Author: Peter Freilinger

Back when I was in seventh grade, we had to do “science projects”. I put the term in quotes because frankly, they were barely science at all, but they were assigned as part of Science class and the projects purported to engage us in the scientific method. I’ve come to realize that the scientific method is actually kind of a facade, a way of using some vaguely Baconian concepts to justify funding from the people who approve grants at universities, foundations, pharmaceutical companies, and governments, but in 1987 in Cape Elizabeth, Maine, the idea that we’d propose a hypothesis and then test it seemed like a good way to consume a few weeks of time and maybe engage the twenty odd kids in the class to do something other than pretend they’d read about meiosis or the carbon cycle.

My topic was “is it possible for an average American to build a workable fission device”. My hypothesis – this was a science project, ostensibly – was “yes”. My rigorous testing demonstrated that, at least in 1987, it was feasible to build a Little Boy-style U-235 gun mechanism fission device, but probably not feasible to build a Fat Man-style Pu-239 implosion device, owing not so much to the construction of the implosion shell but due to the difficulties of legally obtaining enough shaped explosives to successfully build the staging device. I then showed what I believed the likely maximum theoretical yield to be of said Average American atomic weapon, and its damage zones as superimposed on two maps, one a tourist map of Manhattan, and the other a nautical chart of Casco Bay.

I got an A-minus, which is the ideal grade in any class: the headline demonstrates you’re smart, and the by-line indicates the wisdom which made sure you only put in the bare effort to achieve the lower tier of the headline grade. Also, I think I got extra points for my presentation: seventh graders in Reagan’s America, oddly, liked thinking about nuclear war, because we had to think about it a lot for civil defense drills, and actually having some applied knowledge as to why we’d need to duck and cover when a 150 kiloton Soviet MIRV warhead hit the naval station in Brunswick helped put things in perspective.

Before you critique the project on procedural grounds, let me do the work for you. No, I never defined what an “average American” was. And I also didn’t explore at all the fact that my question wasn’t scientific at all: it was an exploration of culture and economics, with just a bare reporting of the best modelled understanding of the explosive, radioactivity, and fallout impacts of weapons as applied to US urban and (in the case of Maine) barely semi-urban centres. But I put together four really good looking large posterboard displays, ordered a small quantity of U-238 from a scientific supply catalog and displayed it with a small working model of a gun-design device, and my teacher, Mr. Plummer, thought it all well done enough. I didn’t tell my parents about it as I thought they might view my fascination with nuclear weapons to be, well, morbid. It wasn’t; I was really just fascinated with the Bohrian model of the atom and how it implied a force model I couldn’t really comprehend yet – but also I was a child of the Reagan era so yeah, I thought a lot about nuclear weapons

We were – excuse the pun – bombarded with nuclear weapons knowledge when I was a child in the 80s. This was the era of intense arms reductions talks – SALT, START, START II – and of course the steady drumbeat of missile technologies: Pershing, Pershing II, Minuteman, MX; SS-18, SS-20. Maine has always been a shipbuilding centre so of course we learned about the ships and submarines, and because I was always a bit precocious, I learned about the Deltas and Typhoons and Ohios, the submarines that made up the “third leg” of the nuclear deterrant triad. We had B-52s stationed out of northern Maine, out of Loring Air Force Base, famous for its three mile long runway that was constructed of a solid slab of concrete fifteen feet deep to be able to withstand both Maine winter potholing and Soviet ground burst attacks, so we were deeply familiar with the first leg of the triad just by going to sports and speech meets up to Aroostock county every winter. And my uncle had served in the second leg of the triad as a missile launch control officer in North Dakota, service which would eventually sterilise him and give him cancer from sitting next to poorly shielded 1.5 megaton plutonium core weapons for ten years. The Cold War ran deep and pure in my viens, and it wasn’t anything to be particularly unhappy or shameful about – indeed, it was kind of cool, hence my selection of a seventh grade science project.

This isn’t to say it wasn’t occasionally scary. I watched enough avant garde movies and television to be aware of the fact that nuclear war was both (a) unfortunately quite likely to occur in my lifetime and (b) very, very, very bad. There used to be bad gallows humour jokes about how bad it would be, and then for good measure, you’d be shown an aftermath of Hiroshima filmstrip in social studies class, or unexpectedly there would be a bad miniseries like “The Day After” when you were really just hoping to watch “Dallas” and see if JR was dead yet, and despite you being 11 or 12 years old, you’d have the full force of just how dramatically bad CBS could demonstrate nuclear war could be would be in your face. You wouldn’t sleep for a few days, but then eventually you’d recover, and go back to reassuring yourself that the combination of advanced early warning detection arrays in northern Canada and failsafe point circling B-52s would make sure that the Soviets would never hit the button first.

And you were reasonably sure that even if Ron did think that launching a first strike was the thing to do tonight, either Nancy would give him some warm milk and put him to bed early, or else George Bush (the older one) was smart enough to hide the football.

All of this came back to me the other night when, thinking a bit nervously, I checked the current deployment status of the Russian nuclear forces. I used to know it cold – I could tell you just how many of their (at the time) roughly 12,000 warheads were on active deployment and on which leg of the triad they were placed. They got down to about 5,000 warheads at some point but since the early 2000s and since Putin came into power for the second time, it’s been creeping up, back to about 9,000 at best estimates today, although that’s the best estimates of available cores, not deployed and active weapons.

The Russian nuclear triad, as the Soviet triad before, always relied slightly more on a smaller but potent first strike capability focused on both mobile and fixed ICBMs scattered through Eurasia; they never had the scale of the US for submarine based deterrant forces, and most of their subs also required coming to the surface to launch weapons, which they still do, making them more suited to second strike weapons or even third or reserve forces. Their main second strike weapons are their large, heavy, slow bomber forces, dispersed again throughout Russia but like the US B-52 forces, at least a quarter of them are designed to be airborne and circling at failsafe points when strategic threats reach a certain level. Being airborne, they would survive the first and response strikes from missile forces, and would then rumble over the pole and bomb cities and targets from above given the likely destruction of ground-based air defences.

Isn’t this fun? There’s a great book, On Thermonuclear War, by Herman Kahn – he’s the model for Dr. Strangelove in Kubrick’s masterpiece – that I bought from a used bookstore in Cambridge, Massachusetts, in high school, and I still have the copy. Nuclear warfare strategy is fascinating as long as you don’t think about it.

