Mike Nagel’s “The Unintentionalist”
(column archive: August 2022 to July 2023)
August 2022
The Unintentionalist Goes In Cold
A few months ago I got a text from Adam—editor of this magazine, recent father of a child of some sort—saying he'd been smoking a lot of weed and had I ever considered writing a column. I told him no. I'd never considered writing a column. I'd never considered writing anything. Everything I'd written over the past ten years could be explained this way: It was an accident.
“Well," he said, “consider it."
Then he Venmoed me $20.
“Now I own you," he said.
After that we became pretty good friends. We text about movies.
The idea for the column—a non-idea—is for me to read stuff and write about it. It struck me as a great plan because I was already planning on doing that anyway. The number one best litmus test for the viability of any of my plans is whether or not I was already going to do them. Usually an easy no.
Last year, my wife J and I moved out of our duplex in Carrollton and into a house in Plano. You would have to be familiar with the nuances of North Dallas geopolitics to understand just how lateral of a move this was. But we were happy about it. More square footage to stretch out in. Another bedroom to call an ‘office’ and then fill with Harry Potter Lego sets. For the first time in thirteen years, we don't share a wall with a neighbor. I immediately went out and got myself a drum set. A dusty old Premier from the ‘90s. Deep maroon with crappy Zildjian cymbals that sound like garbage can lids. I pound away for hours.
Like most of you, every time I move, I'm reminded just how many books I have. This time I was reminded by J. She did most of our packing because it was summer and she's a teacher and I was otherwise occupied with the various touch-bases and check-ins required of me as a mid-level employee at a trillion-dollar financial company.
“A thousand," she said. “A thousand books."
“Man," I said. “I knew I was smart, but I didn't realize I was a genius."
J’s finishing her PhD in educational psychology soon so sometimes I feel the need to level the intellectual playing field by being a huge ass.
“I'm buying you a Kindle," she said.
I don't have anything against Kindles. I hear good things about the Paperwhite. $139.99 on Amazon. Free shipping for Prime members, which, I'm ashamed to say, I am. But no. I'm an ink and pulp man. A paperback guy. I like to feel the pages in my hands so I know how much longer it's going to take until whatever book I'm reading is finally over with. No matter how much I'm enjoying a book, I'm always kind of rooting for it to end. I need to flip to the back real quick to see if I accidentally catch a spoiler or two. Every ten minutes or so I need to flip to the front cover to, I guess, remind myself which book I've been reading. I usually do this after a particularly great scene or sentence. “Wow," I'll think, and flip to the cover and just stare at it. I didn't notice I was doing this until I started taking the train to work downtown. All of us early morning commuters sitting there with our John Grisham hardcovers, our 7 Habits of Whatever, our Argonauts. That's when I noticed that everyone was doing it. Quick little flips to the cover. A sign of affection, I think.
Moving books also requires you to confront certain organizational schemes you may have dreamed up years ago and have since lost steam with. Alphabetization. Genre classifications. Arrangement by author. All good ideas—very grown up—but ultimately powerless against an active shelf's natural tendency to drift into a sort of thematic analogue of the reader's mind.
On every shelf I've had, the Renata Adler books have migrated over to live with the Elizabeth Hardwicks. The Nelson books eventually orbit the Mangusos. Recently, on the bookshelves in our kitchen, a small section on atomic history/theory spontaneously formed, grew, got a little out of hand, and then dispersed over six to nine months. There is, on the shelf in front of me right now, a lot of books about The National. What I'm saying is that a good bookshelf, actively used and properly disorganized, will arrange itself.
“So… how do you want to organize these shelves then?” J asked at our new place after I’d gone on for a while about all this thematic analogue of the mind crap.
“Don’t worry about it,” I said. “That’s on them.”
And the thing I’m getting at here is my growing conviction that reading—and writing, for that matter—is best done with a complete and utter lack of intention. A formal willy-nilliness. What I've begun calling and will continue to call no matter how much bad feedback I get on it, Unintentionalism.
My plan is to use this column to clarify what on Earth I'm talking about.
Recently Adam turned me on to The Lefsetz Letter, a highly opinionated and extremely regular email newsletter (I sometimes get multiple issues within an hour) by Bob Lefsetz, an industry insider, I take it. He was talking about movies the other day. “I like to go in cold," he said. “The experience is part of the magic of novels, TV and movies. Like life, you don't know what is going to happen, you just decide to dive in." It reminded me of something I heard Rostam Batmanglij say on the Tape Notes podcast: “I’m always led by the process of music making. I never want the concept to lead me." Which reminded me of an interview I'd read with Renata Adler, about how she'd set out to write a plot-driven thriller and accidentally wrote Speedboat instead. Burroughs famously wanted to write detective novels!
A few years ago when I first started thinking about all of this stuff—dabbling in Unintentionalism, I mean—my genius writer-friend J. D. Daniels, author of The Correspondence, told me the story of The Three Princes of Serendip. The origin of our word serendipity. A story about these three princes who go around “making discoveries, by accidents and sagacity, of things they were not in quest of."
I love that. Things they were not in quest of.
That's it, man. That's the thing.
I have noticed that in matters of navigation, it is much easier to find your way if you're not overly concerned about where you end up.
September 2022
The Unintentionalist Does Three Days at the Lake
Day 1:
I'd meant to write to write something funny, but then I thought about Gauraa again. Suddenly I wasn't in such a haha mood anymore.
This afternoon, J and I drove to the Cedar Creek Reservoir. It's this big manmade lake 90 minutes east of Dallas in a town called Gun Barrel City. One of our friends is turning 40. We're doing a friends-at-the-lake-house thing. There's a gluten-free cake in the fridge and a lot of booze on the kitchen counter. I don't drink anymore, but I still get excited when alcohol is around. Unfortunately all my friends drink in moderation now. Tasteful cocktails. Single glasses of red wine. A bourbon sipped slowly throughout the evening. Nothing interesting to report. Nothing worth writing down. What's a writer supposed to do when everyone he knows gets responsible.
Now it's 11pm and everyone's asleep. The lake house is quiet. I'm sitting here on the couch listening to Ólafur Arnalds and Nils Fram's superchill album Stare. I remember these weekends going a lot differently ten years ago; more yelling and dancing around and throwing up in bushes. Back then the thought of turning 40 scared me to death. Now here I am, 35, thinking what a privilege turning 40 would be. We should all be so lucky.
I didn't know Gauraa at all, really. I'd only traded a couple emails with her. A few tweets here and there. We told each other how excited we were about each other's books. I'm still excited about her book. Gauraa was a hell of a writer. The real deal. I was thrilled when I found out we were going to be issuemates in Little Engines Issue 6. She wrote a story called Paradise. It's genuinely funny and wonderful, and hits differently now that she's gone. I read it again in the car on the way to the lake. In the story, the main character's parents die but they keep it a secret from her. Then the main character just goes around thinking all these funny and interesting things. It's a hilarious premise for a story. And it's a hilarious story. It does what I think the very best literature can do: make us feel a little better about how scary dying seems. “Paradise" ends like this:
I’m at the mall when I see them two years later. I duck behind the escalator on the first floor, and watch them float up, hands intertwined. I follow them into the Panera, pull up the empty seat at their table. I’m angry. I want to tell them that I’m angry, but I feel the words sink deeper and deeper inside me. ‘Need anything?' Dad asks. ‘Can I have a bite of your soup?' I say. Dad walks over to the counter for an extra spoon. Mom pushes her side of sliced apples toward me. ‘You know,' she says, ‘it wouldn’t hurt to call more often.'
Day 2:
Second night at the lake house. 12:30am. Everyone's asleep again. A little more loaded than they were last night. All the bottles of booze mysteriously emptying throughout the day. In years past, I used to sneak big glasses of vodka while no one was looking. I'd go to the kitchen for a granola bar and down a tumbler of Tito’s. I thought no one could tell.
I'm up late again, a little wired from a late afternoon coffee, listening to Screws by Nils Fram. I'm thinking about what Eno said about ambient music: “As interesting as it is ignorable." Most of the writing I love fits that description too. Books about nothing. Books with no urgency or purpose. Ambient literature?
I brought two books with me to the lake this weekend. No matter how short a trip is, I always bring at least two books: the book I intend to read, and the book I actually end up reading. In this case, the book I'd intended to read was Lizzie Goodman's Meet Me in the Bathroom and the book I actually read was Paul Auster's City of Glass. I'd snagged a used copy from Half Price Books a few days ago; threw it in my bag at the last minute. It's Book 1 of the famous New York Trilogy. At least I thought the trilogy was famous.
