What happens when a megalomaniac crashes into the reality of a 26% approval rating among independents, and a 36% approval rating overall? How does he face the nation in such circumstances?

He dresses himself in the glory of others. He seeks legitimacy by stealing valor, and using authentic heroes as set-pieces in a rigged game. Across the President's shambolic and disgraceful 107 minutes of stage-time, stolen valor was the through-line.

Early on, he hung a medal on the chest of a rescue-worker who displayed conspicuous bravery in the Texas flash-floods of last year - never mind that his own shameful budget-slashing of the NOAA had left Texans without an early-warning detection system for storm surges. He decorated arguments for extorting allies - and surging poorly trained, warrantless thugs into American cities with tactical gear on - by hanging a medal on a fighter pilot who fought in WWII, Korea, and Vietnam. And he fluffed the US Men's hockey team and their standout goalie at nauseating length - no need for medals, as they came wearing them.

In his closing, he had the Congressional Medal of Honor placed on the architect of his Maduro snatch-and-grab, who rode in the lead helicopter and sustained enemy fire and serious injury in the operation. He described the man's blood flowing back and forth down the aisles of his Chinook as he turned the chopper around to keep firing on combatants through his agony.

Then, as if aware that the obvious distance between the failed casino magnate and the valorous man he'd just finished praising had grown too great, he made to bridge it in the clumsiest way possible. He floated making his theft literal.

He began speculating about whether he, a draft-dodging child of ill-gotten privilege, would someday also be awarded our nation's highest military honor.

Like all of his jokes, this one is revealing of the soul-rot at his core. It was played for laughs by the sycophants in front and behind him, but the idea meant enough to him to voice because he understands himself to be incapable of every earning the admiration of the men (all men; women, when acknowledged, were presented as survivors and/or victims of liberal mendacity) he’d spent the night leaning applause-lines for. He can only preen and bask in their glory secondhand, and try to claim authorship for their heroism.

Can only try to speak his glory into existence through theirs.

Whatever comes next - a grab at federalizing the midterms, a flouting of Supreme Court decree, another ICE surge, a War with Iran, or a failed bid at Congressional Medal of Honor ownership - expect more broken decisions, drafted by a broken man, and made policy by some of the worst and most incompetent cabinet-members in our nation’s history.

Expect more valor to be pussy-grabbed.

I’d grown up with cats, and had attended memorials for other cats before Rogelio. But his funeral service was, is, and - barring some extravagant turn of circumstance, will be - the most memorable.

My mom and her sisters had been committed cat-people. This devotion had stayed with them from the Old Country as they came to America with their husbands, and passed down to my brother Anton. It skipped me entirely; I was my father’s son in that respect, and several others. I prefer the bearish solidity and warmth of spirit that dog ownership confers, and as a boy, I was eager to spend time at the home of any friend or acquaintance if a dog or puppy was involved. But it was all cats at home, to my mother and Anton’s mutual delight.

So when Anton called me up with the news about Rogelio’s death at 17, and to convey my niece’s request that I be present at the funeral service to be hosted at their home, I had some sense of what I was in for.

I heard it in the tone of Anton’s voice as he grieved on the phone with me two days after the death, and again in the e-vite. “We request your presence at a service commemorating and celebrating the life and legacy of our dear Rogelio, who recently passed in comfort and at peace with his people.” In neat script, on thick, glossy cardstock embellished with gold-flecked ink.

It was a bit much, even by Anton’s unrepentantly sappy standards.

You might’ve thought Rogelio had been a Secretary of State, from that invite.

***********

I thought about the service some more as I took the 5 to Grand Central.

I concluded that the oddity of a cat funeral, as in the oddity of our continued attachment to the species, lay in the emotional incongruity. The parasocial aspect. I had been around Rogelio enough to conclude that like most cats, he could’ve given a dry dusty fuck about his “people”. He would either raise his eyebrows in pissy aggravation or meow and jump away every time someone tried to engage him without food in their hand. He was diffident, aloof, unpleasant, and only deployed gestures of affection as strategies for obtaining a want.

I’d been around enough cats in my youth to know nice ones. Rogelio was not a nice one.

That didn’t stop Anton and my nieces from worshipping him; first, through a forensic analysis of his habits and actions; subsequently, by buying him any and every little thing they could to keep him stimulated and sated. The cat’s care must’ve been a great source of joy and connection within the family. Certainly, the loss of that tie must’ve been the thing animating their grief now: more so, perhaps, than the animal itself.

No. Had to be.

Because Rogelio - and I really can’t state this enough - was quite the asshole.

***********

Anton and Sherlyn - his second wife, if you counted the annulment - lived in a ranch-style home at the rough end of an otherwise innocuous commuter suburb in Southern Connecticut. It took me about 50 minutes by MetroNorth, and a 12-minute car-ride with Sherlyn, before we were home.

“Anton wanted to pick you up, but Denise wouldn’t let him off the stove. She’s been going at these arrangements like a little quartermaster,” Sherlyn said, chuckling through puffy eyes.

“That’s good, Sher, that’s really good. Denise’s tough, and sending him off right will help the mourning.”

“Poor D. She’s been dev-a-stated,” cried Sherlyn, real tears again, but she checked them carefully and kept her eyes on the road. “She had to ask Annika to read the speech she wrote; said she couldn’t imagine reading it out loud without breaking down.”

I wanted to say, It’ll pass, and she’ll learn from it and grow stronger. But it seemed callous and unnecessary when I played it out in my head.

I settled on a neater expression of sympathy:

“Pain lands hardest on the biggest hearts, yeah?”

“Yeah,” she sniffed. “Yeah.”

***********

Anton and Sherlyn had bought their house assuming it’d be a starter home to help build equity, but three kids and one form of financial setback after another had meant bunk-beds and renovations and continued enrollment in a middling school district, instead of upward social mobility.

But the decor for Rogelio’s service had the same spare-no-expense attitude as its announcement. A closeup of the calico, printed 3’x3’ on glossy posterboard, greeted guests in the living room. One of Denise’s classmates was in a corner, playing a selection from Bach and Mozart’s Requiem on her cello. Annika took catering trays out of the kitchen two at a time as Anton sweated the food prep, and my 8-year-old nephew Brendan ran programs and a coat-check from the guest bedroom. Sherlyn fell immediately into polite-host mode. There were some 30 people spread out over the kitchen and dining area and living room, and some of the other dads in Anton’s circle were out back, nursing Labatt Blue and airing old marital grievances.

It was, in effect, quite the scene.

Even our crepuscular childhood priest, Father Moriarty, was there, dry-coughing and shaking like a linden but as much a presence as ever. I discovered in catching up with him that Denise had campaigned very hard for him to perform Last Rites for Rogelio, and had only been dissuaded after he’d explained to her at length that it would be against the laws of Church and God to do so. He’d promised to read a Seamus Heaney poem, though, and say a few words of his own.

As per the invite’s request, each guest was dressed for mourning.

***********

The family signaled the official start of the service by winding down their respective activities around 3:30pm. Soon, after some shouted reminders between them, all five assembled in front of the TV, in front of the mantle. Anton and Sherlyn flanked the screen as the kids stood in front of it, eyes downcast, solemnity heavy on them without their tasks for distraction. We, the guests, assembled how we could in the space available, pulling up all the chairs and making as much wall-space as possible.

“Well uh, thank you all, first and foremost, for coming out,” said my brother, looking at the back wall and shifting the balance on his legs nervously. He hated public speaking, at any scale, with a passion. “...y’know, uh, I know it might seem like a lot, for a cat, but Rogelio was one of us. And, ahh, it was really important, especially for the girls, that he be remembered as such. Ah --”

Having said all he needed to, and much sooner than he’d expected, he shuffled about a bit more without meeting anyone’s gaze, then tossed to Sherlyn. “You ready, hun?”

Sherlyn did it with more poise, at first.

“I’d like to start with a memory. I remember when we picked Rogelio up for the first time. This was about four years before Denise, when we were together but not married yet. A family in Sharon had found an abandoned litter, and posted online that they were available to any good homes who were interested. I sent them some photos of our space and plans for setting it up for an adoption, and they said they’d be happy to give him to us.”

Here she stopped, sniffed, gathered herself, went on.

“That rental we had back then wasn’t much. But Rogelio was a great ratter. Our neighbors a few doors down had this whole infestation, and it never spread to our place because we had our little tiger at the door.”

And now she openly wept, and had to find her breath to finish between the tears.

“He always protected us - he, he kept us safe - I’ll always love him for th -”

Anton led her gently to a recliner, and found a box of tissues near at hand to place next to her as her sobs got too thick to speak through. He then turned his head and nodded gently to Denise’s classmate, who proceeded to perform a correct, if somewhat studied, rendition of “My Heart Will Go On” on her cello. More tears, from all five of the family members.

Brendan went next. His reading was a letter, addressed to Rogelio in the hope that he was listening in from Heaven. It was grammatically iffy, and deeply pure in feeling: the grief was pouring out from the family into the audience now, riding on Brendan’s words, and there was much crinkling of tissue packs as the guests dove into their pockets, looking for something to stanch the flow of the grief flooding their eyes.

And the mood only deepened with the next program element: a slideshow of some 30 photos of Rogelio, set over a black background with lap dissolves, as a solo-violin recording of “Nearer My God to Thee” played underneath. Denise must’ve taken inspiration from the In Memoriam segments of the major award shows, and a recent family viewing of Titanic; she took care, too, in the sequence of the photos. The final image, which faded out slowly in time with the final sustained note of the score, was a black-and-white of Rogelio, as a kitten, nestled in the cupped palms of Anton and Sherlyn.

Father Moriarty saved us. Dabbing his eyes and clearing his throat, he began with a little scripture about Nature, and the sweetness of the bond between shepherd and sheep.

Then, he said, “I thought about this poem when I thought about Rogelio. It’s one of my favorites, because it’s about how beautiful shared time is - even mundane time, even boring and ordinary time - when it’s shared with someone you truly love. And because Rogelio was the sort of animal where just sharing in his life was enough.”

Then he recited this beautiful little piece - mostly from memory, glancing down at his paper only a few times. It was Heaney’s “When all the others were away at Mass” - a memory-poem in which he recalls peeling potatoes with his wife in their younger days. As a priest sits praying fervently by her deathbed, Seamus is pulled deeper into the memory: “Little pleasant splashes / From each other’s work would bring us to our senses” went one golden line that stuck.

I remembered the ending vividly, too: “Her breath in mine, our fluent dipping knives / Never closer, the whole rest of our lives.”

Having said his piece, the Father clasped his hands and bowed as the assembled guests gave a soft round of applause.

The recitation lifted the weight of our collective grief up a bit; made it a thing more beautiful than burdensome.

Which was just as well, because there was one more trial our hearts would have to stand: Denise’s letter, as read by Annika.

***********

My 10-year-old niece stepped to the front of the TV, where the speakers before her had begun. Annika’s little hands trembled, but clutched down hard on her paper.

I never heard the letter, because Denise suddenly bolted upright and out the living room, missing her mom’s hand as she went to grab her wrist and running down the basement stairs to her bedroom.

“Pasha, would you -?” said Anton, his eyes pleading and frantic at the sight of his daughter in pain.

I nodded, and gave pursuit, careful to walk slowly and not rush, and further add anxiety to the newly tense room.

“It’s alright, everyone,” I heard Sherlyn reassuring the mourners as I took the stairs at a quick clip and made towards Denise’s room. “She just needs a minute, her uncle will keep an eye on her...”

***********

Denise’s pain was in a different register to her family’s; that much was clear before I’d said two sentences. It was thick, feral, and pubescent - essentially irrational, and deeply dangerous. Denise was a few months past 12 and six months from 7th grade, and the dense hormonal swamp-world of private hell that all girls her age swam in had cracked open, into full view, as she’d rushed out of the room.

Had I been a member of her immediate household, I’ve no doubt she would’ve screamed me out of the doorway before I came in. But the greater degree of distance between us meant she couldn’t check me as easily when I asked if I could come sit with her, and have a word.

She nodded, sullen and fuming, sitting with her head facing down at the edge of her bed.

I sat carefully at her small desk chair, careful not to give the delicate wooden back too much of my weight.

“I’m not going to make you talk about your feelings, or about Rogelio.”

That seemed to unclench her sorrow-rage a bit more, but she didn’t look up or move.

“I just want to remind you that you’re not alone, and that you can lean on your family.”

“You don’t know how I feel. Or my family.”

“I do, better than you think. You feel things like your Dad and I do, like the Russian in us does. Don’t act like we’re not blood. Don’t act like you’re the first to have lost someone.”

I kept my voice low and warm and a little close to pleading as I challenged her; that kept her thinking, and away from more aggressive countermeasures.

Her head hadn’t moved yet, but she was fidgeting with her hands and ankles now.

“It’s honestly a little bit funny,” she said at last, her anger ebbing out. “I never thought I would feel this strongly about him dying. I guess he always was kind of a nasty guy.”

Denise laughed then, in spite of herself and the situation; a little one that caught on the grief in the back of her throat, but still came out anyway.

“He had his moments, though. I remember once last Spring, I had the worst day at school. And I came home and sat by the window and put on one of dad’s Duster albums, and he just came up to me and held his head on my lap and he wouldn’t move it, y’know? No matter how much I cried, how hard I shook.

“And I remember thinking how much that meant.”

It seemed like there was more she had to say, but couldn’t organize it how she wanted. She started to say something else, a couple times, and I nodded to show I was listening; that I wouldn’t judge.

But the words didn’t come.

I didn’t press her for them.

I had a few more of my own come to mind as we sat there, so I gave them to her, after what I hoped was a respectful silence: some reassurances, some reminders, some part of my perspective on loss. She smiled kindly, said thank you.

I closed the door not knowing if one bit of what I’d said had touched her.

At least, I told myself, taking the stairs two at a time, she’d remember that I’d tried.

Maybe that could let her believe other people might try, too.

Maybe that belief could keep her safe from despair.

**********

About 15 minutes after we spoke, Denise rejoined Rogelio’s reception. The guests had returned to the beer and wine and party-food, and Denise’s classmate was back on her cello.

Denise didn’t say anything; just smiled across the room at me, with puffy eyes.

And she thanked the people who approached her to compliment her letter.

~2.16.26.

Previously:

Part Four:

I had one of those drives home where you pull into the driveway, and can’t remember a single moment of the drive you just had. The miles passed in trance, hands and eyes driving with mind fully elsewhere. It was just past 1:00 am when we got home.

Sandra stumbled immediately back upstairs and shut her door. But I had to get my head right before I could join her in sleep.

I bullet-pointed out a letter to Ma and Da. I intended it to be the plan of a letter rather than the letter itself, but once I reread it, I found I’d already done a pretty good job explaining the pertinent aspects of the situation. So instead of redrafting, I appended a couple paragraphs underneath - which got a little more sentimental, and which heavily emphasized my need to come to terms with this in my own way, in my own time, without their first going to the press or the Church or the police or anyone but Barb about this.

Then I left Barb’s business card - which she’d given me as we’d left, with her personal cell number on the back - and screenshot her information in a secure folder on my phone’s cloud.

Finally, I sent Sandra a photo of my hands I’d taken before rewrapping them, with instructions to show Ma and Da as proof once they’d read my letter.

That’s that.

I satcheled nearly two grand in cash: the remaining hoard from tips earned last summer while cater-waiting weddings on Cheroux Island. I’d have to be careful with accommodations. Grabbing sleep on the roadside wouldn’t be an option in midwinter, and I wasn’t prepared to ask Da or Ma to bite into their savings on my behalf - not with everyone already pinched after the holiday, and with Gail and Teddy’s birthdays coming up in January.

Then I grabbed a sheet of letterhead from Da’s study, and typed and printed a brief letter stating I was an unaccompanied minor, traveling cross-country to visit an ill relative by car due to a flight phobia. I gave a swirl over the page with his heaviest ballpoint, in passable imitation of his signature, then shook the paper out to dry.

So far, so good. Hopefully the hotels would take it. I had to hope that if a hotel did call Da to verify my check-in, he would play along.

But that was out of my power. I was not above punching a hotel clerk in the nuts and running like hell, if it came to that.

My prep was incomplete, but having these essential tasks done let my mind unclench long enough to bring on sleep. As soon as I’d checked on the bandages I’d reapplied at Barb’s, and was confident they wouldn’t come loose in the night, my head hit the pillow.