Anyhoo, the Russians would be assumed to launch ground-based rocket forces first, and would then be assumed to have their bomber forces launch the second wave, roughly two to four hours after the first wave. The first wave, mind you, would be expected to destroy most of Western civilisation, but not all of it, and since the West would have destroyed most of Soviet – er, sorry, Russian, and probably Chinese – civilisation, the mop-up second wave would be vital for determining who would win the post-apocalyptic peace. But since that wouldn’t be enough either, the Russians would keep their third leg of the triad in reserve, to eliminate any last traces of humanity outside of the Eurasian steppes; the West, meanwhile, would still likely have its submarines as well, to exchange one final volley with the hated but, at that point, largely cellular enemy.

Ah, those old memories. I’d wait every month for the new issue of The Journal of Atomic Scientists, with their ticking clock getting ever closer to an armageddon midnight, and their accurate reporting on updates to warhead designs in both blocs. That was high school; things were already getting weird, with Gorbachev and Reagan agreeing to eliminate intermediate range weapons, with the clock ticking backward, with “Amerika” on ABC seeming trite and silly immediately upon release. By the time I graduated from high school, the Czechs had revolted, and the Wall was down, and Trabants could be had for a song.

Ah, those were the days.

But as I mentioned, the other night, I looked up the current Russian nuclear force deployment status, flexing memories and tactical knowledge that had lain dormant for three decades in my mind. I quickly tallied their submarine forces – 2400 active warheads at the upper range, or about 360 megatons assuming the typical warhead in a MIRV with 150 kiloton yield, enough to hit every military, command and control, and significant civilian target in the West on a first strike. Let’s assume they still bulk up their force, though, in first strike ground launched ICBMs, which would tend towards higher yields – say 400 kilotons on average, arrayed between higher yield air burst warheads for civilian and industrial targets and slightly lower yield but dirtier weapons to attack embedded military and command targets – say probably 3600 warheads, maybe 1500 megatons. And then whatever’s left in the bombers, higher yield simple gravity and medium range air-to-surface cruise missiles, maybe 1500 weapons, probably higher blockbuster yields for shock-and-terror effects, maybe 750 to 1000 megatons.

And then there’s the US and allied forces – the UK Trident deterrent force, the French weapons – and whatever the Israelis and the Chinese and the rest have. The West has fewer weapons but more of them are likely working; their yield is more targeted and has fewer targets. Let’s assume if the Russians have around 2500 to 3000 megatons of deployment capability, the West has around 2000 megatons, maybe a bit more. Enough.

Trolling the internet was a lot more efficient than what I did as an 11 year old; back then, I spent hours and hours in the government document repository in Portland, poring through declassified records, reading research books from the RAND Corporation and from university presses, months of effort obsessing over the likelihood of vaporisation given my home in southern Maine. On Monday night, it took me a few hours – I’ve learned Boolean search optimisation long ago; finding the source materials on Google and DuckDuckGo took very little time – and since I’d learned the strategy and tactics in my formational years, I really only needed to update data, not learn anything fundamentally new.

Except: I reminded myself that the Soviet Union is gone, replaced by a one-man dictatorship. Except to remind myself that the Cold War strategic consensus has vanished, replaced by bitter civil discord about whether it even makes sense to view authoritarians as enemies. That does change the calculus, doesn’t it.

New data, new frameworks, same old weapons of mass destruction.

I miss the first time around, when I was eleven, and when my confidence that I’d live to middle age was more or less unchallenged. Was this what my parents felt like, looking at their eleven year old son, and watching the nightly news, and wondering?

It’s bad déja vu in any event. Good night, and good luck.

The passports have gone missing; in fact they’ve been gone long enough that I filled out the “permanent loss” form with the State Department. Not that it much matters just yet: flying internationally remains a bureaucratic nightmare constrained in particular by the lack of PCR tests available. So for winter break, the boy and I are doing yet another of our cross-country rail trips. We left Saturday early morning, with a car service to Boston South Station, then boarded Amtrak and headed towards New Orleans.

Quite a few readers of this blog probably will not have gone through the US in this way – a mixture of slow and fast, caught behind Norfolk Southern freight trains and then shooting along at 110 mph and then waiting for no reason for an hour at a station. But I must tempt you with the idea, especially if you can get off and explore every now and again. With that in mind, I thought I’d mention some of the hotspots.

Boston

Boston is popular with international tourists, because it feels vaguely like a midsized European provincial capital – Lyon, say, or maybe Antwerp. It has good museums and a lot of college students from around the world, giving it a cosmopolitan flair. The food is barely edible and you should pack sandwiches – in fact, stock up at Pret in Heathrow for the first few days, until you can get the concierge at your hotel to get you an actual good restaurant. People will tell you there are good burgers in Cambridge; they are lying. And the people who recommend pizza in Boston are about as trustworthy as futon salesmen. Move on.

Providence, Rhode Island

Providence’s downtown is a bleak wasteland of late 80s corporate architecture, intermixed with some 1920s art deco that no one really bothers to maintain. The presence of Brown University and the Rhode Island School of Design make for a good couple of days of art, and surprisingly after visiting Boston, the seafood is edible. The train station is grim at all times of the year – they seem to have designed it to either be a sauna in the summer, or a wind tunnel in all other parts of the year. Get out quickly.

New Haven, Connecticut

I sincerely hope you didn’t eat in Boston, because New Haven has the best pizza in North America. It’s worth starving yourself for a couple days, spending a night, and ordering three or four pies and a couple bottles of red. Thin crust, coal fired ovens – delish. Check out Google and most of the places within a half dozen blocks of the Amtrak station are phenomenal. Avoid Friday and Saturday nights as Yale people will be there and they are best avoided, and weekdays between 5:45pm and 7:00pm because commuters from Manhattan – even in these endemic viral days – are on their way home and they loaded up on booze at Penn Station and may be gropey.

New York City

It’s still New York. God I miss going there regularly, and I can’t wait until the boy is old enough to go to museums and, maybe, the opera or a show. For now, though, even he likes the sushi and the pizza (not New Haven, but it’s a different theory, so what can you do) and the steakhouses and the hotels with room service. Pro tip: lots of hotels haven’t returned to room service yet. You can’t stay in New York and not do room service – unless you’re trying to capture some H.T. Hsiang starving communist author vibe, and I’m pretty sure he’d have done room service too, he just would have skipped on the tab in the morning out the service entrance. So make sure your hotel does room service, get the eggs benedict and bottle of champagne, and possibly a half of grapefruit.