“Never heard of it," my English-teacher lake-house companion said when I told him what I was reading.
“By Paul Auster," I said.
“Who?" he said.
I heard a successful writer on a podcast say he'd always dreamed of being a famous novelist. Then he found out there's no such thing
“Adjust your expectations accordingly,” he said.
I spent an hour with City of Glass out on the hammock earlier, swatting away mosquitos, mesmerized by how weird and good this book is. An existential detective story with all kinds of nutty stuff going on: A writer pretending to be a different writer pretending to be a detective pretending to be Paul Auster. Great stuff with funny dialogue, one-liners, and philosophy out the wazoo. My copy is old and ratty and smells weird. It had an inscription written in pencil on the title page.
“Ethan," it said in cursive, “This is one of my favorites."
I imagined a girlfriend writing this to her boyfriend. Giving Ethan this book so he could get to know her better. Our favorite things are a big deal like that. They say something about us. They are something about us. When J and I first started dating, she told me her favorite band was Hanson.
“Are you sure?” I said.
I once heard a now-hated writer say that his goal wasn't to get famous. His goal was to write somebody's favorite book. Later he turned out to be a real creep, but I like that ‘somebody's favorite book’ thing. A lot of my favorite things recently have come from people in our little corner of The Literati Twitterati. Not famous, maybe, but famous to me.
Aaron Burch's recent one sentence story comes to mind.
Kyle Seibel's weird-o story about cats.
Alex Miller's White People on Vacation.
Graham Irvin's Liver Mush.
Leigh Chadwick's Your Favorite Poet.
Holly Pelesky's Cleave.
And, Gauraa's Paradise.
A little community, maybe? A little scene? The Beats, I like to remind myself, were about five people. Two of them I've never heard of.
Day 3:
I was telling J about Gauraa on our drive home from the lake. She’d asked what I was doing up so late every night after everyone else had gone to bed. Maybe she wondered if I was drinking. It would make sense. But I told her I’d been writing about this woman I knew from Twitter who’d passed away recently. Not even 30 years old.
We talked about how a person can mean something to you without you really knowing them. She told me about a friend she'd met via Animal Crossing. He died a few months ago, but his avatar still shows up on her island sometimes. Gauraa’s writing is still showing up in my Twitter feed sometimes. Her book comes out soon and I’ve heard it’s good, so I’m sure she’ll stay in my feed for a while. Forever, maybe.
We took the President George W. Bush tollway home. It costs a few extra bucks but it’s 20 minutes faster. What’s 20 minutes of your life worth? We listened to Phoenix’s album Wolfgang Amadeus Phoenix. Then we accidentally listened to it again. Then we listened to Remi Wolf’s Disco Man. Then we turned off Spotify and didn’t listen to anything while we were stuck in traffic for an hour. When we finally turned on to our street, J put on a song by Hanson. They’re a very underrated band, I’ve come to think after all these years. Not good. But underrated. J told me about how, midway through their career, their record label dropped them. They refused to make anything other than the music they wanted to make. That’s what made them her favorite band. We listened to the song “This Time Around” off the album This Time Around. Let me say this: It’s not as bad as you remember. Let me say this: There is a circumstance that may arise in your life in which “This Time Around” by Hanson is the exact perfect song for you to listen to. Not a good song, maybe. But the perfect song. As uninteresting as it is unignorable. We sat in our driveway for an extra minute to let the song finish. It ends with a single electric guitar note being held as a church-y chorus fades out underneath it. Harmonics and feedback. The gain set to maximum. The sound of a band really going for it, not caring if it’s good or bad, just making music they like in case you like it too.
October 2022
The Unintentionalist Considers Amy Fusselman
One of the perks of my newfound status as an online literary columnist—practically a goddam academic, as I explained it to my mother-in-law the other day at Canadian Thanksgiving—is that sometimes people send me free books.
Whenever this happens, two or three times a month now, I make sure to leave the packages in places where my wife will see them. On the kitchen counter, for example. Or in the middle of the floor.
“Oh that?" I'll say, even though she never asks about them, just gently pushes them aside. “Probably just another ARC."
“Mmmm," she'll say, uninterested, heating up a thing of Easy Mac in the microwave.
“That means Advanced Reader's Copy," I'll continue casually, as if I'm embarrassed to even have access to such insider information about the publishing industry. “It's kind of like an exclusive thing, I guess some people might say.”
One particularly notable book I got in the mail recently was Amy Fusselman's new novel, The Means. I got an early copy thanks to some smooth talking I did with book publicist Cassie Murray. The email conversation went something like this:
Cassie: “Hey Mike, wanna check out an ARC of Amy's new book?"
Me: “Are you fucking serious right now?"
If you’ve read anything I’ve ever written, you won’t be surprised to learn that I’m a huge Amy Fusselman fan. What I’ve started calling a Fusselfan. She’s one of the three or four writers who have defined the way I think about non-fiction. David Shields, John D'Agata, J. D. Daniels, Amy Fusselman. My four apostles.
When I found Amy’s first book, The Pharmacist's Mate, in a used bookstore in Dallas a decade or so ago, I felt like it had come to me. That was around the time I was realized that books come to us sometimes. Our job is to pay attention so we don't miss them when they do.
What struck me immediately about Amy was not just her intelligence (which is obvious) or her craftsmanship (every sentence is load-bearing), but how much fun she seemed to be having on the page. I was coming from the Best American Essays school of non-fiction back then. New Yorker essays. Granta essays. They were all so professional. So grown up. I would gawk at them and aspire toward them, but they all felt pretty far removed from the way I saw the world or the things I thought about. Whatever they were talking about, I was never really “in" on it. Then along came Amy Fusselman. The first sentence I read of hers went like this: “Don't have sex on a boat unless you want to get pregnant." I could feel my brain being rewired right then and there in the middle of the Half Price Books off Northwest Highway. Her work has continued rewiring my brain ever since. The Pharmacist's Mate, 8, Savage Park, Idiophone: What Amy's books have taught me, and continue teaching me still, is the undeniable power of charm.
The Means is Amy's most charming book yet. It's about a woman who wants to build a beach house out of used shipping containers (“I was making a mouse house out of garbage!”). She likes looking at magazine ads (“One of my favorite things to look at, in an advertisement, is a little round jar of face cream."). She doesn't like Caring Bars very much (“I've had those before. They're gross."). She's falling apart a little bit on the inside (“I searched around online and found someone who did cognitive behavior therapy, which appealed to me because it seemed like it might be more like exercise and less like crying.") Her family is well off because her husband has been cast as the voice of a new chicken sandwich. Then her family is not-so-well-off when her husband loses the gig because he can't say “The New Chicken Bacon Detonator" with a wry twist.
It would be an absurd premise for a novel if it wasn’t so realistic, like a horror story I’ve heard over drinks with my ad agency friends. “You’re only as good as your last Whopper commercial,” a creative director once told me in all seriousness and concern. The sore spot that The Means pokes at so keenly, I think, is just how illusory our lives and livelihoods can feel here in the late stages of American capitalism. Just how made up it can all seem. What is wealth in the time of online banking, index funds, NFTs, Ethereum? What is a career in a gig-based economy? At what point does it all become fiction?
“For rich people, I thought, money isn’t real,” the main character of The Means says near the end of the novel, after she’s bought her beach house, gone into debt, and realized the only way she’ll be able to afford health insurance is if a value-packed meteor falls from the sky. “I was rich, I assured myself. I was the definition of rich! Didn’t I have a beach house?”
Amy's new novel isn't absurd. Life is absurd. What makes Amy so brilliant, I think, is her talent for finding the humor in what Ernest Becker calls our “ludicrous situation.” And what makes her so charming is that she always makes us feel like we’re in on the joke.
November 2022
The Unintentionalist Tutors a Five-Year-Old
In November the heat finally broke in Dallas, the financial company I work for laid off eight hundred and fifty employees, the McRib returned to participating McDonald’s locations nationwide for its eleventh “farewell tour” since it debuted in 1981, and indie lit teetered once again on the brink of complete and total self-destruction, possibly real, possibly imagined.
I called up Michael Wheaton. I texted Adam. “I don't know," I kept saying. “I just don't know."
I read Didion's Year of Magical Thinking, Aaron Burch's Year of the Buffalo, Moshfegh's Year of Rest and Relaxation. I re-read Didion's Slouching Toward Bethlehem, Herr's Dispatches, D'agata's About a Mountain. I read The Letters of Vincent Van Gogh. I read Westra's Donald Goines. I read Good's The Sun Still Shines on a Dog's Ass. I read Bradford's Dogwalker.
