fabulist

Time keeps on slipping, and I’m content to slide, skidding sideways into the uncertainty of tomorrow and tomorrow, but sometimes the rituals and obligations of presumptive adulthood grate on me as I hit the rough surfaces along the way. Circumstance has dictated that I need a semi-formal outfit of clothes, and so, after a few frustrating weeks of trying on countless sport coats, slacks, and ensembles in realms from the lowest thrift stores to the loftiest of fine retailers of menswear, I finally found a basic, serviceable suit for slightly less than I’ll be getting back in my tax return this year.

This ought to be a satisfying purchase, but in all honesty, I feel cross and resentful that I’m caught up in adulthood’s grotesque pageantry. It’s not the responsibility, as I have been a legitimate, self-sustaining, reasonably functioning adult since I put down the princely sum of one hundred five dollars for my room in a grim basement apartment on the shaggy side of a college down and emancipated myself forcefully from the comfort of youth at the tender age of seventeen. It’s not the nuance, either, as I’m all for a level of subtlety in my affectations, as evidenced by my continual evolution in the realm of facial topiary and my music-making efforts, which have become so detailed in their studied stillness as to be practically indistinguishable from near-silence.

I don’t mind looking older than I am, or manifesting the scars and marks and bristling late-life hairy patches that come from a life of bumps and scrapes, and I don’t mind that I look to the news and can’t, for the life of me, identify celebrities that the talking heads indicate is an A-list VIP. Music in genres that ring no bells comes and goes, and that’s okay, as I’ve got a lifetime of organized sound in my collection. I haven’t read the hot new author, or watched the exciting new film, or followed the thrilling new series on the television, and that’s okay, too.

I’m insulated from one of the key elements of supposed maturation in that I do not have, and never will have, children, and that, too, is fine. I enjoy the energy and presence of my nieces and nephews and the children of friends, and enjoy being able to bid them a fond adieu and return to my small apartment and my dogs. The ugly conservatives of the world would be only to happy to point out that I’m somehow more prone to the excesses of narcissistic selfishness in this regard, but I’m secure in my knowledge that I am no more likely to live exclusively for myself than anyone else by virtue of who and what I am. How I relate to the world is my own responsibility and it is a chore that I take seriously.

So I stood in the focal range of five mirrors, caught up in a funhouse view of myself as I struggled to seem remotely comfortable in a perfectly handsome charcoal grey suit that appeared to fit properly, even as it did what suits always do, limiting the range and expressiveness of my moves and gestures.

“What if I need to do this?” I asked the saleswoman, raising both hands in the air and waving them like I just didn’t care.

“Will you be doing that very often?” she asked in response.

“Probably not, but knowing I can’t will make me want to even more.”

She smiled a very solicitous smile, but couldn’t come up with a response. I know, on some level, that she was making a mental note, but I get a lot of that, and it, too, is okay. It’s just—well, I hate these damn things. I don’t mind formality, but I chafe against the reality that puts a formal woman into what can be a lovely, flowing, comfortable thing and puts a formal man into a restraint.

I have worn formalwear a handful of times in the past twenty years. For my twentieth high school reunion, I bought a lovely suit at a thrift store and tailored it myself to make me look to be in far better shape than nudity would reveal. Having put on a few pounds, I hurriedly bought a sport coat for the memorial service for my uncle, but the sleeves were too long and I attempted to cover this by engineering reasons to extend my arms, thus bringing the cuffs to a more appropriate position on my forearm, though in retrospect, I think I ended up looking more like a questing Frankenstein’s monster or a sleepwalker than a formal funerarian.

In a way, it’s down to some of the things I reject about adulthood, which leaves me with few places to tread the boards in my fancypants. As a wayward thirteen year-old, I reveled in my peculiar friendship with the composer Gian Carlo Menotti by wearing the jacket from the navy blue doubleknit suit, purchased so I could attend my best friend’s bar mitzvah without embarrassing myself, over my shoulders, Italian-style, like a cape. I did my best to gesture appropriately and to affect a throughly continental manner until my stylish excesses got me sent to the vice principal’s office.

“Mrs. Wall, Joe’s come up with a new one,” my beleaguered sparring partner in the office said, speaking to my mother on the telephone. “He’s been wearing a blazer to school over his shoulders, claiming to know the composer Gian Carlo Menotti and otherwise acting all Italian.”

“Well, Joe does know Gian Carlo Menotti,” my mother said to a rather surprised middle school vice principal, and I think it may have been one of her few pleasantly smug moments in three years of difficult parent-teacher relations. “I’ll ask him to tone it down, though.”

The rest of the time, I just don’t get it. I could probably be more secure and more solvent if I surrendered to the middle-age middle-class office world, where the foot soldiers of the mundane clomp around in formation in service to the almighty fear of difference, but those clothes and those roles make me feel panicky and sick, and the tension builds until I want to roll around the floor of the cubicle farms clawing at my straightjacket.

I don’t go to weddings, and I’ve pretended that it’s because I’m protesting the lack of equal treatment for all of us in marriage, but to be fair, I have to admit that I just hate them. I hate the rituals, the showy repetition of stupid cutesy little obligations that are part and parcel of the event, and the horrid ridiculousness of a big show that exists partly to shut our parents up and partly because we’re all brainwashed into believing that a relationship that’s rooted in our love and trust and adoration for another person requires validation by the masses.  More than all that, I think you have to be a complete and utter imbecile to spend the absurd amounts of money that people flush down the toilet at the start of their couplehood instead of putting it into a down payment for a house, a certificate of deposit, or—god forbid—something more charitable, like having a well dug for a village in Africa. 