Newark, New Jersey

For years, Newark smelled like vomit and coal smoke, but riding the train through this weekend, it now smells like cupcakes, I shit you not. Other people on the train, including the sleeping car attendant, were sort of marvelling at it as well. I’m going to assume it’s a trap laid by either the North Jersey Italian mob or the Jamaicans: just keep going.

Trenton, New Jersey

Trenton still smells like vomit and coal smoke.

Philadelphia

Philly deserves a good couple of days – there’s the Philadelphia Institute of Art, where yes, Rocky climbed the stairs and did that arms raised “top of the world” thing but their art collection is also top-notch, and if you like history, take a gander at where the Declaration of Independence and the US Constitution were hacked together and signed twelve or so years apart. I’ve not yet had a decent hotel stay here, and actually had my worst and most bizarre AirBnB stay ever in Philly. But the food is worth it – some of the best Italian food, both Italian Italian and Italian “red sauce” American you’ll ever eat; the sandwiches, not just the Philly Cheesesteaks but also the Italian pork; shockingly good vegan places – and since most places are BYOB, you save 50-100% on the wine markup you’d otherwise pay, which if you bring a few friends will pay for your shitty hotel room. It’s one of the least pleasant cities to walk around in anywhere (except Trenton, see above), so do yourself a favor and do Uber or Lyft. Also the subway system smells like vomit and ozone, so don’t use that.

Wilimington, Delaware

I’ve written at length in this space about the nature of human existence, and how most of it is now derived in a pure self-referential space. That is to say, the vast majority of us do not experience the world of physical, lived reality except as entirely intermediated by human constructions. And then there are the parts of that human intermediation which are themselves wholly self-referential: the law (laws exist only for human beings; they have literally no meaning whatsoever to anything other than us); money (it’s our exchange of value, and that value is completely foreign to every other species, geological feature, organic molecule, and quantum instance that we can ascertain); and culture and media.

I don’t know of any place that exists solely on that triuumvirate; almost every place that comes close then screws things up and actually does stuff with stuff, like manufactures stuff or ships it or wholesales it. But Wilmington exists solely for one reason: a very flexible set of business and finance laws, and the convenient location of the most active bankruptcy court in the world. No culture, mind you – I dare anyone to provide an example – but the movement of goods and services in the city exists solely to support the lawyers, bankers, and operations and administrative staff who operate that purely intangible, purely humanistic space.

I almost wish they ran a daily tour, where you could watch an hour or two of a Chapter 11 proceeding, then go to a law firm and, behind a one-way mirror and after signing a bunch of NDAs, watch a business arbitration hearing, then see the after-lunch sitting of the Chancery Court, and then sit in on one of the 75,000 or so consumer finance workers as they try to collect from a delinquent credit card borrower. It would be the purest expression of the modern world imaginable, all within an eight block walk of the train station.

The food isn’t remarkable in Wilmington, but my son tells me he saw an episode of “Diners, Drive-Ins, and Dives” where Guy Fieri went to a pretty good looking sandwich joint, so maybe there’s something.

Baltimore

I have a soft spot in my heart for Baltimore. When I was an undergrad at Georgetown, I had an internship on Capitol Hill, and my degenerate undergraduate internship friends and I would take the train to Baltimore to watch baseball and buy really bad weed. The city produced H.L. Mencken, along with Ambrose Bierce and Mark Twain the inventor of American cynical gonzo satire. It brought us “The Wire” and thus apprenticed all of us in the art of removing copper piping from derelict housing while smacked out on black tar. If you can avoid getting mugged or shot, there are great crab places and one of the best aquariums on earth, if you like looking at seafood in addition to eating it. The traffic is awful in a way that only burned out white-flight American cities can pull off, with urban renewal clear-out expressways ending suddenly (due to funding being cutoff when Ford tried to “whip inflation now”) and forcing you to meander through bad neighborhoods before crossing an imaginary line and finding yourself in an upscale college area. Incidentally, this is also part of the charm in New Haven and Bridgeport, Connecticut; Newark and Trenton; and Wilmington – apologies for not mentioning it earlier.

I used to mark my progress on the Acela along the east coast as I left Baltimore station; on the left, there was about a quarter mile square area that was slowly being shot into Beirut status, and passing it to the south meant you had successfully finished travelling through the North East Corridor’s no-man’s land: a stretch from Bridgeport, Connecticut to the Baltimore slum which was an almost unbroken three and a half hour stretch of burned out and abandoned factories, industrial waste and litter, mixed with stretches of row houses that would have made Dickens weep. But this time, probably six years since I’d last taken the train by here and noticed – a lot of those houses and factories had been torn down; the ones that hadn’t were being renovated and had organic neighborhood farms plots in the back; and luxury condos, complete with a Five Guys and sushi and pet grooming at the retail level, were popping up.

Throw some money Baltimore’s way. Keep the car doors locked. Oh, and the train station is a shithole.

Washington DC

Even if you’ve never been here, you have an opinion. I went to school here for two years, and I’ve flown in and out a few dozen times over the intervening 30 years. It’s still a transient town; the ones who stick around are dodgy for a whole host of reasons, but the hardcore criminals seem to have migrated to Trenton. The Metro runs irregularly at best since Covid shut down government offices. Like hegemonic capitals everywhere other than London, the main boulevards and avenues are so far wider than human scale that it feels just idiotic to walk, but if you get off those paths of arrogant giants, Washington’s layout is Southern Antebellum, like Charleston or Savannah without the ocean breezes. Avoid it in summer.

Oh, the food is ridiculously good. You can thank the largest diplomatic corps of any city on earth for that.

Charlotte, North Carolina

NASCAR! And bankers!

Move on. If your train gets stuck here, maybe have Doordash deliver barbecue (in the Carolinas its pork and the sauce is vinegar based) to the station. But seriously, get out.

Greenville, South Carolina

Why this eclectic mix? Because we’ve been tracing the Cresent, one of the oldest continuously running long distance passenger lines in the US, the crown jewel of the Southern Railroad back in the day. Greenville is a nothing town now, but it used to be a junction point, a maintenance station, and regional center for manufacturing. All of this makes for something dreary and inland south now. Take a look around and breathe it in.

Atlanta, Georgia

I know Amtrak is a 70s relic, but come on people – come on Atlanta – spruce up the goddamn train station a bit. Squeezed in a glorified culvert next to where a 14 lane freeway divides into three, with a rotting flatbed car in a siding, a concrete low-level platform, and for our train at least, a 300 yard walk to a station whose architecture seemed to copy a local Social Security registration office, it makes you wonder whether Atlanta wants a train station at all – but apparently its people do, because half the train got off and was replaced almost person for person by new passengers.

