All posts by barrett.hathcock@gmail.com

A Fair to Middling Day for Bananafish

Fiction

The father was at work. The father was always at work. Once, before their second had come, the father and the mother and their then only child, aged two, drove by the father’s work — it was referred to as a campus though he was not a teacher — and their daughter said, Daddy lives? Daddy lives? while pointing toward the campus. They all laughed. So cute.

The father was at work. It was mid-afternoon, around 3 p.m., when the chatter over the cubicle tops seemed to lag and the constant beetle clicking of the keyboards seemed to quiet for a few minutes. It was the span of time when it became impossible to explain to oneself what one was doing, at both a micro level and a macro level. The father was thinking about the author and about his new book. He’d read numerous reviews and several interviews. The praise, that kind of slow compulsory standing ovation, where critics put their drinks down and stand up and dust themselves off to begin clapping, had begun, now a month or so after publication, and the father was dipping daily into the online wave. He’d assembled the author’s biography from available data. He’d even read one of his pieces, entirely in the “read more” preview pane on Amazon. He was even thinking of buying the book. He was not unimpressed.

Then, he didn’t understand why he hadn’t thought of this before, he realized that the author would be on tour, and that there was a possibility he might come close to Memphis. It could happen. He quickly started searching. When he was motivated, he could be very efficient online. There it was: two Sundays from now, at the big bookstore out east in the heart of old money Memphis. He was doing a signing at 2 p.m. It was a twenty minute drive from where the family lived. Now he could make that, certainly. Right?

Hey, can I go to a book signing thingy at the DK Sunday?
time?
2
this sunday? we’ve got Harlan’s party
no no. Next sunday. The 8th.

He awaited her response. He awaited the arrival of the percolating dots that promised her response. Maybe he could ask Stephanie from Accounting to come over and help out, though his wife hated Stephanie, for some reason. It was the period of his life when any non-work yet away-from-family time was intensely negotiated, because a meal had to be made, an ass had to be wiped, a stomach bug had to be squashed. If nothing else, there was a sink full of plastic that needed to be washed by hand.

sure that’s fine. just might need your help getting naptime started
sure, no prob
yr day good?

#

It must be said that the father’s interest in this author was not entirely platonic. He too wanted to write. He had written. He’d even published a handful of stories, three book reviews, and essay about guns inspired by his grandfather, and once, in the thinnest of journals, stapled together somewhere in Minnesota, a poem. He had gone to two schools and taken all the seemingly necessary classes one takes when one wants to be a writer. In short, this wasn’t some personal fad but an endeavor that he’d spent his 20s pursuing. But now he was deep into the weeds of his 30s — the wet field of his 30s, mud steadily caking on his boots. We’re going on a bear hunt! He now understood what an escrow account was. He’d priced car insurance competitively. He had had an almost friendly argument with fellow parents about BPH levels in conventional plastics.

What the father had not yet done and what truth be told seemed increasingly far off was publish a book. He wasn’t sure if he had “enough” to publish a book, meaning enough material. His wife did not roll her eyes when he said this, which was the reaction he was always waiting for. Instead, she took a kind of encouraging pliable silence, a willed refusal to be annoyed at his own blind self-absorption. The father of course wanted to publish a book because that’s what people who wrote did and a book was what led to reviews, and interviews, and even perhaps a chance to teach at a college, which he had only done once as a graduate student and which he had in fact hated. It was a semester of grading 40 essays a week on the most banal topics imaginable, and the essays were executed with the utmost contempt, when they were given any energy at all. But teaching after a book, teaching writing classes — it would be much different. The students would be self-selecting. The women would predominantly wear glasses. They would be more inclined to pay attention to him. Really all the father wanted out of life was a steady stream of young women wearing glasses paying attention to him.

There was something about this author that the father couldn’t ignore. As someone into his mid-30s, the father was improving his ability to ignore contemporaries who could be perceived as radically more successful than he was, people who might under certain angles of light illuminate the father’s own inability to live up to his own (always theoretical) potential. This became a necessary life skill if one didn’t want to live through successive waves of envy and rage.

Why was this author an exception? Well, first he was male, and only a couple of years older than the father. The father had become a finely tuned device for measuring someone’s age and graphing that age against the vertical axis of their potential and then cross-overlaying his own corresponding graph to see how they lined up. It made a kind of sense that this author was so successful. He was at least two years older than the father. And if his Tumblr was to be believed, he’d only had one child. From his preliminary internet research the author did not appear to have attended graduate school. Instead he had been working at magazines for years, and not working for magazines as camouflage for a succession of unpaid internships writing topical lists, but actual reporting for actual articles. In fact, the book that he was now out promoting was a collection of those magazine pieces, an absurd proposition. They were now called “essays.” JFC. He had written one book previously, something about horses. The father had a theory that the smoothest path to authorial success was to write a first book young about either horses, brain science, dogs, cats, one’s sexual awakening (if female, or if male and gay), one’s misspent youth (if male and heterosexual), one’s abuse by the clergy, or one’s culturally mixed Middle Eastern upbringing in the Midwest. It was best to combine these elements: it would be beneficial to write a female coming-of-age story located in a western rural state that involved sexual awakening and horses and the brief threat of clergy abuse, with a late-breaking questioning of one’s sexuality. The only thing missing from a book like that was a dog and Abraham Lincoln. Or a dog named Abraham Lincoln.

Despite knowing this, the father had not written such a book. And it wasn’t out of some principled stand against such books existing. In fact, the father had not written much at all. He had started a few books, he had written several stories, really more like extended jokes than anything coherent or marketable. But at this rate he was going to have a very nice collection of published fiction ready to make the rounds of agents when he was somewhere in his mid 50s. Of course, he knew that agents did not consider story collections, remarked on this fact bitterly to his friends (who would listen), resolved to write a novel that perhaps involved a horse, and continued to go to work.

In addition to being young, male, and ridiculously successful, this author was also southern. Well, he was not truly southern, he was marginally southern — motherfucker was from Kentucky — while the father was fully, unavoidably southern, some might say belligerently southern. And yet the author was in the middle of a full-on southern bear hug by the Southern Literary Establishment. Which, to be sure, is not that big of a deal, demographically speaking, but it is still something, in particular something that this father had dreamed of withstanding, the bear hug, had dreamed of living through since he had been old enough to realize there was such a thing as a Southern Literary Establishment, which gave out bear hugs. It was not easy seeing all those fragments of praise being issued by the gray-headed white men scattered around the southeastern United States, laying out in terms tired and undistinguished how distinguished this new writer’s work was. He was successful enough to draw praise from people he did not personally know. Or maybe he did know all the people who were blurbing him, which made him even more fearsome, suggesting as it did that he was — by dint of talent and/or conspicuous conference attendance and/or just going to a lot of lunches — the most well-connected non-NYC living male under fifty this side of the Mississippi River. He was quickly becoming the person shiny magazines called when young artist-celebrities died and they needed eight-hundred words of non-vapid appreciation. When they wanted that think piece thought through.

