drawing style is different from most manga comics I’ve read. It's loose yet refined and energetic; I have read that he draws freehand (which I think means that he's just drawing straight with ink on paper?). I was surprised by how “unpolished” his work felt in comparison to others— sometimes even seemingly childish (although for certain works, this is done to an intentional effect (see No. 5 and GoGo Monster )). As time passed and I read more of his work, I realized that such adjectives were crude and ill-fitting. I’m often struck by characters that are drawn "reductively" with scrunched up faces, are “out of proportion”, or simplified. I think part of me is in awe of this choice because I’ve regrettably internalized that a published comic should be…not like this? Over the years of studying drawing and thinking about getting "better" at drawing, I haven’t even thought about the stylistic choices to render something in a scrappier way. Of course, with Matsumoto’s work, these occasional "scrappy" panels are in juxtaposition to unquestionably polished and impressive panels. I suppose seeing this gives me a liberating feeling toward what comics can be. As usual, there are no rules .  Taiyō Matsumoto’s works feature flowing narratives that can be both fast-paced and temperate. What’s more, his works span several genres: sports, fantasy, slice-of-life, dystopian fiction, coming-of-age, among others. Works like Gogo Monster, Ping Pong, Sunny, and Tekkonkinkreet have a throughline of coming-of-age / childhood adversity, but all works seem to have a flush cast of characters where, by the end of the work, you feel like you’ve left an entire world behind. 
I recommend you take a moment to get into his work. There are so many interesting books that he's created. Some are quite fantastical, and others are slice-of-life, and I love all of it. I’d recommend starting with Ping Pong Vol. 1. Growing up, I really didn’t like comics. Anything with superheroes turned me off. They were too stark, complicated, and visually overwhelming. If I had known I could have read a comic about a young, melancholic ping-pong star when I was a kid, well, I’d probably have read all of Matsumoto’s works much earlier.

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