Throughout my life, I have often felt like an anthropologist from another planet, largely because a lot of givens get lost on me. I don’t get sports, particularly in the sense that we start off in our youth in the wild, joyous hurly-burly of actual play and end up in our constrained adulthood perched in front of television sets, cheering as someone else plays, and then fuss about how out of shape we are. I don’t get hypercharged regionalism, nationalism, or yellow dog partisanship, complete with all the pomp and circumstance of lifeless repetition that goes along with these things. What’s wrong with a player of one, on the team of the whole planet?

We doll ourselves up for church, too, and like the airy cookie-cutter splendor of weddings, I’m just confused by it all. I don’t wonder why I’m here, and the meaning of life isn’t a mystery to me. We’re here to make meaningful lives, and lives are meaningful when we give back more to the world than we’re given. When we can see ourselves in others, it becomes harder and harder to be selfish. I don’t need to sit in a pew to know this, trapped in an itchy suit. Where I need to change is in holding myself to a higher standard each day, and my history recounts that I’ve done this, and continue to do so. I suspect I’d understand it all better if I believed I was a wicked sinner in need of special redemption, but alas, I don’t believe that. When I need insight, I can read the Tao Te Ching or the Bible or the Dhammapada, or better yet, I can look to the people that I know who live lives of virtue and ask myself how I can better follow their example. No jacket required for any of that.

Still, I’m not completely insulated from the instincts and strictures of fashion. The sight of a grown man in flip-flops always makes me wrinkle my nose a bit, and public appearances of home horrors like sweatpants, droopy drawers, and outfits that function more like billboards for a product you already paid for just make me sneer. I think in a way, given my druthers, I’d turn into a bit of an iconoclastic dandy like my late poet friend, David Franks, who was generally someone you could describe as “dapper” without exaggeration, but when you price out the admission fee for dapper—sheeeeeeeesh. Who can manage that without already being wealthy?

Maybe I’m just annoyed that I’ve embraced so much of what is great about adulthood for so long that I don’t feel like I should have to play the signs and symbols game. If I ever get married, it’s going to be in a courthouse. If I feel compelled to flaunt my couplehood, I’ll rent a pavilion in the state park and have a pot luck with all my friends and loved ones. If I die, I want no ridiculous funeral of weeping folks in scratchy formalwear—I just want my ashes scattered somewhere nice. The moon would be a good place, come to think of it.

The rest of the time, I’m content with the way that age and maturity make things better every day, even as I find it harder and harder to deny the uglier sides of being human. There’s a richness to things I’ve treasured for as long as I can remember that just expands with experience. Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring, a piece of music I’ve loved since I was a freshly minted teen, just gets broader and more amazing with every passing year. The films The Red Balloon meant so much to me as a kid, and means more now. Truman Capote’s A Christmas Memory? Oh my. I don’t understand why the uniform of our latter years is so restrictive, though, other than the conservatism of the grand old gestalt, but I’ll be goddamned if I’m going to keep my arms down because adulthood is supposed to be a sober, taciturn time in our lives.

Maybe I just need to wave my arms in that perfect flail that Kermit the Frog taught me so very, very long ago, and maybe a fitted suit jacket is going to make that moment even more ridiculous, but a frog’s gotta do what a frog’s gotta do.

I never warmed to Catcher in the Rye. I'm definitely among the category of kids who rankled against our assigned work, and my god, but the school system of Howard County, Maryland assigned some epics of dull American writing in my day. It's funny, but I can reread some of those assignments now and think ah—I get it, and that's quite a decent book, but there was this joylessness in repetition that just did me in. How many times can a teacher walk through Steinbeck and still be electrified by what he did well? How many times can you drone through the delights of Gatsby to distracted suburbanites and make it alive for them?

Catcher never came to me. Gatsby did, but only twenty-five years later, when I had lived long enough and hard enough that that final, crushing series of lines at the end became something I felt in the marrow of my bones.

Gatsby believed in the green light, the orgastic future that year by year recedes before us. It eluded us then, but that’s no matter — tomorrow we will run faster, stretch out our arms farther... And one fine morning—

So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.

If you'd told me in the first of what would eventually be three successive sophomore years truncated neatly by my expulsion from school that it would one day become a comfort to me to drive nineteen miles to sit quietly on Fitzgerald's grave, trace out the recesses of those engraved words, and remember, I'd have laughed at you, and said something arch and sarcastic. Back then, I was safe in the embrace of my family, protected from the future by pretense and ignorance, and isolated from things like death and failure.

I wish, in my way, that they taught things the way I taught myself, but I'm being a grotesque egotist to think it might be universal, I suppose. In my day, I dodged the assignments to read Bradbury instead, to work and rework well-trodden ways through huge, expository fictional dream worlds saturated with adjectives in florid, bleeding, syrupy clusters of wordlust. I shivered to the arch excesses of Lovecraft, and wrapped up tightly in my bed at night, imagining the mice skittering through the lathwork of my walls and his rats in the walls. I didn't get Shakespeare, beyond the productions I saw played out on the satisfying tiny stage of the old Folger theater, and didn't get the things that too many adult teachers cherish because they, too, had come to know the future, death, and failure.