#

Sunday. They made the mistake of eating lunch out. Eating out with kids was always a mistake, the father maintained. They didn’t get home until dangerously close to 1:30. They lived all the way downtown on a little island that was not actually an island, but it was on the river so it felt exotic and Nantuckety to refer to it as an island. The father immediately took the four-year-old to pee. The mother tripped backward over a strategically placed red tractor. The baby sat in his punkin seat on the dining room table, sucking on the garage door opener. In the distance, one could hear the door opening and closing, opening and closing. He began a constructive activity for his daughter to engage in during naptime, which meant he got out the iPad and jabbed at it frowning while his daughter attempted to decide which program she wanted to watch. Caillou was forbidden, she knew. She settled on Word Girl, a program which had initially excited the father but which now was just part of the distracting background noise of domestic life. One only paid attention if the signal peaked, distorted. The mother with hand on sore back took an Alleve and went upstairs to attempt to put down the baby for a nap. It was 1:42. The father began to pace their small house, waiting for his chance to leave.

The wife came downstairs at 2:03. The father stood at the door with his keys. The mother fell into the couch.

“Where do you think you’re going? That’s right. Your thing. When do you think you’ll be back?”

“Three-thirty at the latest, I imagine.”

“Well okay.”

“Are you still sure it’s okay I go?”

“Yes, of course. I’m sorry.”

“Positive?”

“Yes, go.” Just then the baby let out a shriek, a solitary warning shot, a reminder of just who was in charge. “Go before I change my mind.” The snappy Word Girl theme music played him out.

#

The bookstore was palatial — part bookstore, part toy store, part café. It was the perfect spot for ladies who just wanted to grab a quick bite during the week. In short, it was a kind of power broker location within the city’s domestic set, the woman’s suburban version of the Biltmore’s male bar. He knew the signing would be held in the back, in a little clearing just behind the magazine quadrangle. He pivoted his way through the Sunday shoppers. This bookstore always seemed crowded, sold every kind of decorative or organizational knick-knack one could imagine, and had long ago pioneered the technique of selling anything remotely book-related in the bookstore. In the furthest recess of the store was the kid’s section with a huge, alluring train station set up in the middle, a honeypot to the under seven set. There was always a gaggle of moms on the bleacher seating, nursing coffees, thumb-rubbing their phones, clucking. In the clearing sat a lone table, a pile of books, and a sheet of paper. It was 2:18. He had driven as fast and as strategically as he was able.

There was no author anywhere to be found. He walked up to the table. The books were a pile of his newest, published as a paperback original. The sheet said “sign up” at the top, and there was a pen lying beside it. No one had signed up. He was curious whether or not there would be a crowd. Sometimes he felt as if he were the only person in the city who was reading books, really reading books, the right books, the books that deserved to be read. He realized this was something he could never say aloud to anyone because they would look at him like he was insanely narcissistic. He wrote his name and phone number on the paper. He looked around the store. He pivoted like a drone surveying a field in Afghanistan. It was the usual Sunday crowd, or what he thought was the usual crowd. He could not see the author anywhere. He knew what he looked like from the internet. Light brown hair, high receding line, frequent stubble, essentially lipless, a surprising, almost affected baritone, an intentionally rakish tendency to leave the top two shirt buttons unbuttoned. Not unattractive, which the father had a theory about. He grabbed one of the books. He wasn’t sure how it worked. Did he need to buy it first? He put the book back. The seats they had set up were empty except for one old funkster toward the back in a raincoat who was deliberately wetting his index finger as he bent and flipped each glossy page of Vogue. He did not seem to be here for the reading. Certainly he hadn’t missed everything. Just then a woman walked by. She looked harried, but like being harried was a uniform she wore to work, a kind of hat. He’ll be right back, she said. He’s gone to the cafe to grab a bite to eat but he says he’ll come back to sign more books. As if there had been some gigantic rush.

So the father retreated to the seats and sat down for a few minutes and began thumbing through his phone, checking his tweets, dipping into Facebook, the land of baby photos and passive aggressive life updates, more tweets. Then, the guilt of playing with his phone while sitting in a bookstore while waiting to meet an author he ostensibly admired. He went into the magazine quadrangle and approached the lone literary magazine shelf. Everything about American literature could be gleaned from a magazine section of a large bookstore. An encyclopedia of tits and bridal tricks. He picked up a Paris Review and began thumbing through it. Perhaps it would function like a beacon. He looked over the edge of the periodical and over the edge of the magazine shelf and scanned heads for the author. He was out there somewhere.

What was the father going to say to the author? Did he think they would become friends? What was the point of meeting people in person that you more successfully met on the page or screen? Why trade that private distillate for the fumbling awkward orchestra of meeting in person? What was he going to tell this guy? Hey, I like your stuff? Hey, I am ravenously jealous of your success? Hey, I appreciate you and what you’re up to? As the reading area continued to seem abandoned, the true purpose of his visit became clearer: he was there out of respect. His bodily presence was merely a way of signaling to the author that he, the father, was paying attention. He was a representative from the unswept corners.

But was that the real reason? Was there not a thin, curled whittling thrill of seeing someone in person who was so apparently successful? Was there not an attempt to bond with that person as a peer rather than just an audience member — a position of dependency and inferiority? Was it an attempt to crawl out of the darkness of the seats onto stage for a brief moment? Or did he just want to see what the guy really looked like? To verify that he did in fact exist and to return home knowing that he was another male human in the steady proliferation outside the father’s house?

Nothing. There was no action at the table or in the reading/signing area. He took his Paris Review with him back over to the table where he had inspected the sheet of paper. There was his name and his phone number. Why they needed his phone number he had no idea. But he was still enough of a student that he followed orders.

The harried employee came by. He should be here in just a few minutes, she said. He will be right back. She craned her neck up and looked over the shelves toward the bistro, then waddled on.

The father discovered a Paris Review in his hands. Where did this come from? He sat down on the first row and began flipping the pages. He’d given up reading literary magazines because the stories inside enraged him. How could these stories be printed and not his? It was a reading comprehension problem at its most primeval. He looked toward the bistro. A brown-headed man was craning his own head and looking over in his general direction. Then the head receded back into the general population of heads.

The father tried to lean back in his chair and peer around the book shelves to get a better look inside the bistro. Was that him? Was he back there somewhere? He momentarily lost his balance and his chair swung back to the ground. He got up and moved a couple of rows back.

He leaned back again, this time more securely, and he could see a brown-headed man in a sport coat sitting at the bar and talking to a tall brunette man. Just a couple of dudes having lunch. Was that him? Did one of these guys look over in his direction? He watched them eat and talk. They had an easy jokey away toward each other that suggested they’d known each other a long time.

Yes, the one on the left. That was the author. In profile, laughing in between bites, something about the exact position of his hairline and his shade of stubble. That’s the author.

Okay. Fine. So he is having lunch with a friend. I can continue to wait. The father went back to his phone. He tried not to notice the time. He’d been waiting twenty-two minutes.