There are things I love about Atlanta – Piedmont Park is one of the finest urban park spaces in North America; the people are ridiculously friendly; it’s diverse in a way that no other “diverse” city has ever struck me. To that point: it’s not cosmopolitan. It’s just diverse. People from around the world and the US move to Atlanta – of all races, religions, nationalities – and they all end up drinking too much Coca-Cola, tailgating for one of the many annoying local college sports teams, and eventually ending up with Type 2 Diabetes. Rural Blacks from Alabama, Muslim refugees from Afghanistan and Somalia, white frat boys from Clemson and Ohio State and Stanford, beautiful women, ugly old guys, you name it – and in five to seven years, they all need to check their A1C levels twice a day.

Don’t stay long.

Addiston, Alabama

The town has been losing population since the KKK tried to burn a bus filled with civil rights activists seeking to register Black voters in 1961. To its credit, in 1963, the town was the first in Alabama in which an all-white jury convicted a white man for killing a Black man. The town is melancholy in the extreme, but as the train pulled out to the west, the next town over is called Wellborn, and seems to be prosperous and happy. And all the people in the church parking lots, and at the ballfield, and in the grocery store parking lot as the train edged through town, were white. Obviously I can’t prove, on the basis of a quick socioeconomic comparison on what is not much more than drive-by research, that this was an example of flight and abandonment of civic responsibility by white people who feel a mix of guilt at racial violence and a core love of being racist, but I can certainly suggest that it’s almost certainly the case and accept, that in the unlikely event if I’m proven wrong, some sort of an apology would be in order.

Also, Addiston is home to the world’s second largest office chair.

Birmingham, Alabama

As the boy reminds me, this is named after Birmingham, England. It’s a carbon copy of Columbus, Ohio; Lexington, Kentucky; Raleigh-Durham, North Carolina; Tulsa, Oklahoma; and a dozen other low-wage, high productivity manufacturing cities across the dustier bits of the Sunbelt. If you like Wal-Mart and very cheap poorly made cocktails, by all means, spend a few. Otherwise stay on the train.

Amtrak Crescent

Every Amtrak route is a little different, but the Crescent is capturing my heart. The guy who runs the bar car has an impenetrable Louisiana accent, but after I tipped him a few bucks every time I bought a hot dog for the boy, he brought me an extra bloody mary for free. The sleeping car attendant, Tiffany, is an absolute sweetheart, and arranged the two teddy bears and the stuffed dog on the beds in our roomette in a tasteful and thoughtful way – she even put one on my bunk. The bar car assistant is helpful, especially since he is able to translate what his boss the Cajun dude is saying. The conductor has the most perfect Southern Black voice: a deep tenor but not a baritone, and not so much a Southern accent as a lilt. Hearing him announce “Next stop is Tuscaloosa, and we do apologize for the delay” was like a cool drink on a warm day.

We’ve got a few hours left before we arrive in New Orleans – hopefully not too late, as I can tell the boy is getting tired. Not bored, mind you – he loves the train rides, the tidy quarters, the food, the train people, and the chance to have a lot more iPad game time than I’d ever allow at home. But he’s looking forward to a nice bed and a shower tonight, and actually, so am I. Especially since he’s a bit gassy from all the hot dogs.

It’s New Year’s Eve, December 31, 2021 – I never know whether that makes it New Year’s Eve 2022, it being the day before the New Year of 2022, or New Year’s Eve 2021, being the last day of 2021. In any event, New Year’s Eve has some particular meaning for me for: seven years ago I shared probably the best kiss of my life with a woman who remains a kind of paramour, even though she lives on only now in the fog of memory. But I’m still going to enjoy a bottle of Pol Roger and a large tin of good caviar, in the front room, while the boy, alas, watches “Nashville’s Big Bash: New Year’s Eve Live” on CBS. We control almost nothing on this earth, but the most painful things which elude even our influence are the musical tastes of our progeny. I will sigh, and pour myself another glass of very good French champagne.

I shared my son’s musical proclivities with the oral historian, whose daughter – much younger – has at least better taste in music than “modern country sound.” She sent me a track that her daughter likes called Wifey, by Qveen Herby (in the waning days of 2021, I don’t take any of this too seriously), which is so much better than Carrie Underwood and Jason Aldean puking melodramatic country-pop that I can’t begin to describe it. Don’t get me wrong, Wifey is pretty awful too, even worse when you think that a five year old girl in rural Maine likes it, but it’s at least got an edge. But only in the way that sophomore songs have an edge. That’s okay for five years olds, but oddly, that’s not the target market for sophomore songs.

Sophomore songs were a kind of pre-meme meme when I was an undergraduate in the early 1990s. Freshman came to school burdened with the musical tastes of their home towns – for me, that meant 70s art rock and funk; for the Jersey kids at Georgetown that meant a lot of early white boy rap and a solid dose of metal; the black kids had that great era of transition street music between early rap and the 90s explosion; hipsters had the post-REM alterno-rock golden years; and the girls had Madonna and to a lesser extent the Bangles and the like. We all came to mixed co-ed dorms, oddly constructed freshman mixers, a lot more alcohol and recreational drug access than most of us were used to, and graduate students who owned the college radio playlists.

As a result, pretty much everyone (except the hardcore Rush fans) went through a kind of transformation: our musical tastes got discombobulated. I was a non-hardcore Rush fan and suddenly I was listening to Belly and Morphine and the Breeders. My Iowa friend across the hallway was now totally into the Beastie Boys. The Iranian rich kid kept trying to get us into Euro disco trash (along with coke) but eventually buckled down and got down with Phish. The girls, though, somehow mystically got into what I could only figure out was sophomore rock. It was the soundtrack to “Friends” and “Dawson’s Creek” and “Beverly Hills 90210” – sugar candy pop that spent a lot of time talking about friendships that didn’t work out, boyfriends who weren’t that cool, unrequited love, anything but good things, but with a good solid Hollywood pop beat and white people singing everything and with a chord progression which somehow promised a future of reasonably but not perfectly happy marriage and family life.

At the same time, we all came to university – this was 1991 mind you – with a quite different attitude about philosophy. Georgetown was not an arts school: it was a Jesuit-run – and still deeply Jesuit-instilled – liberal arts college, where even the clods in the business school had a four semester requirement in theology and philosophy (although under pressure from the alumni, a sequence of remedial classes were open to those business school students who really just wanted to get their accounting degree and join PwC’s local practice in Philadelphia). Most of the kids – not me – had been to either Catholic high schools or Protestant tradition boarding schools, and they came with a philosophy ready baked. The philosophy sequence was, with rare exceptions, designed to reinforce a roughly pre-Enlightenment didactic worldview that would have gotten you thrown out of Thatcher’s Conservative Party but would have gotten you (and did, for several of my roughly co-aged Georgetown colleagues) elevated to the federal appeals or even Supreme Court by the Trump administration.

