The Rake Magazine

Category: Blog Post

  • Uncle Jumbo: The Proverbial Turd In The Punchbowl

    I had an incredible time at the ballpark tonight –and, yes, I’m in a good enough mood that I’m going to go ahead and refer to the Metrodome as a ballpark. It was a strange and amazing game, and a seriously gutty, inspired, and lucky performance by Carlos Silva. There was a point in the second or third inning where I was looking at my scorecard and going back over every batter in the Los Angeles Angels of Anaheim California Angels lineup, certain I’d gotten so caught up in the fireworks on the field that I’d somehow missed three or four runs.

    But, no, there it was: four runs.

    The next thing I knew the Twins had tied it up, then taken the lead, and, finally, coasted to the victory.

    A bunch of other thrilling stuff happened at the game tonight, which I may or may not tell you about one way or another eventually. I’m too fried right now. It was a long day, and I walked back to my car from the Dome feeling tremendous but completely drained. I was –in accordance with a lopsided agreement I’d made over a month ago– expecting my old pal Uncle Jumbo to take me off the hook tonight. He was going to handle Fridays. That was the deal.

    Instead I came home to a rambling phone message from a clearly intoxicated Jumbo. This tirade, apparently, was in lieu of a column, although early in his heavily slurred monologue I think he said something like, “Write this down. My machine is broken.” I couldn’t make it all the way through his tantrum –I absolutely wasn’t in the mood– but I can tell you that there was a long-winded diatribe about Justin Morneau.

    Justin Morneau. The guy who went 3-4 and scored two runs in a 7-4 victory that was Minnesota’s fourth-straight win. The guy who is now hitting .432.

    “I can’t believe what I’m seeing!” Jumbo shouted into the phone. It sounded like he had a mouthful of potato chips. “Those morons have turned Justin Morneau into a fucking banjo hitter! The cursed and diseased Canadian who along with that other big white kid was supposed to be the Great Very-White Hope, who was supposed to hit forty homeruns! They’ve given the big bastard a Tony Gwynn makeover! This team is hopeless!”

    I listened for about five minutes, and then I hung up the phone. I’ll try to gut out the rest of the message in the morning, and if there’s anything of interest to report I’ll let you know.

  • Great Blurbs From Book Jacket History, Part One, And Other Miscellaneous Nonsense

    beckett 3.jpg

    –The day of Samuel Beckett’s Funeral. December 26, 1989. Montparnasse Cemetery, Paris. The Spam hat was my own humble offering.

    This is just the book to give your sister if she’s a loud, dirty, boozy girl.

    –Dylan Thomas’s blurb on the front dustwrapper of the 1966 first American edition of Flann O’Brien’s At Swim-Two-Birds (Walker and Company)

    These days the downtrodden God-Bless-You boys work the stoplight medians along Washington and Broadway in shifts. There’s a guy with a cardboard sign on every median and corner at the intersection, some days six guys holding down every possible point of access to motorists. There’s also always a gaggle of characters waiting on the sidelines, so to speak, sitting along the concrete freeway barrier and on the bus stop benches. It’s like pick-up basketball for the homeless.

    You tend to see the same characters every day. I suspect they all use each other’s signs. “Stranded,” one says, and nothing else. There’s the standard, “Homeless. Please Help. God Bless.” And, “Homeless Veteran. God Bless America.”

    I also saw this virtuous variant last week: “I’m Trying To Get Back On My Feet.”

    “Three Children In Texas” seemed to strike an odd note, and I was uncertain whether the appropriate reaction was sympathy or scorn. I do feel sympathy, or rather compassion, for all of them, especially now that there seem to be more of them everyday. My rule of thumb is that if I encounter one of them at a red light I give him a buck, and they have always been unfailingly polite.

    A couple days ago, in the rain, I saw a motorist hand one of them a pizza box through a car window, and yesterday, as I waited at the stoplight there was a guy who was holding an entirely blank piece of cardboard.