By high school, it may well be too late, unless you had a teacher like I had had years before.

I'd been personally rescued from special education by one of the most important women I will ever know, Mrs. Noreen Brastow, of Hammond Elementary School, who watched me in the school library long before I was meant to be in her grade and paid notice as I was put into special ed as a clumsy mid-seventies way of dealing with my learning disability and my relationship with an abusive teacher, brewing on the sidelines until she couldn't take it anymore, storming into my classroom in the apex where Pod B and Pod C met at the science room and bringing me into her class for the rest of the semester a grade early.

Pod C, in the parlance of our miserably engineered modern "open space" schools of the seventies, was the final destination in elementary school, and a clangorous hangar of distraction made perfect by the inclusion of three boisterous classes with no divisions beyond the low, orange-furred movable partitions that loosely marked out our home territories. Three teachers taught against the background roar of ninety simultaneous voices and the exposed overhead ductwork, and in that Pod, the demoralization of forces formed the majority view.

Mrs. Brastow, on the other hand, was still alive and electric—more Sook than Ben Stein—and she shared that magical interest with the thrilling enthusiasm of a combined Mrs Who, Which, and Whatsit. She read to us, not because it was in the curriculum, but because it was right, and would accelerate the rote portions of the class to allow space to tell us a story in a chapter each day.

She read us The Yearling over the course of a year, and it was the perfect book for the perfect year, a volume appropriate to our age, but which didn't shy away from the devastating wealth of human experience, and when I cried, I didn't have to hide my face, because we all did, watched from across the Pod by the less-lucky classes.

"Y'all were crying today," sneered the squinty young provocateur, Joey Decker, clearly pointing out that our class had been seen red-faced by the other two classes as we made our way to the cafeteria.

"He shot Flag," said Sarah Morris, wiping away a fresh tear. "You wouldn't understand." I always had a crush on that girl, never more so than that moment.

"Yeah, I understand a class of crybabies."

At forty-four, I understand Joey Decker, too.

In high school, there's too often a misunderstanding of our maturity, coupled with the committeethink standardization of what constitutes great literature, and so they toss us into this sea of good and bad work, armed with not nearly enough experience to grasp some of it, and too much of it to not be cynical about the rest. You can get something from Of Mice and Men over a broad range of age and experience if it's taught right, but give a teacher the arch dryness of Shakespeare's "funny" writing and it's all just words, hanging in space, full of sound and fury and signifying not a fucking thing to some teenager caught up in the struggle for second base.

If the groundwork is there, kids don't need to be forced to read, making that sorrowful Pavlovian connection between reading and the march to Gulag.

In the first grade, my teacher called home repeatedly.

"Mrs. Wall, Joseph has read beyond the assigned section of his language arts book again. I've gone as far as rubber-banding off the rest of the book, and he's clearly removed the rubber band and read the next section. He thinks I don't know that he's removed and replaced the rubber band, but I know."

"What's wrong with him reading ahead?"

"We have to work at the same pace in these classes. It doesn't do us any good for some of our students to leapfrog ahead of the rest of the class."

If you had had this wretched, mean-spirited woman as your teacher, you'd understand. Class was boring, empty, and ritualistic. The rubber band, on the other hand, was the boundary between now and the mysteries of the future. In retrospect, I plead guilty, Mrs. Marcellus, but I have thirty-eight years of experience under my belt since then, and you were wrong.

By high school, my dogged, frustrating resistance had beaten down some of my teachers and they shook their heads and said, "Okay, Ford [I was known as "Ford" for my first year of high school in a clever attempt to redefine my uncoolness by embracing my fanatical love of Adams], I gather that you don't want to read the assigned book, so why don't you pick out a book for this report and do that one instead. I will insist, in exchange, that you present yours for the class, so you can make a case for reading outside the assigned list of books."

"Okay!"

I read, I reread, I scribbled notes in the margins, frantically assembled my thoughts and impressions, sat for one long, long weekend at the keys of my Royal Royalite portable manual typewriter with a genuine leatherette carrying case and tassels on the zipper pulls and turned my drafts into a final case for the wonders of the book I selected, which I'd found in my older sister's room and adopted based on the titillating promise of its title. I tucked four pages of erasable linen typewriter bond with a watermark into my doodle-encrusted canvas binder, caught the bus in, and sat there like a cobra waiting to strike.

"Mr. Wall, would you like to give your report now?"

I was following Karen Wassman's less-than-engaging take on Johnny Tremain, so I was pretty sure I was golden, and that my report could well change the world.

"Yes, Mrs. Beurlen," I said, and walked to the front of the class. "The book I have selected for my report is Naked Lunch, by William S. Burroughs."

Her drawn-in eyebrows went up, then down, and she mumbled, "Oh, for Christ's sake" just loud enough for me to hear. I went into the concept of the cut-up, the background of Burroughs, complete with the lurid tale of what happened to his wife, and some of the history of the publication of the book.

"If I might read a passage here—" I started, and was about to read a bit about two boys under a train trestle that would have almost certainly have shut the school down for the rest of the day, but Mrs. Beurlen stopped me, thanked me for my work, and asked me to return to my seat.