It didn’t come up again until full noontime sunlight was streaming through both windows into my bedroom.

***********

Both Ma and Da were back at work for the holidays. Unbeknownst to me, Teddy and Gail had been chaperoned to a classmate’s birthday party at a bowling alley in Deacon Hills by Sandra. Mom’s new cleaners had been scheduled to do the house, but had needed to reschedule to Monday after another of their jobs ran long.

My last thoughts before bed last night were of how I would get away and on the road unnoticed. But I awoke to an empty home instead.

Of all the strange-ass events to befall me in the past 28 hours, sneaking out of my own hallway and leaving a note on the kitchen table felt as strange as any of it. And the saddest part of it all.

But I couldn’t do much about that, other than wick the tears out of the corners of my eyes instead of blotting at them, so that my eyes didn’t get red and puffy before the drive.

Then I threw together a new Kleenex pack with my belongings, and shouldered my bags out to the Oldsmobile. I sent up a prayer, a real live one, that its tires and transmission would see me through the days ahead.

Then I geared the car into drive, and set out. My hands still tingled hot against the steering wheel’s faux leather.

***********

The first part of the drive was the worst. I didn’t stop for over three hours; not until I was clear down into Western Mass. I gassed up and made a call, using a disposable cell-phone bought at the station.

Barb picked up as the first ring stopped ringing.

“Artie, that you?”

“Yeah, on a burner.”

“OK. I’m guessing you’ll want to call your family too, but throw it out after you do that.”

“Sure.”

“How are you?”

I made several noises in my mouth trying to begin the sentence; they conveyed the chaos of my mindset quite clearly.

“Hey, I understand, hey - I can’t imagine how this is for you. I woke up this morning on almost no sleep, and it wasn’t until I saw the blanket on the chair bunched up like Sandra left it before I could accept that last night actually happened. So I can’t even imagine how confused and out-of-sorts you must feel.”

“It’s not really confusion,” I cut in. “I like your plan, I think it’s clear and solid, and I’ll follow it.

“Why I had to be chosen for this mess is another matter, right, of course that’s confusing.”

I paused; she let me go on.

“It’s just too much time alone on the road, with my thoughts.”

“Do audiobooks on your other phone if you can. Whatever subject interests you; or a book.”

“That’s good.”

“I don’t know your politics, but I like NPR. Try it out if you don’t have cell service. You can find it near the bottom of the dial in most regions.”

“Alright, thank you.”

“Did you tell your parents?”

“A letter.” It sounded lame when I said it, so I continued: “I felt it was a better way to organize my thoughts than in-person.”

“No, that’s good. I’m sure you did it right.”

“I saved your info, then left them your card.”

“Thank you for doing that. Call me back if you need me, always, on whatever phone you have. I’ll pick up any number that rings. And I’ll reach out to Sandra and Darien once I hear back from my colleague. I was discreet in the email,” she assured me.

“Good, thanks, was just about to ask.”

“And take care, Artie,” she said.

I could hear her smile through the phone; she did her best to give me some warm notion to hold onto, on those frigid Massachusetts backroads.

“I believe this gift will be a providence, and a blessing for both you and our world. We’ll confirm that for you soon enough.”

I smiled too, in spite of my situation.

“Thanks, Barb. You’re a baddie.”

She laughed, a loud and uninhibited hoot, at the slang.

“Take care, Artie!” she exhorted a final time. “Watch out for ice and little deers!”

“Most definitely.”

***********

I called Sandra before throwing the phone away.

“Hi Artie! Great to hear from you!”

There were no bowling pins falling in the distance, but from what I could tell, the kids’ party was still full-swing. Gail and Teddy were 10 and 12, respectively, and had the same two-year age gap separating them that Sandra and I had; they had even more twin-type chemistry, if anything.

“Hiya Artie!” “Sup bro?” Their voices joined Sandra’s, pitched high above the background tumult.

“Hi kids, howya doin’?”

“Great!” “Alright.”

“You being good to your big sister?”

“Definitely!” “Yah, mostly.”

“Alright. I’m gonna have to go on a trip, might not see you ‘til the start of school. Sandy’s gonna have to go visit a friend of mine for a while, too. Ma and Da will explain later, but you just have fun with her now and be good to her, y’hear?”

“I love you, bro, be safe!” “Yah no problem, talk soon dude!!”

And then a shuffling sound as Sandra took the phone back, and their yells as they rejoined the party.

“I just got in touch with Barb, she said she’d call you when her person got back to her.” Sandra must’ve known all the word person omitted.

“OK.” She was working hard to keep the nerves out her voice.

“It’s not gonna be an exorcism, Sandy, nothing like that.” Though I had no clue, in fact, that would be the case, it felt like what I should say. “It’ll just be like a check-up, probably. Like getting your teeth cleaned.”

“Yah, a checkup.” She sounded a little less tight, at any rate.

“I love you Sis, and I’ll stay in touch. Don’t text my phone for now, but I’ll call when I can.”

“Stay safe, Artie. We love you and miss you, and it won’t be long now before this’s behind us.”

I needed to hear that: not just from Barb, but from Sandra. More so than I knew before hearing it. The comment almost brought on the waterworks for both of us.

But we said our goodbyes and hung up before we let ourselves get too far past the sniffling phase.

***********

I texted Darien.

“Yoh hope u good man. U will kno more soon, just wanna say, hope u r doing ok, and that I luv u. Dawg. Doggy. Bro. Broseph Stalin. Bruvva frumma nuvva muvva. You a g. Stay classy hombre.”

Then I crushed the SIM, and kept the phone.

***********

Three days and nights in the car passed faster than they should’ve.

I tried Barb’s audiobook recommendation, but found the voices too lulling at night. I passed the time and the long, empty miles with them during the day instead, staying wired and dehydrated on instant gas-station coffee to avoid collapse.

Keep your foot steady, and keep it between the lines. My Ma’s words; she was better suited, patience-wise, to driving instruction than Da.

I kept them both in my head and heart as I pushed past the mile markers. Many other of their words and memories came to mind as well.

I had wild, stray notions. Maybe I can stop the war in Ukraine if I lay hands on Putin, and fix what’s wrong with that fucker for good. Shit like that.

And daydreams, too, some of which took on specific, plan-like contours the longer I thought on them. Daydreams of who I’d help, and how; whether covertly or publicly, and how healing might look different in each case.

It was a lot to sort through, mentally. I made a ritual of recording the daydreams each night, at least a couple pages or so in my journal before going to bed.

The family memories I recorded in a different way, on my own time.

***********

The letter from my Da passed as legitimate, and the card cleared; no hotel-clerk drama. No one cared about my age, and I had no trouble with hotels on any of those first three nights I needed them. Trouble with hoteliers would come later.

Most people just need one “fact” to confirm a belief - then, they just get up, and get on with their life.

Not in my situation.

***********

I came upon the Oregon coast as one should: on a cold, clear new-year morning. The sun had traveled at my back across America to join me in New Harbor, and it lit up the spans of the Yaquonset Bridge with golden light as I crossed the harbor’s mouth and made my way to a small public-access beach to park the car.

The Oldsmobile made a small hiss - in gratitude, I assume - as the ignition cut off. I’d rode her hard and put her up wet.

Whatever the coin says, I should try and arrange a service appointment before leaving New Harbor. I’d had a long, tearful talk with Da after he’d found the note, and he’d insisted I use the credit card I’d taken for emergencies for whatever I needed. Well, this would seem to be worth the debt.

Whether it was to be Mexico or Alaska for me, a good-working vehicle would be indispensable.

Thankfully, the Aurora would probably look unobtrusively shitty, in either place.

***********

I was alone still, looking out at the ships, as I finally left the car and walked out to the coastline.

When I’d gone as close to the water’s edge as I could while ensuring that my feet stayed dry, I fumbled the coin out of my pocket.

I balanced it on my thumb.

I said another prayer, but that one’s between me and the coin.

It spun slowly in the air, catching the light as it turned.

Its miracles still to perform.

~12.30.25.

Previously:

Part Three:

It was to my great surprise that though she lived and taught in New Wyckham, Barb Showalter was not of there. Her house was a small ranch-style rental near the Holy Cross campus, tucked catty-corner between two larger lots at the end of a cul-de-sac. She greeted us with sincere warmth at the door, though we were absolute strangers to her, and she invited us in for a non-caff tea before we could even finish explaining our purpose.

Barb kept her chestnut hair bobbed in neat, natural-looking curls. Her eyes were warm, brown, direct. The contours of her face were round, and connoted friendliness, but her mouth had the same hard fixity as her gaze when serious thought was called for. However she came by her academic credentials, it hadn’t been through family money: she presented herself with the humility and modesty and care befitting a woman of faith, but inaccessible to the rich.

Barb gave us seats in her living room, next to a small wood-burning fire in the corner. Sandra, worn out from the day’s stressors and seated closest to the fire’s warmth, settled deep into the cushions. She explained what it was like feeling the hand on her that morning, but was soon having trouble interjecting points into the conversation; then, her eyes grew heavy, and pretty soon even tracking the talk seemed to be too much.

At one pause in my exposition, Barb gestured at the thick wool blanket lying flat on the chair-back; I tossed it to Sandra, who took it as her cue. She was soon curled up and out cold.

“She loves you a great deal,” said Barb softly, as I snugged the blanket under Sandy’s chin.

“We came up close,” I replied, eyes on my sister until she was done stirring.

“Well,” said Barb at length, “I think you’ve shown a lot of sound judgment, to make it this far. I see why she trusts you.”

I suddenly felt tears welling behind my eyelids, and had to do a brush-and-cough across my face to swipe them out of sight. I didn’t feel brave, or smart, or worthy of anything much, so I reined back the tears and found a spot on the floor to look at, waiting for Barb to continue.

She did, once we were sure that Sandra was undisturbed.

“I think, Arthur, if you’re ready, I’d like to see what we’re working with here.”

“I told you, I don’t wann-”

“I’m not talking about you laying them on me. Frankly I don’t know if I’d be up for that either. No, I do just mean see them.”

I realized I hadn’t looked carefully at them for several hours myself, and suddenly, her curiosity became mine.

I quickly pawed off the bandages, and placed my palms up, flat against my thighs.

Barb gasped; my own stomach did a corresponding flop at the sight.

When I had looked that morning, my palms glowed a soft yellow-and-orange - emanating from a deeper-hued glowing center of those colors. What I saw now seemed more powerful, and more complex. The glowing center of each palm was now a deep indigo. If you bent your head close, webs of blue-hot flame, wreathed and woven and compressed together into a small sphere through fusion at the center of each hand, were visible just under the skin. In the low light of Barb Showalter’s living-room, the glow off the hands was now hard white and searchlight-full: gone was the soft-hazy nursery glow they’d emitted when I woke.

“Well, that does look different.”

“How?” asked Barb. I explained.

“Your gift is growing stronger, then.”

“I haven’t noticed a change in the tingling all day, though. Not really.”

“But your body’s adjusting in real-time. So if the power was stable, I’m guessing you’d notice a diminution to the effect. Instead, you’re perceiving no change to it, which means that there’s an increase happening, in time with your body’s capacity to adjust.”

“I think I follow.”

“Let’s get to that difference in reaction that you mentioned, between Sandra and Darien. How much time passed between them?”

“I’d say about four hours.”

“And you covered up your hands with the bandages after the rink, before dinner at your parents. And didn’t see them again until just now.”

“That’s right.”

Barb Showalter breathed, sighed, leaned back, and gathered her thoughts before presenting them.

“Here’s what I think, kiddo.

“I think you’ve been gifted the miracle of Divine Touch. I believe when the day began, the gift was new, not fully formed. Sandra didn’t even notice the glow at first, you said; she felt more soothed than anything. Darien had a stronger reaction - a visionary event; or, more accurately, the outline of one, as per the description he gave you. And he had a stronger physical change. Since your hands were on each for about the same duration, we know that exposure time alone can’t account for the change to them.

“My guess, based on its progression, is that the gift could progress up to the point of healing prefrontal cortex damage and latent cerebral trauma, and rewire corroded neural circuitry. In essence, you could heal a person’s soul, body, and mind.”

My head began to swim as I felt the blood swoon out of it. I narrowly avoided fainting.

Once again, Barb was either too preoccupied or too polite to take note of a moment of weakness. She took a deep breath, and continued.

“But I don’t think your fear about devilry hidden inside this miracle can be discounted, either. Biblical text and canonical writings are rife with accounts of Satan’s mastery in imitating divine works, and, concordantly, corrupting God’s servants through such falsity.

“So here’s the best plan, as I see it. You get in your car, and drive West until you run out of America. Then flip a coin on Mexico or Alaska and drive north or south, keeping your hands covered all the while. Once you’re alone and in a place of safety, call me with the address. Darien and Sandra and I will arrange to stay here during the holiday: that way, they can spend the next five or six days here with me, under observation, until we hear from you. They’re not back in-term until the 6th I’d bet, just like Holy Cross?” I nodded. “So we have next week as well. I have a colleague in the Church who’s discreet, and who’ll check them for signs of cursing or possession while you’re gone.

“Good so far?”

No objections; I nodded.

“Once we know you and they are alright, we can make plans for getting you back here, and going public - if that’s what you want to do.”

“Alright. And my parents?”

Barb breathed deeply. “Arthur, I know it’s not what you want to hear, and I know you fear they’ll disclose it before we’re ready, but I don’t see another choice. I think we have to show your parents your hands, and bring them in on this. There’ll be too much deception involved otherwise.”

“...I suppose.”

“Where do they think you are now?” she asked.

“At a party. We’re out of school tomorrow still, for the holiday.”

“Alright. Think about what you’ll tell them. And be good to your sister.”

Barb sighed, stretched, and looked at the mantel clock.

“You should leave now, before last call, and the drunks get out on the roads.”

And she moved to gently roust Sandra from her armchair.

If there are angels on Earth among us, they’d move across that room as she did.

The Finale:

Start here:

Part Two:

“Ma, Artie and I are going over to the Schoens’ house for a bit.”

“It’s almost nine, why?”

“Party for Derrick’s new promotion.” Like any practiced liar, Sandra kept ours as close to the truth as possible: we had an invite, and would at least drop by the Schoen house to lend credence to the alibi. “Plus he has some old blocker pads we think he’ll lend Artie.”

“Ah, OK!” Ma replied, excited that I’d obtained use of free athletic gear. “Drive safe, stay on the main roads, and stay over if ya drink!”

The cold bit down on my hands as I fumbled with the key in the ignition. My ‘03 Oldsmobile Aurora balked, gasped to life in the dry-frigid night, then caught onto a steady idle. We maxed out the defrost to get vis through the windshield as fast as possible.

“So what’s your latest thinking on the hands?” she asked, once we had it on Highway 12.

“I dunno. WebMD’s been beyond useless. Darien doesn’t have any bright ideas, beyond helping me cover it up and making me stress about it being a secret curse. If I turn myself into the government, I might spend the rest of my life as a lab-rat. If I go to Ma or Da, they’ll go to the Church, and I’ll be anointed a prophet or savior or some shit. So I’m fucked, basically.”

“Well, yah,” she said slowly, “but what if y’are one?”

“Get outta here with that shit.”

“No, seriously. I’m not saying you’re a holy man, but you’ve clearly received a miracle, right? People gotta know somehow. To have an ability like that, and to hide it out of fear - it’d be like you’re denying a gift. Like turning your back on God.”

“Well, I’ve thought about this a good deal,” I said, after a time. “And without knowing who gave me the hot hands or why, I don’t think I should use them.”

“Oh, come on,” she said. “It’s a healing power, Artie! I’ve felt it! You’d know there’s no evil in it if -”

“The greatest trick the Devil ever played was convincing the world he didn’t exist.”

“So what you’re sa -”

“I’m saying I don’t have a damn clue what’ll happen to you or D because of what I did, and that terrifies me.”

The statement hung between us, frozen.

“If I can use the hot hands to help people, and there’s no complications, fine. I’ll find a way to do that the rest of my life, or as long as I have them. But I gotta know I’m not gonna harm anyone long-term.”

What little heat the car could generate was still pushing up against the windshield, defrosting the glass and keeping the way forward visible.