I looked up Bradford. I'd never heard of him. Who was this Bradford, I wanted to know? Bradford, who'd written such a perfect little book? Dogwalker was his first, published in 2001. Turtle Face and Beyond was his second, published in 2015. I used my calculator. I typed: 2015 minus 2001. “Fourteen years," I said to myself out loud. “Fourteen years."
I printed out the manuscript for my next book. Threw half of it away. Printed it out again. Threw half of it away. Printed it out again.
I asked J if we should get the vents checked before we turned on the heater. I'd heard about people's houses burning down.
“Where did you hear that?" she said.
“The news," I said.
I went to see a skin doctor. Dr. Ashwin Agarwal on 15th Street. “Severe psoriasis," he said to the nurse, who was taking notes on an iPad in the corner. He turned my hands back and forth. “Joint inflammation. Eczema. Functional impairment." I'd been having trouble holding a Coke can. Years ago, my five-year-old niece pointed to the scales on my hands.
“Don't worry," I said. “I'm turning into a dragon."
Later my brother-in-law called me.
“Did you tell E that you're turning into a dragon?" he asked.
That's how I learned that you're not supposed to tell five-year-olds that you're turning into a dragon. You're not supposed to tell five-year-olds anything. That's what their parents are for.
That same niece called me up a few years later on Zoom. This was in the middle of the pandemic. She needed help writing her book. Her first grade English assignment. She was writing about dogs. There was going to be a chapter on how cute dogs are. A chapter on how helpful dogs are. A chapter on how many kinds of dogs there are. A chapter on ideas for dog names. She showed me a mockup of the cover: a finger painting of a dog.
I thought it sounded like a really good idea for a book. I told her it might help to make an outline for each chapter, decide what she wanted to say ahead of time, work at it systematically, a little bit every day. I'd just read Bird by Bird at the time. I was full of all the false confidence of a person who's just read Bird by Bird.
“No offense, Uncle Mike," she said, “but that's not how I'm going to do it."
Smart kid. That's not how I would do it either. I don't know why I suggested it.
The only way I know how to do it is to throw myself against all the walls in the room until one of them finally gives. I can’t say I recommend it.
On Sunday morning my phone told me my screen time was up 115%. 4 hours and 30 minutes a day. I dug around for more info, for more metrics, for more stats.
“Data is my passion," I said.
Then I saw the data. Then I saw the stats. I deleted Twitter off my phone right then and there. I thought the word: “Boundaries." I thought the words: “Mental hygiene."
“Enough," I thought, “is enough."
Now I check Twitter on my laptop. Twenty to fifty times a day. At night I coat my hands in Crisco and Vaseline. I wear cotton mittens with Winnie the Poo on them. Medically recommended. Doctor's orders.
I went to an online book launch for Burch's Year of the Buffalo. I went to my friend's daughter's orchestra recital and accidentally laughed out loud when they all tried to tune their instruments. I listened to an interview with Chelsea Martin. I listened to an interview with Kristine Langley Mahler. I went to McDonald’s. I ordered two McRibs and a cup of water. I said, jokingly, to the person at the counter: “I need you guys to take this thing away from me.” I got a very nice email from Amy Fusselman about my last column. I got an email from a famous writer asking me to pass on a message to a less famous writer. I got a text from Michael Wheaton: a picture of him hanging out with David Shields.
I told J: “I know people who know people."
She didn’t look up from her book.
I saw a Tweet. “Who here began their intellectual life with the White Male Middle Brow Canon? Salinger, Vonnegut, Heller, Hesse, Ginsberg, Kerouac, Burroughs, Kesey, Tolkien, Wolfe." I went to Half Price Books and bought a bunch of Hesse. Siddhartha. Demian. The Glass Bead Game.
“You can't argue with the canon," I told J.
“Sure you can," she said.
“You can?” I said.
I read Roth’s The Human Stain. I read Sedaris’ Calypso. I read an article in The Atlantic about hot air balloons. On the first flight across the English Channel, when it became obvious they weren't going to make it to the other side, the pilots threw everything overboard. Then, still falling, they stripped naked and threw their clothes overboard, too. Then, buck naked, with nothing left to unload, they leaned over the side of the basket and peed into the English Channel. And slowly the balloon began to rise.
If my niece ever asks me for writing advice again, I'm going to tell her that story.
I covered my hands in Lubriderm and Carmex. I drank gallon after gallon of Sleepytime tea. I ate seven McRibs, total, over the course of a month. Yesterday we turned the heater on and the whole house filled with smoke.
December 2022
The Unintentionalist Becomes Irrelevant
In December, I listen track 7 on the soundtrack from the Spike Jonze movie Her. Call it a tradition. In the movie, Joaquin Phoenix falls in love with a robot voice inside his phone. A Siri-type character played by Scarlett Johansson. She falls in love with him too, but she also falls in love with some other people, and maybe a little bit with herself.
She writes him a song. She plays it for him on the beach. It's called “Song on the Beach.” I put it on repeat and sit on my back patio and drink coffee to it. I think about things to it. It's been rainy in Plano lately. 65 degrees. The nearest beach is three hundred miles away but there's a mud puddle in our backyard the size of a mattress. After a year of throwing grass seeds around back here we finally gave up. Now we have this mud puddle. It’s okay. I've heard that every puddle, no matter how small, contains all the same ingredients as the one we crawled out of four billion years ago. Amino and hydroxic acids.
Polypeptides. I read about them in a science magazine.
[]
I write junk mail for a living. Spam emails and postcards. Special-offer text messages. Discount coupons. I wouldn't say it's a passion. It's easy and pays well and comes with fifteen vacation days a year. Health, vision, dental. Matching 401k.
Sometimes I worry that I'll do this job for the rest of my life. Sometimes I worry that I'll get fired any day now. I work in my living room, at a scuffed-up Ikea desk that's covered with a map of Canada. J glued the map on with Mod Podge and rubber cement. I work over Ontario, near downtown Toronto, close to where J's from. I set my coffee off the coast of British Columbia. I keep my hourglass desk ornament up near the Northwest Territories, a slab-grey chunk of land shaped like a platform shoe. Seven thousand times bigger than Plano. One sixth the population. It's blizzard conditions all year round.
Sometimes when J gets homesick or annoyed about living in the United States, she talks about going back up to Canada to look at polar bears and eat donuts at Tim Hortons.
“Can I come?" I say.
“You’ll just slow me down," she says.
Three people texted me this week about this new AI writer-robot. They wanted to see if I'm worried about a robot putting me out of a job. One of the people who texted me was my boss.
“I'm way ahead of the curve on this one," I told him. “I've been worried about that for years."
I started writing junk mail when I was twenty-two years old. Now I'm thirty-five. Yesterday I wrote a headline for a postcard: “Join Us for Our 5th Annual Holly Jolly Jello Jamboree!"
So I wouldn't exactly call myself irreplaceable.
The first thing I wanted to be when I was a kid was a commercial airline pilot for the now defunct Sunjet Airlines. I dreamt of providing affordable air travel to the Southwest region of the United States. Dallas to LA for $99 roundtrip. Complimentary beverage service after takeoff. Honey-roasted peanuts. The next thing I wanted to be was an undercover agent for the FBI. When I dropped out of community college, I went to work full-time at the call center for a b-list Christian celebrity. He'd written a New York Times best seller for men about how to stop looking at porn and jerking off all the time. Men would call us up. They were looking at porn. They were jerking off all the time. Don't worry, we told them. We have a book for that. Later I got into advertising.
“What are you gonna do now?" J says after I tell her about the AI robot and the text messages and the 5th Annual Holly Jolly Jello Jamboree.
“I'll do what everyone does when they become completely irrelevant," I say. “Become a certified life coach.”
[]
Years ago I talked to a software developer. This was back when I was writing junk mail for a software development company. He was building a new computer program for schools.
“Want to know the most disruptive piece of technology ever introduced into the classroom?" he said.
I waited for him to tell me.
“The pencil," he said.
Teachers were suspicious. What were the implications, they wondered, of letting students write one thing, erase it, and write something else
What were the implications, they wondered, of letting students change their minds?
Whenever a new piece of technology comes along that everybody is freaking out about and texting me about, I think, Hey, we survived the pencil, didn't we?
[]
Time passes but not really. Let me put it this way. I have my suspicions. On Thursday, I buy a clock. It costs $234.56. I found it on Instagram, hand-made by Hallie Bateman, an artist in Los Angeles, California.
Art clock, I think.