When the report came back, it was marked with an A, as well as a little note that said "Perhaps we should reconsider the assigned reading list for the next one," coupled with a desperate little smiley face. I followed that advice, but never got another A until I put myself through college.

If my high school reading had been the main effort of getting me to read, I would be a different person today, and the problems that sent me to special ed in the third grade would by now have put me in a very, very different place. Instead, I had a teacher early enough who caught me at exactly the right time, and who made me cry in a way so much harder than our legions of overprotective adults will ever allow now.

Jody shot Flag. I—

"Mrs. Brastow, I said. I don't like that he did that. That's not how it's supposed to go. Why did the author make us love Flag if that was going to happen?"

"Oh, Joe—too much of life is not how it's supposed to go, but we can't hide from that."

"I dunno."

Except now, I do.

And one fine morning—

I've been in a deep blue funk of late and have turned to Janelle Monáe in the way I once turned to The B-52's when I was coming out, when hearing someone sing "If you're in outer space, don't feel out of place, because there are thousands of others like you [others like you]" was a magnificent bulwark against the desolation of loneliness. When Ms. Monae sings "I'm trying to find my peace - I was made to believe there's something wrong with me," it is like divine brain chemistry, with the right molecules on the right receptors at the right moment to make it all right that things are not all right, and may not be so for some time.

I was a robot as a child.

I was meant to be a team player, and my guidance counselor would sit me down and look at me with a grave, thoughtful look, and say "Look, Joe—maybe you should think of school, or life, even, as a game. There are rules you can play by that will make things easier and you can set goals and accomplishments as a part of the play."

I thought this was stupid, largely because I have always thought sports metaphors are as stupid as a gym teacher's most shambling, hackneyed wisdom, but primarily because accepting the sports metaphor meant accepting the possibility that life, too, picked me last, and only then because I was the lone gangly kid standing in the line of humiliation to the bitter end.

"Well, I'll give you guys a bonus point 'cause you're stuck with Wall," said beloved gym teacher Kevin Kelly of Hammond Middle School, not to be specific or anything, and that was that.

As for me, I was not going to think of life as a game. I'd read far too much glorious alienating golden age science fiction by then, and I had an even better idea.

I am not like you. I am an adventurous robot, sent by unseen forces to observe.

It didn't improve my grades, or my academic outlook. I was still the last one picked for any team. I was still bullied, often with particular brutality and cruelty, but being a robot has advantages.

You cannot hurt me. I do not feel. I cannot be shamed.

Sticks and stones merely clang against my duralumin substructure.

One day, everyone like you will be moldering in the earth, and I will abide.

Asimov taught me well.

I had a Craig model 2603 cassette recorder with a stickshift control and a genuine leatherette carrying case, and I cultivated my love of the cold and the robotic. I transcribed Wendy Carlos and Kraftwerk from my sister's record collection, holding the recorder to a big Advent speaker to make primitive mix tapes, and added in tweedly space music from Klaus Schulze and the repeating mathematics of Glass. Oddly, I also lurched into the territory of funk in this way, too, listening to WOOK FM -Your OKAY 100 and finding science fiction wonderlands almost incomprehensible to a small town white kid in the trippy blowouts of Parliament/Funkadelic. Synthesizers were the future, and were the music of well-informed robots, and guitars were the tools of the laughably old fashioned.

I'd tune into the future on my Craig, with a little white cord tied into the little white nipple of a malaise-era earphone. Around this time, the world of the original Hitchhiker's Guide opened up around me like a gateway twisted out of nothingness by my radio, and as much as I thought maybe I was Arthur Dent, or styled myself as Ford Prefect (to the point of telling my classmates that my name was Ford, not Joe, in my first day in high school, but that's a whole other tale), I felt like Marvin—colossally sad, put-upon, and hopeless.

As luck would have it, I had one of the few surviving flying buildings in Ringworld at my disposal, too. I'd sling my Craig over my shoulder with its accessory leatherette strap, tuck a Bradbury in my back pocket, climb onto the railing of the back porch, then scrabble onto the low roof over the utility room, climb on top of the cast iron pipe for the sewer vent, then carefully sling myself up into the V where gables met. The real world would fade, and the jumble of gables and angles would become a floating refuge, watched over by the sentries of chimneys topped with swiveling galvanized helmets that kept the rain out of the Franklin stove and furnace and directed the smoke into the easy flow of the wind.

The ground around me would recede, the troubles would drift off, and I would be there, alone—a robot perched in the rooftops over a strange, old world, with the tinny soundtrack of my tapes and all that Bradbury could accomplish with his lurid and sensual use of adjectives.

I may be the last of my kind, or maybe one day a spaceship will bring another lowercase n.

Everything is so far away. I need nothing more than what I am, my music, and my stories.

My mission is to watch, to learn, and to keep notes. This is my program. I do it well.

In the same way superheroes live, with a twinkle in the eye, unnoticed by all, that sums up their otherness, being a robot was my secret identity. I knew, on one level, that it was not real, and that it was just a game to keep the mind sharp whilst one is imprisoned in the same way that I survived church by staring into the overhead lights until a blue afterimage was seared into my retinas, then guiding it around the sanctuary to touch every head and jab at the groin of the choir director.