“Well, OK,” she said. “OK. What if he and I went in for full physicals? Order up every last test our parents’ insurance will let us. Would that give you peace of mind?”

“It’d be a start.”

“OK. And how d’you wanna come out with it?”

“I think we need help with that from a religion scholar. Someone who knows something about the paranormal and has a medical background. We need someone who doesn’t have a profit motive in helping us.”

“An academic can see dollar signs as well as anyone,” Sandra pointed out.

“But they’d have a professional interest in making sure we were treated fairly. Maybe.”

“Maybe,” she said, lingering on each syllable as she thought through the angles.

“May-be.”

***********

We talked through our academic some more, and thought that the nearby Catholic boys’ college, Holy Cross, might have someone on staff worth searching up.

It was our best option, as we reasoned. Holy Cross kids came from downstate money, or the Greater Boston area; they wouldn’t know us from Adam, unlike the priests and deacons in our parish. Sandra thumbed through her busted iPhone, somehow making out text on her twice-shattered screen as I wheeled the Oldsmobile towards the Schoens’ house.

“Here’s somebody. Barb Showalter. Teaches Organic Chemistry and Theories of Divinity. Says here she graduated from Tufts with MAs in Psych and Biochem, and has an MDiv from Boston University.”

“Alright. There a picture? Contact info?”

“Just a school email, but I bet I can find a staff directory photo or something.”

“See if you can get her syllabus online. Something with her office hours or phone number on it.” She nodded.

We lapsed into silence as Sandra tapped away for the rest of the drive. She was still typing and tapping when the car ground to a halt.

“Any luck yet?”

“No, but I’m not done.” She exhaled. “Guess we’d better see Derrick now.”

***********

Derrick Schoen did in fact have some blocker pads he was willing to loan out, provided we brought a rack of Natty to his house-party. He’d fucked up his leg in a slip-and-fall at a kegger down at Boone’s Hollow; serve him right for partying in such a methed-out place, and bad luck for his Spring League participation. At least he’d parlayed misfortune into some beer.

His mom and Ma were old friends through a previous job, and we were close enough in age that we were friends by both circumstance and family. In early adulthood, however, we found ourselves playing out different character arcs. Our moms never fell out, but they too were less close. Still, we remained close enough to have heard about the party.

“Artie, wus’good my man.” Derrick raised his chin in greeting as he saw Sandy and I at his front door with the Natty rack.

“Wus’good, Schwifty.”

“You gonna get those pads and head, you said?”

“Yeah, Dad has me on curfew for Spring League.”

“Guy’s a hardass. Alright I gotchu then, they’re upstairs, les’ go.”

He had a 40 of malt liquor in one hand, and kept a roach going in and out of his mouth as he picked a line through the crowds in his home, unbothered by the smell and the noise the crush of people made.

We got the pads, and got back out into the hard-quiet of the night without saying hellos or goodbyes.

“Wish I could stay,” I said, and meant it. Joanne Turner was there with Sophia Jessup; I’d have happily hooked up with both or either of them. They liked to drink and get wild, and had a history of hooking up at parties.

“Another time, brother. You get your body right for the season. Go all-out for us gimps.”

Derrick wrapped me in a bear-hug, thick with liquor, reefer, and regret. Sandra hugged him goodbye as well, then we backed the Oldsmobile quickly back down the lane, careful not to lose traction on the ice by the mailbox.

***********

“So where are we with Barb?”

“I’m almost to an address, I think,” Sandra replied, hunched over the glow of her screen.

“Alright. About 15 minutes to campus.”

Holy Cross was in New Wyckham: a postcard hamlet which served as a ski-resort town in winter and a stayaway-camp destination in the summer. Its downtown was restyled with cloying quaintness some 30 years ago, in cut-cost 20th-century imitation of a Olde New England Village. It had enough louvered shutters and windowbox tulips and gazeboed-town-square curb appeal to help downstate money feel comfortable vacationing in the provinces.

Townies like me and Darien and Sandra were raised on an intense hatred of New Wyckham people. I could only think of a handful of occasions I’d had to visit New Wyckham as an adult, ever since they opened the indoor-outdoor winter sports complex in Stedley, despite the fact it was only three towns over.

Yet this foreign social stratum was the best hope my hands held.

“Alright, I think I got it. Try 78 Pine Street,” Sandra said at last.

I plugged it into the nav at the next stoplight.

***********

The Teslas and Range Rovers and Benz E-Classes kept metastasizing as I got closer to Showalter’s, along with the front yard square-footage of the properties. I liked my Aurora just fine, but it felt conspicuously shitboxy underneath my tingling palms as I wheeled us into the city limits.

I felt the weight of class judgment grow heavier at the sight of these status-totems.

More accurately, I sensed in them the contempt the powerful of this world would treat me with if they thought there was profit in my hands.

I would not be a person of equal personhood, in their eyes, in that scenario: I would be a shithead kid from a dirtbag town; to be exploited, not honored.

And I was certain I’d be treated as such in all matters, miraculous and non-miraculous alike.

Next up:

I felt a strong tingle pulsing hot out of both palms as I rose on the last Thursday of the year, two days past Christmas. It probably began at night somehow, but I only noticed it upon waking up.

Being the recipient of a half-assed miracle was only the latest aggravation to befall my acnified 17-year-old posterior. I won’t get into the others. I’m sure your time is money, like everyone else’s. Suffice to say I didn’t welcome it.

How to explain the sensation? It came on a bit like the pins-and-needles feeling, but warmer. There was an accompanying yellow-orange glow emanating softly from the center of each hand. It wouldn’t subside; it could only be concealed.

What I found out, wholly by accident, is that I could heal and soothe a person through these newly tinglized hands. Not cancers or anything! Not big chronic conditions or, y’know, decapitations. Nothing like that. But colds, flus, and overstressed nervous systems hated to see me comin’.

Anyhow, as you might expect, this turn of events has complicated my life no end. I’ll tell it now; see what you make of it.

We’ll start with Darien and the gloves.

***********

“This some King Midas cursed-gift shit?” Darien asked at last, knocking Cheezos dust off his fingers absentmindedly. “Like, ‘careful what you wish for’?”

He couldn’t take his eyes off the glow-tingle center of my palms.

“Could be,” I admitted. “I thought I might lose my own life-force in the process, too. But no cost to me, far as I can tell.”

Darien went back into thought for a long time as his hand went back into and out of the Cheezos bag of its own accord, his mind fully on my unique predicament - not even tasting the X-treme Cheddar Facemelt™ advertised in neon lettering on the bag.

Finally, like a good Cheezos food scientist, he started asking some pertinent questions.

“Do you notice the tingle consistent throughout the day, like the glow, or does it ebb and flow?”

“Consistently constant.”

“Does it work the same for everyone?”

“Don’t know. I just tried it on Sandra.” My younger sister.

“How’d that go?”

“She was feeling hot this morning, so I put my hand on her forehead to check her temp. I’d noticed the hot hands, but had no idea what they’d do. All of a sudden, she was like ‘No wait, just leave your hand there a sec.’ So I did, then the tingle got stronger, then after like a minute of that she said ‘OK’ and I took my hand off, and she was totally at ease. No symptoms.”

“She tell anyone?”

“I swore her to secrecy.”

“Can you trust her?”

“She knows that I know that her and Brian are on third base now. I have some leverage with Mom and Dad.”

“Well, ‘s somethin’ anyway.”

He finished off the Cheezos bag, shaking the remaining flavor-dust into his mouth before crimping up the bag and tossing it. “I guess you’ll need to try it on me too.”

I thought of an immediate problem. “Sandra was sick; you’re not. What if the tingle’s got a reverse effect on healthy people?”

“Can’t know unless we try.”

“Yeah, but -” This was reckless, even for Darien. “ -shouldn’t it be someone else? A rando?”

“What rando’s gonna let you come up to them and start touchin’ up their forehead? Nah bruh, you need a tester you trust.”

Can’t argue that point.

“Alright then. How you wanna do it?”

“Do it just like you did with her to start. Hand on the forehead, or whatever.”

“Fine,” I assented, no better option available.

Slowly, so damn slowly, taming my nerves with immense effort, I put the palm of my hand flush on his forehead. He closed his eyes.

Just as it had with Sandra, the tingle in my hand started to intensify with the heat of his skin. The warm-buzzy feeling radiated out from the center of my palm, into his forehead and skin. I felt his worry-lines relax, his breathing and heart rate slow perceptibly.

But there was a twist; something that hadn’t happened with Sandra.

About 30 seconds in, I felt his eyes rolling around in their sockets, as if in REM sleep. I was put in mind of the bump and bounce of the load bar on a computer download. But I didn’t know who the sender was - or why they had chosen my hand, of all hands, to work through.

After about another 30 seconds, I lifted my palm up off of him. He snapped out of it, roughly. His eyes were unfocused, his manner thoroughly discomposed.

“What happened?! Where’d you go?” I asked.

“Whaddaya mean?”

“Your eyes rolled back in your head, like you were an exorcism or some shit.”

“I didn’t go anywhere. I was surrounded by warm yellow light; couldn’t see anything, just the light. There was this mellow mood I felt too, like that feeling of solving a hard problem on your own and being content with it. Then you took your hand off and the light went away and I was back here.”

“Sandra didn’t see any of that.”

“Bully for Sandra.” He blew the air from his nose impatiently.

“How do you feel physically?”

“Fine, I guess,” he said, as he shook out his limbs. “No, y’know, pretty damn good actually. I had a rash along my crack all morning, but it’s better now.”

“Y’know, I bet that’s what this power was made for, Darien. Your funky ass-crack.”

The words power and made stopped our conversation cold. Who - What? - had given me the hot hands?

To what end?

***********

Darien and I live in Passamassett, Maine. It’s a flat musky armpit of a town near the state’s center, tipping towards obsolescence but for a Warsaw Springwater packaging facility on its outskirts, and a railyard ferrying grain north and south through its middle. There’s a couple hotels that busy up for leaf season, some public access roads you can beel around on when the snow’s deep enough in winter. That’s about the sum of it.

You could sit down with a team of theologians and sociologists and cartographers and map out the Least Likely Place in America for a Miracle/Curse to Occur, and Passamassett might top the list.

And, given how little transpired here on the daily, rumors and stray gossip ran through the French-Catholic townships of the county like wildfire. It seemed inevitable that word of my hot hands would get out, and that public opinion would hem in our available options soon.

But perhaps, we reasoned, some gloves could buy us time.

I took off the brown wool overcoat my aunt had cut and sewn for me last Christmas, and arranged it in a drape over my right hand. I kept the hand cocked in a fist, in case a self-defense scenario transpired. I shoved my left hand as far as it’d go inside my khakis’ pocket without busting out the seam.

Then we entered the Cumby’s with studied nonchalance, and cast our eyes about the non-food aisles to see where gloves might be.

This Cumberland Farms had to stock gloves. Had to. For one thing, it was more than an auto-service center. It had one of those retail gift areas selling licensed Maine products, like ceramic lighthouses and lobster bibs and clothing silkscreened with lakes and loons and deer. They had an aisle for OTC medicine and toiletries, an aisle for car parts and fluids.

There.

In the back, next to the orange hunting vests and parkas.

I gestured with my head, and Darien walked with me to the gloves. As planned, he picked them up for me, so my hands stayed concealed. Then he took them up to the register. They were canvas work gloves, better for gardening than hunting, with a palm laminated in plastic that wouldn’t let the glow through.

“Get a couple Semteks, so we don’t draw suspicion,” I advised in a low voice as we walked to the register.

“Good thinkin’,” he replied, fishing two yellow tallboys of energy drink from the cooler by the register.

“You boys havin’ a good day?” asked the clerk.

“Yessir,” replied Darien, doing the talking as planned. “Thought we might play some pickup at the rink once free-skate’s over.” Part of our cover.

“Good for you boys.” He winked broadly. “No cross-checking, y’hear?”

We were careful to take the gloves behind the store before I put them on, ensuring we were out of frame of any store security cams. Then we strode down the rink, and worked on wrist shots on the practice ice while we waited for the post-free-skate zamboni.

***********

“Artie, whya wearin’ gloves to the table?” Da asked, looking down at my hands.

I avoided Sandra’s eyes on the other side of the table, and launched my lie:

“Thought I’d go out for Spring League hockey in a few weeks.” There was a small eight-team league organized by a network of New England indoor rinks that ran each Spring; the lie had been carefully chosen to appeal to Ma and Da, who were always looking to encourage team sports. “Darien and I were doing stick-work all afternoon, now I’ve got blisters comin’ in like a bitch all on my palms.”

“Language,” admonished Ma over her shoulder, trying to whip the boxed potatoes on the stove into a texture less like epoxy. “Well, I think that could be a very positive development for you, Artie, if you make the team.”

“Darien’s ma gave me some ointment, then wrapped and covered ‘em up.” We’d committed to this part of the lie too, slathering on enough mint-and-eucalyptus ointment to generate a cloud of vapor around my hands after finishing up at the rink, then wrapping them in several layers of gauze to make sure no light leaked out. The cool of the ointment didn’t diminish the tingle-glow coming from each palm’s center; the hot and cold sensations crossed streams, flowing around each other like alternating current.

“Well, you’d better thank her again when you return ‘em,” said Da, chiming in. “We should make her a casserole or somethin’, all the first aid she’s given Artie over the years.”

“Who’s the ‘we’ in that sentence, Mike?” said Ma crossly, about to give up on the spuds.

“Now don’t get fresh.”

I was still attuned to Sandra’s every move, soft-focusing my eyes to watch what she was doing without looking at her. She was picking at her dinner roll with nibbly little movements that were out of character.

She relaxed somewhat as Ma and Da moved past my discussion of my hands and into their bickering over shared domestic responsibilities, but she had a harder time not stealing glances at my gloves. I started to feel claustrophobic under my shirt-collar.

We’d need to talk after dinner. Somewhere out of the house, away from prying eyes. I could barely carry the weight of this, and I couldn’t very well ask her for help with carrying it; it wasn’t her burden. But we’d need to talk all the same.

Teddy and Gail, our younger siblings, clattered to the table at the same time as the gluey potatoes. They filled up the dinner table with enough chaotic energy to keep the parental units distracted.

And my hands didn’t come up as a topic of conversation again.

Next up:

The Cause

The Cause must be anti-oligarchy without being anticorporatist. It must critique class war by recasting the phrase, and using antipoverty measures and progressive taxation to achieve just prosperity and reform. In my head, I’ve taken to calling it the Second Restoration. Huge percentages of Americans already fear some form of civic collapse, so positioning The Cause as an end to an era of national disunity and political violence seems like a good start. The exact phrasing isn’t important, though, so much as that it unifies The Cause’s aims behind a clear idea of common good.

The Cause must avoid sweeping condemnations and indictments of capitalism writ-large; it must be more focused than that. It should indict the greed of the economy’s major manipulators, and hold up as villains the microclass of 300-odd multibillionaire families atop a new American caste system; the people who’ve been handed egregious authority and self-serving tax dodges for too long, and to our collective detriment. It establishes context for this argument by pointing to the Supreme Court’s 2010 Citizens United decision - which swamped our electoral system with dark-money contributions and gave us the super-PAC campaign finance model - as definitive proof of a system which responds to the demands of wealth before the needs of its citizens.

The arguments themselves are not hard: you could make them thoroughly and conclusively with three line-graphs and two minutes on a timer. The hard part is convincing people that your solutions won’t worsen the problem, or destabilize American economic life further. People rely on the efficacy of corporate systems, in spite of their designed unfairness, and leftist thinking discredits itself as juvenile when it calls for their overthrow. Order, consistency, and predictability are the entire ballgame in a post-Trump political world.

Are America’s problems deeper and more systemic than a few plutocrats and a single Supreme Court ruling? Absolutely. But 50 years of policies stratifying American wealth have undercut the promise of fairness inherent in the American Experiment, and fed nihilistic thinking and cynicism about the role of government. You need to tell the story of how they’ve worsened in pitching your vision for fixing them, using a clean narrative (accommodating bipartisan blame) about how and why things got so fucked in this country. If the Trumpist vision is to be countered, this is essential. The Cause should embrace narrative simplicity, and save elaboration for smart surrogates doing podcasts.