Thirty-five minutes. He continued to look over at the bistro bar. It was definitely more interesting than anything on his phone. In fact, this was the first time he could remember when there was something much more interesting nearby than anything trapped within his phone.

The Vogue-reading funkster had moved on. The only sad sack still waiting around pretending to read was the father. The penguin lady started to waddle in his direction, looked toward him and squinted in pain, and then changed direction. Was that directed at him?

Come on now, this is fucking ridiculous. I’ve been here forty-five minutes. A waiter arrived at the table in the bistro. It appeared like tab settling was imminent. It was awfully hard to inconspicuously stare while leaning back and turning sideways and basically leering in the middle of a cleared reading-signing nook area. Yes, tabs were being divvied up. The black-haired guy stood. Man, he’s tall. Serious, corner office-level stature. The father eased his own chair back down and sat forward like an athlete waiting to be called into the game. He put down the ridiculous Paris Review. He walked up to the table and grabbed one of the books and held it with both hands. He looked back at the bistro but that section of the bar was now blocked from view. He sat down on the front row, crossed his legs professionally, the book resting on his crotch.

After a moment the tall black-haired friend and the penguin intersected at the signing table.

“Did you —”

“Yeah, it was great.”

“He’s great.”

“So great,” said the black-haired friend. “We go way back. He’s really going places.”

“Well thank you for coming.”

“You bet. I’m just going to grab —” and he reached forward to grab another paperback to join the no doubt already signed copy pinned to his chest. Neither acknowledged the sitting father. Then they walked off in the general direction of the front of the store.

Probably friends from school, the infinite years of school. And what is this “going places” bullshit? Dude is already at that place. Motherfucker got his book of essays written up in the New Yorker for the love of god. This guy doesn’t know what the fuck he’s talking about. And he’s the one who gets to have lunch with him? He’s the one who gets to shoot the shit at the bar just because they played seventh-grade basketball together or whatever? This is why I’m here. Because no one understands what he’s done, what he has accomplished. No one appreciates him.

Ten more minutes passed. Still, no one came by. He thought okay surely now that lunch is over it would be time for the author to come back by. The penguin said he would come back by. But there was no one. The bookstore was an old lady ghost town. He looked at his phone. It was 3:23. He’d been there over an hour.

He stood, which seemed to make him angrier, but he didn’t want to sit down again because his ass hurt. He’d lost the ability to sit still. How dare they treat me this way? He approached the table. There were four copies of the book left. To the pile he added his own. He scanned his immediate area, desperate for someone to appear and rebuke him with their presence, but there was no one. Well fuck him if he thinks I’m going to buy his goddamned book, mister fucking epic skip town lunch fucker. He picked up the pen and crossed out his name on the list of potential signees. And below it he wrote, “left after waiting over an hour.” And then he underlined “over,” because that would make it clearer somehow. And then he added, “I am not a loser.” Immediately he regretted it. He should have written “some loser.” No, he shouldn’t have written that either. I don’t appreciate being treated like a loser. No, no. It sounded crazy, desperate, loserish. He thought about scratching it out, but then there would be the forest of maniac pen redaction which would be an even greater loser move than writing what he had written. His pen hovered over the intractable words in a fugue of panic. He dropped the pen and turned to leave. He had a sneer ready for the penguin but he couldn’t find her anywhere as he walked to the front of the store, turning left, then right through the maze of bookshelves. It felt like Pac-Man, but then who were the ghosts?

“Can I help you?”

The father turned around automatically, before thinking. It was the author.

“I’m glad I caught you. I missed you at the signing station. Do you . . . Did you want to get your book signed?”

“Sure,” the father said. “That would be great.”

“Do you wanna . . .” and the author craned his head backward, toward the little table three maze rows back.

“Yes, sure,” the father said, not entirely clear to what he was agreeing to.

He walked behind him. The author looked rumpled, like he’d slept in his clothes. He was about the father’s height and his hairline was much farther back than his pictures indicated. The hairline wasn’t even really receding anymore. Dude was basically bald.

“Yeah I was grabbing lunch with an old high school buddy and it ran long. There was something up in the kitchen. You know how those things go.”

“Sure. Did you go to school in Memphis?” He chastised himself for asking the question, already knowing the answer from his preliminary research.

“No, I grew up in Kentucky, but my parents sent me to a boarding school in Tennessee, on the east side, near Chattanooga.”

“Oh, yeah, um, what’s it. Good school.”

“Yeah, it was something.”

They arrived at the clearing.

“You live here in Memphis?” the author asked.

“Yeah, I’m originally from Birmingham, but we ended up here for a job after schools and stuff, touring around the southeast.”

“Oh, yeah, well this is a cool town. I ended up in Raleigh.”

“Uh-huh.”

“North Carolina.”

“Right, of course. I’ve heard that’s lovely. Is that like in the research thing or like outside of it? You know the . . . the polygon?”

“Oh, yeah it’s in the triangle.”

“How’d you end up there?”

“Wife’s a doctor.”

“Ah, smart move,” the father said.

“Yeah, well I sure couldn’t be one. My kid skins a knee and I pass out.”

The father snorted automatically. Instantly he was afraid he’d snotted on himself. He tried to check but make it look like he was merely scratching his cheek.

“I hear that,” the father said through his hand. “My kids and I have a deal: no blood and I’ll make them three squares a day. Any blood and they’re on their own.”

“That’s funny,” the author said without laughing. He appeared sincere though. “Let me get you a book.”

The author turned toward the table with the scattered paperbacks, the pen, and the sheet, which was still there proudly, waiting to be discovered. The father did not move. He had not frozen. He could have moved if he wanted to. It was only that it was impossible for him to backflip out of the entire store in that moment, so option B was to stay rooted in his feet. The author touched the desk, grabbed a paperback. Was he lingering over the sheet of paper?

“Do you want me to make it out to someone in particular?”

“Uh like a gift?”

“Just to you?”

“Sure.”

“What’s your name?”

“Uh, my name? It’s Michael. My name’s Michael,” the father said. It was his actual name. He was powerless to invent another.

“Great.”

The author was able to hold the book in his left while purposefully signing it with his right, the mark of a true professional.

“Michael, I’m Jared. It’s nice to meet you,” he said, handing him the autographed copy.

“Thank you. Nice to meet you too. I’m really looking forward to reading it.”

“Hey, thank you. I’m really proud of it. Years of work. Hey, you working on anything?”

“Me? Uh, yeah, you know, stories and stuff.”

“Oh, that’s great. God, it’s hard with kids. To get any work done. If my wife wasn’t a doctor, I don’t know what I’d do. I thought of dedicating the book to our nanny.”

“Ooh, probably an unpopular choice — not that anyone actually reads front matter anymore.”

“Precisely! It would’ve just been a waste. It would have gone over everyone’s head. So I dedicated it to my wife instead.”

“Probably the better diplomatic move.”