It's just—well, the sports metaphor doesn't work for me because sports metaphors are as stupid as a gym teacher's most shambling, hackneyed wisdom, but making my life into a B-movie with rockets dangling from strings, with exhaust going up despite our being in space, and  screeching rubber Japanese monsters terrorizing space stations and the cool wonderland of our lost moon starring Catherine Schell as me seemed to fill the void. In the future, I can be as calm and flat as the acting of Barbara Bain. I can be a robot. Robots don't hurt and robots don't cry. Robots outlive their tormentors with patience.

"Now look, Joebie—your books are on the floor! Aren't you gonna pick 'em up?"

OBSERVE: SUBJECT IS USING SIMULATED CONCERN TO PROVOKE THIS UNIT
ACTION: GATHER BOOKS

OBSERVE: SUBJECT IS KICKING BOOKS AWAY

"Oh, you can't pick 'em up? Why can't you pick 'em up?"

OBSERVE: SUBJECT HAS KICKED SOCIAL STUDIES BOOK TO END OF CORRIDOR
ACTION: SHUT DOWN. NO ACTION POSSIBLE

I stood there, still as a statue, with eyes as dead and empty as the eyes of a porcelain doll. Joey Decker pranced around me, looking for a larger audience, and kicked my books around the corridor. He sneered and laughed at his dime store grand guignol, casting out his net.

"You're not funny, Joey Decker," said Tracy Day, my usual savior in these moments. She was my best classmate in Special Education, and the lone one who seemed to get me. Not that I was fond, or anything, because robots don't have feelings. We don't have time for your human emotions.

"Look, Joebie, your retarded girlfriend is here to save you! Nice job, 'tard."

OBSERVE: SUBJECT HAS LOST INTEREST. SHUT DOWN SUCCESSFUL
ACTION: RETURN TO ACTION. GATHER BOOKS. WALK WITH TRACY DAY

"That boy's 'flicted," Tracy said, handing me the last book.

On days like those, once the school bus had lumbered back to Scaggsville, I would climb onto the roof with my talisman in my pocket, an R5-D4 action figure with a sticker worn away until he looked like a trash can with a robot head, put my best robot music into my Craig, and dance wildly on the roof to "Jocko Homo" until my father's silver and purple Suburban would turn into our driveway.

Back on Earth, familiar conversations would unfold.

"The boy's on the roof again, Jane."

"Oh, I know. He must have had a good day—he's been thumping around up there for hours. I wish his batteries would run down, though. Jenny's nowhere to be found and I need him to go check on the nest boxes."

"Your kid's a piece of work."

"He's my kid now? Should I get him down from there before he falls off?"

"Let him work it out. He's like a damn mountain goat up there."

This, of course, was not true. I was a robot. Robots are naturally dextrous.

As it happened, just when robot music was getting really, really good, my sister brought home a new album, and my days as an observational automaton were pretty much over, because all I was ever looking for was another open door.

I did get to live in the future, though, and here I am.

Still.

I studied Swedish in college.

I studied Swedish partly because I like to take the road less traveled, partly because I had a beloved hunchbacked Saab 96 sedan at the time, but mostly because in my major, you had to take either a math track or a language track as a way of "supplementing" your arts and humanities degree. Despite the fact that my SATs were ten points shy of getting me out of math altogether, I took and failed MATH 001 five times (and had to pay extra for the "remedial" class, to boot) and would have had to take it at a community college had I not gone to my faculty advisor and bawled my eyes out about how I was working a full-time job, a part-time job, and moonlighting as a stripper to pay for college. Had almost the same experience in MATH 110, so the math track was out.

Flopped in Latin, experienced serious schadenfreude in Deutsch, couldn't even make out the words in Spanish, but Swedish—well, that was a truly wonderful thing. Swedish is grammatically as simple as languages that aren't Esperanto get, but most people couldn't handle the pronunciation. The most elemental Swedish tongue-twisters, little ditties about seven sick nurses and such, would kill most mortals, but I spent my teen years phonetically learning to sing Zarah Leander and impersonate Kraftwerk singing about calculators in Japanese, so my tongue was already relatively twisted.

It helped that my Swedish professor was an absolute gem. She was onto me and how, when I couldn't remember a word, I'd svenskafy English or Latin root words into Swedish because that would work, astonishingly enough, at least five percent of the time. Still, even though she knew I was hopeless, she enjoyed my company and enthusiasm, and would be extra patient.

Fortstå?

Where I was less than I could be with language, I made up by getting obsessed with Swedish culture, politics, and of course, cars cars cars. I'm a gearhead, and Sweden was a country of eight million people with two world-class automakers. Besides, I love clean, simple, elegant design, and the Swedes concur.

My professor also had the funniest mouth I have ever seen on a living human, and I've been to The Black Eagle with Scott Thompson. That lady—usch usch usch. I think I went out of my way to rile her because Swedish expressions of despair and frustration are just...stunning spectacles of off-kilter vowels and impossible combinations of S, W, H, and the way a dolphin arcs its spine in mid-leap, as rendered in unvoiced sound.

"Can you go over the vowels again?"

I knew them. She sort of knew I knew them, but oh my, how I loved to watch her say them. So many vowels, so similar, and so alien—sigh.

