A Work Unknown (excerpt) – Author Omitted

February 12, 2026

I don’t know what this book is.

My coffee is fresh and it is hot but it is not scalding.

I deleted what I wrote last night.

It’s almost eleven in the morning.

I’ve been awake for six hours. 

I have had nothing to eat.

I just finished reading Lara Pawson’s memoir, This is the Place to Be.

I think I’ll have black bean tacos for lunch.

Sometimes I think about suicide (albeit in a sense best labeled idle).

I liked This is the Place to Be, though not as much as Spent Light, Pawson’s other memoir, or quasi-memoir, something between memoir and essay and aphorism, though perhaps autofictive, I’m not sure.

I need to dust, vacuum, and mop the second floor of our house. 

I need to do it in that order.

I read several books a week if they’re small, under 200 pages, or one or two a week if they’re large, over 200 pages.

I think about reasons, for example.

I can not clean our house all at once, it’s too large, it takes too long, I have to break it up across multiple days.

I read Gass’s The Tunnel in five days, 651 pages, Gaddis’s JR in eight days, 770 pages.

Not all pages are the same, some have more text, some have less.

Perhaps I won’t eat black bean tacos, perhaps I’ll eat peanut butter.

We watched Cast Away last night with Child Three and Child Four.

I put Child Five to bed before starting the movie.

Child Two ignored us, she played video games on the family computer.

Child One is away at college, Child One never comes home, never calls, wants nothing to do with us.

We dirty our house faster than I can clean it, by the time I finish a multi-day cleaning cycle, I have to start over.

I think about causes, for example.

Grandmother went into a nursing home last week. 

She has Alzheimer’s disease. 

It has progressed to the point of senility. 

She has lost her mind.

She is losing her body.

I have to get the house ready for a playdate this afternoon.

I like when Tom Hanks is on the island in Cast Away, I dislike when he returns to civilization. 

He learns nothing.

He ends the film chasing beaver.

I was raised, along with Sister, by my maternal aunt, and by her husband, we called them Aunt and Uncle, for we were not clever children, and we lacked imagination.

I have no memories of my mother, or my father, or my brother, they died, I was too little, I can’t remember them.

Grandmother was diagnosed with early-stage Alzheimer’s five years ago. 

After receiving her diagnosis, she fired her doctor, told no one.

But we did not need a diagnosis, we knew.

Two years ago, she introduced Child Three and me to the president of her HOA. 

She said, Here is my grandson, and his wife.

Child Three was 12 years old at the time.

She turned 13 during that trip.

At least Grandmother still knew who I was.

On her birthday, we took Grandmother to the town she grew up in.

The town was empty, the streets deserted, the sidewalks cracked and broken, the shop windows boarded up, the homes dilapidated or abandoned.

Like most towns in the state.

The state was once known for an abundance of timber, now its known for an abundance of methamphetamines.

And murder.

I think about consequences, for example.

I have many cousins in that state.

One struggled with meth addiction.

Another went to jail for child pornography.

The former is now clean and happily married with children. 

The latter is now dead.

He died in jail.

By suicide.

I play the drums.

I think about justifications, for example.

Grandmother still has a body but no longer has a self.

Tom Hanks’s character in Cast Away chose to survive.

Was that wisdom or was that folly?

I last saw Grandmother nine months ago, I took Child Five and Child Four. 

She had met Child Four once before, she had never met Child Five, whom she shares a birthday with.

He is seven years old. 

She is eighty nine.

During dinner, Grandmother forgot who we were. 

She demanded to know what we were doing in her house.

Sometimes I am gripped by a feeling of despair.

Decades ago, I gigged in New York with jazz combos.

Now I play alone on practice pads.

Now that I have no one to make music with, I’ve never played better. 

That’s irony.

Wife is growing apple trees in the back yard.

We have two cars, one of which is not a car, but a Sports Utility Vehicle.

We use it to cart chairs back and forth to our kid’s lacrosse games and baseball games.

I like lacrosse, it’s fast, it’s physical, it’s dangerous. 

I do not like baseball, I struggle to pay attention, I miss important plays.

In New York, I had a steady gig, two nights a week, with a piano trio, at a restaurant.

We played two, forty-five minute sets. 

The customers paid us in tips.

The restaurant paid us in food.

I took home a margherita pizza after every gig. 

No one came there for the music, no one cared about the music, the music was ambience, nothing more, barely audible above the din of chatter and clanking plates and glasses and silverware.

I think about place, for example.

Wife is also growing lemon trees and orange trees.

I’ve read close to 100 books this year, it’s only July.

We planted the apples trees in the ground, they can survive a New England winter. 

We planted the lemon trees and the orange trees in portable planters, they cannot survive a New England winter.

I can still carry the lemon trees in and out by myself.

I can no longer carry the orange trees in and out by myself. 

The children help with that now.

During that same visit, Grandmother grew terrified of her smoke detectors.

She no longer knew what they were.

She wanted to know why they blinked.

She thought they might explode.

She cried.

When I sit and read a book in the morning, I focus on it, when I read a book in the afternoon, I fall asleep, unless I stand and read.

We have planted pollinator-friendly native flora in our garden beds.

Wife’s the brains behind it, I’m just the brawn.

I think about timing, for example.