“You’re probably right. You’re a smart man, Michael,” and in between them was a hand, floating. Apparently it belonged to Jared, and Michael was supposed to shake it.

In the car he finally looked. In between the father’s name and the author’s signature, he’d written Thanks for coming! And for waiting so long!

#

Michael parked in the driveway. He’d left the garage door open, and the rear mouth of his house gaped at him. There sat the van, site of pulverized snack cracker dust and dried formula, swirled into a mixture and slowly drying within the machine’s crevices. There sat all of the stuff they couldn’t fit in their house, a type of accumulating museum of aspirational American familydom. A mysterious unlabeled box of books, a broken treadmill, a shrink-wrapped econo-pak of 60-watt light bulbs. A pile of objects that felt demographically pre-determined. The father sat staring at the pile, the exhaust of his house, his life. They didn’t know he was home yet. Usually at the sound of the garage door opening, someone opened the house door, to see what was taking him so long, his daughter hip-weaving through the debris to see daddy. The fuck is a bistro anyway? One shouldn’t be this tired at 3:50 on a Sunday afternoon. There was too much of the day left, too much of life left. He got out of the car and walked toward the back door, no longer sure what story to tell. When you’re young and ambitious, you never realize how hard it will be simply to remain ambitious. You don’t think the very inclination to be ambitious is a practicable skill, an endeavor that will require fuel, focus, determination. It always seemed like being tall. He stood at his back door, a greasy white-painted metal. He could hear faint singing coming from inside, his wife and his daughter. Down came the rain. His daughter was transfixed by the hand motions. Her ambition was to make her hands the most expressive spiders. She had an innocent enthusiasm for the entire manifold of life that was baffling, invigorating, exhausting. This was, he realized, the first purely personal errand he’d taken on his own since the baby had been born. It was strange to think of work as personal private time, his commute as some kind of brief, spiritual oasis. But that’s what it had become by dint of circumstance. The door was cold. When he opened it, it would make a sucking, hermetic, mouth-opening pucker sound, the portal. He yearned to get away, to a take an afternoon by himself, but any time away was mixed with the anxiety of checking in, of wondering how the baby was, how things were going. And the relief of coming back, reassuming the correct role. Self-imposed burdens are the most difficult to extrude. Would Jared keep his note? Show it to his successful, well-connected, blurby friends? Would it become a keepsake, a token of the anti-version of himself out there in the American wilderness? An artifact for the museum of crazies? Or would the penguin simply throw it away without even reading?

The father opened the door, startling the family inside. They all stopped singing. The mother sat on the couch, bouncing the giggling baby on her knee, while the daughter held the baby’s hands, a moment free of logistical complexity and vomit. They all looked immediately to the opened door, and after a snap of silence, everyone cheered.

What’s not to like?

essays,

I was ranting to a friend about something and she said, so do you like anything? And it arrested me, because as I get older I do increase my list of dislikes, my discovery of areas that contain room for improvement, my recommendations subtle and not, perceived slights, accumulated grievances, clearly articulated affronts. What do I like? 

I like everything bagels toasted and still warm but with cold, almost solid, cream cheese. I like Al Green at almost any time of day or listening context. I like the memory of drinking Coca-Cola from a six-ounce glass bottle at my grandmother’s house in Cleveland, Mississippi, when still a child. I like the sounds of my children moving around the house. I like it when my dog lays on my feet. I like making strangers laugh. I like the United States Post Office. I like it when I walk by people and they are humming to themselves. I like it when strangers talk to me for no reason as if I were their friend. I like it when people call me boss, honey, hun, chief, etc. I like the ceremonial handshake, the unnecessary fist bump. I like very cold unflavored mineral water from a glass bottle. I like hearing from friends. I like riding a bike in almost all contexts. I like Herbie Hancock in almost all contexts, from almost all periods. I like being sucked into a novel for three days. I like the memory of being nervous. I like not feeling thirsty. I like email when it approaches physical letters. I like postcards in almost all contexts. I like almost everything David Hockney created. I like Louisiana’s Pure Crystal Hot Sauce. I like watching performers who are freakishly exceptional. I like Cynthia Ozick. I like Nicholson Baker. I like thinking about them going about their day in the pale shadow of their lifelong work. I like mid-career Beastie Boys. I like mid-90s David Foster Wallace when his sentences were most elastic. I like how Faulkner is secretly funny. I like tap dancing in old movies. I like that one gif of the puppet giving side eye. I like extremely ordinary drip coffee piping hot with honey instead of sugar. I like kolaches, except those with egg. I like lunch with friends. I like remembering that one great uncle who when I saw him as a child always asked how much I weighed. I like it when my kids riff. I like it when my kids have friends over and they bustle around the house puppy-like. I like this one podcast, especially when the two hosts hit a beam of mutually reinforced riffing. I like going for a walk. I like it when the mornings are surprisingly cool. I like it out west. I like live music if not too loud. I like Robert Hass. I like the idea of a sabbatical. I like Barack Obama. I like the song “C’est La Vie” by Robbie Nevil. I like almost everything by Huey Lewis and the News. I like going to art museums and not reading the captions and only staying for 90 minutes. I like the memory of watching movies by myself as a child early in the morning before anyone woke up. I like how Florida feels porous. I like college towns. I like small cakes. I like British gardens. I like the idea of a pub as opposed to a bar or a club. I like the wild yeast sourdough from this one place in Birmingham. I like Chicago, both as place and idea. I like the television program Veep. I like the television program Seinfeld. I like re-listening or re-watching something I liked as a kid and discovering that I still like it. I like Birkenstocks. I like the suede Adidas campus shoe in grey. I like knowing what the plan is. I like remembering Looney Tunes. I like remembering songs from Sesame Street. I like the Grateful Dead live album Reckoning. I like hitting on just the right song while driving. I like eating a sandwich that was made with love. I like watching tennis on television with the sound off. I like puttering in the morning. I like the idea of leftovers. I like dropping by and when others drop by. I like Levon Helm. I like not wearing socks. I like how a family generates its own private language. I like not having lots of stuff in my pockets. I like feeling freshly shaven after finally shaving. I like rooms that have those really small hexagonal floor tiles. I like the idea of sailboats. 

This is not everything I like, only what I could think of immediately. It’s helpful to remember that I don’t hate everything, that I don’t move through the world taking absolutely everything as a personal insult, even if that’s how I appear much of the time. It’s strange to remember what one likes and to remember to like things — and to refuse to ask why, to resist the categorical impulse, to simply let enjoyment occur, like accidentally wading into an invisible cold patch of water in the creek. It’s hard to be likeable, for sure, but it’s also hard to be able to like things, anything, even oneself. 

Dear Aliens

literary lint, plague journal, ,

You’re going to want to eat some ice cream during your visit. Trust me. There are all kinds of variations so go to a big shop. Baskin Robbins is fine. No need to be too precious about it your first time. Everything gets complicated fast enough. Basically it’s milk that’s been churned and chilled, almost but not entirely frozen. The process has something to do with rock salt? Doesn’t matter. You’ll like it. It’s made with milk, which comes from cows’ titties, believe it or not. You might encounter sci-fi, milk-like substances such as oat milk or almond milk. Avoid this stuff. This is computer food designed by dorks. Go for the real mammalian hit if you’re going to try it.