I'd make her laugh all the time, and a laughing Swede manages to go through a hell of a lot of vowel sounds if one's just lip-reading. I don't know how deaf people manage in Sweden, to be honest. I offered her a neatly wrapped gift one Christmas, and explained that I intended to put poison in her vagina.

"You want to put poison in my vagina!?" she exclaimed, and it was a natural mistake. Svenskafying "gift" into Swedish does not equal "present." It equals "poison," and the worst part is that the Swedish for "present" is "present," not "gift." I was on the right track, but so very, very wrong. I don't even know how "fitta" got in there, but my teacher was kind to say "vagina" instead of a more literal translation.

She corrected me, I blushed, and she laughed and laughed. I was content.

I nearly killed her later that Christmas, though. Where I sucked at scholarship, I excelled in going native, and I was going to Swede the hell out of myself in place of always having the right word. For Christmas, I made Lucia buns and made myself a kick-ass candle hat to do the Lucia procession. Learned the song, albeit the simplified kids' version, and even though it was gender-bending for me to wear the candle hat, I didn't want to be a dumb stjernespill, because star boys are lame. Excused myself from the classroom, lit my candle hat, got into gear, prepared my sack of candy and buns, and reached around to extinguish the classroom lights so I could burst in, all gloriously lit in the spirit of the holidays—

Sadly, the end result of a homemade candle hat and the physical action of leaping into a room was not good. Real candle hats have little wells that catch the extra wax, but my candle hat did not. Real Swedish children wearing official Lucia candle hats also don't tend to jump around, because of the obvious potential for disaster. I was instantly covered in a cascade of burning hot wax for the second time in my life, which abruptly halted my Lucia song and set me into a frenetic dance of agony. This had the effect of sharing my agony with the rest of my very small class, because when one dances in agony in a homemade candle hat, one is shockingly effective at dousing the rest of the class in burning hot wax. The viking obsessed bisexual hippie in the front lurched backwards and fell out of his chair, and I managed to dislodge the homemade candle hat.

My professor was absolutely silent, but her eyes were clenched tight, as if she was having a heart attack, and her perfectly amazing lips acted out the silent death cries of every fish on Alderaan in those last reverberating seconds. I stood there, surrounded by wax and irritated classmates, and watched tears roll as she doubled over in sweet agony.

When her composure returned, all she could say was "usch, usch, usch," but that pretty much said it all. I passed Swedish, and for a while, I could read it fairly well, could write like a grade school kid, and could watch Mitt Liv som Hund with a piece of masking tape over the subtitles, but it's slipped away from me. I last spoke it with confidence in a diner on the Taconic State Parkway in the mid-nineties, and then it just faded. I'd learned a language, though, which made me right proud.

On my last day, knowing I probably wouldn't see her again, I brought her a little present.

"I have some poison for you, though I'll just put it in your hand if that's okay."

"Tack. Det är mycket vänlig."

These days, the residue of a language learned is mainly used annoying people by pronouncing the names of things in Ikea properly.

"It's smOHlahnd, not 'small' land."

"Only you would learn a language to annoy people at a department store, Joe."

"Hey, I learned it so I could yell at my car."

"Sure you did. Doof."

"I believe the word you're looking for is 'knasboll'."

I'm not a fan of hospitals. Even worse, I'm not a fan of hospital waiting rooms. More even than that, I'm not a fan of hospital waiting room small talk in response to the "news" channel television that's blaring there because my fellow countrymen are all so addicted to distraction that they can't go five minutes without some day-glo idiotalk to keep 'em entertained into grumbling self-righteous complacency.

"Yeah," said the walleyed Baltimore lady with big hair and a misconception that I, as another white person in a Baltimore hospital waiting room, would be on her side. "I think that's whut they should do."

I didn't acknowledge. I was reading a book, trying to stave off a headache from a week's worth of powerless fretting, and hoping that my mom was not expiring on a gurney somewhere.

"Yeah," the walleyed commentator repeated, with emphasis. "Don't you think so?"

It was made impossible for me to stay in my bubble of private space. I peered furtively around the room. Just me, just you, and a TV set loudly being fair and balanced at me like a frantic street corner preacher with a megaphone down in the gay neighborhood of a big city.

"Pardon?"

"Ah wuz sayin' that the soldiers ought to go there when they come back here."

Go where? Why am I so often the target of middles of paragraphs?

"Go where?" I asked, hoping that the mask of please-stop-talking-to-me I was trying to present would be clear. It wasn't.

"Put 'em on the borders at Mexico and Canada, so we can keep them from floodin' in."

"What, Canadians?"

"Nah. Mexicans. Immigrunts."

I narrowed my eyes. I briefly thought that my mother could be at death's door, and my instinct to stand up and bellow "WOULD YOU PLEASE SHUT THE HELL UP, YOU WALLEYED IGNORANT IMBECILE!" at the walleyed ignorant imbecile could be indulged without regret, with the excuse of grief and all that, but I decided to be positive, to project my best self in that space, and let it go...after a fashion.

"Well, that's a thing, I suppose."

An answer devoid of content for a meaningless question.