Like Mamdani, don’t get caught up in ideological rhetoric. His many motivated opponents were unable to paint him as a radical, despite the word “socialist” in his party affiliation, because his actions didn’t conform to the fearmongering. Instead, he connected many specific change proposals to broader themes of shared prosperity and improved quality of life. The lesson: connect your policy positions to the positive effects they’ll have in improving peoples’ station - not to those ideas’ good-liberal bonafides, or their inherent rightness. Mamdani’s brand of politics is “yes, and”: yes, we can do it, and here’s how. Democrats need to keep having conversations on those terms, and accusing opponents of unseriousness if they start tossing out pejoratives like “Marxian” or “globalist”.

But whatever the specifics of the story Democrats tell about economic precarity and social injustice, it must set up an upbeat ending. I have to believe that ten years of old-man grievance politics has set up a fierce appetite for a new tone atop our political system; I have to believe there’s still an appetite for idealism in this country. So Democrats of all types must speak to the opportunity our moment affords, and not to the fears which it amplifies.

The Agenda

Get specific about democratic reform. An important precondition for restoring America’s role as a just international actor, and for rebuilding once-profitable trade arrangements, is proving ourselves once again capable of internal improvement and honest self-assessment. Frame it in those terms. Restoration of lost American legitimacy and honor, for global benefit, is the scale at which liberals need to think again. Give The Agenda the same moral purpose as The Cause: movements define eras once they harness campaign-trail energy and translate it into policy.

Get staffing right. Modern presidents have an insane ambit of issues - too many to stay front and center on at once. Their greatest abilities as change-agents also frequently lie overseas. Just ask Obama, who struggled mightily to implement any legislative priorities in the wake of his shellacking by the Tea Party in the 2010 midterms. For that reason, I believe an international/domestic division of leadership makes sense. I hope for a VP in ‘28 with broad Congressional ties, deep loyalty to POTUS, and presidential aspirations of their own - someone who can run point on the domestic agenda in tight coordination with the president. This would keep The White House’s presence on the Hill during strategy sessions and in tiebreaking votes while the president is abroad, looking to reset partnerships and alliances.

I believe The Agenda should start with nonpartisan priorities, like protections for government workers who are guardians of objectivity: watchdogs, whistleblowers, fact-checkers, statisticians. These people have been abused by Trump the most, and their legal protections and social role need reified urgently. Make reality shared again.

To that end, look to pivot and reframe before dismantling. ICE provides an excellent opportunity. Calls to abolish, curtail, or defund the organization will no doubt come fast and thick during the Democratic primary season of ‘27 and ‘28, but to heed them would only establish the next Republican lines of attack in the ‘30 midterms. Potentially, ICE’s resources and expertise could be of immense aid in interdicting and ultimately combating cartels and human-trafficking networks in tandem with the FBI. Far better to repurpose and elevate the mission of the agency. It was turned into a smash-and-grab paramilitary wing of the reactionary far right; it does not have to be run as such ever again.

Center a legislative agenda on reform issues popular with the body politic: lobbying regulations, campaign finance reform, and reforming the SEC and IRS with goals of class fairness in mind. Starting with IRS reform could be hugely important - not only for revenue, but for good-government symbolism, and to pre-empt old-saw critiques of liberal profligacy. Publicly funded campaigns are another idea worth a big push. Why be afraid of big ideas, in an era when thousands of government workers can be slashed from the rolls without congressional act in the span of a week, or the Department of Education can be slashed in the space of an order? Remind people of the necessity of restoring economic fair play as a means of guaranteeing stability. Get them interested in recentering the people’s prerogatives on an electoral system not distorted by super-PACs and dark money.

After a couple high-profile wins to set the tone, and with some new rules of the road, begin to flood the zone. Move on all fronts to repair the government and reestablish new priorities, with the same sort of focus and multi-tiered strategic thinking which dismantled it. Establish a reputation for sober, solutions-oriented governance; work to ground government in real problem-solving. This can win begrudging cross-aisle respect. By all reports, there are still Republican congresspeople who have sharp criticisms of Trump to make behind closed doors, and who haven’t lost sight of the dangers MAGA poses to their political futures. They’ll move with the wind once it shifts.

In fact, court unlikely Republican allies as a matter of course: as a tactic, as a means of re-injecting legislative politics with the comity which both sides of the aisle say is absent, and to provide needed votes. There are plenty of establishment Democrats who have done quite well within the status quo, and who want to respond to the party’s ‘24 losses by accepting Republican argument-logic and moving Democratic positions rightward. You’ll need votes and allegiances from across the aisle in fending off their backbiting - even from people who may hold abhorrent views on other social or ideological issues.

Use a restive and divided Republican caucus to your advantage. No purity tests for allies. The Agenda’s separate parts should be unified by The Cause’s purpose, but pursued with realpolitik: bill by bill, issue by issue.

The Message

Be a proud liberal. Speak with the courage of your convictions - you’re heirs to a centuries-old legacy of positive social change. Act like it.

Don’t dilute The Message - sing Republicans a song that speaks to their self-interest instead. Remind them how much of their time and energy goes into soliciting donations and organizing fundraisers, and how little goes into the people’s business. Get Republicans excited about the idea of congressional reform, and legislating without special interests dictating their every move. Bring them to the table in helping them draft that legislation when possible, but ignore the MAGA flank and their media allies: stay on-message, and out of pissing matches.

Win the polls and the approval ratings, and keep articulating your endgame if the numbers slide. This was what Biden could never do: his whole shop was geared towards managing gaffes, instead of making affirmative cases for his vision. Speak about The Cause and The Agenda; speak about it often, through good allies as well as the mouthpiece of The Oval Office. Be visible, and be consistent.

Stay out of cosmetic battles. There will be a bunch of loose talk about the perils of socialist overreach no matter which Democrat rises to national prominence next; keep hammering away anyway, and fold every defense into a further articulation of The Cause. Use soaring language to raise the tone, not as a vehicle for preening intellectualism.

The Message must be essentially traditionalist. It must ground itself in and draw strength from the Founders’ values of public morality and personal sacrifice. This is how you stand against the status quo without adopting a burn-the-house-down mentality: by continuing to point out how far MAGA is from the virtues with which America was conceived, and making good claims for how we get back there.

This stance gets you out of the Culture Wars. It lets you honor commitments to America’s marginalized groups - so crucial to maintaining common cause on the Left - and ties their cause to the broader ideals of the American Experiment. Why support trans rights? Because the Declaration’s pursuit of happiness is impossible when you’re forced to conform to the wrong identity, or are persecuted as a result of changing it. Why support gay marriage? Because the republic needs stable families and strong tax bases, and protecting the right to marry another consenting adult irrespective of sex or gender helps meet that need. Why support diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives which encourage broader participation in government? Because any vision for a Great America involves the active participation of a wholly engaged citizenry - not the passing-down of power and privilege through birthright.

The Message can be full of Trump critique, but as with The Cause, the critique should tee up the presentation of better ideas to legislate, and not be an end in and of itself. People are sick of potshot, drive-by, soundbite culture in politics, and are longing to hear proposals informed by a consistent and solutions-oriented worldview. Changing the way the conversation is had, as much as the policy ideas themselves, is crucial. The Message must help reframe liberalism as a clearly defined set of ideas with the public good at their end-point - not style itself as a set of reflexively anti-Trumpist impulses.

Play offense. Find a neglected issue that resonates in Trump Country, like agriculture policy, where the Republicans have abandoned public welfare to moneyed interests. Make a plan for reform, and share it out with message discipline and repetition until you control the news cycle. Tie your spotlighting of each policy area back to a common, tightly focused theme: ending a 50-year class war by America’s moneyed interests against the interests of our polity and the aims of good government.

Get people into The Message emotionally: if you can’t do that, you don’t have a Cause or an Agenda. Do retail politics. Do the slogans, the memes, the corny call-and-response chants at rallies. Do any and everything that helps get your message talked about. Be easygoing and openhearted. Laugh at yourself, while being unironic and serious about your own values. Be the person Tim Walz was on the early days of the campaign trail last year: a pugnacious, good-spirited avatar of decency. Be decent, dammit; be gracious. Say that you want people’s votes; say what you’ll do to earn them. Don’t be afraid to treat democracy as a popularity contest, and be so invested in a we-go-high mentality that you become inaccessible.

Tell stories of the government’s success, like the FDIC, and use them to articulate reform, and the strength of collective buy-in on practical humanist principles. Connect stories of governmental crisis and failure to disinvestment and strangulation by private monopolies. But as with The Cause, The Message should avoid offputting, faux-revolutionary, campus-liberal anticapitalism. Liberalism has too often become a study in conventions; of adopting orthodoxies of belief and self-presentation which too many people find stultifying and hypocritical. Vast swathes of the country would rather vote against their interests than make cause with a self-satisfied liberal - no matter how thoroughly the liberal’s position works to their benefit. Recognize that dynamic, and work against it in how you comport yourself.

Bring up the Epstein papers as often as is relevant. Draw the contrast between you and the abusers/enablers atop the opposing party’s leadership. Connect the moral disasters of their actions to their neglect of the American Idea and a metastasizing comfort with tyranny. But yes-and it again: say why you’re right, as well as why they’re wrong. The great temptation with Trumpism is to point out its moral horrors; but, as many commentators observed after November ‘24, we too often feel absolved of examining our own beliefs having done so. The Message needs to define a counter-vision, and give it weight.

Use concepts and language from the armed forces. Use the 250th anniversary of the Declaration as an unironic rally-point. Use Scripture, even if you’re not Christian. Jesus of Nazareth had a lot of important insights, and you can reference them even if you don’t worship Christ the Redeemer. Moreover, it’s a good means of demonstrating respect to the majority of worshipping Americans who are, and for charging a secular mission with spiritual and emotional power. And a third benefit: Republican rhetoric seeking to cast you in the role of cultural outsider will have a harder time of it.

Democrats can do these things; plenty of heartland Democrats do it already. Take Jesus and the Stars & Stripes back from the people abusing their names, and lean into the many pronouncements against unjust authority present in the Federalist Papers, the Constitution, and the Bible. Trump, and his many blasphemies, provide a generational chance to fuse activist energy to a Message animated by spiritual purpose. Historically, national politicians do very well when they pull that off. Connect personal faith to pluralism, and to the faith systems of the communities you’re campaigning in - and ultimately, to the mission of restoring American honor and spiritual purpose.

When you’ve done all that, elevate your message - take it interfaith and inclusive. Cite the Quran when campaigning in Dearborn, the Talmud in Forest Hills, Confucian precepts in San Francisco, the speeches of Harvey Milk in Provincetown. If your sense of humanity is expansive and open-handed and respectful of difference, you’ll have gone a long way towards improving American political culture, regardless of what transpires in Congress.

You don’t have to be someone you’re not. You don’t have to be an everything-to-everybody messiah, or claim false kinship or allyship. But you need to do more than speak about prescription cost-caps or carried-interest deductions or affordable-housing plans. You need to bring these topics up as fronts in a struggle for a more just and prosperous and morally ordered society.

The Message must, in part, be a hymnal. It must use faith to speak a new future into existence.

Conclusion | The Case for Hope

In The True Believer by Eric Hoffer, the author studies mass social movements at length, and - quite unexpectedly - reaches a couple conclusions which give me a case for hope.

Written out of post-WWII anxiety, and using Nazi ideology as its major reference-point, the book came to prominence after Eisenhower cited it in a foreign policy address. Part historical survey, part work of political philosophy, it’s full of stick-to-the-ribs pronouncements like, “Self-righteousness is a loud din raised to drown the voice of guilt within us.”

In studying what makes a revolutionary, Hoffer observes this about extreme political positions:

Though they seem at opposite poles, fanatics of all kinds are actually crowded together at one end. It is the fanatic and the moderate who are poles apart and never meet. The fanatics of various hues eye each other with suspicion and are ready to fly at each other’s throat. But they are neighbors and almost of one family. They hate each other with the hatred of brothers.

In his rendering, political conversions can take place more swiftly than people realize. Today’s MAGA diehard could be tomorrow’s Mamdani Mama, more quickly and more easily than a mild-mannered person could be inflamed into street protest. A political era of fanaticism need not favor any one political party, in other words: it is simply the reflection of popular dissatisfaction with the status quo, a state of governed and governors in disunion. Passion in politics, in turn, creates fluidity in the polity, with people receptive to ideas for drastic change of all sorts - not just the sort of change aligned with revanchist ideology. Whomever channels those passions most effectively can rise to the top of an electoral system, whether democrat or demagogue.

Hoffer is cognizant of such movements’ dangers. He refers to the fanaticism which animates mass movements as a “malady of the soul” - the product of violence and miseries borne by the young and newly dispossessed.

But he also concludes The True Believer on this note:

In receiving this malady of the soul the world also received a miraculous instrument for raising societies and nations from the dead - an instrument of resurrection.

If radical notions can bring nations to crisis, they are also the means out of them.

But whether and how we roll back the reactionary tone new to our politics is up for debate; the process is never foregone, as Hoffer knew from myriad examples. Bad actors are many, and bad power systems have a way of self-reinforcing and perpetuating. The way forward is hard and hazardous.

May we hope for it regardless.

The stakes are a habitable planet, and a government of The People.

They don’t tell you about the squeaks.

My baby girl squeaks and yips and burrs like a coyote pup. When stressed or anxious; when she stretches as she comes into or out of a nap; when she’s in active sleep, dreaming her little dreams; when she’s happy or clean or sated. I’ll remember lots of visual detail from her start - I watched her leave the birth canal, watched Two become Three - but the sounds stick first in my memory. Her burbles and coos reduce me to gelatin.

What could she be dreaming of? One of our early wonderings. Her whole world is shadows and shapes; how do those translate to dream-life? Why is there such an expansive soundscape involved?

***********

She comes to us on a mild night, Sunday, October 19th, exiting the womb after a short, hard labor just before 10:00. The New York Giants suffer a devastating comeback loss in Denver; Mom suffers from a biological imperative that is staggering in its demands. But everyone makes it through to Monday.

Our girl arrives crying, healthy and in possession of sound common-sense: she tries to latch for feeding several seconds after being placed on Mom’s chest for the first time. We were with her in the hospital until Tuesday afternoon, and, with the exception of our pediatrician visits and our errands, we’ve been at home with her ever since.

***********

I have a line-a-day journal I keep up with - actually six line-spaces, plus the top margin - to use each day in documenting her young life. But I want to write for other purposes, too; want to write at length about all the odd, stray details which give our new life together texture and color and emotional truth.

Which details stand out?

Her tree-frog body. Her desire to fold herself up against our torsos, in diametric conflict with our need to keep her airway straight and long. Froggery is apparently common amongst infants: in talking to a close new-mom friend, Carla discovers that Tree-Frog’s been an early nickname for her friend’s boy, too.

The way her hand clutches my chest-hairs, or shirt collar, or the wax string on my necklace, as she sleeps.

The way she cops Derek Zoolander’s Blue Steel look whenever she’s calm but trying to cue a feed (I always laugh, and resolve to help her work on Magnum before the Derelicte show).

The downy hair at the crest of her ear. It falls off the top within the first week, but still wreathes the bottom of her earlobe in a fine corona as of this writing. It makes me posit an alt-universe where her ear-hair stays, and is groomed with the same manicurists’ fervor as her eyebrows. But Carla says it all goes eventually.

The strange markers of old age present ex utero - the premise of Benjamin Button must’ve been born from these. Her scrunched face, its heavy cry-lines and creases; her missing chin and pursed mouth; her gray, wrinkly hands. Only late in her first week do her face and features start to settle out, and does she regain the appearance of youth.

***********

I find myself developing little soothing rituals in caring for her. Soothing, we find, is a critical aptitude: if an infant’s melting down in tears, they won’t latch or burp or fart or void their bowels or do anything else you want them to. We’re also taught that it fosters healthy caretaker attachment. Just doing something - being active in trying to meet baby’s needs, more so than having the correct move on hand - is what builds trust, and puts you in good standing with them.

When I soothe Girly, I often find myself crooking my index finger and running the flat of it along her cheeks and nape. The skin here is impossibly soft, warmed to a perfect low heat by the oxygen-rich blood pumping up her neck. This has a mellowing effect on me, as much as her: it focuses me on that precious neck and face, and keeps me receptive to new ideas for their care.