Important note: ice cream melts, so be about it. The hotter it is, etc. It’s compulsively transitory, qua substance. This somehow makes it better, like life itself.

But then you will probably see something called soft serve ice cream. This is also ice cream but just, well, softer. It gets ejected from a spigot rather than scooped from a bucket. So not as thick. The way you lick it is subtly but definitively different. You can get this at places like McDonald’s and sometimes it has toppings. Easily confusable with yogurt, also known as frozen yogurt, which is not the same as real yogurt.

See? Complicated. Real yogurt is made with bacteria cultures and milk. It occupies the same liminal, mouthfeel space in that you don’t really have to chew it. But frozen yogurt is basically soft serve ice cream without it actually being yogurt. I think it was basically a psyop by Big Yogurt back in the day to get people acclimated to the idea of yogurt, meaning regular, tangy, wholesome-but-not-really-dessert yogurt. Frozen yogurt also comes with lots of toppings. Generally speaking, the more toppings that are available, the less fancy the version of ice cream. Those people are just lipsticking the pig.

Then there is custard, which where I’m from we treat with suspicion. It’s made with eggs. These get pooped out by chickens daily, and we turn them into all kinds of stuff. That’s a whole other letter but they’re also weirdly liminal and creepy but still, somehow, delicious. Life here is weird. Custard is made with these but is still gross. It leaves a sticky film in your throat. But then sometimes ice cream doesn’t have hardly any milk or eggs at all and it’s called sherbert, and it’s mostly fruit and always pastel-colored. It’s like ice cream’s preppy, New England cousin. It’s also delicious, very rarely served with toppings, and springier. But then get ready because there’s also sorbet, which is like sherbert’s preppy cousin who’s been abroad for an entire year and is impossibly smug about it. I don’t think it contains any milk at all; it’s transcended it. Also lots of fruit, no toppings, and usually expensive. If they’ve got sorbet on the menu, ask a local to cover the bill.

But then also you might get a milkshake, which is like even softer serve ice cream. As in you don’t even lick it. You drink it through a straw. If you get it in a restaurant, you might get an additional spoon to scoop out the innards, complicating matters further. Quick logistical note: if it comes in a cone, you’re supposed to lick it. If it comes in a cup, you’re supposed to scoop it with a spoon, unless it comes in a long cup and then you’re supposed to drink it from a straw. A milkshake is just ice cream with even more milk so that it gets swampy and, yes, drinkable. Though sometimes it’s just barely drinkable and this is somehow a sign of its excellence. There are flavors here, and sometimes toppings, but they’re not really toppings. They’re in the ice cream swamp itself. Example: Chik-Fil-A peach milk shakes, but act fast because that one is seasonal and remember they’re closed on Sunday. Real proud of that little middle finger to all the pagans.

Alert: an ice cream sandwich is not actually a sandwich. It’s ice cream that uses a cookie as a containment mechanism. But you eat it like a sandwich. Honestly, if you’re looking for something to skip, this is the one.

But if you go to a Dairy Queen, you can get a trad milk shake, but also you can get a Blizzard, which is their proprietary milkshake-like concoction that’s even thicker and comes with chopped-up candy bars inside. Or cookies. You get the idea. These are a little sus and are mostly the terrain of adolescents and adults who have given up on life. They should put a diabetes warning on those bad boys. And then if you go into a gas station you can also get almost edible drinks, like a Slushy which is a fruit-flavored, chunky ice drink that will stain your tongue. More fruit flavors but not like sorbet sophisticated real fruit but like lab-grown, ultramarine alien blue flavors. No offense. Also sometimes at the gas station are the Icee machines which are basically Slushies but cola-flavored and, to my discriminating palate, much better. These are ingested through a straw but a special straw that sports a tiny spoonlet on the end so that you can scoop out those truant half dozen ice nugget crunchers at the bottom.

A Frappacino is just a coffee-flavored milkshake that costs more and comes with a line. A smoothie is just a milkshake that’s pretending to be healthy. Gelato is just Italian sorbet — sorbet’s sketchier, sluttier cousin. You will have a good time with gelato.

While you’re here, lots of people are going to tell you that they’re the real ones in charge. Be that as it may seem, it’s important to remember what one of our best rappers said about all this: the only emperor is the emperor of ice cream.

The website Quarter Mile held a contest for letters to send to the aliens, should they ever arrive. This was my entry. No, I did not win.

The curse of spring

plague journal, ,

I try not to be superstitious, honest, but as one gets older they creep in. It’s like when people once referred to diseases by whispering, or the way some people pray before take-off. Mostly foolish. Mostly harmless, a small dam against the unknowable and uncontrollable. But there is one medieval, superstitious belief I hold onto and it’s that springtime is weird. Shit goes down in the spring. Excuse my language, but this is serious. Mistakes are made. The fukú reveals itself. The karmic bill comes due. Beware the Ides of March. All that. 

Perhaps it’s just when the statistics catch up to me, or when they are revealed to me, the stochastic churning of the gyre briefly visible underneath the sidewalk, but there does seem to be something about the spring, by which I mean the period between Spring Break and Memorial Day. This is when the accidents happen, the expulsions, the seemingly random deaths, the It-like instances of small town terror, the enactment of scenes from Donald Barthelme’s story “The School.” Spring is when Artax is swallowed by the Swamps of Sadness. Every March I tell my kids: “Don’t catch a case of the Dumb Ass in spring, because spring keeps the score.” They roll their eyes. It has recently been pointed out to me that I repeat myself. Very well, I repeat myself. 

I know what you’re going to say. And sure. But old man yells at cloud because old man got electrocuted on the golf course that one time. The reason Ahab storms across the shipdeck is because he knows who ate his leg. It was spring. The clock-digesting crocodile in Peter Pan? That’s spring. The old men are angry and terrified and feel the phantom injuries from springs past, and no one will listen to their raving. 

There’s something about the pollen in the air, the histamines, the promise of summer or graduation. When I was in high school, I had friends commit impromptu acts of vandalism just before graduation. Of course they got caught, and thus began the intense negotiations between parents and school administrators regarding continued enrollment and hence pending graduation. I had friends who stole props from the local goofy golf course. I think it was to impress a girl? Back in the 90s, grownups wore ties and such acts were not tolerated. Maybe this kind of chaos happens all year long but the consequences arrive in the spring. But even that implies a causality that is not consistently apparent. That’s what makes it all the more unsettling, the lack of clear structure to the misfortune. This ambiguity is what makes me superstitious and makes me harangue my children, this paranoia over somehow angering the gods. 

The thunder shakes the windows more. I hate astrology. I hate hippies. But, like, I feel it in the air, man. There’s something about spring. The truth is out there. Thankfully, it’s almost over. But still, be careful.