For those of us who either came from a critical thinking tradition – listen and debate and compare everything, but assume everything is wrong in its way – or from a non-tradition where no notion of intellectual truth had bubbled up through the miasma of post-boomer-age education, we were faced with a challenge, which as I look on the last couple centuries of undergraduate education is really the norm. Once you get past high school – secondary school – where you were taught mostly by rote, and you are suddenly exposed to primary texts and a modicum of questioning, you are dangerously at risk of falling in love, much as undergraduates are dangerously at risk of falling in love with one another and, much more perilously, are dangerously at risk of falling in love with Phish. You are given access to the full bore of Western and Eastern thought, and usually, are given access to it by educators who are so human that they are actually trying to do anything except help you navigate it all.

A lot of us, alas, end up as sophomores.

In music, it means we end up in 1991 with a lot of Spin Doctors CDs, and need to throw them out in a dumpster behind a Burger King in 1997. In film, it leads to a lifelong obsession with “Sex in the City” and “Seinfeld”, unspoken perhaps but more likely celebrated with others of the same persuasion with binge nights involving similarly bad wine choices as those made when you had to have the one person in the quad apartment with a decent fake ID buy a few bottles of Carlo Rossi. In literature you end up with a lot of unread James Joyce and all-too-much-read Philip Roth and Martin Amis and Susan Sontag. In art you have way too many posters of French apologist photography of the late 1940s and a similar surfeit of Klimpt prints – oh, and bad origami. It even infects our diet: we eat less fast food crap and more vegetarian crap, basically staying price-point neutral and taste-neutral as well. We replace light lager with cheap red wine or, if we’re devoted to the sophomoric pursuit of alcoholism, off-brand vodka or Jack Daniels.

In philosophy, though, it means we end up with a bad love affair with Neitzsche, or Ayn Rand, or Nikolai Krapotkin, or Chez Guevara. We end up with the people who tell us what to think, tell us what not to think, tell us what everyone before us did wrong, tell us how we are capable of being better and “they” aren’t. They aren’t totally discredited by losing a war like that idiot Hitler, who took things too far and besides wasn’t anything more than a failed-out Austrian corporal in the wrong army; they aren’t totally discredited by actually having ever assumed power like Mao, who everyone kind of admired but because his own country rejected him lost a good deal of credibility. Philosophically, sophomores gravitated to the people who never actually did anything, but did write a lot, and ideally wrote a lot during times where they weren’t popular enough to be fully rejected by critical thinkers.

It took a lot back then to be a critical thinker. The sorting mechanism that is undergraduate life was heavily biased towards the kids and their enablers who came in already fully engaged in a mainstream philosophy – whether at Georgetown it was Catholicism mixed with libertarian republicanism, or at Oxbridge it was milquetoast Marxism mixed with analytical philosopy, or on the West Coast it was libertarian anarchism, or in Canada it was multicultural communitarianism. If you entered with that – from a Jesuit high school, from Eton or Winchester or an appropriate grammar school, or from Palo Alto High, or from an Anglo Montreal prep school – you were in good shape. But if you weren’t, then you had another path that could sail you through: you either rebelled against your foundations or you gravitated independently towards the sophomore philosophers.

It struck me this weekend, watching some historical documentaries with my son, that this was really the lure of Hitler back in the late 20s with Mein Kampf, perhaps the only sophomoric piece of philosophy that can compete with Nietzsche or Ayn Rand in terms of being basically mental cotton candy – simple sugars practically designed to hit the pleasure centres of the brain. America’s great simpish popularisers – Williams Jennings Bryant, Father Coughlin, Barry Goldwater – all made the mistake of trying to appear rational and normal. Rand, Neitzsche, and Hitler all realised that the transformative impact comes from sweeping away any attempt at decency or quality – just like the sophomoric artists that pull in second year college students ignore the same in creating 25 minutes of improv rock which requires a careful balance of THC, MDMA, and Everclear to appreciate, just like Damian Hirst, in a cocaine haze, realized that the more crass and ugly he made his sculptures, up to and including their suggested retail sale price, the more it would appeal to the sophomores, maybe past college in their careers in banking or art curation but still stuck in their zones of self-terror, that zone where they don’t know what they like but are terrified to admit it.

Because that is, really, the space of the sophomores in any space. The freshman, the plebes, everyone knows they don’t know – and there’s no shame in them not knowing either. The upperclassmen, on the other hand, in theory have knowledge, but they also have to assume a position of knowledge: they’ve chosen their course of study and thus their course in life. They now have to fake it to make it, as the current phraseology describes. By the time they are allowed to graduate, they have to project some kind of confidence in their choices or else they’ll not even be allowed to become fully fledged adults.

Sophomores are the suckers. They are caught in the middle – between being allowed to be caught in the snares of youth and not being allowed to escape the tendrils of adult society – and thus they are most vulnerable. You don’t find many adults who take Krapotkin seriously, and when you do, they are laughable. You find more Ayn Rand fans – dear lord, take a look at the non-Trump Republican party – but they are laughable in their way as well, just as the Democrats who cling to their notions of Guevara or Robert Kennedy are similarly embarrassing to those of us who just want to figure out how to pass an infrastructure bill.

Sophomores do form the weird foam upon which our modern society sits. Most of us, of course, are indoctrinated early – we are “left” or “right” wing, and feel comfortable within the truths given to us long before we actually had a range of choice to challenge our notions of right and wrong. Some of us also end up in a happy zone of full choice: our parents and teachers gave us the safety and nudging and encouragement and gentle ridicule which inured us to the simplistic effects of bombast and fiery rhetoric. It may have left us in a place where we’re still – even in our late 40s- questioning what the right choice should be on centralized versus localized political structures, over coercive versus collaborative legal forms, but it’s still better than being rigid. But so many people try to stay open but are hijacked in their thinking by sugary sweet rhetoric, by false dichotomies in argument, by Mein Kampf or by qAnon or by the non-linguistic side of Chomsky or by Senator Warren from Masschusetts.