When we first moved here, I liked to sit outside in the summer. 

Now I prefer to stay inside, year round. 

Aunt and Uncle separated, I was 17, still in high school, Sister 19, in college, away, unconcerned. 

Neither Aunt nor Uncle remarried, they both now live alone.

Uncle has become a shut-in, he never leaves the house, he has no interest in the outside world, he has everything he needs delivered.

When we lived in New York, I owned a drum set, despite the fact that we had no space for it in our tiny two bedroom apartment.

Now that we live in Connecticut, I no longer own a drumset, despite the fact that we have plenty of space for it in our four bedroom, four bath, four story house.

That’s irony.

I think about method, for example.

Our garden beds attract a large variety of pollinator fauna, including bees, butterflies, moths, hummingbirds, flies, ants, beetles, and wasps.

Author wonders if the term fauna applies to insects, or just animals.

The latter definition would render the former usage inappropriate.

We have several paintings inspired by Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, Wife purchased them from a local gallery. 

At first I did not like them, now I do.

I do not know why I did not like them when I did not like them, I do not know why I do like them now that I do like them.

I now wonder if I have not in fact read closer to 50 books this year, as opposed to 100, I should count, I should be sure, I should not misstate, or overinflate, my accomplishments.

At the end of my last visit, Grandmother cried when I packed up to leave.

What will I do without you, she said.

Please don’t leave, I feel safe when you are here, I don’t feel safe when you’re gone, she said.

I am almost never there, a mere handful of times in the last decade.

Last year, I read Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland to Child Five.

I did not like it. 

It was absurd but nothing more.

Some of it held the attention of Child Five, some of it did not.

It did not hold my attention.

Carpenter ants infested our home last month, we had to call an exterminator. 

We never found the nest. 

I do not know how many lived and how many died. 

I no longer see any around the house. 

I picture thousands of dead ants rotting under the floorboards.

I have now tallied up the books I have read so far this year.

97 books.

I think about means, for example.

We summered in Portland, Maine last year.

When we lived in New York, I declined gigs whenever the venue did not provide a house drum set.

Despite owning my own drum set.

I felt embarrassed and angry whenever I tried to carry my drum set into the subway or onto a bus.

I had no car of my own.

I could not afford taxi cabs.

There is no money in jazz.

It’s pretentious to say that we summered in Maine, as if we have a home there, as if we have money.

We have money, but middle class money, not summer-house-in-Maine money.

Wife is a scientist, I am a consultant.

We turned our house in Connecticut into a construction zone last summer. 

We took out a renovation loan to gut the top floor and turn it into a livable, finished garret.

Author wonders if finished garret is an oxymoron.

The demolition took over two weeks.

The noise, dust, and constant foot traffic rendered the house unlivable, hence Maine.

We have not paid off the loan.

We do not know how we will pay off the loan.

I want to read the letters Vincent Van Gogh wrote to his brother Theo.

I remember the mist in Maine.

Every day it would appear without warning, a sudden sort of haze.

At first I mistook it for smoke, perhaps from a far-off brush fire.

I could not smell smoke, but I have little to no sense of smell, thanks to a botched surgery two decades ago. 

I hate thinking about that surgery.

I hate thinking about the painful recovery.

When we returned to our home at the end of the summer, we discovered a broken air conditioner and a kitchen infested with German cockroaches.

Every time I opened a cabinet, dozens of cockroaches would fall out and rain down on me.

I felt like dying.

Or at the very least, disappearing.

I like a Van Gogh quote about the blankness of every day life.

I cannot find the quote.

I like an anonymous suicide letter from the 19th century about the tedium of everyday life.

I do not need to find the quote, I have memorized it.

All this buttoning and unbuttoning.

I think that’s funny.

I don’t think it matters how many books I’ve read this year, it’s not a contest.

And anyway, I have an unfair advantage, unemployment.

I found the Van Gogh quote.

Life itself, too, is forever turning an infinitely vacant, dispiriting blank side towards man on which nothing appears, any more than it does on a blank canvas. 

I think the poor are too busy surviving to experience Angst.

I think leisure time reveals an essential emptiness to existence.

I think Man cannot bear that emptiness.

I think many have felt that emptiness, but few have understood it.

I think even fewer have found a way to live with it.

I did in fact eat black bean tacos for lunch.

I weigh 109 pounds today, I weighed 181 pounds four years ago.

I do not know why I weighed 181 pounds four years ago, I do not know why I weigh 109 pounds today.

My weight has been stable for the last year, I will not disappear.

I wonder whether I treat Child Five different from the way I treat Child Four or Child Three or Child Two or Child One.

I wonder whether Child Five is too dependent on me.

We will not have any more children, vasectomy.

Child Five is our last, our baby.

I am six feet tall.

I have not had steady work in over seven months.

I am not six feet tall, but I tell people I am six feet tall.

I am five feet, eleven and three quarters of an inch.

I tell myself that this is a difference without a distinction. 

I have placed a robotic chicken next to my desk.

I coach leaders in my consulting work.

The last two sentences have nothing to do with each other.

I have two clients at the moment.

One client wants a one hour session every week, the other wants the same every fortnight.

Even at $275 per hour, that amounts to more or less nothing.

I think that if Wife did not work, we would be homeless and starving.