I shush, but I try to shush with purpose; not as a tic or reflex. I try never to smack her with one, or hiss in her face like a busted steam-pipe. As a kid, I’d always hate to see others’ caregivers do that - very “do as I say, not as I do.” I’ve got no problem getting loud with my shush - very loud, if I’m trying to head off a fuss, or break her loose from a cry-spiral - but I’ll bring that shush right back down to a gentle between-the-teeth breeze the moment I can. I try to do it intentionally, and make sure I’m mixing in gentle words and phrases.

I do that in two languages. I speak a few Spanish phrases to her - ¿que paso, que paso?; no te preocupes; te amo, mija. I use ¡Pobresita! or ¡que lastima! in mock anguish, when she needs a soothe. I remind her she’s una mariposa maravillosa at every opportunity. Carla told me how active Girly would get in utero when she’d hear Carla’s Duolingo lessons, and it feels right to keep that trend going.

Girly’s active in self-soothing, especially using her hands. Early in our first week at home, Mom asks me to note in the journal how resourceful and adaptable she is, how comfortable with experimenting and acting on instinct. And I see it too: how clever she is in meeting her own needs, how she flexes those little fingers around any object she finds which might calm or aid her.

***********

Big emotional transactions go hand-in-hand with the godawful moments. I’ll give a case in point from our first night at home after the hospital.

After cleaning and swaddling Girly during an epically difficult all-night crying jag - nothing in her system but colostrum and meconium - I hear her suddenly pull up on her cry as I take her off the changing table. She studies and searches my face while in a cradle-hold; I return the study.

I look straight down into her eyes. They’re still baby-blue, but with lighter purple midtones folded in: lavender and indigo in with the cerulean.

She goes silent. My world shudders and stops as she does.

Suddenly, and quite unexpectedly, she’s out of distress - and she knows that someone possessing my face and voice helped her out.

In a moment, I’m a father.

I feel my daughter clocking a caregiver: using her purple-tinged irises to identify and memory-bank a person who can meet a future need. And after a night in which every previous effort has fallen short, this moment is a balm beyond measure.

Moreover, it gives me an object lesson to call back to when later crises arise. I now have a tangible reminder that there is truth to what we were told about the importance of working through despair, always, even without knowledge or confidence.

***********

I won’t write horror stories here: no tales of unruly body fluid and witching-hour melodrama. These are old hat if you’ve had kids, and not something you’ll want to read about if you haven’t. Also, I want this to be a positive record. She may find this piece later in life, when she’s curious to know who she was at the start, and I don’t want her thinking she was anything less than a singular and profound joy. She is, she was, and she will be, come what may.

What else can I tell you about her, then?

She has big strong lungs, and she does not suffer in silence. I love this about her, even when it leads to helplessness and frustration when the crying can’t be quickly sourced. I hope she always cries out to me, in some shape or form; I hope I can be trusted with her private pains and nagging thoughts.

Though we’ve broken out the “Fussbudget” nickname a few times, Girly’s not one; not really. She wants to be soothed - when she isn’t, it’s because she’s communicating, conveying. She loves napping against our chests, and letting us stroke her fontanelles and wavelets of hair. She came out of the womb with both hands clutched to her face, like Supergirl, and she keeps them there often.

Speaking of nicknames, we love to give them to her - does every parent do this? “Ms. Booty-Butt” when she gets cheeky; “Ms. Bootysqueaker-Butt” when she’s gassy; “Rizzy” when we coo at her; “Dalia Lee” when we want to proclaim or announce; “Girly!” or “girly...”, in excitement or exhaustion; “Little Frog” or “Little Squirms” when she clutches up against our body heat, or is otherwise gentle; “Squeaker” or “Squeaks” or “Li’l Squeaky” when she’s in a verbal mood.

I love that eyes go wide and bright when her energy level’s good. She’s an alert observer, attuned to her environment. She likes to move; loves to move. Whether clutching to me as I waltz her in the kitchen, bouncing about in our pediatrician’s hands, or rocking in her nursing chair en route to sleep, Girly’s built for a world in motion.

I love how far-away and parenthetical the outside world feels; how even trips to the Stop & Shop, or downstairs to the washer-dryer we share with the building owner, feel like major plot-points in the day’s narrative. We are protectors of our space, and the feelings of closeness it generates go hand-in-hand with the domestic dramas she cues up through her cries. Peace is an earned right here: a reward for good care of this complex and wonderful being.

***********

In three weeks, I’ve figured some things out. There’s a metric ton more that I’m still ignorant of, but by the grace of a patient spouse and a pair of open eyes, I’ve figured some things out.

I’ve figured out that attentive listening, as much as active effort, is foundational to parenting. It’s the first step in getting off your ass. It gives you something to do, not just something to be anxious about - something which motivates the effort and ingenuity to do what’s needed. The listening informs the thinking, which then guides the action.

I’ve learned to listen to the body, not to work around its demands. Hunger pangs you can’t really soothe through, but are welcome for their clarity - the Zoolander puckering and lip-smacking cues are great. I’ve learned that fussing due to gas or constipation is the seventh circle of Hell. Get a bottle of mylicon and a box of Windi gaspassers, practice the holds and moves you see online, and pray to a loving god. If you don’t give up, you can’t lose.

I’ve figured out that getting good soothes in is central to any gratifying day; as mentioned, it’s the core competency, and the hardest one. Babies can only have temporary wins with self-soothing, so ultimately, it’s on you to head off the wails. But there’s a positive flip-side. As much any choice you make in preparing your space or products, soothing is where you’re value-added to your child. Especially as a father, with no skin in the nursing game, it’s where you’re best positioned to resolve their crises, and be demonstrative with your care.

Lastly, I’ve figured out what I can do when all else fails: when her cries are banshee-loud right in my ear and spiking my stress-response, and I’m at a loss. I can close my eyes, hold her firm without squeezing or shifting her, and start focusing on long inhales and exhales. I try to counter my body’s cortisol release the only way I can: by slowing my heart-rate. By signaling to my limbic system with my breath that all is in fact not melting down, and this is just one moment in time, sure to fold into the next regardless of what I do.

Transference works both ways, I’ve found. If it’s within her power to press me, surely I can loosen her up too.

***********

Some advice for prospective fathers, and fathers-to-be:

Be open to the sheer variety and singular weirdnesses on offer in this life experience. Adjusting to new emotional burdens, same as adjusting to care rituals, does and will happen through process, albeit painfully. It’s a game of highs and lows. There are times filled with surpassing sweetness - where joy feels diffused into every moment, and every pip from her feels like an encryption from Heaven. There are also long hours spent trying to get her to shit and fart and burp and take the nipple, and coach her through other basic life-moves which are not, in fact, involuntary. “I think we’ve got a broken one,” I joke offhandedly to Carla one night (she’s less than amused).

So feel it all - but let feelings pass on with patience once they’ve made themselves known. Bring some stability and consistency to these mad proceedings.

Next: learn to listen more than aspire.

That one may require some elaborating. What I mean is that I don’t believe there’s sense in beginning parenthood with an achievement mindset. Inevitably, this leads to deficit thinking about your new loved one - to the impulse to “fix” who your child is, and move them closer to the nine months of visions you had about who they’d be. This, in turn, hinders your appreciation of the reality of them.

I’ve no doubt a tiger-parent mentality will be critical for certain inflection-points in their life, but this ain’t one of them. Bonding by building healthy feelings of trust and attachment is paramount, which means backseating the parental ego. Let them tell you who they are, instead of leaning on your own expectations (or worse yet, those of others).

“Be a shepherd, not an engineer” is a good aphorism I found pre-parenting, and I’ve found it to be true. I’m not saying don’t have hopes for your child - that would be sociopathic - but don’t let those hopes freight every interaction with elation or disappointment either. They’re there for inspiration and sustenance; they were not preinstalled in you as the Correct Blueprint for raising Highly Effective Humans.

It’s a fine line to walk. But there’s fine lines all over.

Careful footwork required here.

***********

But back to those wonderings in finishing. How central wonder is to all that’s happening here. How I wonder what you are.

I wonder who you’ll take after. Mom and I are complementary, rather than alike, in our own personality types; we’ve been strengthened through our contrasts. Whose personality will you be more predisposed to? Will you end up splitting our differences? Will you be drawn to a variety of perspectives in your relationships, or keep your circle close?

I wonder about others’ personalities, too: whose will magnetize you, whose will repel you. Whose confidences will you seek out, and whose will you avoid? Mom and I will be raising you in a city we didn’t reside in until our twenties - there’s so many facets of being a New York kid which we’ll be figuring out alongside you. Who else will come into your life, and shape your sense of who you are?

I wonder what you’ll be into. How will you go about forming your tastes and preferences? Culture and creative media have shaped the lives and careers of Mom and I indelibly: which forms will you be drawn to? Will you be a creator, or an observer? A collaborator, or a solo act? A viewer, or a listener? How will your tastes change, and what will motivate those changes?

I wonder how you’ll meet this wild planet. Everything you’ll need, you came in with already: a healthy body, good ears and eyes, a curious mind, trusting parents who love you. But the world’s cruelties and vagaries have a way of subtracting pieces of the spirit.

I wonder if I can teach you some addition, too.

~ November 11, 2025

Aura-farming - slang; modern - The act of dominantly exerting one’s persona, charisma, and demeanor as a noticeable social pressure, through intentional actions supportive of the Aura Farmer’s desired demeanor/persona.

~urbandictionary.com

***********

Journal of Hezekiah Potts, Settler in the East Williamsburg Colony

Year of Our Lord 2025

*

June 13, 2025

*

Lean times ‘round the aura farm lately. Abigail Harcourt was scheduled to help me get dripped and iced for the local council’s Player’s Ball this coming Saturday, but was stricken with dysentery; mercy and grace be upon her home, and her distended bowels. In her absence, I’ve planned a Y2K-coded tracksuit with throwback Reeboks and a Yankees fitted for the function. Alas, verily, no one has a talent for creating aura through haberdashery to match Abigail’s.

Snap has been acting weird lately. I think I’m being shadow-banned. Those feckless, censorious cowards have hitherto been unaccustomed to my steez, but this would mark a notable escalation in tactics.

What else? Weather has been hot, unpleasant, no Spring cool left in the evenings. I yearn for the coming Fall, when the summer-body harvest has been brought in, and I can resume a Soft Life of PSLs and merino cowl-necks.

But much aura to till and grow and add to Instagram Stories yet. I pray for its safe growth, and for many likes and reposts.

June 28, 2025

*

I have left Snap for now. I may return; I may not. Time and prayer and the Good Lord’s beneficence will see me through, and light my path to new aura. I now farm exclusively through Insta and TikTok, with an occasional cross-post to X or Facebook.

The season wears on, yet I feel I have not sown enough clout, nor reaped enough subs, from my recent labors. It must be said that my angles feel stale, and my looks feel chopped. I don’t think it’s poor taste, so much as lack of inspiration; my style is giving, but not owning, lately. And I’ve been leaving crumbs - a sure sign that I haven’t fully ate, or perhaps even slayed, in quite some time.

Some good news from the village yesterday, however: Constance Truly hit a sigma mewing streak on Tok just before sundown, and was hailed with great hosannas in the local town square. We all remembered how cholera had claimed her three youngest last Spring, so it was wonderful to see - even at the ripe age of 24! - that she can still serve a face-card at such a high level.

But I confess that I find my heart hard and obdurate, unable to rise in shared communal joy; for I am bedeviled with preoccupations uponst my own inadequacies.

Sending up a prayer to the opps in closing.

July 5, 2025

*

The holiday has helped work a change!

I had forgotten the immaculate vibes surrounding the Fourth of July - the opportunities it brings for bold prints and high-inseam shorts and patriotic je ne sais quoi - and so too forgot this excellent annual opportunity for a one-day aura harvest!

It wasn’t a promising start, that I’ll say. Old Man Jenkins, our shopkeeper down at the dry-goods merc and the last surviving member of the Great Flood, got loaded on sour mash before he was to speak his annual frontier claptrap. Then, he had a fit of apoplexy as he was taking the stage.

But it was our great fortune that he and his weird spazzy body didn’t distort the energies too much. The Olufssen twins sung a fine rendition of “Suds in the Bucket” instead, which built some good cheer; then, Mayor Stilton brought that fragrant ass of his onstage to announce that Jenkins had stopped spazzing, and would make a full recovery once sobered up.

This news brought the shawties to the floor in short order, and a dance was begun. Gertrude Fleming hit a jig-and-reel so clean that the townsfolk are still ablaze with chisme, even a day later. That brought yet more tasty shawties off the wall, and it was here I really began to shine. I mogged a few betas to get a rizz-streak going - then, I converted that rizz into the clout I’d long sought, and verily, I got my bands up. It was great to behold - or so I’m told.

Waxing into peak summer season always brings its fair share of aggravations: pit-stains, hot breath, and dengue fever, to name a few. So this holiday’s based spirit was gratefully received, and shared widely amongst the townsfolk.

July 23rd, 2025

*

My triumphant summer continues!

Despite the spotty rains and searing heat, aura continues to grow in bumper crops. I’ve found the ideal seasonal drip at last: a fisherman’s hat with louvered sunglasses, a puka-shell choker, summer linens, and a floral-printed swimsuit. These pieces create a relaxed, nonchalant look, signaling virility in an appropriately nonsensical and self-amused manner. Women have been by turns confused and aroused; perfect 👌

I continue to make plans with my cousin Elwood to head west this coming Fall, and try my hand with aura-mining. Elwood tells me it’s a surefire way to get both jacked and ripped, and perhaps even cut. I confess to some nervousness where this practice is concerned, unacquainted as I am with hill-labor, but he assures me that the painted ladies of Colorado are worth the sweat equity. Only time and experience will tell, methinks.

I really feel the Universe has been providing for me lately, and that a focus on keeping my vibrational energies aligned and chakras open will help me perpetuate this Gigachad streak. I’ve been sage-ing my home and shed regularly, and getting in the homies’ groupchats with more frequent sends and replies; concordantly, I’m feeling karmic benefit, and the steady accrual of aura points. Better still, Mayor Stilton found that it was little Teddy Weaver who’d been poisoning the town well with strychnine - so we’ve been drinking clean water lately, and making plans for a fine hanging this August.

***********

Life on the aura farm, in short, brings many perils. Carpal tunnel, tech neck, malnutrition, and played-out looks have ravaged our homestead, as they have others.

But through it all, we retain a redoubtable and providential vision of our future - one in which we all get minted, go Founder Mode, get the limited-edition Labubus of our dreams, and celebrate with a matcha latte, an Erewhon shake, and some Dubai chocolate. Maybe even pop out some nepo-babies in a few years!

A dream worth livestreaming.

Early this August, I showed up at the Rockaway YMCA in search of routine, and strength. I’d gone soft with hazy IPAs on the Peninsula’s perfect beaches through much of July, and a course correction was needed.

I circle the gym, scanning for any equipment or activities I can try on. In the far corner of the facility is a dance studio. In the main mezzanine, a set of weightlifting benches, racks, and machines occupy the center, while ellipticals, stair machines, and treadmills frame the space in a tight border; aerobic and anaerobic workouts are segregated spatially.

But I needed both.

In a far corner of the mezz, overlooking the pools and placed next to a lat pulldown station, I found two rowing machines.

Something clicked. A short self-Q&A ensued:

When did you try one of these before?

A young kid, no older than 12 or so. A friend’s dad had one in his basement. I liked the way the fan whirrzzzed as I pulled back hard on the chain. And something in the motion, too; something I liked in it.

Who gets a hard workout in when they recreate?

People who do water-sports.

What’s a water-sport that can help with strength and stamina?

That last one was rhetorical.

I was into the idea, notionally.

I sat down on a small ass-contouring plastic seat, adjusting my feet beneath two straps and withdrawing the machine’s handle from where it was nocked atop a large fan-and-chain assembly, hidden under casing. I gave it a go. The screen came to life as I pulled back on the chain; soon thereafter, a six-panel display appeared on a cellphone-sized screen above the fan’s housing. It tracked my stats in real time as I pushed my hips back into the first row - away I went.

40 minutes the first time; I’d take that number over 90 minutes before the summer was out. As with any unfamiliar form of motion, first rows are a feeling-out process: I put my shoulders into the chain’s handle, pulling it back into my lap band like it was one of the lat pulldown machines next to me. But I quickly came to appreciate that though hands and arms have the most dramatic range of motion in a row, they are the rider atop the elephant: the real work starts in the quads, travels upward through the front and back of your core, and circuits back down through your hands into the bar, by the grace of the trapezoids next to your neck.