Artistic publishing

literary lint, ,

Yesterday Anne Trubek, founder and publisher of Belt Publishing, posted the provocatively titled “Are Agents Now The Real Publishers? And Are Publishers Making Themselves Redundant?” Her premise is that publishing is itself a creative act, and she thinks through how a publisher might differentiate itself from others, and where creativity lies within the Rube Goldberg machine that is contemporary book publishing. 

In doing so she addresses the Big 5 publishers: 

“The expectations are that the editors at the press need a book to be ‘done’ when they get a query. They won’t do much editing, and there’s so much competition, so when an agent sends a manuscript to the editor, the book needs to [be] just about printer-ready — some copyediting and proofing, sure, but not much beyond that.

“But what does it mean for a book to be ‘done’ when it has not gone through the publishing process? It means that what publishers do is not germane to the book itself. That publishers don’t shape manuscripts. That their work is less creative and more operational.

“Because this is now the way things work with many Big Five presses, agents are now the people who do the heaviest lifting when it comes to shaping a book.”

She keeps thinking through this situation and arrives at the reasonable questions of “what is a publisher actually for?” and also whether or not the agent, having done all of this editorial heavy lifting, would be better positioned to move the book through production, that is, become the publisher him or herself. 

These are pertinent questions, and I’ve already written about some of these ideas before here: 

Strangers in the night: A note on agents
New York Review of Book Design

To summarize myself and to put it slightly more bluntly than Trubek does: literary agents are pimps.

Trubek is absolutely correct that a publisher forfeits its aesthetic judgment, its designation as a publisher vs being merely a printer (a book-binder, a marketer; they do not even distribute them) when it outsources its queries to an agent. A grim, necrophiliac incident from a few years ago is instructive here. In 2015 HarperCollins published Harper Lee’s Go Tell a Watchman and described it as the sequel to To Kill Mockingbird, though it quickly became apparent that the text was actually that classic novel’s nascent form, as yet untouched by editorial guidance. In the related brouhaha, the history of how Watchman became Mockingbird was documented. That is, it was the result of an intense collaborative relationship between publisher and writer. Back then the publishers employed figures who served as a kind of book doula, creating the best environment for the best book to be born. I believe these people were called editors. If it weren’t for that heavy editorial hand, it’s arguable that we would never have had To Kill a Mockingbird, much to the devastation of 8th-grade English teachers everywhere. (P.S. if there is a Hell, all the people who participated in the exhumation of this text and the exploitation of Lee, then senile and near death, will go there.) But now these figures are called agents and they do the same intensive editorial work, with the major exception that they do not put any money up to publish the book. They get paid a cut when the book gets bought, pimp-like, but they don’t write the check. 

As I get older and slightly more cynical (only slightly!), I think that the one who puts up the money, the person who pays the bills, is the one who is the true publisher/producer/etc. They are the ones with skin in the game. If the book doesn’t get sold, the agent has indeed lost time — uncompensated labor. But they’re still not the one who’s going to pay for all that printing and shipping and have to take it in the teeth when they pulp those remainders. 

To be clear, I don’t think the agent-as-pimp comparison is completely negative. Sometimes one needs a pimp! Or at least an explanatory sidekick. There are complex financial transactions that due to their sensitive nature absolutely benefit from a neutral-ish middle-person. Buying a house, engaging in a complicated insurance transaction, the thorny contractual stuff. The kind of stuff your parents warned you about. It’s not fundamentally evil. But with any kind of consultant figure, one who doesn’t make anything, or put up their own capital, or whose contribution to human flourishing isn’t immediately apparent, there is the constant question of “what is that guy doing here?” — aside from raising the price of the underlying transaction, aside from functioning as a kind of professional turnstile.  

Are there publishers actively publishing as a creative act, who are distinct aesthetic entities? Absolutely. But they tend to be of the more independent and small press variety where the skin that is in the game is a lot more precious. The books hew closer to aesthetic objects rather than commodities. Everyone keeps wailing online about AI in book publishing, but have you been to Barnes & Noble lately? Have you seen the covers on the table? I’ve seen more aesthetic risk and individuation in the cereal aisle. Oh, look, there goes another middle-aged woman finding herself after heartbreak. Oh, look, another searing historical family saga that is somehow related to WWII. And the turnstiles only let through one sub-30 female novelist a year. I wish her all the best, and I hope they let her publish a second book after her kid is born.

All I can think is that, overwhelmed by the sheer volume of manuscripts, by the ever-growing mountain of editorial decisions to make, publishers employed the prophylactic of agents, a filtration device, one that has worked too well, one that has alienated them from the crucial job of editing books themselves. This changed the nature of publishing from editorially focused to production focused, as Trubek says. As a result, readers have virtually no interest in or awareness of the publishing house. The only people who care who published a given book are other writers, who are always everywhere aspiring, and thus keeping score. I would say that publishing house inside dope is the province of dorks but that would be an insult to dorks. (All hail the New Directions colophon!) 

And yet, publishers are valuable, because despite their aesthetic impotence they remain good at one thing and that’s getting books on those Barnes & Noble tables. Or on the tables at the hip indie cultural touchstone of your choosing. It’s all about distribution. I remember buying the Miranda July novel All Fours a couple years back in the Orlando airport. I was already aware of it and was surprised to see that novel, presumably high brow, in the airport. A smooth move, publicity wise. (Side note: it’s a good novel. I find July’s public persona slightly grating, but her talent is undeniable.) A writer friend of mine quipped once, when his own father compared his newly published novel to a can of peas lining the shelves at a grocery store, that his novels weren’t peas, and he was right, but also wrong. They are peas. They’re going to be shelved just like peas. They are relentlessly physical objects. (Still working through why I can’t get excited about ebooks). It takes a lot of skill to make the trains run on time. 

And maybe that’s the real lesson here. Maybe the publishers are right: the aesthetic/editorial judgment doesn’t matter. What matters is getting peas on shelves. If they’re on the shelves, if they look like the other peas, people will buy them. Who knows what will actually sell, people are so weird in their tastes, but whatever takes off, they can get more of those same peas to that shelf pronto. Maybe that’s what the publisher is really good for and good at. The best of what has been thought and said was always a low priority — more of a side quest. They just outsourced the part they don’t really care about: what the book actually says.  

In it to win it

literary lint,

The other day on Substack Ross Barkan wrote a note about Ben Lerner and how he didn’t publish frequently and how that surprised him — how back in the good old days successful writers published a book every couple of years. And he’s right. People don’t seem to publish as often now. I was reminded of Lorrie  Moore, who went ten years between Birds of America and A Gate at the Stairs. I remember the good old days (the 90s) when Updike and Roth were publishing books so frequently that keeping up was a form of cardio. 

I realize that material conditions are different now. And I’ve read enough author interviews to know that Moore was likely raising a child by herself during that time period. The frequency of publishing is not really a judgment on that person’s character, but a desire to see that person more, read that person more. If you like their voice, you just want more of it. It sounds like judgment but it’s really just the greediness of admiration. 