The aforementioned robotic chicken is Hey-Hey, from Moana.

If you squeeze Hey-Hey’s right wing, he screams.

I like making Hey-Hey scream. 

I wish I could scream.

In the spring, Uncle called me for the first time in three years.

He spent an hour talking about himself.

A child has arrived to play, the playdate has begun.

The topic of happiness came up somehow during our call. 

I told Uncle that happiness is rare and fleeting.

Uncle agreed.

Most people assume that a sleeping pill overdose is a painless death.

That you just fall asleep and die, but have no experience of dying.

That you don’t know that your breathing slows, that your heart slows, that your brain slowly starves of oxygen.

But what if they’re wrong?

What if it’s more like paralysis?

Maybe you realize you’re suffocating but you’re powerless to do anything about it.

Maybe you realize you can’t move, you can’t speak, you can’t open your eyes, you can’t force yourself to draw a breath.

During our phone call, Uncle told me that his rheumatoid arthritis had worsened over the winter, that it was affecting his quality of life, that it now hurt to move, but also to sit, even to stay still, to do nothing.

He said he had no interest in living a life no longer fun.

He said he would kill himself once that happened.

I don’t think Uncle knows anything about the philosophy of hedonism or the history of its development.

I don’t think he has ever heard of Epicurus, Lucretius, Hobbes, Locke, Hume, de Sade, Bentham, or Mill.

I also doubt he has any familiarity with the term’s modern usages.

He may never even have heard the word hedonism.

I did not mention the word.

I did not tell him that since happiness is rare and fleeting, and since when we have fun we are happy, that having fun is therefore rare and fleeting.

That therefore life cannot be fun, in any general sense.

That his life is not now, nor has it ever been, fun, in any general sense.

That any fun, any happiness, that he has experienced, has been brief, ephemeral, unenduring.

That at best the most common affect in his life has been a sort of dullness, an affect without significant valence, but that, more likely than not, the majority of his life has passed with a less than neutral affect, an affect with negative valence, for suffering, not joy, not happiness, is the rule of life, the one constant that we can count on.

I don’t think Uncle takes his hedonistic suicide calculus very seriously.

If he did he would have worked out the above syllogism, leading him to kill himself long ago.

Or perhaps he is in denial about the overall lack of fun in his life up to this point.

Or perhaps both, perhaps he is unserious and in denial.

Or perhaps he is simply stupid.

When I look at Hey-Hey I do not think about Moana, but sometimes I think about the show Robot Chicken.

Primus wrote and performed the Robot Chicken theme song.

The only words in the song are It’s alive.

I have not watched the show in twenty years.

Primus sucks.

During the playdate today, I told Wife that I wanted to check on Child Five.

He and his friend were playing in his room.

The door was closed.

I did not hear anything out of the ordinary.

Wife told me I was being a helicopter.

I did not check on him.

We have set up another playdate for the subsequent weekend, with a different child, for a different child.

My mother and father, and my brother, died in a car accident.

Sister and I survived the accident.

I was two years old at the time, Sister four, brother an infant.

Sister and I, in the back of the car, strapped into carseats.

Mother, father, brother, in the front of the car, strapped into nothing.

Father, driving.

Brother held in mother’s arms.

Just a short trip.

My therapist said my thoughts don’t matter.

In his memoir, Gathering Evidence, the novelist Thomas Bernhard wrote that his motto was So long, nothing matters.

He admitted that he did not coin the phrase. 

Instead he heard it from a common laborer.

They struck up a brief conversation, after a chance meeting.

At the end of the conversation, the laborer said So long, nothing matters.

The phrase hit Bernhard with uncommon force. 

Bernhard realized that he lived by those words. 

But that he had never put them into words. 

Despite his erudition.

Despite his supreme self-reflection.

My therapist didn’t say my thoughts don’t matter, he said some thoughts aren’t that important.

Which I interpreted in the worst possible way.

I wonder if Thomas Bernhard killed himself. 

He seems like the type. 

But I don’t think he did.

He suffered from a terrible, chronic lung disease all his life. 

He had tuberculosis as a kid.

I think his lungs killed him in the end.

Or maybe his heart.

I once knew, but now I can’t remember.

I wish I could remember.

Bernhard stipulated in his will that his works never again be published in Austria. 

He was an Austrian citizen, his parents were Austrian citizens, he lived in Austria his entire life.

I take everything in the worst possible way.

I have never admitted this to my therapist. 

I don’t need to admit this to my therapist. 

He knows I’m a Cassandra.

He has induced it from the details of my sessions.

Induced, not deduced.

We deduce the specific from the general, we induce the general from the specific.

I can never remember which is deduction and which is induction, I always have to look them up.

I love Bernhard, I love his style, but I can’t write like Bernhard.

Just like I can not write like the other writers I love, who have changed the way I understand prose. 

Like Krasznahorkai, like Levé, like Woolf, like Gass, like Gaddis, like Beckett, like Miller, like Salinger, like Pawson, like Pessoa, like Lispector, like Markson, like McCarthy.

By McCarthy, I mean Cormac McCarthy.

I have never read Mary McCarthy.

I am not trying to write like anyone right now.

I am just trying to write.

I do not know what this book is.