Thirty years ago, on December 31, 1991, I was a freshman. I’m still not a senior by any means. But I hope that the philosophical obstacle course I’ve run in the last three decades will set up my son to avoid the sophomore trap. He’ll probably show up as a freshman loving country music – but hopefully he’ll never think the Spin Doctors are anything other than crap. That will be a moral victory – and even better, if he thinks Ayn Rand and Nikolai Krapotkin are no better than “Little Miss Can’t Be Wrong”, he’ll also be right. Fingers crossed.

Late November in the northern temperate zone is always a crapshoot, and today, it came up craps. 2 or 3 C at best, a dark overcast, and on and off rain, showers, and clumpy snow that immediately melted on contact with one’s coat or the forest floor or the beach sands. Windy enough to make the damp cold bite, but not enough to stir the wet leaves and clean up the ground before the inevitable snow soon to come, it was a day that normally I would have said “I’m going to catch a cold” but this being 2021, I’m almost certainly not going to have enough human contact today to acquire a cold virus, this despite it being the day after Thanksgiving and thus, in theory, I should be shopping somewhere, boy in tow, to affirm my belief in American consumerism.

Instead, the boy is at home, reading a new stack of books from his mom, and the dog and I are out on a trail. She’s in her bright orange vest on this, the second to last day of hunting season, and I’m in an ill-chosen dark grey jacket, which will enable any erstwhile hunter who accidentally shotguns me in the back to say “hey, I couldn’t see him, and his movement made me think it was a deer.” I’ll deserve whatever I get as we walk through state wildlife reserve land.

I love this trail when it’s not hunting season. It winds through scrublands about a mile from the ocean, flat, sandy soils with occasional semi-permanent puddles where the drainage isn’t good. On this soil and in this town, the puddles mean the granite that lies beneath everything here gets close enough to the surface that it prevents the water from washing through the sand, and after awhile the leaves accumulate and forms rotting peaty mud, and then the puddle – which could be six inches deep, and could suck your leg down to your hip if you step in an unfortunate bit as I have done before – acquires a life of its own. In a month, once it’s below freezing for a few days in a row, despite weak sunlight, the puddles will freeze over and we’ll be able to walk across them with confidence, but for now, walking this path requires extended bushwhacking through the surrounding forest. A month ago, the dog would have just tramped through the water, but it’s cold now, and despite her fur and her desire to take the shortest path, even she is skirting into the woods.

It should be snowing today, but hey, global warming, and we’re probably two to three weeks late for our first decent snow of the season here in Scarborough. It’s been a good year for us here in town to assess what that means – global warming, I mean – and it seems to settle in on a few items beyond the obvious. “The obvious”, to be clear, is sea levels rising for us here on the coast. Normal monthly high tides now regularly put the Audobon Society marsh recreation centre, the place that rents out kayaks and canoes, under a foot to a foot and a half of water, and even a mid-lunar tide has the high tide water lapping onto the edge of its parking lot; when I was a kid thirty years ago, that only happened in the spring for the yearly neap tides, and my guess is the spring tides next year may require sandbags. The houses on the back side of Pine Point are probably five years away from the same yearly or monthly flooding; there are a couple up for sale and I’m sort of stunned they are trying to command seaside prices when they will be underwater within a decade or two.

That’s the obvious; we joke (badly) about it in the town’s Long Range Planning Committee – “you don’t buy houses on the beach these days, you rent them from the Atlantic” – but the non-obvious is the subtle changes through the year. The mosquitoes, for example, are now intolerable from mid June until roughly the first week of October. Maine is well-known for its mosquitoes, but on the coast, the foggy chill that used to be June kept them down until July 4th, traditionally, and the first decent cold nights, the ones where it wasn’t really below freezing but you’d get some white bits on the low grass in the fields which got shady earlier in the afternoon as the sun starts to get low, the first cold nights which would finally kill the larvae in the puddles in the forest, those nights would come around typically in mid September. So you’d only have July, August, and a little bit of September where being in the woods, or anywhere at all at dusk or dawn, required a hearty dose of barely-legal DDT bug repellent to be at all tolerable.

Not anymore: it’s an extra 30 days of warmth and summer and biting insects now. It’s not like Maine is suddenly Costa Rica, mind you; the high temperatures in the summer are still decidedly moderate. We just barely made it to the waterpark for five days this summer, not because we were so busy but because only on five days was it so hot that the boy and I both agreed it was necessary, we had to be submerged in a pool – which in Maine meant it was maybe 30C and a bit humid. The water at the beach was a smidge warmer than I remembered it, but still not comfortably warm. And while I’m glad to have had air conditioning – well, a heat pump that cools as well as warms – we really only needed it for a couple handful of days, and a handful of nights.

My friend Al observed that New England is one of those places that’s probably benefiting from global warming, a lot like most of Canada (with apologies to my friend in British Columbia, who in one year has both recorded Canada’s highest temperature ever and floods which temporarily made Vancouver the city an island due to flooding). The winters, usually barely survivable and always too long, are now mild enough that I don’t even need to hire a neighbor kid to shovel the driveway – even as a portly 47 year old I can do it myself. Also, winter clears up promptly in early April, which means the summers, usually all too brief, have an extra three or four weeks padding to them. Fall lasted a full 10 weeks this year, and spring’s meltwaters and mud and grime and raw early southwesterly winds came and went almost without notice before it was warm enough to start thinking about backyard campfires. All in all, things are better here in Maine, which may help explain the steady rise in home prices.

All of this expansion of Maine weather perfection will only continue – that is, if in the almost fifty years of my life, we’ve seen an extra two weeks of Maine accrue, and an extra foot or so of ocean level rise, it’s not hard to realise we’ll see more before we’re through. “Before we’re through” recognises that humanity will eventually stop burning carbon at its current delirious rate, which I’m actually confident we’ll do, not because of the strident activism of boomer and millenial environmentalists but because of basic supply-demand pressures on what’s left of the carbon in the ground and the obvious economic benefit of shifting from mined energy to energy from zero-cost sources like sunlight and running water and wind. But having been on our carbon binge for nigh on a century or two, and coming off a longer term sectoral cooling and in the midst of an inter-ice age warming trend, we’re not going to see temperatures level out any time soon.

I’m not a human climate change denialist, mind you; I know a lot of those types, alas, and they are painful to listen to, their strident ignorance usually accompanied by some sort of conspiracy theory linked to Black Lives Matter or Al Gore’s involvement in private equity or the pope being some kind of Argentinian communist plant. Humanity has done its best to screw up the climate and it has succeeded. But the environmentalists I know are similarly tiresome. Bill McKibbon is my bete noire but I suppose I’d throw Greta Thunberg in the mix as well, as they pound the table – McKibbon now for forty years, Thunberg painfully for the last five or six, since her parents allowed her to have a Twitter account – about how humanity needs to stop burning carbon, now, or else the world as we know it will end.