The walleyed ignorant imbecile furrowed her brow. Like so many of the people who want to incorporate you into their army of the disgruntled, she'd met an unwilling recruit. Just like the groaning complainers in supermarket lines, looking back to me with rolling eyes to lament that the cash register wasn't working properly and therefore aren't we all united in our distaste for these ignorant people who are not like us— Just like the folks who moan about how stupid everyone else is, quoting long-debunked conspiracy theories to support their rants about the "sheeple"— Just like those church ladies who used to knock on my door and open with the question "isn't it just terrible the way the world is going down the tubes?" because that's supposed to be the thing we all agree on these days—

—Except the world isn't going down the tubes. We live in the world of the future compared to the "good ol' days." We are smarter, faster, stronger, more compassionate, more informed, more thoughtful, more able to filter the chaff, more concerned over the stuff we used to pretend not to see. The world of my childhood was a world where neighbors would tut-tut about mixed-couples and still think Jewish people were discernably different and we drove monstrous cars that guzzled fuel by the barrel and would still kill you in a low-speed accident. We had leftover John Birchers stinking up politics, Uncle Ronnie threatening to push the button, and an epidemic that we let run wild because those people aren't like us, dear. In the world of the future, science stands a good chance of fixing my mother's unexpected calamity, whereas in the good ol' days, ol' white-haired Doctor Nelson would come in shaking his head.

I'm not nostalgic for that sun-kissed Thomas Kincade painting of our supposedly illustrious past, and of a world of happy caucasians being productive little John Galts for the shining city on the hill that's surrounded by the slums where the people who built that shining city live.

We are strong because we are many, and diverse, and distinct, despite our common goals.

"A thing?" asked the walleyed ignorant imbecile, and I could tell she wanted more, but when my mom is in trouble, the last thing I want to talk about is why, dear lady I've never met before, but who feels like we're old buddies united against the flood, there's so much wrong with everything she thinks, says, and feels. I made a little sketch in my head of the moment, smiled a clearly insincere smile, and looked back down to the little electronic book in my hand.

My sister stepped back into the doorway.

"Found her, she's on the fifth floor," she said, and I followed her out. 

My storytelling hero, Jean Shepherd, is an interesting case in the concept of empirical truth versus story truth, in that his long career as a radio novelist had him telling stories over and over, with details emerging and fading, connections made and broken and refashioned, and by the end of his career, it was hard to know what was fact, what was fiction, what sort of happened and what didn't. Because there are literally thousands of hours of tape, carefully made and archived by the people who got Shepherd, one can go back and trace out the way the tales changed, but it's all beside the point. I don't care if Flick was a real person or an evolving composite. If Shepherd was reporting on human rights abuses in Sweden, it would matter, but stories are stories, and the truth only becomes an issue because jittery legalistic types, feeling burned by the fact that James Frey and Augusten Xon Burroughs's wild tales were called "memoir" to compensate for lousy storytelling. Good lies don't evoke doubt, and good stories are good lies, almost to a letter.

Thing is, if someone's recounting a story from their childhood that includes dialogue and they're not Marilu Henner—they're writing fiction. It's not a deceptive fiction, which is the key point, but rather a reconstructive falsehood, because as clear and bold as childhood memories can be, you're always working to recreate the moment, not justifying the accuracy of the Scriptures.

People used to always ask me if the stories I tell are true, and the fact is that they are, moreso when I tell them well, because I've managed to cram a hell of a lot of awkward circumstances and random occurrences into forty-four years of my schlubby existence. In telling, though, I leave things out, and I pick the best possible phrasing to make the story feel like I want it to feel.

When showing off the clock tower where I work, I describe an incident where I had to call my boss to tell her that falcons broke the elevator, I'm creating a feeling by reducing what happened to its most ridiculous essence. It's a bit of metafiction I use to set up the backstory, in which peregrine falcons in Baltimore hunt pigeons, eat them on the roof of my clock tower, and leave the heads behind to wash into the roof drain. Drain clogs with heads, big storm floods the roof up to a spot that lets water pour right down, through three floors, until it drips into the 1922 control mechanism of the 1911 Otis elevator and renders the elevator inoperative.

It's true to say "falcons broke the elevator," too, and that's a funnier line.

Leaving stuff out isn't true, but it's true.

"Joe, seriously," my friends have asked. "Are those stories about your old girlfriend true?"

That's a lie, of course. No one's asked me that question quite like that, and I phrased it thusly because I have some grasp on writing dialogue in a way that makes it read true, and I'm not perpetrating a fraud by doing so, except in framing, but framing is the vile necessity of a world without telepathy—if I want you to feel what I felt in the moment I'm describing, I need to use the tools of telling the story to make that happen.

In the same way I think all people who write struggle with this issue, I struggle sometimes to figure out if I'm just fooling myself, and if I'm just a huge liar and a pathological blowhard, but I already know that that's true. Writing about truth is awkward because any good storyteller has to play the game language and convention imposes on us, and you wonder, like a magician with a bloody oversized saw, if copping to the fact that we live in worlds that are true to us and to others only as much as craft and trust can open that permeable boundary between speaker and listener will discredit us, and break that suspension of belief that we need in order to tell our stories.

I used to take the hard line, insisting that everything is exactly true, hand-on-the-good-book, scout's three raised fingers and all, but it's just such an ugly, cold place, that realm of the always-true. It's not even always-true, the always-true, because every chosen word and every carefully selected adjective is a moment where a story can turn from a sketch to a living thing, fleshed-out and breathing and full of fun and fury and fire, even in the precise region we call journalism. What's the camera angle saying? Who's the author? Who's the listener? What's the inspiration for why we're telling this.