I have now written I don’t know what this book is three times, including this time.

The first time with a contraction, the second time without, the third time with a contraction again.

I don’t know why I used a contraction the first time I wrote I don’t know what this book is but not the second time.

I don’t know why I use contractions when I use them and why I don’t use contractions when I don’t.

I just feel it.

Sometimes contraction yes, sometimes contraction no.

I think about poison, for example.

The child has left, the playdate has ended.

Child Five has had very few playdates.

He grew too wild at a certain point during today’s playdate, Wife had to intervene.

I made a cup of Lapsang tea, it tastes like smoke.

Aunt drank Lipton iced tea growing up, sweetened to hell.

Perhaps guns are superior to sleeping pills, with respect to suicide.

I think father’s stepmother agreed.

She blew out her brains with a shotgun.

Father’s real mother died young, when an aneurysm ruptured in her brain. 

Father’s stepmother suffered from a manic-depressive disorder.

Her suicide may have been an unpremeditated act of despair.

I remember that she had curly hair.

That she smiled and laughed a lot.

That she was overbearing.

I remember the wake, I had never seen people dress in black before.

No one told me how she died for many years. 

When they told me, they explained that I had been too young to understand.

But I don’t think they understood either.

Does anyone understand anyone else?

Does anyone understand even themselves?

I don’t understand anyone or anything.

Least of all myself.

Last month, when I bought a pack of loose leaf Lapsang at the Mystic Spice and Tea Exchange, I told the proprietress that Lapsang was what they threw into Boston harbor during the Boston Tea Party.

The proprietress said I was wrong, that they threw Bohea.

But the proprietress was wrong, or rather she was right, the revolutionaries did throw Bohea into the Boston Harbor, but they also through Souchong.

Souchong is Lapsang. 

The full name of Lapsang is Lapsang Souchong.

Aunt never left the house without a gallon of iced Lipton, she drank it constantly, I thought there was something wrong with her.

I was right, of course, there was and continues to be something wrong with her.

But now I drink caffeinated fluids constantly, I am never without a thermos of coffee or tea.

I hate the way I have grown to resemble Aunt, and resemble Uncle, the only parents I have ever known.

Aunt stole sugar packets everywhere we went, she used them to sweeten her tea, she would use a dozen sugar packets in her thermos of tea, I could hear the sugar as she gritted it between her teeth.

I do not sweeten my tea.

I drink tea and I drink coffee, and I drink them both black.

I used to drink coffee and tea well into the evening.

I now think it wise to stop myself mid-afternoon.

Said wisdom gained after several nights of caffeine-induced insomnia.

During today’s playdate, Child Five stuck his butt into his friend’s face.

They’re both seven.

I didn’t see it, Wife saw it, she relayed this story to me.

He kept his pants on.

At least there’s that, with us he moons sans pants.

Author is aware that the phrase moons sans pants is a tautology.

That the sans pants is implied.

My mind suffers from dozens of distractions.

Like the bass drum practice pad underneath my writing desk.

It looks and sounds nothing like a bass drum.

It’s a small, rectangular piece of foam, attached to a piece of metal, attached to a bass drum foot pedal.

I told my therapist that I agreed with him when he said some thoughts aren’t that important.

I didn’t tell him why I agreed.

I didn’t tell him that no thoughts matter.

If no thoughts matter, no thoughts are important.

Which makes the assertion some thoughts aren’t that important trivially true.

Nolen Gertz wrote that The only thing that matters is that nothing matters.

That’s the only thing I remember from his book, Nihilism, an entry in the MIT Essential Knowledge series.

I read the whole book.

I highlighted significant portions of it.

I am looking at it right now. 

The only thing that matters is that nothing matters appears on the back of the book. 

I don’t know if it appears in the actual text as well. 

Perhaps it’s only on the back blurb.

Perhaps its just marketing copy.

Perhaps I would be no different today had I only read the back blurb, instead of the whole book.

That’s irony. 

I think about gas, for example.

The Buddha said we are not our thoughts, that there is no self.

I don’t, of course, know if he really said that. 

No one does.

None of us were there. 

And the Buddha wrote nothing, as far as we know.

His immediate followers also wrote nothing, as far as we know.

In fact, the oldest extant Buddhist writings date several centuries after the Buddha’s death. 

I sometimes wonder if the Buddha ever existed. 

If his followers invented him.

For reasons I cannot fathom.

Therapeutic.

That’s how I felt about my regular gig in New York, decades ago.

It felt therapeutic. 

It didn’t matter what kind of anxiety or anger or obsession I walked into the gig with.

It all melted away during the gig. 

I left the gig feeling like nothing mattered anymore.

It felt great to shake off the world.

A heart is a heavy burden.

My therapist told me about a conference of psychoanalysts.

A renowned psychoanalyst gave a talk, and afterwards he answered questions.

Someone asked Do you have a psychoanalyst?

No, he answered.

Why not? they asked.

My thoughts aren’t that important, he answered.

My therapist said this answer has stayed with him for decades now.

Sometimes things stick.

We don’t know why.

My tea is getting cold. 

It’s lukewarm at best. 

I like hot tea, I don’t like lukewarm tea.

I need to finish my tea soon, before it cools to room temperature.

I don’t like to waste a good cup of tea.