Such complaining bothers me at a fundamental level because, despite the fact that thinking about the environment would seem to require a deep consideration of system complexity, thinking that going “carbon neutral” now, or in a decade, or by 2050 implies that “we can do something and make a difference now.” Let’s be honest with ourselves: we can do nothing to make a difference now. The warming we’re seeing – whether in Maine, or in British Columbia, or in chronic drought fire conditions in southern Europe, or in permanent smog clouds in China, or the expansion of the sahel in Africa, or monsoon disruption in south Asia, whatever – is because of the coal and oil burned in the first half of the 20th century, because of the insane destruction of forest lands during the same period. Climate change today is because of what people did to the planet decades or a century or two ago, and whatever changes we make on the margin today will do nothing to stop the long, slow, molasses like trend that will continue the process whereby Pine Point will be underwater in thirty years even if we all permanently park our cars and turn off the carbon generation stations tomorrow and rely solely on solar-powered intraday Wi-Fi to power the global information economy.

This is the fallacy at the heart of the global environmental movement: that we as individual human beings can make a difference today. That’s not how complex systems work – that’s the lesson of the failure of Soviet communism, of the collapse of Gosplan, and indeed of the failure of the US space program and of the laughable parody of governance that was Donald Trump. We as individuals are not heroes in a complex interconnected world: our capacity for heroism has been steadily eroded not by the world getting bigger, but by the world getting more interconnected. When our environments were small and disconnected, each of us meant a lot; when our environments merged and became interconnected, each of us individually matter not much, and we have to be content to acknowledge our importance only as ripples of influence, not as direct actors or causal agents of change.

This is painful to humanity because all of our folkways rebel against the idea of the individual being meaningless. Chinese and south Asian cultures probably are best armed to remind us that as individuals we are essentially meaningless, even though our actions and our choices ripple in ways we will never understand and cannot predict, but even those cultures retain traditional stories and mythologies which hold up the individual actor as being somehow important: the peasant who rises up to become emperor; the poet who changes the language; the Buddha. In the context of the global climate system, though, we are truly irrelevant as individuals, and even as a generation, we have no real impact in changing the direction of what has already been laid down by the centuries of uncomprehending humanity that came before us. We might make a meaningful difference to the future, but just as all of the people who have created the climate of 2021 are already dead, so we none of us – including Greta, including my son – will be around to experience the “difference” we make from altering human carbon consumptions decisions in the next few decades.

Does this mean we should lay down arms and say screw it, “burn baby burn” as Sarah Palin once famously chanted to her ignorant followers in the 2008 election cycle? No, of course not. But it means that we should stop lying to children and adults about why it is that we should be enviromentally conscious. We should stop burning oil like it’s going out of style because it’s never a good thing to waste a limited resource, not because if we do so we’ll have better weather in ten years’ time. We should stop orienting ourselves towards a culture of endless consumption because it will never lead to any real psychological or moral satisfaction, either individually or in aggregate, not because it means we’ll save the planet.

Indeed, the planet isn’t depending on humanity to save itself. That, in fact, is the crowning conceit of the environmental movement: the notion that we, humanity, and in particular we humans alive today in 2021, are essential to the operation of life and sentience. We are not. Life in its diversity will continue whether we burn oil, whether we wear hairshirts and live in straw huts, whether we produce per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances in quantity or stop doing so, whether we allow the use of single-use plastic shopping bags or ban them, whether we vaccinate or not, whether we go vegan or double down on toe-to-tail carnivorism, whether we expand global air travel or ban it. Life does not require you or me as individuals – and, difficult or even unimaginable that it may seem, it doesn’t even require humanity. Life, and the beauty and tragedy that life implies, does not care.

Environmentalism depends on rejecting that basic fact – and I use the word “fact” with intention. Environmentalism is really a doubling down on the idea of human exceptionalism – it demands that humanity have a unique role in saving an environment which it has, consciously or unconsciously, started to damage and perhaps destroy. Indeed, it depends on privileging humanity’s ability to destroy “the environment” first, so as to grant humanity a privileged role in saving it. Both positions are false. We have, to be sure, impacted the environment; and our actions in the future will continue to impact it. In a very real way, our actions to date have had an outsized impact versus other, non-human directed long term trend changes; they may have even had an outsized impact versus non-human directed short term changes that we don’t have enough data to model or describe effectively. But we are not simple, linear, directing principals on a global scale; painful as it may be for our collective ego, we are one of an almost infinite series of interconnected agents acting in a system of collective complexity. None of us makes a meaningful difference, but all of us are essential for the system’s overall expression.

I do what I can at a local level to make Maine a better place. I serve on local town committees; I participate in public forums which debate things like a utility corridor to ship hydro power from Quebec south to New England, or to build rail-to-trail corridors for public recreation, or to develop public transit. I also drive a car, and have a job which flies me across the country (it used to be around the world, but Covid, blah blah, no more), and in those jobs I also try to do things which won’t reinforce dumb overconsumption but in which I also understand that my influence globally is limited. I pay attention to the news about environmental consequences and discussions in Glasgow but ultimately I’m more interested in how my town and region are making their local decisions, because after all, that’s the level at which development and building and consumption and waste disposal actually takes place, not at the level of the globe, or even of the continent-spanning country in which I live.

I know the environment will continue to develop along its trend lines over the next 100 years; I know that decisions we make today might ameliorate the trend in 100 years time, but the environment will still be warmer, the summers longer and the winters milder here in Scarborough, in 100 years time, and still again in another 100 years, than it would have been had Watt never powered up his steam engine to leverage coal production 250 years ago. The environment’s future for the next 100 years is locked in, and anything we, or our children, do, will not effect that in the least. We need to teach them that the reason we should burn less carbon and produce less toxic chemicals and do less mindless destructive stuff in general is not because we matter – not because we causally impact anything at all – but because we should just be thoughtful, considered beings in a world that is precious with or without our presence.