I imagined the Olympic and NESCAC rowers that I'd seen; I tried to memorize in mind’s eye how they'd cut the water. I remembered a rowing sequence in The Sopranos; the tensile, feline grace of the scene’s rowers. I'd heard that the most successful rowing teams weren't individually the fastest or strongest: they were the ones who eliminated wasted motion through tight synchronization; who had good coxing and good strategy, and a keen situational awareness of when, where, and how to push all-out.

Though I was alone, on hard plastic, far from New England's watersheds, I tried to take something of these principles to heart. Without a coxswain to coach up my strokes, I tried instead to assume the role of student to my body's instruction.

And here's where I have to get a little dharmic, a little mystical.

As I rowed, I tried to keep the kinetic energy of the chain moving in and out, in a continuous, unbroken flow. I tried to eliminate the small pauses at the top and bottom of each stroke, treating them instead as moments of transition and conversion, where the energy reverses course but does not stop or break. Runners know this principle: pausing to walk and catch breath might feel necessary, but ultimately, it means that more exertion to regain momentum and stride is needed. So I tried not to use the stroke-per-minute counter - or think of the strokes themselves as separate entities - and instead tried to conceive of each in a state of oneness with the next.

In this way, 40 minutes passed quickly. I felt my body had more to give, but I stopped there, and let my muscles regroup.

I’ll give them a day off, I said to myself, then see what they can do next.

* * * * * * * * * * *

In subsequent sessions, I got a clearer sense of what the fan rower I’m using likes, and what makes its numbers go up the fastest. I now orient my efforts around these preferences. Maybe this means I’m learning good form; maybe it means I’m just improving at gaming a system, and acquiring bad habits in the process. At least a bit of what I pick up feels like the former.

I learn to keep the chain low and level - the more my hands pump up and down to try and initiate each row, the more energy feels wasted. I try to ensure the chain passes smoothly over my knees as they come down at the midpoint of each row, no pause or break in upward motion needed to clear them. I try to keep the full band of my core engaged as my legs extend fully, not letting it relax again until my arms come forward to finish the motion, and my legs and pelvis resume the work of coming forward in a crouch to channel power into the next pull: this seems to lessen the pain in my legs and arms, and brings my back into the game.

I work on postural alignment. I try to make sure I’m not favoring my dominant right by sitting up with a straight, plumb spine, and engaging my core as I extend my legs and start each row. My chiropractor, whom I find knows a good deal about rowing, gives the 11-and-1 principle: don’t angle your body past 11 or 1 on a clock-face at any point in the row. This helps get me past an early tendency to lean as far back as possible in getting the chain to full pull, and helps make sure my balky lower back is strengthening, instead of wearing out.

If I exert a greater pressure in one hand than the other in pulling back the handlebar, I see both it and the handlebar wobble to that side, and more kinetic energy gets lost. So keeping even force in my hands and arms as I pull the handle straight back into my body’s center-line becomes a major point of focus.

* * * * * * * * * * *

My chiro had one more nugget for me which stuck: that a completed rowing motion engages 85% of a body’s muscle groups.

That one bowls me over. Not 85% of the arms, or the back, or the legs, or the abdomen - 85% of the body’s more than 600 muscle groups, doing work in three seconds.

I’m beguiled.

This simple thing has become a fascination, a fixation, and a devotion, in the span of six weeks.

* * * * * * * * * * *

My progress is affirmed by seeing others come by to use the second rowing machine some two feet to my left. This happens several times over the 14 sessions I do at the Rockway Y this summer. A stout gym rat hops on and starts flailing wildly on the handlebar - only to find they can sustain their pace for no more than a few minutes, and so hop off. Some come by to try it out, give it 10, 15, even 20 minutes, but no one else seems to be trying to distance-row. This feeds into a false feeling of specialness; helps me bear up and cast a warrior mentality when my muscles start to play out. No one else is making a study of this; no one else is trying to understand what this machine offers. Keep going, I tell myself. One more benchmark.

I feel like a disciple in an esoteric faith.

* * * * * * * * * * *

And as my body’s muscles knit together in tough new arrangements, I feel my life changing in other ways.

I began this piece with a pun on the title of a U2 song: despite the band’s many sins on good taste, The Joshua Tree has a durable hold on me. I also liked how it hinted at my use of a stationary rower: that whether I rowed 10k, 15k, or 20k in a session, I still went nowhere.

But I’m starting to see a bigger resonance in the title. The truth is, I feel more comfortable standing still and upright, confident in the truth of who I am as a man and person, when I’m in rowing shape.

Interactions with strangers and retail employees seem kinder, politer; based in more-positive reads on my intentions. There’s less apprehension in my life in general. I find myself more at ease in interactions with colleagues and students as well; any ambient anxiety about how I’m being perceived in a given situation recedes to a dim static, well-behind my conscious thoughts.

I walk different, sit different, move different. My whole life, I’ve been told not to slouch: I should’ve been told to row instead, because my shoulders now go back more often at a default, and my spine and stomach follow suit, drawing upright naturally into something like a proper bearing. Objects and motions which required conscious use of muscle to lift or complete now happen with a new offhand lightness; an ease of feeling.

Even on days when the business of school or home seems dreary. I can be on my feet all day as a teacher, and still not have any fatigue in my lower back on the subway home. I can bring more energy home to Carla each afternoon: there’s more of myself to distribute, more there to hop into chores or pregnancy prep. More initiative in addressing things that stick and bother; more of a solutions-driven mindset present in each aspect of daily life.

It’s quite impossible not to feel better about myself.

* * * * * * * * * * *

Yesterday we went to Rockaway Beach. It was perhaps our last full day of the season: there is a new degree of cold in the still-nice water, and the lifeguards have packed in for the season. But it was still in the high 70s, and the breeze still wasn’t biting yet. Local families shared in chisme and laughter as their kids dug holes, and got frolicsome in the surf. Couples still pick shells in the heat, looking for big unbroken ones, then lean up against each other in the shade once it’s time for rest. Fat, glossy seagulls, mottled grey and brown and healthy on crab-and-shellfish diets, preen and fluff on the shoreline; they are rich and full of dignity, a breed apart from their squawky, thin-white cousins, who populate parking lots and garbage-piles up and down the Eastern Seaboard.

I don’t stagger on the sand anymore - my feet find their balance firmly, and my legs are light when they need to move. Pulling the cart with our beach-gear happens, like everything else, with new ease: its wheels part the sand smoothly, refusing to sink and drag under the pull of my hand.

When I get in the water, I feel the water soothing and smoothing my torso, my legs, my lateral muscles. I’d gone on a row that morning, and the light break of the Atlantic over my body is a balm.

I think of a line from Wendell Berry: “When I move to go, it is as though I rise up out of the world.”

A neat trick.

But it’s water I want to rise up out of.

And I want to return to a rowing machine once I do.

Happy Labor Day!

I both do and don’t want to write this piece.

I don’t, because there’s enough haterism and commentary in the world without me adding my own.

I don’t because the piece’s position is in and of itself a bit ridiculous. A relative unknown taking shots at two authors frequently published in both the New Yorker and the Times - right away, the power dynamic’s asymmetrical.

I don’t because the targets are soft: other takedowns of these men are plentiful online.

I do, because snark is fun, and these pompous fools need puncturing. I do, because if we don’t demand more from men of letters, and the publications which air their opinions, we do our own intellect a disservice. I do, because the traits of good writing are not so many or so complex - but they do require defending.

I do, because sometimes there’s nothing more helpful to figuring out who you are than articulating who you hope not to be.

So let’s dig in.

Two pieces of writing under discussion today: New Yorker movie reviewer Richard Brody’s take on James Gunn’s Superman, released this summer, and Thomas Friedman’s recent New York Times op-ed “Ukrainian Diplomacy Reveals How Un-American Trump Is.”

Richard Brody | “Fortress of Synergy” | Published in the July 21, 2025 edition of the New Yorker

Unlike Friedman, Brody is not without merit as a prose stylist. At his best, he can condense dense plot-points into breezy summations, and set up clean sight-lines onto a story’s action and themes. His best writing is usually found near the beginning of his pieces, as in this excerpt:

“[Snyder’s Superman adaptations] had a hectic, howling, near-apocalyptic sense of tragedy, but Gunn’s vision is bright, chipper, and sentimental.”

Nothing wrong with that whatsoever. The adaptations are juxtaposed in neat threes, and the intent of the contrast is clear.

But this gift for condensation fails him utterly when his pieces demand that he pivot and expand into analysis. Like a bookish child thrown into the deep end without requisite strokes or flotation training, he flails from one overwrought insight to the next. Consider this wet brain fart:

“There’s also a climactic twist so good that it deserves not to be spoiled - a crisis of identity that leads to a rock-’em-sock-’em showdown but smashes to smithereens any hint of psychological significance or personal conflict issuing from that twist’s enticingly vertiginous strangeness.”

Read it again.

Go on, if you must.

Read it a third time.

It’s a sentence so floridly bad, it indicts Brody, the editorial process which allowed it to happen, and the concept of a Just and Merciful God.

Brody’s stance towards the material is conflicted: he seems taken with the plot twist, yet uncomfortable with its implications. Why, then, not use something approximating legible syntax to delineate that mixed opinion - in multiple sentences? Why stuff everything into a grab-bag of poorly figurated impressions, then shake it up and dump it out?

I get the sense that “enticingly vertiginous strangeness” is something akin to the tone Brody was shooting for in the passage - as if poor syntax could sub in for profundity, and we wouldn’t notice. But he can’t turn that trick.

“Gunn has a strange gift for undermining himself,” Brody opines, without apparent irony, in the next paragraph.

He also has this next gem waiting for us there. As with most of his sentences, Brody’s good intentions are clear up-front:

“In moments when Gunn leaves behind his own virtuosic intentions and allows his imagination to run free, the movie catches a spark of life”

Again a bit overwrought, but a sturdy topic sentence nonetheless. He could’ve easily opted for a period after “life,” and had firm ground to stand on in expounding. But no. He goes comma - then goes there five more times. We are treated to a hot-nonsense fever-dream of semantic hubris:

“In moments when Gunn leaves behind his own virtuosic intentions and allows his imagination to run free, the movie catches a spark of life, as when Lex lets fly a soliloquy of envy that, in its snarling grandiloquence, attempts to rival Iago’s self-justifying spew of venom, and when Mister Terrific, searching for Superman, finds him by traces that turn into human-size aura-like images.”

I mean, Christ.

The film’s director, Richard Brody appears to believe, is at his most effective when he listens to his own creative assumptions, instead of playing to his audience’s collective idea of who the Superman character should be. OK, I’m with ya, Dick!

But it’s an indefensible stylistic choice to pack two examples onto the end of the thought in finishing it. The result, inevitably, is a seven-comma, seven-car-pileup of a sentence.

The passage also evinces the tendency, so particular to New Yorker reviewers, of trying to validate their beliefs with a glance-shot at Shakespeare or Antiquity. The sexual politicking of Venetian courtiers doesn’t have even the slightest business in a Superman movie review, or in the sentence structurally: it only serves to reify Brody’s projection as a Well-Read Reviewer.

I imagine Brody, lit to the gills on weed gummies and Chablis and listening to old Replacements albums on vinyl, just absolutely free-associating in front of his viewing notes in the hours ahead of deadline to get this review in.

I can’t fathom how prose this godawful happens otherwise.

***********

That fusty old cinephiles like Brody are called on to review superhero movies at all is a bit farcical. Out of the gate, they have a disrespectful posture to the genre’s conventions, production methods, and mythologies - unless a superhero movie has received a groundswell of critical acclaim from other sources, á la Dark Knight, it can count on a New Yorker pan.

Brody keeps that tradition alive here. It's feckless, self-regarding, and intellectually lazy work.

Which gives us as good an opening as any to discuss the oeuvre of Thomas L. Friedman.

Thomas Friedman | “Ukrainian Diplomacy Reveals How Un-American Trump Is” | Published in the August 19th, 2025 edition of the New York Times

In the pantheon of paper-moon intellectuals to have graced the firmament of the New York Times op-ed page, Tom Friedman is a shining celestial orb. He has, does, and will no doubt continue to display a uniquely tin-eared prose in his op-eds - a weakness that would be forgivable, were his insights not also regurgitated, repackaged, and risibly middle-of-road.

Friedman rose to prominence as a public figure during both Clinton and Dubya Bush presidencies. He started writing for the Times foreign affairs desk in 1995, then had a big hit ten years later, publishing The World is Flat in 2005. It synthesized some trend-lines and research on globalization effectively, and won high praise in nonfiction circles. Friedman’s kept a perch from which to opine on politics, culture, and economics for some 30 years now.

He revisits developments in Ukraine in a recent op-ed. Here's his opening:

“I am really trying to be fair in analyzing the Trump-Putin-Zelensky-Europe drama that has been playing out the past few weeks.”

Why?

Why feel the need to state that? Have other columns not been fair-minded?

Also, why immediately establish grounds for critics to accuse you of being unfair? Certainly his tone is ripe for accusations of bias, even in this paean to Journalistic Fairness: referring to the current events as “drama” underscores a disdain towards the actors involved. The title of the piece announces a sophomoric right-hook at Trump's loyalty to America - why, then, undermine that stance with a squishy appeal to highmindedness in the very first line?

Friedman goes on to say that while the Trump administration's goals of personal diplomacy are laudable, they are undermined by the ignorance and gullibility of Trump and Ukrainian ambassador Steve Witkoff. Trump’s intentions cannot be trusted, he writes: “Especially when every bone in my body tells me that Trump does not get what this Ukraine war is truly about.”

One could reasonably ask why we are listening to his bones on the matter.

He tells us. He cites himself as an expert - “I have covered a lot of diplomatic negotiations since becoming a journalist in 1978” - then neglects to provide an example from that 47 years’ work of how diplomacy can or should look different. He gives a head-pat to Trump's desire for a legacy achievement, then casts it as a doomed effort in several ways: all while leaving the topic of actual solutions comfortably out of frame.

Try as he might, Friedman’s no Anne Applebaum; not even her lesser cousin, journalistically. To offer a realpolitik look at the situation in Ukraine would require Friedman to draw upon expertise he doesn't have. He can’t glean it at white-linen fundraisers, with Malala keynotes and Maryland crab-puffs. The journalists who have what he needs are in the streets of Kyiv and Kherson, but he doesn't cite them. He elides the need to do so at all, instead falling back onto good-liberal befuddlement. “It all leads me to ask: How is this ever going to work?” he writes early on, like Carrie Bradshaw trying to square conflicting social obligations.

But even this simple self-set ambit gets disregarded in tales of Witkoff's bootlicking, and Trump's already well-documented disregard for NATO allies. The result is a piece of commentary which advances no new ideas, but merely synthesizes various common critiques, and sets them to the off-key music of his tepid prose.

So, since we’re on the subject, let's end by talking about that tin ear of his.

***********

Whenever I read Thomas Friedman, I'm always reminded of the unique power of figurative language to elevate an idea, or kill it stone-dead. Friedman often aspires to the former, and falls flat into the latter. We see that in this piece, at several junctures. Exhibit A:

“I am convinced that Trump looks at NATO as if it’s a U.S.-owned shopping center whose tenants are never paying enough rent. And he looks at the European Union as a shopping center competing with the United States that he’d like to shut down by hammering it with tariffs.”

More of that fairness afoot.

Reducing Trump's intentions to the image of a tenant/owner dispute provides no greater insight into how his diplomatic efforts will or won't fail; it doesn't do any work, alone in its own paragraph. It's just there as Friedman comfort food: a feel-good way to call back to an old-saw critique of Trump's decision-making.

Ah, but the cringe deepens:

“Sorry, if Putin really prayed for Trump’s life, it is because he knows that no other American president could possibly be manipulated as easily as Trump has been. Putin is not and never has been looking for “peace” with Ukraine. He is, as I have written before, looking for a piece of Ukraine — in fact the whole piece if he can get it.”

***Thumps head on desk repeatedly***

Use of a hacky pun as substitute for serious inquiry is an old trope for Friedman; read any number of his op-eds, and you'll see this tendency at play, gumming up the workings of his arguments with cheeseball energy.