It’s summer here, but I prefer winter.

I like winter because nothing grows.

I like winter because people stop wanting to go outside and they stop wanting to do things.

I like winter because I like to sit inside where its warm and look outside where its cold.

Author sometimes does not know what to write.

I feel both wonderful and terrible when I watch my children grow up and become autonomous human beings with egos and identities and senses of self.

I celebrate their accomplishments, their personalities, yet I mourn for their innocence, lost, outgrown, unceremoniously shed.

I fear for their trials and tribulations ahead.

At the age of thirteen I masturbated with another boy.

The boy showed me a pornographic magazine he found in his father’s closet.

I told him that the images gave me an erection, that I wanted to masturbate, he replied that he had never masturbated, that he didn’t know how.

We used Vaseline.

We masturbated in his closet, he took one corner, I took the other, we both faced away from each other, our butts almost touched, the closet being small.

He came first, I took longer.

He waited, silently, awkwardly, facing his wall.

I don’t remember what we did after we finished masturbating. 

Swimming, probably.

He had a pool, which I coveted.

I wonder if he remembers our co-masturbation.

Does he ever think about it?

Does he still masturbate?

Or has he given it up, other than once in a blue moon?

I have. 

I have lost my libido, for reasons I cannot explain.

I think about hanging, for example.

I used to play chess.

I find the fear of losing at chess crippling.

For years, instead of playing chess, I solved chess puzzles.

But I once played a daily chess tournament online, the tournament required you to play three simultaneous games per round, every player was required to make a move in every game at least once every fourteen days, no one waited the entire fourteen days, everyone made a move every day, sometimes several moves in a single day, I did not in general play as fast as my opponents, I sometimes took longer than my opponents, I sometimes spent days fretting over a single move, I didn’t lose a single game, I drew two games, in one game I had a losing position that I saved with a complicated perpetual check that my opponent unwittingly allowed, I won the tournament, I was proud of winning, it took several months, probably six months, it broke my brain, while the tournament went on I couldn’t think about anything other than my games in progress, I was terrified of losing a game, it affected my performance at work, it affected my concentration at home, it was akin to treading water in the ocean in a storm, it felt like swells were constantly breaking over my head, it felt like I was drowning.

I no longer play chess.

Though sometimes my kids ask me to play.

They’re beginners, they never win, unless I let them win, they make a lot of mistakes. 

I’ve lost touch with my childhood best friend.

We remained friends all through college, we were roommates, he was my best man at my wedding, and I was his at his.

I called him apropos of nothing a couple of years ago, a bolt from the blue.

I was surprised by how familiar his voice was.

He still said the same catch phrases he said when we were kids, phrases that I had long forgotten, that I could not have recalled if asked, that I cannot recall now either.

As a child, I laughed at his catch phrases. 

As an adult, I did not know what to make of them. 

I texted him again a year ago. 

I sent him a picture of a book titled God is Dead, He Will Stay Dead, and We Have Killed Him.

It’s a collection of excerpts from Friedrich Nietzsche’s many essays and works.

I had taken the book with me to a Green Day concert. 

The Smashing Pumpkins opened for Green Day. 

An aging Billy Corgan sang his now cliché line, God is empty just like me.

That gave me the idea to take the picture and send it to him.

Because he loved The Smashing Pumpkins when we were teenagers.

I improvise on the drums with single strokes, double strokes, flams, hertas, paradiddles, para-paradiddles, and paradiddle-diddles.

I also improvise with flam-flams, or repeated, alternating flams. 

Some drummers don’t think repeated, alternating flams are a separate rudiment. 

That’s because those drummers can’t actually play repeated, alternating flams, at any significant speed. 

If they could, they would know that playing repeated, alternating flams at any significant speed turns the flam, a controlled rudiment, into a bounce rudiment. 

In other words, I use one technique for flams, and a completely different technique for flam-flams. 

If you master one, you still have to master the other.

You have to master them both, on their own merits. 

Very few drummers have mastered the flam-flam rudiment. 

Fewer still have made it something musical. 

I count myself among the few.

To play a flam, you play one stick high, the other stick low.

The low is soft relative to the high.

The low lands just before the high. 

Drummers debate how long the low should land before the high.

It’s a matter of opinion.

And taste.

I prefer wide flams. 

Others prefer tight flams. 

To each their own.

When you play a flam, you enlarge, or lengthen, the main note.

Sometimes I play a malf, instead of a flam.

Malf is flam spelled backwards.

Because a malf is a backwards flam. 

Where the low lands after the high.

I like that sound.

Sometimes I play a double stop, instead of a flam, or a malf.

In a double stop, both sticks land at the same time, with the same force.

When you play a double stop, you choke, or stop, the sound.

Some drummers consider it a musical faux pas.

I think they’re wrong.

Because I don’t think sounds are right or wrong.

Sounds are just sounds.

And all sound is meaningless.

It’s hard to write a good short sentence.

A perfect short sentence does not exist.

I hope.

A bird just flew by my window.

I think it was a Carolina wren. 

They are small, brown, cute, and fat, but their beaks are long and sharp, almost menacing.

They nest every year in the tops of our propane tanks.

I should ignore my children more often. 

I should make them play with each other, or alone, more often.