At one point today, there was a particularly large puddle in the woods. It’s actually a kind of waypoint on the trail – roughly 10 minutes into the walk, there’s a big puddle, clearly a granite depression, the water dark and tannic from endless leaf decomposition, you could probably profitably install a hood with a copper pipe to harvest the methane from it all. Sometime awhile back, long before the dog and I started walking the trail, some idiot trashed a couple of refrigerators in the mud, and being constructed of plastics and intelligently forged aluminum alloys, they remain intact, a more or less permanent part of the landscape. Only this year, with time to waste due to Covid no doubt, and with a longer summer making it more worth it to do so, someone ripped the doors off the fridges and installed them off to the side of the puddle, as bridges between dry bits of earth, given the dog and I a dry path around the water. I noticed on the mud-smudged surface a weird combination of shoe prints, raccoon prints, some bird claws, some dog paws, some leaves, some smudges.

More impactful than anything in Glasgow in the last month, more effective than anything passed in Washington in the last week, and probably more lasting than anything I’ll decide to do in the future, the environment – including its human participants – changed along the trail and became more sustainable, for humans, dogs, creatures of the forest, for the world, courtesy of some doors fabricated by Whirlpool somewhere in the rust belt. And the dog and I walked on, skirting the muddy bits, she chasing squirrels, me marvelling at the lost leaves and quiet rain falling at the end of yet another season, ready for winter, excited to be alive in a world that views me at once as essential and, as an individual, as irrelevant.

Happy Thanksgiving.

I’ve played golf four times in the last month, for the first time in two years, and it’s made me realise how much has changed in the last two years. My body is pathetic – doughy, out of shape, but mostly just out of sync. I can putt the ball as well as I ever could – in fact a few times I found myself wondering where that touch came from – but every swing of the club felt like a quarter second delay in mental initiative to physical execution, and it even extended to basic things like picking up the ball from the cup or putting the bag of clubs onto my shoulder. I’ve lost rhythm, and it won’t come back quickly.

It’s not like I’ve been totally sedentary for the past two years, mind you. I’ve been taking the dog for her minimum of two hours of daily walks – she has energy and she needs it and she demands the effort – and I’ve been raising the son full time, with only rare breaks, since last March, including all cooking, cleaning, commuting, teaching, encouragement, discouragement, and all the rest. That burns calories. In the meantime, I’ve also realized that not going to the office at all means I can mix a gin and tonic at 11am and no one cares; indeed, sometimes having a gin and tonic in hand for an 11am conference call is the thing that preserves my sanity. Perspective is a challenge, and having perspective in the face of a pandemic, in the face of a multiple part-time startup enterprises, often requires a gin and tonic at 11am. I am making no apologies.

Hitting the course was strange because that weird disconnect – that tenth of a second between head and shoulders, brain and wrists – meant I was losing golf balls at a majestic rate. In fact on Tuesday this week, I had to give up after six holes because I had literally ran out of golf balls, despite the late fall bare ground allowing me to find at least one ball for every two I lost. It was a new course for me but I joined for a membership for the next year – I’m going to get out and play more, and the boy is really getting into the game, and it seems like a good idea to be able to have a place where I can just trot up and play. But not if I’m going to lose a dozen balls every six holes – I need to polish things up.

In Maine, one doesn’t polish one’s game up starting in November, however.

I walked the last three holes without playing them – not having a ball is a significant impediment to playing golf – and threw my clubs in the back of my car, changed my shoes, and let my body feel itself. Nothing nasty, mind you – I just let my body talk to itself, describe its aches and annoyances and the like – and that’s where I heard it talk about the disconnect. Yes, it felt the impact of an up and down three mile walk on a chilly November morning; yes, it said “you really need to take an Advil before you play golf these days”. It also said yes, it’s now 1pm and you’ve earned the gin and tonic. But what I felt in my flesh and bones was a disconnect, a timing being off. My body as it has aged has gotten slightly slower than my mind, and my body is awfully annoyed about it.

So I got in my car and drove back to the house. The dog was in her day care so I didn’t need to pick her up, and the boy wouldn’t come home until much later in the afternoon. I grabbed some supplies for dinner and checked the mailbox; the New York Review of Books had arrived. I read the first essay, about a book written by an author whose family had a long history with the Ku Klux Klan, and fixed that gin and tonic.

And it occurred to me that I hadn’t written anything in a long time. I mean, I know I haven’t written anything for The Essence of Water in awhile – for those who follow it, you may be excused for thinking that this has become Mark Hannam’s personal essay site. Heck, Vero and Matt haven’t written anything in even longer, so that’s not a singular failing on my part. But even more than that, I haven’t written any letters in a long time. This is noteworthy because for most of my life, letters have been the way I’ve expressed myself. Letters to lovers, to friends, to coworkers, you name it – I write letters as my primary means of expression. These essays have, in a basic way, been extended letters to an audience of friends – old and new, current and long-forgotten – but also an extended letter to my son, to let him know how his father was as a human being while he was growing up. From 2017 to now – for over four years – this has been an extended letter to the universe, and yet for the past five months or so, I haven’t written back.

It’s not like the universe has stopped talking to me, or that any of you out there have stopped talking to me. I mean, some of you have – I got an entertaining email from someone asking to be dropped from the distribution list I occasionally send out to let people know of new postings, for example – and what with the pandemic and travel restrictions and the like, plenty of us have just sort of lost touch out of entropy. We may very well like to stay in touch but since the likelihood of physical contact has vanished, part of the incentive to keep the other elements of communication alive have also atrophied.

The art of speaking out, however – not speaking per se, but speaking out into the wind, into the public, regardless of whether anyone listens – is a practice, and when put aside, that practice gets stale. I can’t hit the ball straight anymore, and it feels the same way to put hands to keyboard as it does to grip the club. Typing this is easy; finding the words is a lot harder than it was a year ago, two years ago. There is a disconnect, a hesitancy in the act of bridging the thoughts in my mind to the fingers which press the keys and make the words appear on the screen.

It occurs to me as well: you have to start sometime all over again. It’s November here, and the air is crisp but also it gets damp and cold, the wind howling off the Atlantic. The house is more or less ready for winter, and it’s not the right time of year to be learning golf again. But I’m going to head out next week, on Tuesday, when the boy is in school and the dog is in day care, and I’m going to buy a dozen golf balls from the bargain bin, and I’m going to try to play again. I will be awful; with luck I will sink a few putts, or have that lovely pitch that gets within a few feet of the hole, before I drive it into the bushes on the next tee and curse and feel the disconnect in my nerves, my hips, my feet, my shoulders, my mind.

And today, I’ll hit publish, and start over again on writing. To my son: I’m sorry I forgot to write for a few months. To the rest of you: I hope you viewed the respite as a little break in a year where little breaks mattered a lot. To the ex-reader in San Antonio: screw you. It’s time to start over again.