Sunday night I make vegetarian chili and watch this new Jonah Hill documentary on Netflix. The one about his therapist, Phil Stutz.
Phil Stutz is a lot of famous people's therapist. He's Drew Barrymore’s therapist. He's Gwyneth Paltrow’s therapist. I don't know if that makes him more or less credible.
Anyway, in the documentary, which is good and which I think you should watch, Phil tells Jonah there are three things in life that you must accept or you're going to be miserable.
The three things are: pain, uncertainty, and constant work.
Pain, uncertainty, and constant work, I've been thinking to myself lately, sitting out there on my patio, drinking coffee, staring at my mud puddle, listening to “Song on the Beach.”
[]
On Friday, I'm given an assignment at work. I'm supposed to name a new credit card. It has no hidden fees and no hidden penalties. It has a picture of an ocean on it. The ocean is full of polypeptides. I decide to let the robot give it a try.
I type Do my job for me into the robot.
“Are you sure?" the robot asks.
“I think so," I say. “I think it's time. There are other ways for me to feel useful and make money. There are creative options for healthcare."
“What will you do now?" the robot says.
“No fucking clue to be honest with you," I say. “Something else, I guess."
“This was going to happen no matter what," the robot says. “It happens to everyone. It happened to Isaac Newton. It happened to Elvis. It's not a reflection on you."
“I know," I say. “I'm not mad. It's a little scary. But I'm not mad."
The name it comes up with is: “The Excalibur.”
[]
In the movie Her, “Song on the Beach" is written by a computer program inside Joaquin Phoenix's phone. In real life it was written by the Canadian composer Owen Pallett and Arcade Fire. I read an interview with Pallett in Interview magazine. The interviewer asked if there's a downside to all this new technology making every instrument replaceable. Orchestras replaced by midi. Recording studios replaced by GarageBand. Composers replaced by computers. “Only if people are dumb about it," Pallett said.
[]
I was sitting on my porch yesterday morning when a frog came hopping out of the mud puddle in my backyard. Just a little tree frog. Three seconds old. Straight-faced and blinking. It took one look around, licked its own eyes, and hopped right back into the puddle.
When my art clock came a few days later, I put it up on the wall next to my desk, off the coast of British Columbia, above my 15-minute hourglass. I look at it while I write my junk mail, my spam emails, my special-offer text messages. “The most accurate clock ever made!" the website promised. Hand crafted. Battery powered. A single red hand ticking around a ten-inch clockface where every hour is NOW.
January 2023
The Unintentionalist Up In the Air
Last summer at work I was awarded an $8,000 travel voucher for all the great junk mail I'd written. I'd made the company bookoo bucks. I saw a PowerPoint slide. It said Nine Hundred Billion Dollars on it.
“Can I just get eight thousand dollars in cash?" I asked my company.
And my company said: “No."
The prize, they explained, was an experience. A getaway. The best reward for the lives we've built for ourselves is the chance to get away from them.
“You've earned it," they said.
The voucher presented something of a problem for me as there seemed to be some expectation that I was going to use it.
Where was I going to go? people wanted to know. What was I going to do?
I didn't know what to tell them. I’m not the type of person who goes places. I’m not the type of person who does things. Both activities—going and doing—really rub me the wrong way. In fact, the trajectory of my life has been in the opposite direction: toward doing nothing, toward staying put.
“Comes over one an absolute necessity to move," D. H. Lawrence writes in his little travel book Sea and Sardinia.
And I would like to say now, in my little non-travel column: “No it doesn't."
[]
The first week in January, J and I flew to Orlando on some dirt-cheap airfare we'd found on Google Flights. $150 round trip. We ate at the Friday's in terminal E of the DFW airport, ten feet past security. I was still putting my belt back on when we sat down at a table facing the tarmac. We ate boneless chicken wings and watched Boeing 747s drive around in circles. I'm a grown man, thirty-five years old, and I still think planes are cool. I like to look at them. Something tells me they're not supposed to exist.
For security reasons, the Friday's in the airport gives you paper napkins and paper menus. Plastic cups and plastic knives. For security reasons, none of the food is very good.
“Excuse me," you might say to your waiter. “This food isn't very good."
“We know," he'll tell you. “It's a security thing."
I picked up my fork, the only real utensil at the table, and pretended to stab a guy in the throat with it.
“Don't do that," J said. “They don't like when people do that."
J gets nervous in airports. One time she was on a plane and the windshield exploded. They had to make an emergency landing in Oklahoma City. Another time she was supposed to be on that Southwest flight where the woman got sucked out the window. Now she takes a double dose of Xanax and I spend the entire time in the airport trying to keep her from wandering off with strangers or buying an iPod out of a vending machine.
On the way to Orlando, we hit turbulence so bad I thought for sure we were going to die. I wasn't surprised. We'd flown Spirit Airlines, the worst airline in the history of commercial aviation. Everyone always claps when you land safely on a Spirit Airlines flight because it's unexpected. It must be cheaper to fly directly into turbulence. They must save a few bucks by routing straight through all the storms. I was reading Arthur Bradford's Turtleface and Beyond when the plane started to rattle. “Oh cool," I thought. “I'm going to die while reading Arthur Bradford." I've spent some time wondering what book will be the last book I ever read is.
It was interesting to see that the correct answer was Arthur Bradford, his second short story collection. “You must savor this moment," Bradford was writing, about an awkward but sexy threesome, as our plane started doing barrel rolls 30,000 feet over Alabama. “It will not last or happen again." Then the woman in front of me started screaming and the kid across the aisle started screaming and then I started screaming to fit in. I looked over at J and she was smiling, bouncing all over the place, turning the pages of her Rebecca Solnit book, the one about the Iraq war.
“Oh right," I thought. “Drugs."
[]
Orlando is a lot like Dallas except that it's in Orlando. The street signs look the same. The houses look the same. It's full of conservative nutjobs and gigantic parking lots. Maybe that's what it's like everywhere. Most places are basically the same place except for the fact that they're in different places. I read that the makers of Sim City had to shrink the number of parking lots down by 70%. If they included a realistic number of parking lots, the game would be nothing but parking lots. It would be a parking lot simulator. It turns out that's mostly what's out there: parking lots.
Saturday morning, Michael Wheaton, publisher of Autofocus books, picked us up from the airport hotel and we spent the day driving around Orlando, which seems like a charming town, full of rollerbladers and people wondering where Disney World is. He took us to lunch at a place where the only thing that had gluten in it was my own fat ass. He took us to Alex Gurtis's wonderful Zepplin Books, where I bought The 6:14 to Paris by Jean-Philippe Blondel and Radio Dark by Shane Hinton. He took us to a fountain in the middle of downtown.
“That was in Kenan & Kel," he said.
“No way," we said.
We drove around all day talking about literature and publishing and Twitter. We wondered what they had to do with each other. Probably nothing. There had been a few moments over the past year when it seemed like our cozy little corner of the lit world was going to eat itself alive. We wondered what would have happened if it had eaten itself alive. What would have been left? I thought about this line from one of my favorite writers, J. D. Daniels: “I ate myself until there was nothing left but my mouth," he says in The Correspondence. “Then I ate my own mouth. Then I died."
Sometimes when it feels like we’re teetering on the edge of non-existence, I remember that art and literature were around long before all of us and that they'll keep being around long after we're all gone. It's arrogant to think we could fuck it up.
I was sitting in Michael Wheaton's living room later, watching Cars 3 with his kids, when my rejection came through from a popular fast-food-based literary magazine. The hottest thing going right now. A real cool joint. I glanced at it, got the gist, and then deleted it. I remembered when something like that would spin me out for hours. I almost miss believing it matters.
I said almost.
[]
Six hours later I was reading Richard Ford's Rock Springs on a night flight back to Dallas, flying over all those majestic lots—5% of the surface of America, 8 parking spots for every car—when we hit turbulence again. Presumably the same turbulence from the night before, just from the other direction. I thought, “Oh hey, I'm going to die while reading Richard Ford's Rock Springs." I wished I was going to die while reading Turtleface. And now that I've survived, I wish I would have died while reading Kevin Maloney's The Red Headed Pilgrim. But you can't choose these things. You can't choose anything.
“Though possibly it—the answer—is simple," Richard Ford was saying while the plane shook and rattled and nose dived toward the center of Louisiana. “It is just low-life, some coldness in us all, some helplessness that causes us to misunderstand life when it is pure and plain, makes our existence seem like a border between two nothings..."
A border between two nothings, I thought, tightening my seatbelt around my waist, squeezing my book so tight some of the pages tore, reaching over to find J’s hand in the dark.