Instead of relying on me to entertain them.

Wife ignores them with benevolence.

I envy Wife her parenting skills.

Author has typed all of this into a virtual teletype terminal. 

Author doubts Reader knows what a virtual teletype terminal is.

Author barely even knows what a virtual teletype terminal is, despite using one every day.

I still haven’t finished my tea, it’s even more lukewarm now than before.

I need to take a drink.

I think about jumping, for example.

I think it’s hard to become a person.

We develop egos somewhere between the ages of five and eight.

When we develop an ego, we develop a self image.

We also develop the need to defend that self image.

To defend it, we develop a new psychological repertoire. 

We learn how to be mean to others, spiteful to others, contemptuous of others, envious of others.

We learn how to be selfish.

We learn how to be cruel. 

We develop the capacity for shame and guilt.

When we become a person, we lose our innocence.

I think the story of the Fall is an allegory for the process of becoming a person.

Ashes, ashes, we all fall down.

I prefer cloudy weather to sunny weather, foggy weather to clear weather, winter to summer, autumn to spring, snow to rain, day to night, morning to midday, evening to midday, morning to evening.

I need to make the children dinner at some point within the next two hours.

I do not know what I will make.

I keep my best books here in the tower, in my bedroom. 

We live in a 19th century Queen Anne Victorian.

It is a beautiful house but there are bugs in the walls.

I have installed bookshelves under each window in the tower. 

I placed Henry Miller and Jean Genet on the first shelf. 

I love their prose. 

They also write a lot about sex. 

Gay sex, in the case of Genet, straight sex in the case of Miller. 

I hope my children do not open those books.

I also placed Beckett, Woolf, Lispector, Gaddis, and Gass on the first shelf. 

I love their prose too. 

On the next shelf I placed every translated work of Louis-Ferdinand Céline, all of which I’ve read, every translated work of Thomas Bernhard, all of which I’ve read, four translated works of Pär Lagerkvist, all of which I’ve read, every translated work of Osamu Dazai, all of which I’ve read, and every translated work of Laszlo Krasznahorkai, all of which I’ve read, except for Herscht 07769, which I started to read but put down, since I did not think it was up to his usual standards.

I love Céline for his vitriol.

I love Bernhard for his obsessiveness. 

I love Dazai for his laziness.

I love Krasznahorkai for his run-ons.

Author has written all of this in a single day.

Author doubts the quality of what he has written.

Author finds it easy to write but hard to rewrite.

On the next shelf, I have placed over twenty NYRB classics.

I like the two-tone spines. 

I like the way the colors coordinate.

I acquired most of my NYRB volumes second hand. 

Despite being used, most were unread.

Most still are.

I placed Proust on the same shelf. 

Since Proust only published one novel during his lifetime, I don’t need to name it. 

It’s a big novel. 

My edition has six volumes.

I have never read it. 

I may never read it. 

I genuinely fear that reading it would be time lost.

Time that I could never regain.

That’s irony, for those in the know.

Next to Proust I placed two works by Gerald Murnane. 

I have never read Gerald Murnane. 

Next to Murnane I placed five works by Bohumil Hrabal.

I have read Bohumil Hrabal.

Next to Hrabal I placed six works by Javier Marias. 

I have read Javier Marias.

Next to Marias I placed a work by Mauro Javier Cardenas.

I have read Mauro Javier Cardenas.

Next to Cardenas I placed two works by Andre Gide. 

I have read Gide.

I love The Immoralist by Gide, American Abductions by Cardenas, A Heart So White by Marias, Too Loud a Solitude by Hrabal.

I love other works by these authors, but I love these works the most.

I think about getting hit by a train, for example.

I placed a digital picture frame on top of the next book shelf, next to Hey-Hey.

Wife gave me the frame.

She also gave me the contents of the frame.

She uploaded a set of digital pictures to it, which rotate automatically.

Every thirty seconds I see a different child.

Sometimes I also see Wife. 

Sometimes I also see me.

Sometimes I cry.

Aunt has sent me several texts about Grandmother over the past two weeks.

Aunt is histrionic. 

She lies and exaggerates, she has all her life, I never know what to believe.

Someone hurt her a long time ago.

She was just a kid.

I think traumatized children survive, but I don’t think they recover.

Grandmother continued to drive for several years after her Alzheimer’s diagnosis. 

She terrorized her town.

It’s a miracle that she’s alive, that she never crashed.

She liked to drive down the center of the road, straddling the yellow line.

She liked to park in the middle of the road, exit the vehicle, and wander around the street.

In her nightgown. 

In the middle of the day.

We do not know what she was looking for.

Child Five has asked me to make dinner.

I declined, it’s too early.

I gave him permission to eat a cheese square.

He left, satisfied with this compromise.

The state of Connecticut is a forest.

The trees of the forest are, however, young.

Farmers razed the entire state one hundred and fifty years ago. 

They turned Connecticut into New York’s breadbasket.

When they plowed the fields, they turned up stones. 

Hundreds of thousands of stones, perhaps millions of stones.

Because you can’t dig a hole in Connecticut without turning up large stones.

The glacier that covered all of Connecticut during the last ice age left the stones behind when it melted and receded.

The farmers used the stones to mark the boundaries of their fields. 