There are a couple of current writers who publish frequently, Brandon Taylor and Lauren Groff and Barkan himself, and props to them. They are out there hustling. Then there are the semi-famous who have almost stopped writing books entirely. I am thinking of Michael Chabon, who has been working on TV stuff perhaps? But still. It’s been ten years since his last novel Moonglow. I realize that everyone’s conditions are different, man’s gotta eat, and television is a valid medium, all that, but still. There’s being stuck in development hell and there’s books being stuck on my shelf, and I know which I’d rather have.  

The list of people I wish would publish more frequently is legion. I won’t list them out of fear of being whiny and weird. (Batuman! Gates! Beatty! Wherefore art thou?)

Some people get so famous that any additional publishing dilutes the brand’s prestige. Example: Cheryl Strayed. But that’s marketing logic, not reader logic. Was I excited when Updike published Gertrude and Claudius later in life? Did I think it would help his brand? No and no. But I’m glad he was out there trying new stuff. The other night I caught Andre Agassi playing pickle ball on TV. Pickle Ball. On the one hand: what a pathetic attempt at garnering attention and prestige and money from a person past his prime. On the other hand: dude was covered in sweat, smacking that ball like a man who knew what he was doing, in the game. And I was on the barstool watching him. Turns out you don’t ever win the game. You just stay in the game. 

And the crowd goes wild. 

Commerce in the morning

The Portable Son, ,

I love the feeling of commerce in the morning. Grabbing a bagel at the coffee shop, stopping off at the drive-thru bank teller, booking a car while briskly walking to an elevator in a distant city. I don’t know. It gets my small-town, merchant-blood flowing. It’s my middle-aged belief that all real business transpires before lunch.

All that’s throat clearing to say that there is a new online spot where you can buy my book, specifically my Bandcamp page. I do realize that books are not usually sold on Bandcamp, but I’ve already got the page up, and the pipes connected, and that “merch” tab was sitting there unused. This effort is partially inspired by the “you can just do things” discourse, which I’m a sucker for, and partially inspired by a couple of friends out there doing cool stuff. 

The paperback is the “limited baby blue” edition. I’ve got about 19 left.

Notes on ‘Privacy’

book reviews, ,

Privacy by Molly Young
2025

It’s a short novella-length memoir derived from the journal she kept while pregnant. Her wit sparkles throughout. It’s basically a normal pregnancy, punctuated by her particular sensibility, until the post-pregnancy hemorrhage that almost kills her, which she narrates in a surprisingly brisk and unemotional fashion. Perhaps all that’s occluded here is what’s meant by the title, which puzzled me throughout, until I finished the book and sat pondering the crumbs of my breakfast, suddenly grateful for all the mothers I knew who became mothers without dying. 

It seems difficult to write any kind of memoir, but then also to write any kind of memoir that has a lever regarding how much personal information to include. I have written before how I have come to think that personal writing, or “reality television,” for lack of a better phrase, invites judgment on behalf of the audience/reader, whereas fictionalizing somehow invites empathy. This is not my idea, and I don’t know why this seems to be the case, but it still strikes me as true. That’s to say that Young is able somehow here to disclose personal details of her pregnancy and its aftermath without it being personal, or “too personal,” or personal enough so that it transpires into the kind of “real” performance that invites audience judgment. Perhaps it has something to do with her brisk narration, her rather clear obscurities. Perhaps it’s because it’s more focused on details in the world than her own psychological theater. 

Throughout the book, Young mentions how there appear to be no works of literature that deal with pregnancy, and so this memoir stands as a small corrective. It’s not as if all the details are groundbreaking. There is the routine transformation of the mother’s body from an autonomous being into an animal that exists to provide sustenance to another animal — the rude assertion of nature that occurs while everyone is still living in a semblance of civilization. Routine stuff, but still, it’s made interesting and new by Young’s voice, the details she notices. She collects obscure pregnancy pamphlets and peppers the text with historical flotsam related to her progress. It’s the most normal story of all, until it’s not. 

In the final pages of the book, when the hemorrhage takes place, pregnancy turns into trauma, or rather giving birth is the trauma. While there may not be many books where pregnancy is the underlying narrative, I do think there are books where giving birth is depicted as a traumatic event. Two recent novels spring to mind: Miranda July’s All Fours and Taffy Brodesser-Akner’s Fleishman is in Trouble. In both novels, the mother characters undergo terrible births, and they are (understandably) haunted by this experience throughout the book. It functions as a gigantic, characterological explanatory event, like a personal Nagasaki. 

This isn’t bad per se. I think that both mother characters in these two novels would be more interesting without the trauma-birth story, but that being said, the traumatic birth story does serve as a reminder, that amidst the comedy of pregnancy and child-rearing, or the accidental drudgery of marriage, all of this entertainment floats by on a river of blood, potentially. 

At least that’s how it feels in Young’s zine. That’s how she refers to it. The short book is self-published, and brings to three the number of novella-length nonfictional zines she’s published. It’s a sharply designed, all black, perfect-bound paperback that’s not quite thick enough to weather the kind of aggressively splayed bookreading I prefer, but otherwise it’s a nice object. Young is a successful journalist and book reviewer, having written for the New York Times Magazine for years, and also having done stints at New York magazine and the New York Times Book Review. I think I’ve got all those credentials right. What’s interesting is how despite her consistent success in established legacy media publications, she has continued to publish her own stuff as well. That is, it’s interesting to me, a total nobody. She refers to a meeting with an agent at one point, who throws out wild ideas she could pursue. It’s played for comedy in the book, but it makes one wonder. Did this small book ever get pitched? Why did Young choose to publish it this way? Aside from being glad that it exists, qua book, it’s neat that it exists in this particular way, so tightly envisioned and executed. It’s as if Geoff Dyer and Maggie Nelson had a little sister who knew her way around InDesign. 

The book is available here.

Against coherence, part II

Uncategorized, ,

Once again I am deeply disappointed in my home printer.

Everyone talking directly to a camera, holding a gimmicky, small microphone, explainitorializing. 

My review of all modern tacos: entirely too much crema.

All software is too slow. 

When people show me their AI creations, I feel embarrassed for them.

New York Review of Gift Guides

All literary criticism is just an excuse for making lists.

You’ll be more interesting without optimizing.

Look, you can either do your life’s work, or you can look up stuff on Wikipedia, but you can’t do both.

Modern life contains entirely too much beeping.

Gulf of Amnesia

You’re not “obsessed” with that object — backpack, lemon-peeler, whatever. You just like it. Just say that.

The United States of Lines

The only people who care about audio fidelity are dorks. Dorks are important, but they are necessarily a subset.

Home design shows: problematic.

Something powerful about making a soup.

I always forget how many people dig on the Pope.

Indifference to royal family as principle of adulthood.

Every interaction now triggers a survey. “How did I do?” shrieks the mailbox, the fire hydrant, the paper towel dispenser.