Finally, because we must, we come to the denouement.

Unable to offer a good means forward from America's various diplomatic crises, Friedman resorts to asking and answering his own questions. Bear witness, dear reader, as a man grasps for a fourth Pulitzer with both hands:

“Who will tell [Trump] the truth? No one.

No one but the wild earth of Ukraine.”

Oh God.

I hate it already.

…let's continue.

“No one but the wild earth of Ukraine. In the trenches in the Donbas, there is truth. In the 20,000 Ukrainian children that Kyiv says Putin has abducted, there is truth. In the roughly 1.4 million Russian and Ukrainian soldiers killed and wounded as a result of Putin’s fevered dreams of restoring Ukraine to Mother Russia, there is truth. In the Ukrainian civilians killed by Russian drones at the same time that Trump was laying out the red carpet for Putin in Alaska, there is truth.”

Spare me.

Spare us all.

In the imminent need for the retirement of Thomas L. Friedman, there is truth.

***********

A few takeaways from all this shade, then.

One: if you're going to go off on a flight of rhetorical fancy in your essay, put it behind a sturdy topic sentence. Make sure the poetry you're aspiring for in your prose has purpose, context, and clear intent; that it's not just there to ego-stroke, or virtue-signal.

Two: state your intentions clearly and honestly. Establish credibility through transparency. Critique openly, and in good faith, with an eye to solutions. If your perspective isn't adding something new, why is it needed?

Three: don't write like a schmuck. Don't use byzantine sentence structures that try to do four things at once; you think it displays your erudition, but it does the opposite. Argumentative writing isn't a game: don't reduce it to a contest of scoring jabs. You devalue the craft and your audience when you do so.

Lastly: be humble. Don't cite yourself; we can all use Wikipedia. Posit your claims directly, and anticipate counter-arguments. Gain respect from your readers by giving it. Don’t adopt respectful postures, only to set up straw-man arguments. We all know when you haven't done the reading, and are faking the funk.

Re-read.

Revise often as you type - you can always revert your doc back to a previous idea.

Above all, be good to yourself without worshipping it.

***********

In these words, of course, I hope there is yet more truth.

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Cameron Maxwell currently teaches creative writing and media production in Midtown Manhattan, and has taught in the NYC DOE for thirteen years. He lives near Rockaway Beach, in Queens, New York, with his lovely wife Carla.

Part One here:

Welcome back, friendo!

What else can we learn from Viginia Woolf’s example?

3. USING CONTRAST TO SPIKE CONFLICT
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“The wild child [Mrs. Manresa], afloat once more on the tide of the old man’s benignity, looked over her coffee cup at Giles, with whom she felt in conspiracy…She looked before she drank. Looking was part of drinking. Why waste sensation, she seemed to ask, why waste a single drop that can be pressed out of this ripe, this melting, this adorable world? Then she drank, and the air round her became threaded with sensation. Bartholomew felt it; Giles felt it. Had he been a horse, the thin brown skin would’ve twitched, as if a fly had settled. Isabella twitched too. Jealousy, anger pierced her skin.” (45)

As with the second scene analyzed yesterday, we see an author serving up characterization in strong doses - trying to land images on our conscious mind before the story careens off again. This scene tells us a number of important things about Mrs. Manresa, and one very important one about Isabella.

We see expectations flipped; in their flipping, future conflict is seeded. It is not Isabella, the young wife with a heart that yearns, trying on fine threads of sensation - but an older woman, of late-middle age, who has the latitude to strive for an unconventional life, marked by liquor and suitors. And these factors converge, with jealousy and anger rearing their heads at the end of the scene. Woolf dresses up negative emotions as a figurative knife, shivving into Isa and spurring her on.

In Virginia Woolf’s world, moments of sensualism and ecstasy are neither poisonous, nor unattainable, in and of themselves - but she’s too keen an observer of the human condition to ignore the costs and pains which attend them. There is no epiphany of self for Mrs. Manresa without a keen awareness of marital bondage by Isabella.

There is no luxury without poverty in Woolf’s tightly ordered moral universe; no wild yawp of joy that doesn’t go hand-in-hand with a cry of existential dread.

In this way, it must be said, Virginia Woolf is as fair-minded as they come.

4. USE CRISIS AND STASIS AS FOILS
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“Now Miss La Trobe stepped from her hiding. Flowing, and streaming, on the grass, on the gravel, still for one moment she held them together - the dispersing company. Hadn’t she, for twenty-five minutes, made them see? A vision imparted was relief from agony…for one moment…one moment. The the music petered out on the last word we. She heard the breeze rustle in the branches. She saw Giles Oliver with his back to the audience. Also Cobbet of Cobbs Corner. She hadn’t made them see. It was a failure, a damned failure! As usual. Her vision escaped her. And turning, she strode to the actors, undressing down in the hollow, where butterflies feasted on swords of silver paper; where the dish cloths in the shadow made pools of yellow.

Cobbet had out his watch. Three hours till seven, he noted; then water the plants. He turned.” (75)

Miss La Trobe's experiences during and after the show form an important story-line in the novel’s second half. Here, we see her unrealized ambitions coming into full bloom - and we understand the severity of her self-critical stance towards the world. That Miss L has mentally consigned her company's effort to failure, twice, after the performance of only the first of her play's three Acts - and on such a flimsy pretense! - is a detail that can be read a number of different ways.

But we never linger, with Woolf, and that can balm as well as sting. The depth of the feeling in the early passage is undercut by the simple beauty of Cobbet and Giles milling about, and the butterflies down in the hollow. The contrast exposes Miss L's self-flagellation as vanity. We see Woolf's inclination to absurdify life's irreconcilable truths, and acknowledge the chasms of feeling which separate us. One soul is disintegrating just a few meters from another, who's timing the day's gardening schedule.

Also of note here is how Virginia Woolf can make crisis and stasis act on and with each other. Miss L's emotion rushes out in a wild exclamatory tone, peaking as she repeats “failure” - then, we have the slow dilation of the scene with those butterflies, and, finally, Cobbet and his watch bring it up short. Everything crashing about and remaining still, all at once.

Black-and-white thinkers hate to see a Woolf comin’.

Which brings us to our final quotation:

5. TRY TO SEE AND FEEL IT ALL, THEN PUT IT TO WORDS
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“At last, Miss La Trobe could raise herself from her stooping position. It had been prolonged to avoid attention. The bells had stopped; the audience had gone; also the actors. She could straighten her back. She could open her arms. She could say to the world, You have taken my gift! Glory possessed her - for one moment. But what had she given? A cloud that melted into the other clouds on the horizon. It was in the giving that the triumph was. And the triumph faded. Her gift meant nothing. If they had understood her meaning; if they had known their parts; if the pearls had been real and the funds illimitable - it would have been a better gift. Now it had gone to join the others.

‘A failure,’ she groaned, and stooped to put away the records.

Then suddenly the starlings attacked the tree behind which she had hidden. In one flock they pelted it like so many winged stones. The whole tree hummed with the whizz they made, as if each bird plucked a wire. A whizz, a buzz, rose from the bird-buzzing, bird-vibrant, bird-blackened tree. The tree became a rhapsody, a quivering cacophony, a whizz and vibrant rapture, branches, leaves, birds syllabling discordantly life, life, life without measure, without stop devouring the tree. Then up! Then off!

What interrupted? It was old Mrs. Chalmers, creeping through the grass with a bunch of flowers - pinks apparently - to fill the vase that stood on her husband’s grave. In winter it was holly, or ivy. In summer, a flower. It was she who scared the starlings. Now she passed.” (151-152)

Here, some 70+ pages later, Miss L's musings about failure return as motif. Internal and external chaos mash up against each other, instead of dissolving. The starling attack plays like something from a poet's account of the London Blitz: if you think the scene pops onscreen, just try reading it out loud, and see for yourself how sturdy it's built.

The utter cringe of the character detail anchors the scene in both tragic and comedic registers. Rather than make small-talk with her actors or audience following the show, Miss La Trobe has fled their company to gather props and costumes backstage, hurrying about at a crouch to avoid the eye of anyone who might approach. If you've struggled with social anxieties or phobias, the scene's truthfulness is immediately legible.

Ah, but again, Virginia continues to ask: why dwell on personal agonies at all? The world does its thing regardless, spins about at its own indifferent tempo. The widow Chalmers - the woman literally responsible for the starlings’ disruption, fulfilling a self-imposed duty of care for her husband's memory, with those pink flowers - speaks to that truth.

As with Isabella and Mrs. Manresa earlier, the moment places the characters as foils of each other. The self- and legacy-preoccupied theater director, by turns elated and dismayed, runs smack into the simple, stoic ritual of a devout widow. What that contrast signifies is debatable, and left ambiguous - right up until the novel's end. But I love how implied satire and pathos are compatible in the scene. Yes, Miss La Trobe's grandiosity is absurd: that doesn't strip her pain of its poignancy, or let us put it aside. Right up until the novel's ending some several scenes later, we watch a person wage war against competing aspects of herself - trying to integrate them into reality, and learn to live within their contradictions.

If that sort of inner conflict can't quicken your blood, dear reader, I've got nothing for ya.

***********

Like Chekhov before her, Virginia Woolf has created neither angels, nor demons; she offers only people.

How rich she can make that offering.

How eager she is to offer prayers and admonitions in the same breath.

And how well she knows a fundamental truth: that our salvation and our ruination are entwined more closely than we'd like to believe.
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Thanks for dropping by today, and as always, please add a comment or send an email with any questions or reactions of your own! Would love to hear your thoughts.

😌,
Cameron

One Note:

She’ll receive the full letter, with additional sections, when she’s older. I wanted to put an excerpted version of this letter out there in the Substack community for any other fathers, or fathers-to-be.

Why?

I firmly believe that in embracing our roles as caregivers, teachers, and guardians, men honor the best parts of ourselves. I feel called to act on that belief, now as ever, as our due date draws near.

Throughout the piece, I address the letter to “her”: our child will be born a biological female, and my pronoun use reflects this fact. This does not in any way equate to a gender preference on my part: who and how she wants to be in this world will be her choice. I see my role as being the person to help her make those choices from a place of empowerment, and self-acceptance. I hope to be more of a shepherd, guardian, and teacher - sometime-buddy too, if I build the trust right - than a law-giving paterfamilias. That seems only fair to me.

I’m unbelievably, overwhelmingly, over-the-moon excited to be a parent! Carla and I are not blind to the struggles ahead, but there’s never been an easier time to find an optimistic mindset. The horrors of the world persist, but so will we.

Specials thanks to the friends and family reading who have supported us through the sweetest seven months of our lives. We grow happy and confident, each day, through your many kindnesses, and the constancy in your love!

❤️,

Cameron

***********

Hello dear!

I hope you're having a wonderful day! If not, I hope I can help turn it around here on the page :)

Your due date is getting closer and closer as I write this - about eight more weeks now! - and so as part of the process of getting ready to greet you, I wanted to write you this letter.

I want to let you know that I am going to wake up each day for the rest of my life with the intention of being brave and good for you. But I want to you to know that I will fail. I want you to know that I will come up short. I may be an absence in your life, when a presence is required. I may say things in anger which I don't even come close to actually meaning or believing.

You may feel that in my worst moments, I've played loose and reckless with your feelings. You may be hurt deeply by things I have done or said - you may even be holding those hurts with you now, as you read this.

Baby, I want you to know how sorry, how profoundly sorry I am.

I've never parented before, and new situations are the ones where you make the most mistakes. But with good intentions, and some thoughtful use of the word "sorry", you'll also find that you can learn the most from them, and avoid being hard on yourself.

Above all, above and beyond any argument or bad day, I want you to know and feel the depth in the love that your mother and I have for you. I want it to be part of the reality you inhabit, the air you breathe, steady as the sunrise - come what may in our families, or in our world. You might not understand that love fully, or how we came by it, and that's OK: it's the sort of bond which lives between the space of two peoples' souls, and without a certain number of years on Earth already, maybe it doesn't make sense. But it will live in everything we do for you.

Even most of our arguments, I think you'll come to find, have our love for your firing away at the bottom of them. Because it's a colossal heart-swelling tonnage of emotion you've been building up in us each and every day, dear, ever since the news of your arrival. To be able to love a child, even the idea of one, is the sweetest feeling you may ever know. Our lives changed for good, and forever, the moment the hope of you entered them.

So I want you to know that we never saw you as an accident, or a regret, or a mistake. We never saw you as a pain, or as a bother. No child is ever any of those things, but some feel they are, or are made to feel so by cruel adults. I want to emphasize, in case there was ever any doubt, that You, lovely you - who you are right now, right at this very moment - were all we ever wanted. All we could ever hope to want.

I want to talk some more about who your mom is.

You know her as Mom with a capital M, of course, and through the stories you've heard about who she was before we met you. Her friends, family, and the many people who love her have also no doubt told you of the wonderful person she was and is. So I want to add my voice to theirs, and tell you a little more about how we met.

I want you to love her through my eyes, too.

***********

I was drawn to your mother by how she spoke, and how she spoke to me; other women could never put me at ease within myself like she did. The self-critical voice I live with even now was very intense before your mother entered my life, and I used to have a metric ton of anxiety about even casual interactions with women I found attractive. I felt a stupid pressure (from within myself) to project some idea of who I thought they wanted me to be onto them, as I think you'll find many men and boys do. And so companionship and self-worth were hard for me, and took time to build.

Most days, I went to work and retreated home again, living mostly for my students. A quiet, private life, led by a quiet, private man, from the basement room of an apartment which was, thankfully, loud and happy-rowdy; that helped draw me out of myself when I got too serious. It had a nice courtyard between two apartment units, and all the tenants were about at the same stage in life, so the arrangement had a nice leftover-college feel.

Your mom and I had a mutual friend in that apartment complex, a great guy by the name of Derek Dahmann. I hope you've already gotten to meet and know him, because he's very important: he's the one who set our love-story in motion, and in a very real sense, you might not exist without him.

Derek organized a birthday party for his then-girlfriend Elise in October of 2017. I hope you know Elise, because she's another warm and big-hearted person, just like your mother: part of why they stayed such close friends after college.

Your mother came for the party, and I was there too, since the whole apartment came out for Elise. We all went out for drinks at Duck Duck, a bar bordering East Williamsburg and Bushwick, and I heard that voice of hers for the first time.

It was cool and low, like a South Florida sunshower, releasing its rain onto a dry heart.

***********

But our situations weren't quite in alignment for romance; not yet. I messaged Derek the next day that I'd loved meeting you, and that I'd be interested in dating you. He let me know that you weren't available, but he clocked my interest.

So on March 31st, 2018, almost six months later, when it was Derek's turn to have a birthday, and your mom came back to Brooklyn for that happy event - he knew to put my name in her ear again. For your mom, that was all it took.

Me, I was already gone.

Your mom was wearing a loose, billowy blouse, Mexican-style, when I saw her early that evening. I'll always remember: it was a light blue, like the sky gets close to the horizon.

What else did I love about her then?

Her voice, of course, all its warm vowels and midtones: they communicated passion and intensity and soul-deep honesty. I loved her double-dimples. I loved the way her eyes seemed to shine extra-bright and light up her face when she was taken with an idea.

I felt, with her, as if I was good. I didn't worry I wasn't enough for her, as I had with others; I never did. Her spirit, full of acceptance and understanding, ran strong within her then - as it no doubt still does now.

I felt like I'd been driving at night, long hours spent with just my headlights and my thoughts, knowing the destination but no sense of how to reach it. Then, quite unexpectedly, I'd found a country lane, leading to a beautiful old frontier house, made of cedar and river-stone, and it was one of those houses where you could tell at a glance that it was full of heat and laughter. It felt like I'd turned off onto that lane, and that your mother was waiting inside that house (a home, after all!) at the end - waiting for me to join her in it, and to fill it with a lifetime of her care.

So I hope you know you can always come home to her, no matter where she is. She is the best and strongest and most dependable person I know, and she will guard and nurture your happiness every day she is with you.

I want to add some more thoughts on the person I hope you'll be, and tell you some things to be mindful of as you move ahead in life.

I feel like a bit of a hypocrite in doing this. As a boy, I always put up a stupid amount of resistance, even to benign pieces of advice from my older family members, if they didn't agree with what I felt within myself. Some of this same donkey stubbornness probably persists in you, too - so sorry if it's ever brought you to any hardship.