They made tens of thousands of stone walls. 

The walls are still there.

Walk anywhere in Connecticut, you will come to a stone wall.

The windows of the tower look out on forest trees that ring the edge of our property. 

Sun slides through the leaves and dapples the grass. 

It’s beautiful, like a dream.

But all the same, I’d rather it be winter.

I love our house.

I love it most when it’s clean and when the surfaces are clear and empty.

I love the silence of the early morning, when everyone, even the animals, are asleep, and only I am awake.

I love to break that silence when I sip my coffee, or turn a page in my book, or type on my keyboard.

I can see out over the backyard from my writing desk in the tower.

I can see Child Five in the backyard.

He’s alone, swinging on the tree swing.

I spent hours trying to loop the rope for that swing over the tree branch.

I do not like that memory.

I can see poison ivy growing up the tree next to the tree swing.

I noticed it when I last tended the yard, I meant to pull it, I forgot.

Child Five stopped swinging, he’s now pushing the empty swing, his feet bare and close to the ivy.

I watch him, I watch his feet.

He has run off, I can no longer see him.

The backyard now still and empty.

I think about getting hit by a car, for example.

I have an obsessive-compulsive disorder.

When we lived in New York, after the birth of Child Three, I became obsessed with the thought of a home invasion. 

To deal with the obsession, I compulsively checked the locks in our apartment.

I would leave for work early every morning, while Wife and children slept.

Halfway to work, the thought of the home invasion would appear, along with the fear that I did not lock the doors. 

I would turn around and go home and check the locks.

Sometimes this process would repeat itself, sometimes I would leave and return and leave again and return again.

And again.

Because something in my mind would swallow my memory of locking the doors. 

I began to arrive at work later and later.

One day I did not arrive.

I could not trust my mind.

I still cannot trust my mind.

I attribute the quote Where Id is, Ego shall be to Sigmund Freud. 

But I don’t where he wrote it, or where I read it.

Perhaps I heard it.

Freud used Es, Ich, and Über-Ich, meaning it, I, and over-I.

He never used the terms id, ego, and super-ego.

James Strachey, Freud’s first English language translator, chose those terms.

He thought they would make Freud sound less philosophical and more scientific.

Freud approved.

Id means that in Latin. 

Ego means I.

When I write, I enter a flow state.

When I improvise, I enter a flow state.

Both distract me from anxiety, dread, and despair.

In flow, I have no room for those emotions.

In flow, I cannot think, I cannot feel, I can only do.

When I practice, however, I enter a state of frustration, where the challenge exceeds my skill.

The same happens when I rewrite.

Flow creates, but it does not improve.

I like the result of improvement, I dislike the experience of improvement.

My favorite drumsticks are painted white but the paint has rubbed off at the fulcrum where I hold them.

I do not know what book I will read next.

I find it hard to choose a book. 

I own many books, most of which I have never read. 

I suffer from a sort of choice paralysis at times. 

I have an embarrassment of unread riches.

I realize that I am privileged.

I need to go make dinner. 

I went downstairs but I did not make dinner, it was too early. 

Instead I chose what to make, Ramen.

When I came back to my tower, I also chose what to read next.

Seymour, an Introduction, by J.D. Salinger.

Last month I read Salinger’s Catcher in the Rye for the second time in my life.

I read it for the first time in high school. 

Four decades ago.

I decided to reread it a month ago, because I knew that I enjoyed it, but I could not remember why.

Now I know why.

Catcher in the Rye is transgressive. 

It violates cultural, moral, and literary norms. 

I want to read Seymour, an Introduction, because it’s short, a little over one hundred pages, a novella, more or less. 

I like short works. 

I think a short work is less likely to interfere with this manic writing episode.

Author needs to save this work.

Author does not know what to call this work. 

Author chooses to call it My Spent Light.

Author feels that it is wrong to name it after Lara Pawson’s memoir. 

Yet no other name comes to Author’s mind.

I do not know what this book is.

Contraction, no.

I will read Seymour while waiting for the water to boil.

Author knows that word counts don’t matter, that word counts don’t guarantee anything, that works large and small get published, based not on their word count, but on their strength, or their perceived strength, meaning commercial strength, literary strength doesn’t matter, no one reads literature any more.

My words have no worth.

My thoughts don’t matter.

My therapist never said my thoughts don’t matter.

I catastrophize what people say to me, or about me.

I do not know why, I may never know why.

I attribute the phrase There’s no accounting for taste to Woody Allen. 

His character says it in Crimes and Misdemeanors, to explain the fact that there is no way to understand the scatalogical perversions of another character.

I do not know why this line struck me so. 

I think about this line whenever someone likes something that I dislike. 

For example, when a friend of our family, or a member of our extended family, brings a movie over to watch with us, and when I see them smile at the film, laugh at the film, when I see them follow the story line, compelled by it, absorbed by it.

While I neither smile nor laugh, finding the style without merit, the acting without merit, the plot without merit.

Sometimes I tell Child Three There’s no accounting for taste, in order to console her.

She feels down about the fact that the rest of the family either dislikes her music or at best tolerates it.

I have not seen Crimes and Misdemeanors in over twenty years.

Perhaps I’m wrong, perhaps Woody Allen says no such line.

My memory makes mistakes.