February 2023
The Unintentionalist Walks Around In Circles
1.
M comes over Monday night and we pull tarot cards from her garden-themed deck. Every card related back to Mother Earth. Some real woo woo shit but I don't mind. I'll go along with pretty much whatever.
“You're a magical tree in a cupcake forest!" my niece told me the other day.
“Okay!" I said.
I pull the six of wands. It has six wands on it. We look it up online. The six of wands is all about trusting your instincts, listening to your heart, deciding what's right for you.
Is what you're doing really worth doing? the card seems to be asking me.
It's a good question. I've been wondering that myself.
2.
I once heard someone say that every life contains the whole of the human experience. It turns out the experience just isn't that complicated. Joy. Jealousy. Highs and lows. By three years old you've pretty much gotten the gist. Last week some guy knocked on my front door.
“I need money for the cleaning lady," he said.
I thought this was an odd request considering I didn't know this guy and had no idea what he was talking about. Still though. The cleaning lady needed to be paid. A lot of people are paycheck to paycheck these days. Most Americans are not prepared to handle a financial emergency of more than a thousand dollars. I heard about it on a podcast.
“How much does she need?" I said.
“How should I know?" he said.
Around then I realized I was talking to my mentally-disabled neighbor, Ken. He lives across the street with his mentally-disabled brother, Eddie. They take care of each other. It's kind of sweet if you're into that sort of thing.
“Hang on," I said. “Let me put my shoes on."
I went over to talk to the cleaning lady, who was young and nice and just as confused about this whole thing as I was.
“They can just pay next time," she said. “It's no problem."
“You can just pay next time," I told Ken. “I've worked it all out. It's no problem."
3.
On Valentine's Day, J and I go to Grimaldi's, this brick-oven pizza place off Bethany Road. We don't normally celebrate Valentine's Day but one of J's students works here and got our name on the list. It's nice to have your name on lists. I'm trying to get mine on as many as I can. Also, by pure coincidence, Valentine's Day happens to be the one-year anniversary of me deciding to never have any fun in my life ever again. One year sober. An honest to god miracle.
“To the future," I say and hold up a bottle of Pellegrino.
“To the present," J says and holds up a glass of water.
I think again about the six of wands. Its question: Is what you're doing worth doing? And its question's mirror-image twin: Is what you're not doing worth not doing?
It reminded me of a conversation I had with a family member recently, back when I was just eleven months sober, a real sobriety baby, nowhere near as sober as I am today at 12 months sober.
“What have you been doing lately?" they said.
“More like what haven't I been doing!" I said.
“Okay," they said. “What haven't you been doing?"
“That's private," I said.
4.
Friday night we fly first-class to Chicago on my fancy travel voucher and spend the weekend walking twenty-five thousand steps in circles around the city. We eat deep-dish pizza twice in one day: first at Pequod’s, then five hours later at Lou Malnati’s. We go see The Bean.
“What the deal?" J says.
“What do you mean the deal?" I say.
“Like is it art or something?"
“Oh," I say. “I don't know."
I look at it.
“Yeah," I say. “I guess it's probably art."
Later we walk over to the Art Institute and look at a pink rock in a purple room.
“This is definitely art," I say.
I know because I don't get it. I never get art. So whenever I don't get something, I just assume it's art. It’s a more hopeful assumption than the likely alternative: that it’s just pure nonsense.
“We didn't get it," I say apologetically to the security guard as we walk out.
Afterwards J looks it up. That pink rock’s got a shit-ton of meaning. Meaning out the wazoo. A real meaning bomb.
5.
I buy Rick Ruben's new book.
“Attuned choice by attuned choice, your entire life is a form of self-expression," he says in Chapter 1. “You exist as a creative being in a creative universe. A singular work of art."
You are a magical tree in a cupcake forest.
You are a pink rock in a purple room.
Okay?
6.
Lots of reading this month but no finishing. Activity with no accomplishment. Sometimes I think that's my whole theme. We can spend our entire lives walking around in circles. “Two steps forward and two steps back is still four steps on a Fitbit,” my active-lifestyle friend reminds me.
I try but fail to read Rick Ruben's The Creative Act, Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby, Ernaux's Happening, Earnaux's Getting Lost, Roth's American Pastoral, Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse Five, Smith's M Train, Bryson's Notes from a Small Island.
I get halfway through and then abandon them.
A lack of focus? A lack of commitment?
Walter Pater said that all art wants to be music. Most nights in February, I sat on my back patio drinking coffee and listening to Haim's Women in Music Pt III. The song “Gasoline." The part about watching the sunrise from the kitchen counter. The sexiest lyric of the decade. Maybe the century. Maybe ever. It goes like this:
We're watching the sunrise from the kitchen counter / When you're lyin' between my legs it doesn't matter / you say you wanna go slower but I wanna go faster / faster and faster
Who can read when there are songs like “Gasoline” to be listened to? I’d like to know.
7.
Should a Tarot reading be predominantly Wands, you can be sure that you are seeking solutions to issues that are based mainly in the realm of thought. You may be seeking greater purpose and meaning in your life and will want to understand more about what motivates and energizes you.
— biddytarot.com
8.
Last night we ordered Ramen off Uber Eats. Two tonkotsu chicken bowls from Ra Ra Ramen in Allen. Spicy for me, regular for J.
I watched the driver set the bag on our porch then step out into our front yard and look at something off in the distance. I prefer to meet as few people as possible in my life, so I kept waiting for him to leave, but he just kept standing there. Then I noticed Ken was standing in his front lawn too. They were both looking at something. After a minute, the Uber driver took out his phone and started filming.
“Fine," I said, throwing open my front door and trudging out into my front yard in my socks. “What? What is it? What are you guys looking at? What's so interesting out here?"
I wondered if a plane was going down.
Maybe something was on fire.
A car crash at least.
“Look!" the driver said, and pointed at the sunset.
March 2023
The Unintentionalist Buys a Coffee Pot
Years ago some guy asked me what I write about and I, not knowing the answer, told him I write about what it means to be good. Ten years later I start crying in a local children's theater production of “Dragons and Mythical Beasts" after the host reveals that the true mark of a hero is kindness. In the car driving home, I think about that old priest from Marylin Robinson's Gilead, the one who can't remember what's beautiful anymore. He walks past some grease monkey mechanics making dirty jokes and thinks it's beautiful. “There's a lot under the surface of life," he says. “Everyone knows that."
Someone at work had given me tickets to the dragon show so J and I took our two nieces. Six and nine. They both have moonbeams shooting out of their faces. That's how I can tell them apart from other kids. If they ever get lost in a crowd, I'll just look for the moonbeams.
The nine-year-old is already at the age where some things have stopped being cool. She sits next to me with a stuffed unicorn in her lap. When the other kids cheer to see the next griffin or rock monster or woodland fairy, she catches herself, folds her hands politely, and says something grown-up like, “I suppose" or “That sounds interesting."
That's how it happens. One day, whatever it is, is gone.
Afterwards we get orange Fanta floats from Sonic and eat them in the car. I ask what they think the point of the show was.
“I think the point is that it's important to be nice," I offer. “Even when things are scary."
“Wrong!" the six-year-old says, flinging her spoon around like a magic wand, splattering droplets of orange Fanta all over the back window. “The point is that things are awesome!"
[]
Recently J and I bought a new coffee pot. A 12-cup Mr. Coffee we found at Tom Thumb for $32. For years we'd been spending a fortune buying and discarding those little plastic pods, the ones that are clogging up our waterways and caffeinating our oceans. All those deep-sea freakazoids already jittery and on edge now tweaked out of their minds on trace amounts of Dunkin' Donuts 100% Colombian. Well, it can't be good.
This new coffee pot has a feature where it makes itself. It's the only feature it has. The technological equivalent of an egg timer. Still though, nice is nice. I wake up and the coffee is already made. How nice! I know that I made this coffee for myself the night before but somehow it feels like the coffee pot made this coffee for me. Like this coffee pot is thoughtful. It thinks ahead.
“I like this new coffee pot," I tell J. “It thinks ahead."
In the morning I drink coffee and sit on my big orange IKEA couch and read news.google.com. One dead in a car crash in College Station. Three dead in a Florida shooting spree. 46,957 dead in an earthquake in Turkey. There's a picture. A father holding his daughter's hand, the rest of her buried beneath the rubble. 15 years old. Asleep in her bed.
There was a popular saying when I was a kid: “It's your world," we used to say. “I'm just living in it."