But I still want to put myself in the role of advisor to you, while I can. Before you grow up and out and into the world, like the divine life-force you are. 

The first thing I can say is that it's good to develop a healthy attitude towards the negative emotions you'll experience in your life: fear, anger, jealousy, anxiety, sorrow. These emotions can create pain within us when they touch down, and so our tendency is to try and shut them out and push them away and give them bad names.

But the truth is that they are important signals from our mind and spirit that things are not right within us. We need to receive those signals honestly, openly - and let them motivate new choices on our part. If we don't, they start to swell up, and become huge things ready to burst into and kick over our lives: terror, rage, envy, panic, suicidality. Just like how small forest fires become wildfires when you suppress the natural little burns which help regenerate the forest.

So strive to keep things in balance. And don't be ashamed when you slip up; we all do. What’ll define you is how you go about getting back up.

Another little metaphor (not mine) I always liked, to illustrate the point: let these emotions be a powerful wind at your back, pushing you on in new directions - and not a wall, not a barrier, between you and the life you want to lead. Try to conceive of them that way, and greet them as you would people who care about you.

If they stay too long, or if their side-effects start causing you pain and you can't get away from them through willpower alone - know that there is no shame in seeking help. Some of the cruelest people in this world adopt a destructive posture towards life because they feel there is no one to help, and no one who cares, not really: they go down some of those dark roads I mentioned earlier, but with no car and headlights, and no Mom waiting in a warm house at the end of the street. They feel they must hide their true selves to survive the night. That pent-up pain creates agony, and a hatred of the world.

Please, don't follow their example, and isolate yourself from people and situations who can help you process, heal from - and ultimately find joy and purpose in - the life we gave you. Alone-time can bring clarity at times, but you were designed by nature to be a social animal. Try to be gracious and good-natured, and forgiving of small flaws in others: that's the surest way to receive good treatment and fairmindedness from them.

Another thing that will help you in this world of social connections is building skills. Skills can mean anything: baseball, cross-stitching, origami, oil painting, the trombone, writing and reading poetry, acrylic nails, film photography. Anything which requires experimentation and creativity, and which can be done by you and/or friends for long intervals. Skills are great on a lot of levels - they let you get outside your own head, and into a world of other people and ideas. And, as you develop those skills, you'll learn processes you can use to live by the rest of your life: they're foundational to a person's resiliency, because the habits of mind needed are the same in each case.

If there's one thing Dad still struggles with sometimes, it's putting himself out there in such situations; unfortunately, it's led me to some heavy regrets in my time. So learn from my example! Let the things you love be a bridge to the people you want to be with. And don't be afraid to make some new choices, if either hobbies or friends start to vanish from your life.

If you keep your heart facing open to the world, ready to accept the joys and aggravations of life with others, no pain will last forever. Your body is a healer: it was made in your mother's image. No matter how deep the grief, the loss, there will be life and loves on the other side. All you have to do is let them in, and accept that they're possible.

Just like Tinkerbell.
Clap your hands, my love.

I love you so much.

Clear eyes, full heart, can't lose.

Your loving father,
Cameron Porter Maxwell

Author’s note:
Screenplay formatting, unfortunately, doesn’t translate neatly onto the Substack interface from a Google doc. I’ve made some changes to original formatting in adapting the text to Substack’s space; the complete text I’ve been working on is in a separate document.

First post:

Second post:

SCENE FOUR

INT. - ONESTATE ACADEMY AUDITORIUM 112 - EARLY EVENING

The scene opens on a proscenium stage, labeled 112 at its apex, with high-backed chairs raked in gradual rows up to the auditorium’s rafters. The ceiling is composed of massive domed-glass panels: in day-time, tempered light floods the space, but dusk has just passed. Smooth globular lighting fixtures accentuate the space in rows. There is an expectant tone in the air.
AFX: sounds of an orchestra warming up, played over a loudspeaker; this sound indicates that the lecture is to begin in one more minute. Audience members start taking their seats and wrapping up their conversations.

D-503 and O-90 are seated next to each other, with an empty seat next to O: she has draped her yuny jacket over the seatback to reserve it. D-503 glances up at the loudspeaker as the warm-up warning tone comes on, then at the auditorium doors.

D-503:
He’s really cutting it close this time.

O-90
(Not looking up from her program):
Wait. He’ll be here.

Before she finishes the word “here”, we see two auditorium doors on the far side of the space burst open. R-13 squeezes between the aisles as the other attendees take their seats; looking up, he makes eye contact with the pair, and waves.

He is younger than D-503: closer in age to O-90. His hair grows long down his neck, beyond a comb’s influence: he is a poet, tasked with composing works dedicated to the Glory of OneState.  

ONESTATE PROFESSOR
(Clearly into a lapel mic):
Thank you, honored Numbers, for your attendance at today’s academy session! 

Pauses, as if waiting for the audience to settle, but it is already silent. He clears throat and continues. 

Our topic today is the social history of our ancient ancestors. We will examine that history through samples of the music they created, then contrast them with a selection of some of our recent anthems.

When the professor speaks, three-dimensional infographics, mirroring the contents of his speech, are projected behind him in beams of light. The graphics underscore his points, and serve as a teaching tool for the audience.

ONESTATE PROFESSOR (CONT.):
As we have always taught in OneState, it is clear that our ancestors’ single-minded focus on the individual let their society decay into self-interest and greed.

The graphics show images accentuating the point: clips of political rallies and mass religious leaders and, finally, concert musicians surrounded by tens of thousands of worshippers. 

ONESTATE PROFESSOR (CONT.):
Their music reflected this decay, and in fact, made it worse. It was written with the intent to create chaos in the individual - their thoughts, memories, emotions, desires, and so forth.

The natural effect was, of course, to separate people from one another. It created a world in which 10,000 people could hear a song, and have 10,000 different reactions to it.

A music score, depicting several bars of Alexander Scriabin’s Piano Sonata No.4, replaces the footage of the mass-gatherings.

ONESTATE PROFESSOR (CONT.):
It created a world in which every person, for the terribly short space of a few moments, could be God in their own mind. Music, instead of serving a vital purpose, became a source of their insanity.

As he continues, a Steinway Model D is rolled out onto the stage behind him by two Academy assistants. They stop once it’s facing the music score projected behind the professor.

ONESTATE PROFESSOR (CONT.):
To help give us an object lesson on ancestral music, we have a special event to present as part of today’s lecture. 

A gasp and a light round of applause as I-330 walks onstage.

ONESTATE PROFESSOR (CONT.):
One of our Numbers, who takes an abiding interest in the customs of our ancients, has agreed to perform a selection of their music, on the instrument it was written for.

I-330 is wearing a low-cut black cocktail dress, held in place by two daringly thin spaghetti straps. FLASH CUT TO: D-503’s face, expression betraying nothing, but eyes widening.

D-503 (V.O.):
Her smile was a bite, and I was its target.

As she readies her hands, we see a private smile grow at the corners of I-330’s mouth.

ONESTATE PROFESSOR (NOW IN V.O.):
Without further ado, allow me to present I-330, in period costume, playing Piano Sonata No. 4 by Alexander Scriabin!

MUSIC: I-330 performs the first 1:41 of the sonata. The CAMERA cuts between CUs and XCUs of her, and D-503 watching with subtle but noticeable interest. In one shot, we see 0-90 turn her head almost imperceptibly to watch him watch her, then resume its forward gaze.
I-330, on a signal from the professor, stops the performance abruptly and lays her hands in her lap. Some applause.

ONESTATE PROFESSOR:
Ah! Pure insanity, is it not? So wild; so without order, purpose, logic. . . reason! Thank you once again, I-330, for your contributions to our knowledge today!

I-330 waves briefly at the audience as she stands, then departs through the wings to more polite applause as the PROFESSOR continues.

ONESTATE PROFESSOR:
Now, by contrast, watch as I use this composition machine to generate three sonatas of our own, now fully in line with OneState’s official methods. . .

The PROFESSOR leads a demonstration, in low-inaudible dialogue, on how to create music in OneState: inputting a series of prompts through a touchscreen interface and creating music with a single, specific emotional effect.

In whispered dialogue, raised to room-tone in the mix, 0-90, R-13, and D-503 speak under the lecture. Their faces are blank, but the energy is tense. Small moments of their mouths and bodies, more than their rigidly fixed body language, reveal who the speakers are in the shot.

O-90:
Where were you?

R-13:
Caught up with a new ode. Problems with the meter in the third stanza .

D-503:
All good now?

R-13:
Maybe yes, maybe no. I’ll know in edit tomor-

O.C., a Number from somewhere in a seat above shushes him before he can finish the sentence. He turns, angry, but realizes all eyes are on him, and that it will be impossible to identify the shusher. He turns to face forward the rest of the scene.

R-13:
I have a second lecture pass on my Table of Hours for tonight, if either of you can join.

He looks only at 0-90 as he speaks. D-503 watches her reaction with interest.

O-90
(Lightly, softly):
Ah! Well, no, I’m afraid. You see, D-503 and I arranged a Sex Pass a couple days ago.

O-90 looks up at D-503, who responds with a thin smile, and a squeeze of her hand.

SMASH-CUT TO:

INT. - D-503’S APARTMENT - LATE EVENING

O-90 and D-503 enter, draw the blinds (AFX: ticking sound), and use their Sex Day passes. Neither appears deeply into the act at first, but we see O-90 make a more focused effort to initiate, at each stage.

Gradually, both soften into what seems to be genuine passion. 0-90’s mouth is firm, insistent.

Throughout the cuts of the scene, we hear a tick-tick-ticking. Finally, cut to a beside timer reveals that 30 minutes are up. We see the blinds whip up at zero: Sex Day is over. As if on command with the rising blinds, 0-90 slips on her yuny, kisses D-503 goodbye, and leaves.

D-503 lays back down in bed, and closes his eyes. A long moment. Then, a sustained minor-key piano chord pops them open. The sound dies to silence, and D-503 is left under his bedsheets, sweat beading on his face.

D-503 (V.O.):
The first time you see something that isn’t there, you don't know what to think.

We see him roll over, clear his throat, punch the pillow in aggravation at his sleeplessness, then scrunch up his eyes, as if attempting to will something out of them.

D-503 (V.O. CONT.):
But the thoughts take your sleep all the same.

We see D-503 continuing to toss and turn, looking in futility for an angle that will give him sleep, as the image dissolves.

FADE TO BLACK

Author’s note:
Screenplay formatting, unfortunately, doesn’t translate neatly onto the Substack interface from a Google doc. I’ve made some changes to original formatting in adapting the text to Substack’s space; the complete text I’ve been working on is in a separate document.

Catch up on Scenes One and Two:

SCENE THREE:

INT. - D-503’S BEDROOM - 7:00AM NEXT MORNING

D-503’s bedroom is as squared-away as his office: hospital corners, spotless surfaces, cold white-gray-black color palette. It has a sterile, unlived-in feel, high atop an upper floor: no photos or personal signatures of any kind, despite the fact that D-503 has lived there for years,  since the start of the INTEGRAL’s construction. Only sheets of sketches, diagrams, and equations populate his bedroom desk.

As his voice rolls in V.O., we see D-503 progress through his morning routine. He begins by writing  the report that's playing over V.O. at his desk; the audio continues to play as he exercises, eats, and showers. Blue tones, cold hard light in each room.

D-503 (V.O.):
I should probably explain some more about our way of life. I understand, reader, that living as you do in a different era, more elaboration may be helpful.

Let’s start at the beginning of life: birth.

When a citizen of OneState is born, they are designated one letter, followed by a number. In ancestral times, names were sources of bloodshed: markers of ethnic difference, of tribal affiliation, of class and status. Vicious wars were fought by citizens to protect the “honor” of their rulers’ names. All very cruel.

There is no irony in D-503’s exposition: he is a true believer.

Our names, by contrast, ensure equality between our citizens. They reinforce our great and noble truth: we come from One, and to One we belong.

Hmmm. . . what else should we discuss?

Well, since I’ve mentioned them already - since they’re indispensable to the harmony of OneState - we should probably go over Sex Days.

SMASH CUT TO:

Two pigs rutting in a feedlot. In fields and feedlots, we see a brief montage of common animal-rearing practices used in the late-20th/early-21st century, shot in the style of handheld documentary footage, playing over the next V.O.

D-503 (V.O.):
Sex Days are another gift from our Benefactor. The Academy teaches that our ancestors did not use a system or program for arranging sex - but instead lived as beasts, selecting and discarding partners in a madness they termed “freedom.”

Can you conceive of the irony, dear reader? They had advanced knowledge of animal breeding technique, yet refused to apply it to their own species! The ones most in need of its correct application! 

The next montage sequence depicts the sequence of how sex is arranged and performed in OneState, with visuals explicitly matching V.O. D-503 presents these sexual norms with factual seriousness; this creates a farcical quality in the speech’s text, music, and camerawork.
MUSIC: light, energetic; emotionally, the sort of stuff which would play over the PA before a motivational-speaker seminar.

D-503 (V.O.):
OneState has always known the dangers the emotion known as “love” presents to an ordered society. To meet its threat, OneState created the Lex sexualis some 300 years ago. Its creed states, “Any Number has right of access to any other Number as a sexual being.”

CUT TO:

EXT. - D-503’S BEDROOM - 7:00AM NEXT MORNING

We see the Lex sexualis printed in poster form on a doctor’s office wall - camera slowly zooms out and begins panning/cutting through the next sequence, enacted with 0-90 and D-503.

D-503 (CONT.):
The rest is a purely technical matter. They give you a careful going-over in the Sexual Bureau labs to determine the volume of sex hormones in your blood, and work out a Table of Sex Days based on this data. If your table-day aligns with the day of a Number whose spot is not yet claimed, you fill out a declaration for that Number, they hand you a pass, and a notice is sent to their residence.

No silly courtship rituals this way, you see? No need for vanity, ego, sexual competition. A perfect system.

But how do Sex Days themselves work? First, on the Sex Day assigned to you, you must present your pass to the residence duty officer for permission to use the blinds.

We see, for the first time, the inside of a OneState apartment complex: all tenants live in open square-glass apartments, where each part of their day (save bathroom use) takes place in full view of one another.
MUSIC: the score slowly shifts into a techno-menacing ambience during the scene, guiding the scene away from the slapsticky quality of the sex-pass stuff.

EXT. - ONESTATE APARTMENT TOWERS - NIGHT-TIME

Shots of drones on patrol, roving between different levels of OneState’s apartment towers with cameras swiveling and recording and inspecting each unit, accompanies the next V.O. Blinded units are checked against computer records for approval before each drone moves on.

D-503 (V.O. CONT.):
Our residence towers are designed for blinds to stay up during normal hours. This allows the Guardians easy access for carrying out their noble, heavy burden: ensuring no illegal and immoral activity is being hidden by the blinds at home, and that the Table of Sex Days is being followed.

CUT TO: INT. - ONESTATE BIRTHING CENTER - INDETERMINATE TIME OF DAY

Over D-503's V.O., the last images in the sequence show a newborn being taken from a birthing room, cleaned and wrapped in linen, and placed swiftly into a rolling crib, which is then wheeled into a nursery and attached to monitoring equipment. Medical-horror undertones, and deep feelings of unease at the designed inhumanity of OneState’s system.

D-503 (V.O. CONT.):
And - well - that’s that! Any little people resulting from sexual activity are of course turned over to OneState, and raised within Maternity Facilities. The labels “mother” and “father”, so beloved by our forebearers, have no place in OneState. All little people are raised with equal opportunity and influence, in identical care-centers, using identical methods of care.

As D-503 speaks, a birdseye on the baby the CAMERA has been tracking zooms out to reveal the scale of the nursery: rows of hundreds of newborns, with nurses roving amongst them like farm-workers in a field.

D-503 (V.O. CONT.):
All the hardship, the anxiety, of raising little people: gone. All the damaging emotional attachments and poor decision-making that come from having to caregive one’s own little person: gone.

Perhaps now, dear reader, you can appreciate how well we have conquered nature’s tyranny - and the defects of our kind.

MUSIC swells ominously as the CAMERA cuts in on newborn squirming away from an intubation; abruptly, both MUSIC and CAMERA CUT TO BLACK.

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