Jazz lives (at the airport).

The people who travel with their pets are different.

Dancing, as a part of live musical performance: almost always overrated.

AI iconography reminds me grimly of glitter.

To go on sabbatical from being one’s self.

If it doesn’t work all of the time, it doesn’t actually work.

This is a test of the mundane broadcast system.

I am anti-Holidays, but the innovations in seasonal inflatable decoration are undeniable.

Is it possible to dislike a golden retriever?

The internet sped up the lifecycle of cliches. It’s a superspreader of conventions.

I rather fancy the Midwest.

Overall I applaud the proliferation of Substack newsletters and related examples of writers banging their own drum, but I encourage better proofreading.

I don’t understand how pop-ups on web pages are still a thing.

Camping: I don’t see the appeal.

Primal disgust: wet cat food.

Thinking of taking my mimetic desire out for a run on my hedonic treadmill.

At some point we all became diatribalists.

Country dogs hit different.

I dislike sequels.

There are people of the Word, people of the Excel, and people of the Confusing Color Charts.

Small dogs hit different. 

Going through life on the lookout for that Danver’s ice.

Airports should be silent

plague journal, ,

Can you hear it? It’s the silent airport, the text-only airport, the airport of the future, the airport of your dreams. This is the progress of civilization. Airports shouldn’t be library quiet. They should be completely silent. Abandoned-church-in-the-middle-of-the-night quiet. Welcome.

There are lots of indignities in the modern American airport. The food, both on the ground and in the air, is somehow both overdetermined and bland. TSA is our contemporary theater of the absurd. The process of herding on and off the planes with all our nicely designed luggage puts the idea of human intelligence into question. The overwhelming presence of coordinated sweatsuit sets does not help matters. All of it makes me feel crazy. And yet, I’ll take it everyday. What I want to change is simply the noise in the modern airport.

Here in wonderful 2026, there is no need to have anything but text-based communication in the airport. No public announcements. No announcements from the gate. No more innocuous “welcome to our city” messages by whomever the mayor of Atlanta currently is. (I always seem to hear this while I’m urinating.) No more well-intentioned announcements about child trafficking. There should be signs saying what’s arriving, what’s departing. There should be signs outside the gates showing the same. There should be text messages delivered silently to your phone updating you on the whereabouts of your flight. If you come into the airport, you automatically consent, along with the TSA body search, to receiving silent text messages from the airport. Like with firearms, all audible alerts should be removed once you enter the premises. If we can make AI happen, then we can make this happen. No phone calls. If you need to talk on the phone, there should be private booths where you can conduct your shameful business. (I feel like this used to be a thing historically.) If people can hear you converse from your booth, then they should stare at you and you should feel shame. If you have a problem with your flight that cannot be resolved via text, there should be slightly larger booths where you and an airline official can discuss the matter, far, far away from everyone else.

Part of my beef is that it there are too many sounds. To begin, there is the modern American compulsion to blast pop music from every restaurant, bar, and kiosk, as if we were all trapped in an endless music video directed by Satan. (His theme song is “Mambo No. 5.”) Second, the public announcements don’t work. They’re too difficult to hear and they don’t inform. Airport terminals are too close together for any of the individual terminal announcement systems not to get hopelessly muddled. And then these announcements get preempted by the larger terminal-wide announcements. I’m always trying to parse the noise, trying to figure out what is relevant information. It’s like trying to unweave a rug with my teeth. They should instead install those digital highway signs, those boondoggles that purportedly announce upcoming traffic accidents and road closures but which in the Land of Progress mostly sport bad puns related to safe driving. It’s like a modern WPA program for poets. There are worse uses of federal funds, but still.

The announcements that are given at the gate and then on the airplane itself are so rote that many airlines or flight attendants use the occasion to work on their stand-up material. We’ve all witnessed the “humorous flight safety video.” We’ve all been accosted by the flight-attendant doing a bit. It feels like being trapped with an overly enthusiastic football mascot with slightly less fur. I like it when people are funny. I am not a monster. But this is not funny. It’s annoying and desperate. I know the lawyers require the pinned-back-eyelids transmission of the safety video though it seems like this sphere is ripe for innovation. Perhaps take a clue from the endless, unreadable and unread Terms of Service agreements. Let’s get Apple to work on those flight videos. Perhaps travelers can agree to the terms at the same time they agree not to make a peep as soon as they enter the jetbridge, or whatever we’re calling the entrance to the airport now.

While I’m being picky, the planes themselves should be quieter. These machines are too loud inside. All that groaning and gear-shifting. I shouldn’t have to wear my cubicle-grade headphones to shield myself from the Lynchian industrial keening. Perhaps Delta could explore some better insulation technologies or phase cancellation possibilities. Perhaps a collaboration with some outfit like Yeti coolers. I realize that’s a different technology entirely, but man, those coolers really do work. I feel like this could be a mutually beneficial synergistic collab.

And then finally there is my fellow American traveler, equipped now for 18 years at least with a smart phone and yet none the wiser about using it, or at least none the more subtle. The prevalence of taking phone calls on speaker in public shocks me, as if I’m some spinster witnessing white pants after Labor Day. I am not a monster. But honestly, take that call somewhere else and in a way where no one else can hear it, where no one else is subjected to it. It’s a kind of aggressive rudeness, forcing a private conversation into the public sphere. Of course I have heard middle-aged professionals instigate calls while urinating in the public restroom in my office building, so there are really no limits to a lack of decorum. (Perhaps they are calling the mayor of Atlanta.) Video calls on speaker are just a declension of the same psychosis. I admit to not understanding the appeal of video calls in general, much less while I’m walking between terminals. (I’m pretty sure Short Form Video is one of the Seven Seals, but I’ll save that rant for another day.)

Instead, hear it with me. See it. Feel it. Completely quiet. Just the sound of people walking. I don’t want to put anyone in jail or anything. I just think some strategic social shaming is in order. I don’t think people should be cancelled or whatever we’re calling it now. But I do think that the people who take video calls on speaker should be politely led off the premises and banned for six months. I’m not a monster. It’s just that silence is golden. Or if not golden, then a pleasant ocher. And something we should strive to paint together. No one likes travelling. I mean, maybe the super rich do. But I’m talking about actual human beings here.

I’m of course writing this from an airport. I’ve got my ear plugs in but I can still hear the kids shrieking from one direction and the vacuuming from another. I can’t hear the announcements, but I can hear that emergency door alarm, the kind that goes off intermittently and seems engineered to loosen bowels and yet which effectuates no change in behavior from anyone. The door just makes that sound every now and then like some dispeptic animal. I don’t think my prohibition should apply to small children. I’m not a monster. Toddlers are going to be toddlers. But as the kids get older we should teach them that the proper approach to air travel is a funereal respect. A holy silence so that can people can watch their ipad movies in peace. Air travel is an absurd privilege, one we should accept while minimizing human suffering.

Also, grownups: no traveling with a blanket. Have some self-respect.