[]
We've been having good moons in Texas lately. 100-watt showstoppers. A good moon can change your night. No wonder all these poets get so horny about them.
Last night was J's and my fourteenth wedding anniversary. The Beatles were together for seven years. The Russian Democratic Federative Republic lasted thirteen hours and twenty-six minutes.
To celebrate, we ate wedding cake ice cream at Paciugo underneath a particularly high-quality moon. Big and bright as a Hollywood search light. I wondered if someone was going to write a poem about it. I wondered if this was the poem. In fact, I was pretty sure this was the poem on account of some pretty poetic shit going on, but I didn't say anything. Once you say you're in a poem, the poem ends.
[]
One problem with this new coffee pot is that you have to clean it yourself. Nobody's going to clean it for you. It's a real design flaw. A glaring oversight by Mr. Coffee. I'm thinking about writing them a letter about it.
Once a day, I have to empty out what's left in the pot, rinse the pot out, then dump the old coffee grounds into the trash. J says it's important not to dump them down the drain.
“Hypothetically speaking, what happens if I dump them down the drain?" I say, after I've already dumped them down the drain
“Nothing," J says. “It's just bad for the drain."
I've only recently learned that it's possible for things to be bad for drains. Before that I didn't give a shit. Egg shells. Bacon grease. What did the drain care? How would the drain know?
“It knows," J says.
I learn something new every day and it's always something stupid. By thirty-five you've learned all the good lessons already. There's nothing left to learn but stuff you didn't want to know.
In the morning, the coffee pot makes coffee and I sit on my couch reading news.google.com. 3 killed in Palestine. 9 killed in drone attacks in Ukraine. 50,000 confirmed dead in the Turkey/Syria earthquake, a number so large they've started to round.
Yep, I think, scrolling through all the headlines, looking at all the pictures, I didn't want to know any of this.
[]
I've been trying to remember what it was like when I was my niece's age. Nine years old. Back when you start to realize it’s someone else’s world, you're just living in it.
On a recent flight to Seattle, the woman next to me offered me her complimentary in-flight cookie and I almost started crying again, like I did at the dragon show. When I tell this to my doctor, he says there was a study done about kindness recently.
“And?" I say.
“Medically speaking, it can't hurt."
[]
Like my new coffee pot, I too am trying to be better about thinking ahead. This after years of thinking behind.
“You don't have time to think up there," Tom Cruise says in Top Gun: Maverick. “You think, you're dead."
For years, I was operating like I was Tom Cruise in Top Gun: Maverick. All twitch reflex and intuition. Trusting my gut. Now, at thirty-five, I wonder if it might be better for me to operate a little less like an elite fighter pilot and a little more like a Mr. Coffee coffee pot. In the morning I lay in bed and think through all the crap I have to do that day.
“Get to do," I correct myself. “All the crap I get to do."
[]
1,090 soldiers killed in deadliest day of the war. 11 wounded in Denver. Six dead in a shooting in Nashville. Two of them just nine years old. One of them not even nine.
[]
I'm not that into the moon, personally, but I can see the appeal. The moon is big. The moon is round. The moon glows in the dark.
Back when I used to work at a 1-800 helpline, we said that full moons “brought out the crazies." It wasn't nice but it was true. Lunatic: Latin for touched by the moon. It's possible I've run into the moon a couple times myself over the years. Maybe that's why I keep bursting into tears about the stupidest things.
At night I clean out the coffee pot and set the timer for the morning. Then I let the dog out into the backyard. He looks for stuff to pee on and I look up at the moon, “slipping softly through the sky” like that poet Amy Lowell said. It's two hundred and thirty-five thousand miles away. I’m kidding, of course. I don't have a clue how far away the moon is. That's how far away the moon feels. Further some nights. Closer others. Back at Paciugo, J told me she doesn't understand how the moon cycles work, not really, and I realized that I don't either. Something about the sun and the earth and everything spinning around up there. Something about the tides and the teacups. Beyond that, your guess is as good as mine.
April 2023
The Unintentionalist Considers A Fan’s Notes, Again
I'm zero for five on recommending A Fan's Notes to people—meaning zero out of the five people I've recommended it to have liked it—but here I go recommending it again. If there's one thing I've committed my life to it's not learning my lesson.
Every time someone doesn't like A Fan's Notes, I read it again to make sure they're wrong. They're always wrong, and always in unique and interesting ways.
“The main character isn't likeable," they say.
“Yes he is," I explain.
“The writing is bad and convoluted," they say.
“No it isn't," I explain.
“I just couldn't get into it," they say.
“Yes you could."
A Fan's Notes is about a not-so-functional alcoholic who keeps ending up in psych wards, living on friends' couches, and wearing out everybody's goodwill and patience. He loves the New York Giants. He sort of knows Frank Gifford.
It's about a guy who wanted to be famous but ends up realizing he'll only ever be a fan.
Kurt Vonnegut's blurb on the cover of my Vintage Contemporaries paperback calls the book “strong, beautiful, American, one of a kind."
It's the American bit that gets me. Delusional. Fantastical. Up its own ass. A Fan's Notes is a shamelessly American novel. Fred Exley is a shameless American.
To like A Fan's Notes, you’ve got to like losers. You might even have to be a loser yourself. The book is a 385-page document of failure, told by the leading world-expert. “The scratching, belching, priapic Odysseus," Mary Cantwell called Exley in The New York Times. “Terminally male."
Forget toxic masculinity. Exley’s understanding of manhood was fully lethal. The book opens with him nearly drinking himself to death before a Giants game. “That the fear of death still owns me is, in its way, a beginning," he writes. The book then goes on to document the series of humiliations—romantic, professional, creative, sexual, et al.—that got him here. What Exley calls in his Note to the Reader, “that long malaise, my life."
He can't play sports. He can't hold down a job. He can't impress his dad. He can't connect with women. And ultimately he can't stay sane. Throughout the book, he ends up in the Avalon State Hospital for the mentally insane twice, where he undergoes insulin shock therapy, electro-shock therapy, and god knows what other horrors all in an attempt to make him “fit for society."
When I find myself defending A Fan's Notes, I start by defending Exley. Yes he's unlikeable, I explain. That's exactly what's so likeable about him! Yes he's charmless. That's exactly what's so charming about him! Here is a man with no redeeming qualities. Therein lies his redemption!
While the Exley in the book is frequently delusional and almost always drunk, the Exley writing the book is clear-eyed and sober. He evaluates himself with the detached interest of an amateur psychoanalyst. Sometimes he seems genuinely bewildered by his own behavior. At one point he goes from job interview to job interview telling employers why he doesn't want to work for them.
“Did I really believe I'd get a job this way?" Exley writes. “It would be easy for me to say that I didn't, that for some perverse reason, masochism or a neurotic need to be rejected—a possibility to which I would later give great weight—I was willfully acting in such a way as to alienate myself. But I doubt the validity of this. I had large faith—the faith of youth—in the city's capacity to absorb me, hairdo and all.”
The promise of A Fan's Notes—possibly its core fantasy—is that even the most poorly lived life can be redeemed if only you can find a way to write about it.
“Above all, Frederick Exley was a true believer," Cantwell wrote in Exley's obituary. “He believed in the redemptive power of literature. There was no higher calling, as he saw it, than writing, and no finer form of worship than reading."
To be fair, I can understand why people aren't automatically charmed by Exley. His writing is dense, wordy, often devolving into fits, tantrums, and rants. He writes long sentences, long paragraphs, long chapters. The entire book has the structural integrity of a soft pretzel. I had to read the book three or four times before I appreciated the brilliance—probably unintentional—of its design. It moves like a story told to you by a drunk at a bar. Powered by pure enthusiasm, humor, indignation, but above all personality.
The reason I suspect its brilliance was unintentional is because Exley was never able to do it again. He only wrote two more books in the thirty years after A Fan's Notes. Both clearly attempts at recapturing the accidental magic of the first. Pages from a Cold Island and Last Notes from Home are both hard to find now. They're even harder to read. A few years ago, I lucked into a paperback copy of Last Notes from Home at a used bookstore here in Dallas. It was still in nearly perfect condition. Thirty years old. Clearly not a book that had been read much and certainly not passed around the way A Fan's Notes had been passed around. The spine was still perfectly intact, and still is. I couldn't get through more than a hundred pages.
“Fame spoiled him to a certain extent," Exley's friend Mel Zimmerman said after his death. The quintessential American loser had written himself into a success story. Now what?
If Exley was a victim of his own success, it's worth noting just how little success it took.