My stories are all fictional, but then so is my life. When this moment passes, the one just ahead of the cursor in this little open window to a common daydream we share here, there's the written history and what I remember, and even the written history is subject to how open and how fair I felt as I opened my mouth to speak or flexed my fingers to type. You lie by exclusion, by leaving out details, or by writing dialogue that omits the "umm" and "uh" and stammering and random crap you say, or by flattering yourself by pretending you're not the kind of guy who's always interrupting. The world becomes slightly brighter, or lit in a golden glow, or harder, more complicated, more amusing, and more...whatever.

Still, sometimes, you have a moment of clarity, and you remember it perfectly, but it's not made of language. It's just a place and a time when you were there, right there, just in the instant and not immersed in the chatter of your inner monologue, and it is when something about the world changed for you, something raw and wonderful and full of genuine 24 carat awe.

I went for a walk one night because it was foggy out and I love the fog, and the way it brings the ceiling of the world so close that you don't have to worry about the unbearable infiniteness of things. My dog was relaxed on her lead, leaving the perfect little arc of braided nylon between us, and I paused at the corner by the Armory as a sedan rumbled by. On the front walk of the Armory, a little tree stood, and it was early enough in the season that its leaves hadn't come in yet, making it look like a huge, tangled sculpture of lines.

Behind the tree, a buzzing mercury lamp lit the fog in a cold blue-grey light, and the way the light came through the branches on the tree made the hair bristle on the back of my neck. Every gap, and every branch, interrupted the light like blades slicing up a fuzzy ball of cotton, so that the tree just radiated this glorious mass of rays, fading into the haze. I stood for a moment, noticing how every breath I took seemed to make the rays move, almost like the tree was breathing in perfect sync with me, then stepped forward.

The light changed like a kaleidoscope turned impossibly inside-out, and every move made it different and then different and then different, a three dimensional canvas of protons fleeing their electrochemical source, and as I marveled at what a beautiful thing it was, this moving work of intangible art, something occurred to me—it wasn't moving at all. My perspective on that cool, still evening was the movement, and I was seeing something in slices like frames of a film as if it was in motion, but every form and shape and contour and hard-edged cut to those rays of blue-grey light was already there, all at once, visible from any angle, but translated into something else by nothing more complicated than a step in any direction.

How you look at a thing makes the thing become what you see.

That walk, and that stopping point, are a fixed part of my memory, one of the ones that I can recount with more accuracy than most, because it's a point where a paradigm changed. Sometimes, it's a moment where your heart's being broken, or when you figure out how something works, or when you get an insight into another person that makes all the difference.

I don't relate, generally, that my dog, in the middle of my blissful moment there, arched her back and started shitting while I was having this epiphany, and that the light also made a dark tunnel of her shadow, with the little bits of motion as the crap fell and as her tail cranked like a pump handle in that hard floodlight as it always did in such incidents. I didn't incorporate that fact that there was an unusual amount of farting and spluttering involved, too, which would later make the bit with the plastic bag unusually nauseating, leading to me ending up doubled over as I kept the bile down. I leave out the sounds of the squeaky sneakers on polished wood coming from the basketball court inside the Armory, or the number of cars that actually passed by along the way, or that I was listening to Sergio Mendes and Brazil '66 on my earphones and not something more meditative.

Sometimes, I relate this story with the dog excised altogether, or change the year, the season, the way I felt, or the reason I was out there, though those things change because they're less present for me, and even less so as time passes.

"Did that really happen?" asks the rhetorical device, and I have to nod.

Yes. I was there. How you look at a thing makes the thing become what you see.

When I'm successful, truthful, and when I let myself truly revisit the moment, the story is true, even when I get the details wrong. When I'm too loose with the corroboration, or a little full of myself, it loses resolution, drifting into that blowhard realm of pompous philosophical object lessons, and the reader loses a little faith in what I have to say. In everything, you have to ponder why a tale is being told. When it's just showmanship and novelty, anything can be true if the skill is there. When it's something to share because I was there, and felt those feelings, and learned something, the requirement of craftsmanship is a bit less demanding, but it's always there. The most perfectly empirical, exactly precise, overwhelmingly accurate event ever described is always subject to translation from moment into strings of sounds and marks on pages that convey some rendition of what went on.

The older I get, the truer my stories become, even when I'm recounting the ones swiftly receding into the past. When you're young and inexperienced, there's a crutch in the gory detail or the absurd circumstance, but the more you learn, the more you hurt, the more you lose, and the more you find patience trumping arrogance, the less you need to draw people in with the old Grand Guignol stage show, artlessly drawing up that raconteur's chair to hold court. When I was young, I lied and fortified and embellished because I never felt like my life was worth sharing, and the real and the surreal competed for attention, but I've had my heart broken, lost whole lifetimes of friendship, and failed on scales so grotesque as to require no elaboration. These days, I delete, I trim, I edit, and leave out the farting and the nausea for the most part, but even the best story is just a few rays radiating from a tree on a foggy night, destined to catch just enough of what made it worth telling without lapsing into physics and phenomenology.

So this thing happened to me the other day—

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