There’s no accounting for memory.

The children had ambivalent feelings about the Ramen.

I had ambivalent feelings about the book.

I am not sure whether the source of said ambivalence lies in the book itself. 

The prose in Seymour is virtuosic.

Perhaps I am conflicted. 

I want to read, but I want to write, more than I want to read. 

Seymour consists of the prolix stream-of-consciousness of a possibly manic, possibly crazed narrator, as he describes his brother, Seymour, who he idolized, and who has recently killed himself.

I see nothing not to like.

Sometimes I think about the everyman’s desire to ruin films for others.

By cutting films in to clips, by reducing them to sound bites and images and memes, by sharing these reductions ad inifinitum, with people who have never seen the film, until people lose all interest in the film itself, until no one watches the film any more, until the film itself fades and disappears, until only the reductions remain.

I sometimes wonder how many films has the world already ruined for my children.

Whenever someone ruins a film for my children, I feel a sense of despair. 

I do not know why.

I realize that this feeling is incommensurate with the reality of the situation.

I wonder if I could survive the return of the repressed.

I think about jumping out of a train, for example.

At the age of twelve, I loved John Coltrane, but I hated Pharoah Sanders.

Now, at the age of fifty one, I love both. 

I feel Coltrane’s solos.

He appeals to the pathos.

I contemplate Pharoah’s solos.

He appeals to the logos.

I remember the first time I listened to Meditations, the first recording Coltrane released with Pharoah Sanders added to the lineup.

I hated it. 

I felt betrayed as a listener.

I thought Pharoah ruined Coltrane.

Now I love it, and I have listened to the album countless times.

I do not think I will ever get to the bottom of Meditations.

I played sports as a kid, I played sports as an adult, I no longer play any sports. 

I played baseball as a kid, I played well, I hated it, I quit.

I played ping-pong as an adult, I played poorly, I loved it, I quit.

Last week, I played ping-pong with Child Four. 

It was the first time I had played in over a decade. 

I still loved it, I was still terrible at it. 

Sometimes I wonder about the experience of suicide by gunshot to the head.

I wonder if you feel anything at all.

I wonder if the challenge of this method is in the anticipation of its execution, not in the execution itself.

My wonder is idle.

My therapist refers to it as a morbid fixation.

Film and television exaggerate the effects of ether.

Ether can take up to 15 or 20 minutes of continuous exposure to render someone insensate.

Ether irritates the respiratory tract.

Ether leads to nausea and vomiting upon a return to consciousness.

Ether is highly flammable.

Ether was commonly used for surgeries, from the mid 1800s, up until the 1960s.

Ether has been abandoned as a form of anesthesia more or less everywhere, including the third world.

The slow induction, the post-operative effects, the respiratory irritation, and the flammability, have all contributed to ether’s obsolescence.

Sometimes when I look at myself in the mirror I see a skeleton wearing a sombrero.

I realized in therapy that my vision may have something to do with a film my children love.

The film stars a sombrero-wearing skeleton, who lives in the land of the dead.

His last living relative is on the verge of forgetting him. 

Once forgotten by the living, he will disappear from all existence, even his ghostly one.

I cry whenever my children watch this film, I don’t know why.

In the last seven days I’ve read This is the Place to Be, Lara Pawson, Autoportrait, Édouard Levé, Dark Spring, Unica Zürn, Midnight is not in Everyone’s Reach, António Lobo Antunes.

The first three works are short, under 200 pages.

The last work is long, almost 600 pages.

I read the first three works in a day, each.

I read the last work in four days.

Autoportrait changed my understanding of literature.

Each sentence is a random fact about the author.

I felt dizzy while reading it, I felt haunted after finishing it.

Author wants to board up all of the windows and all of the doors, in order to blot out all light and all sounds.

Author does not know why.

I remember a French film.

A family lived in a house in the country.

They had no neighbors.

An unfinished, empty, closed freeway stood three feet from the family’s front door. 

One day the freeway opens.

Cars fly by at all hours of the day and night.

At the end of the film, the father of the family boards up all the windows and all the doors.

I remember a Hungarian film.

A doctor sits at home, staring out the window all day, and all night, watching the neighbors, writing down their every movement, discovering their secrets, their vices, their conspiracies.

One day the sound of a church bell drives him mad.

At the end of the film, he boards up the windows and doors of his house, and begins to write, in the dark, the words that the narrator spoke at the beginning of the film.

My sciatic nerve hurts. 

Sometimes I have to take pain pills for it. 

I think I’ll take pills for it tonight, otherwise the pain will keep me awake.

I don’t care if people enjoy mindless entertainment.

Like what you like.

To each, their own.

There’s no accounting for taste.

I took two pain pills. 

The pills look like horse pills.

I am not surprised children One, Two, and Three have struggled to transition from children’s chewables to adult pills.

I am surprised Child Four has had no problem with the transition.

I wonder how Child Five will handle the transition, when the time comes.

Author dreams he disappears from the civilized world. 

He walks out into the desert. 

He watches the sun rise and the sun set and the sun rise again. 

He watches the heat waves bounce off the rocks during the day. 

He grows parched and dehydrated. 

He starves. 

He does not know how to survive in the desert.

He dies.

I am too sleepy to write anymore.