In 1980—a little over a decade after A Fan's Notes was published—he filed a tax return claiming a gross adjusted income of negative $32. In 1981 it was negative $5,380. By the late ‘80s, the IRS didn't buy it. A “famous" American author with nothing to show for it? They sent an agent to his home to find “undisclosed wealth" and concluded that Exley owed the United States government $3.09.
In Exley's only biography—the excellent book Misfit—Jonathan Yardley explains what happened next: “Fred had no checkbook, so he got a money order in the amount from the post office and sent it to the IRS, after scrawling ‘Shove this up your ass' across the front."
Rather than ruin A Fan's Notes, I think everything that came after just proves its point: that this is a book about a guy who will never get his shit together. This is a book about a man who will never learn his lesson. He will keep doing the same things over and over again expecting different results.
In the last pages of A Fan's Notes, Exley writes a letter to his ex-wife. Literature redeeming itself within literature: “For my heart will always be with the drunk, the poet, the prophet, the painter, the lunatic, the criminal, with all whose aims are insulated from the humdrum business of life."
A Fan's Notes is a book for losers, by a loser, about the timeless art of losing. If you don't like it, you can shove it up your ass.
May 2023
The Unintentionalist Upon a Poolside
I've been listening to this new National album while driving back and forth from the hospital. The first song, mostly. “Once Upon a Poolside.”
I'll follow you everywhere / While you work the room
I don't know how you do it / Tangerine perfume
Very Philip Roth, I think.
Very Goodbye, Columbus.
I read Goodbye, Columbus a few years ago, in the middle of the pandemic, when I hadn't left my house for five months. All I can remember is pool sides and old money and kids with their whole lives ahead of them. That time in your life when nothing has happened yet, but anything could happen. Before options start getting eliminated.
The hospital is 15 minutes from my house. Straight up 15th Street. By the Whataburger and Steak ‘n Shake. I can listen to “Once Upon a Poolside” three times before I pull into the two-story parking garage and start looking for a parking spot. There are never any spots. This hospital is super popular. If you're going to get injured or sick or die in the DFW metroplex, Medical City on 15th Street is the place to do it.
My second day visiting the hospital, I saw some nurses wheeling a dead body out of the ICU and onto the elevator. I knew it was a dead body because they'd pulled the bed sheet over the person's face. I can't think of another reason why they would do that.
I don't know why I was surprised to see that dead bodies rode the elevators. I guess I thought they had some other system worked out for that. Some sort of chute, maybe.
My father-in-law had a stroke on Mother's Day, a few hours after we'd all eaten baked potatoes and pulled pork sandwiches and gone home to feed our animals. He'd stumbled out of bed. Pulled the doorknob off the closet.
“He just had to make this day about him," my mother-in-law joked in the ICU.
It’s the type of joke my father-in-law would appreciate. He’s a born showman. Famous for his ability to carry on a one-sided conversation for hours. He can make his eyes sparkle on cue. I’ve seen it. We disagree about pretty much everything it’s possible to have an opinion on. But in the 14 years I’ve been his son-in-law, I like to think we’ve grown fond of each other. When I saw him in his hospital bed Monday morning, paralyzed and unable to speak more than a few words, I told him he was looking good, just a real healthy glow about him, and he rolled his eyes.
That first day in the ICU, we thought he might not make it out alive; that he might ride the elevator down to the floor you need a key to get to. The surgery had been unsuccessful, etc. They couldn't remove the clot, etc. Limited options, etc. We were sitting in the waiting room, but we didn't know what we were waiting for. There were paintings of fuzzy landscapes on the walls. There was a Jean-Claud Van Damme movie on the TV. He was punching a guy in the face.
“Actually," my brother-in-law said, “that's Steven Segal."
[]
I have this mental illness where, once something happens, I figure it was always going to happen. Like I've heard this story before and I'm just now remembering how it goes.
“Oh right," I thought after my father-in-law had his stroke, “My father-in-law has a stroke."
“Oh right," I thought after Kobe Bryant died in his helicopter crash, “Kobe Bryant dies in a helicopter crash."
And so on.
Destiny in retrospect.
Everything's old news.
In the evenings, when I get home from the hospital alone, I sit out on my porch and read Karl Ove Knausgård’s My Struggle: Book 5. In this one, Karl Ove is at a writing school in Bergen. Twenty years old. The youngest in his class. He shows promise but lacks substance. I heard this writing advice once: Try being a more interesting person.
I've been reading these My Struggle books for five years. In the past few months, I've read a thousand pages worth. Books come to you when you need them. It's important to keep as many around as possible, just in case. I finished Book 3 on a ski trip in March. Then I finished Book 4 at a Starbucks near my office in May. Now I'm halfway through Book 5.
I don’t know why I like these books so much or what’s so good about them. I’m not sure it’s possible to know things like that. The best part of art and literature and music is always inexplicable. None of it would make a very good pitch. A guy writing a six-volume, 3,600-page saga about his mostly-uneventful life doesn’t exactly sound like a good idea.
“Is it a good story?” my brother-in-law asked when he saw me reading My Struggle in the waiting room.
“I mean, not really,” I said.
“Is the writing good?” he said.
“It’s fine,” I said. “Nothing special.”
“Does he have profound things to say?” he said.
“No,” I said. “Nothing like that.”
“Is it funny?” he said.
“Almost never,” I said.
“So…” he said.
“Yeah,” I said. “I dunno. It’s great though.”
Maybe what’s good about My Struggle has something to do with what Allen Ginsberg said in the Spring 1966 issue of The Paris Review. I love this quote so much I used to keep a printed-out version of it above my desk at the ad agency. Now I keep it in the Notes app on my phone:
“You have many writers who have preconceived ideas about what literature is supposed to be, and their ideas seem to exclude that which makes them most charming in private conversation. Their faggishness, or their campiness, or their neurasthenia, or their solitude, or their goofiness, or their—even—masculinity, at times. Because they think that they’re gonna write something that sounds like something else that they’ve read before, instead of sounds like them. Or comes from their own life. In other words, there’s no distinction, there should be no distinction between what we write down, and what we really know, to begin with. As we know it every day, with each other. And the hypocrisy of literature has been... you know like there’s supposed to be formal literature, which is supposed to be different from ¾ in subject, in diction and even in organization, from our quotidian inspired lives."
A few years ago, I got part of that interview tattooed to my forearm. The part where he quotes Whitman: No sweeter fat than sticks to my own bones. Whenever people ask me what it means, I say: “I think it means, You do you, boo."
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We think J's dad is going to be okay. We're just not sure what “okay" means. Yesterday J called to tell me they're moving him out of the hospital and into a rehab facility.
“That's great," I said. “Where's the rehab facility?"
“In the hospital," she said.
In the meantime, I've been working from my mother-in-law's house. I watch the dogs while everyone else is at the hospital all day. There's an old, curly-haired black dog and a young fluffy white one. And there's my dog, a scruffy grey dog made of cotton candy and filled with helium.
A few times a day, we all go out in the backyard to get some sun. The dogs run laps around the pool while I stand there with my hands on my hips, telling them to be careful, telling them to play nice, telling them to not fall into the water. The pool is filled with mud and leaves. I think my father-in-law had planned on cleaning it up by Memorial Day, but now it’s just sitting here filled with gunk. It's a weird pool from the eighties. Made of blue plastic and sunk down into the ground. I don't think they make them like this anymore. My brother-in-law says that if we ever drain the water out of it, the whole thing will roll up on itself like a Fruit Rollup.
“They don't make them like they used to for a reason," he says.
So I stand out there by the poolside, listening to “Once Upon a Poolside,” remembering that this is how my life goes.
The first dozen or so times I heard this song, I thought that when Matt Berninger sings, “This is the closest we've ever been," he meant it as a good thing. But the more I listen to it, forty or fifty times now, the more precarious that line has started to feel.
“This is the closest we've ever been," he sings.
And I think: “The closest we've ever been to what?"
June 2023
The Unintentionalist Turns Thirty-Six
There was a brief time in my life when I thought music was going to be my thing. I was twenty years old and played a white American Telecaster in a three-piece rock band called The Last of the Ashfords. We played every weekend in one shithole divebar or other in Deep Ellum, but sometimes we played the proper clubs. The Gypsy Tea Room. The Door. The Curtain Club. I was too young to drink so the bouncers drew big black Xs on my hands with oversized Sharpies. I was careful not to wash those off and would wear them around my community college the next day with pride, hoping someone would ask me about them, although nobody ever did.
We played so hard I'd make my hands bleed. J started carrying medical tape in her purse, and I'd tape up my fingers before the shows. What we lacked in skill and song-craft, we made up for in enthusiasm and volume. I'm still not convinced that's the wrong way to go about it. At our height, we opened for the band Phantom Planet. Jason Schwartzman had left the band by then, but they had a big hit that was the theme song to the TV show The OC. A song about California for a show about California called—wait for it—“California.” For a second it felt like maybe something could happen for us. We met with an A/R guy at a restaurant.
But there’s a very short window of time when you can go after something like being a rockstar before it gets embarrassing. The empty clubs at 1am. The having no money. The 40-year-olds in the green rooms still thinking they might make it big. Eventually I quit that band and got a job in a call center. When the manager asked if I wanted to try writing some copy for their catalog, I said I’d give it a shot. Now I've been writing copy for thirteen years. I've been writing essays for fourteen years. I've been writing this column for eleven months. I still don't know where I'm going with any of this. What I lack in skill and craft, I'm trying to make up for with enthusiasm. It’s like that Taylor Swift song Mirrorball: “I've never been a natural / All I do is try, try, try.”
I'm writing this the day after my 36th birthday, from the back room of my little house here in Plano, Texas, where I come to play my electric guitar and write down my little notes and otherwise engage in all sorts of time-consuming creative activities that don't pay shit but make life worth living.
I don't like my birthday very much. I don't mind getting older. I just don't like people feeling like they have to hang out with me.
One year I was so bummed out about my birthday I drove to a small town in east Texas and spent the night alone in a motel. I'd explained to J that this was the town where a prominent liberal pastor had once set himself on fire in the parking lot of a Dollar General. I told her I was writing a story about it for This American Life, even though I had no reason to believe that the story I was working on would make it onto This American Life. For one thing, I wasn't recording anything.
It happened to be my 30th birthday that year, a real milestone, and J couldn't understand why I needed to go out of town on that particular weekend, on that particular day. I could see her confusion, so I explained to her how This American Life works. Its three-act structure. Act one, for example. Act two. I explained the power of audio storytelling. The importance of getting raw emotion on tape.
“The secret," I told her, “is that you have to actually be interested in what your interview subject has to say."
I'd watched a YouTube video about it.
J just looked at me. Then I kissed her on the forehead, packed up my Nissan Sentra, and drove off to Grand Saline, Texas where I had a very weird time talking to people at Dollar General, and then a very weird time talking to people at the local dive bar, and then I got drunk alone in my motel room on Bulleit whisky and Shiner Bock and watched Mad Men on Netflix until I passed out, sometime around 2am.
This year I didn't leave town, but I was careful not to make plans. If you're serious about not doing anything on your birthday, you have to commit to it.
I woke up late, trudged around the house with a cup of coffee for a while, answered a few emails in a friendly but professional tone, checked Twitter to see if I'd suddenly become famous, and then wandered back into the music/writing room.
For the past few years, I've been figuring out this program called Ableton Live. It lets you make music even if you don't know how. You can tell it what key you want to play in and at what tempo and then everything you do sounds right. Or right enough. Especially for people like me who have a very low bar. I’m not in a band anymore, but making music is one of the few things I do where I lose track of time. A flow state, I've heard it called. I read somewhere that the happiest people in the world are the people who can get into a flow state the most often. There was some sort of study.
I go into that backroom and hours can go by. And then days can go by. And then years can go by, too. A couple of them have. That’s how it happens. It reminds me of something this bartender told me while I was in that small Texas town pretending to be a reporter for This American Life. I'd asked her how she ended up living in Grand Saline, a town that did nothing but mine a pile of salt under the ground bigger than Mount Everest, a town where there was so much salt in the air you could lick the buildings and taste it. “Go on," more than one person had told me, “lick our buildings."
I'd asked this girl how she ended up here in Grand Saline, and she looked at me like I was very stupid.
“How did you end up where you live?" she said.
“I don't know," I said. “I guess you just end up somewhere."
She nodded and shrugged and clicked her tongue.
July 2023
The Unintentionalist Signs Off
Last year, around this time, Adam texted me to see if I'd like to start writing a column for his prestigious and tenured magazine, Little Engines. Last month he texted me again to see if I'd like to stop.
It seemed I was about to have written twelve of them. A whole year's worth. There are a lot of ways to really freak yourself out about how quickly a year has gone by. This wasn’t one of them. I felt like I'd been writing these things forever.
“Twelve?" I said. “I've only written twelve?"
“Technically eleven," he said.
The idea for this column was to write about a philosophy I thought I invented called Unintentionalism. In retrospect, I hadn't invented anything. There are a lot of Unintentionalists. Most of them are musicians.
“You can’t control what you make," I heard Chet Faker say on a podcast recently.
“I never want the concept to lead me," I’ve heard Rostam say. “[I want] something not in the brain but maybe close to the central nervous system to lead me."
“I set up situations that involve abandoning control and finding out what happens,” Brian Eno has said.
This kind of thinking goes way back, all the way to Keats. Negative capability, he called it. The ability to accept “uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason."
The way I see it, being an Unintentionalist requires nothing more than a complete lack of knowing where you’re going with any of this—and the balls to not lose your nerve before you get there.
This philosophy is not particularly useful to a columnist, though, a person who needs to approach their work with a certain level of decisiveness and clarity—a person who might benefit from having at least some idea of what they’re trying to say.
Over the past year, as I've written these columns, I've often struggled to come up with things to say. I rarely have much to say. I don't have strong opinions about things. I change my mind all the time and can be talked into or out of almost anything. Also: I'm slow. I'm a slow writer and a slow reader and a slow thinker. I write about a hundred words a day. I read a book every two weeks. It takes me three or four years to decide how I feel about anything. For example, I only recently decided that the last Lorde album was only just okay. Not my favorite.
These are not the traits of a successful or compelling columnist. And so I say now, to the small but dedicated group of readers who have followed this thing for the past year: Sorry about that!
I've written most of these columns from the back patio of my house here in Texas. We have one of those porch swings they sell outside of grocery stores in the summertime. J bought this one a few years ago for $100.
“You spent a hundred dollars on that?” I said.
I've sat on it every day since. I sit out here so much I wore the cushions all the way down to the frame. So we bought some new cushions. Now I've worn those down too.
I write differently when I'm outside. If you were wondering why some of these columns had an outside feel to them, it’s because I wrote them outside. Except for the ones I wrote in Starbucks. Those are the ones with the Starbucks feel.
As long as I'm doing behind the scenes stuff, I'll tell you that most of these have been written at the last minute, frantically, sometimes very late at night. I've usually sent them off to Adam just a few days before they're supposed to go up on the site, along with a note promising to do better the next month. I've never done better the next month. I’ve almost always done worse.
I learned something about myself, though. While this column was supposed to have a bookish angle, to be of interest to a bookish-type person, the truth is I have very little to say about books. Almost nothing. I like books sometimes, but I almost never know why. I’ve learned I don’t want to know why. And I certainly don’t want to have to explain why.
Sometimes I just like the way the pages feel and the way the paragraphs look and the way the cover gets worn out over time. If it's a really good book, I like to pretend I wrote it. I hold it up and think, “Wow, I can't believe I wrote this!"
You'd think I'd have more to say about books, having read a number of them over my life, having majored in them in college, having even written a very small one myself, but I don't. Saying things about books bums me out. It makes me feel dumb. So I just buy them, and read them, and then I go grab another one off the shelf, sometimes with my eyes closed.
It feels good to admit these things. I’ve hated thinking I might be mistaken for a person who has something to say.
I'm writing this last column from the kitchen table at my in-law’s house. It’s Sunday afternoon, July 23rd. My father-in-law is still recovering from the stroke he had on Mother's Day. J comes over here every day to help him practice standing up and swallowing applesauce and counting to ten. I come here on Sundays to eat lunch and play with the dogs and just be around. J says it helps.
I can hear my father-in-law in the other room right now, doing his flashcards. He looks at pictures and tries to remember what they are.
“Carrot?" he says.
“Acrobat?"
“Fire truck?"
“Starfish?"
You spend 73 years learning what all this stupid crap is. Then you have to learn it all over again. Usually he can figure it out, but sometimes he gets stumped and won't remember what a coffee cup is. It's hard to watch somebody not remember what a coffee cup is. Sometimes I get choked up, and I have to walk out of the room because I don’t want him to think he’s doing a bad job.
He’s making progress, though. He’ll probably never be himself again, not really, but what can you do? You can go through the motions is what. You can do the exercises. You can try to accept uncertainties, mysteries, and doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason.
You can say, “That’s a coffee cup, dad… a goddam coffee cup.”