    “What’s your sign say?” I asked.

    “You know what it says,” he said, without the slightest hint of hostility. He was, of course, absolutely right.

  • Rage

    Forgive the late entry today. I was busy with the day job.

    I had the pleasure of meeting Betsy Brown last week. She’s a real poet, and I tried to get her to stay for another glass of wine and recite a bit for me, but she had to go. She graciously sent this along to me though, and so I thought I’d graciously pass it along to you.

    She told me she’d written it about her sister, who’d been found to have breast cancer. We have some of that in our family, too, and it was a sad but sweet pleasure to read Betsy’s poem.

    Rage by Betsy Brown

    In 1764, a herding dog lunged out
    of her fields to ravage the French village
    of Thiers, attacking twenty people

    and infecting them fiercely with
    pre-Pasteurian rabies, called rage
    by the French. You traveled to Paris

    to study the original printings
    of these stories: the victims doomed,
    the pages onion-skin parchment

    too frail to copy, sometimes too precious
    to open, the bitten first numbed
    with knowing what’s coming, then

    as they say, enraged, terrified of water,
    convulsant, apologetic about how much
    they wanted to bite their Parisian

    doctor, who bled them and burned
    the fanged gouges with steel and mercury.
    In the Fifth Arrondissement, your

    fine tall library, your walk daily through
    Luxembourg gardens and all the slim
    streets past high black iron gates,

    shuttered window panes; they put
    the victims in a huge vacant hospice
    and separated those who became

    hydrophobic: Eh Monsieur, I see clearly
    that I am lost, they place me in this
    unfortunate room, from which no one returns.

    In 18th century France, rage patients
    sought miracle cures at the shrine
    of St.-Hubert, the priests worked

    to keep that pilgrimage active,
    and all the scholars fought about
    the passions and the morals of the dead.

    I’m sorry I had to take you home
    from Paris. It was snowing and you
    were crying. All the mad strangled

    rabid patients carried us, remember,
    back to Baltimore; you wanted
    to save them, we brought our offerings

    to radiologists, we applied to oncologists —
    we were all ghosts and stories
    about walks to the health food store

    and the ways people so deeply numbed
    find to talk about a future. In Thiers,
    the 12-year old boy just simply

    could not drink the water. He shattered
    the cup and convulsed so violently
    they tied him to the bed. Tonight

    in a tiny lamplit apartment in Paris,
    a reader sits riveted by the newspaper —
    all these stories ending with life.

  • There's A Cancer In Twins Territory, And Its Name Is Brad Zellar

    Back in the day –this was in 1987– I used to have this Nancy and Sluggo tee-shirt that I believed was some sort of magic talisman for the Twins. Whenever I wore it to a game the Twins won, and somehow I figured out, or thought I figured out, that when I didn’t wear it they would inevitably lose. I know all sorts of fans have these crazy superstitions, but the thing was, mine was real. It actually worked. I started making notations in my scorebook (an ‘N/S’ next to the date of the game) on the days I wore the tee-shirt, and the Twins were something like 18-0 from the time I started wearing it religiously. This included the four straight World Series wins at home against the Cardinals.

    The next year the spell seemed to be broken. The Twins lost three straight when I donned the Nancy and Sluggo shirt, and the thing was starting to get pretty ratty so I tucked it away in a drawer and sort of forgot about it.

    I got wigged out during the 1991 Series when Atlanta came back to take a three games to two lead, and in an act of manic desperation I remembered the talismanic tee, and dug it out for the final games at the Dome.

    And: Abracadabra, of course. Just what the doctor ordered.

    I didn’t really retire Nancy and Sluggo so much as the damn thing eventually fell apart. In 2002 I scoured the Twin Cities for a replacement to no avail, and seriously considered having Nancy and Sluggo tattooed on my arm. In hindsight I probably should have gotten the tattoo. I might yet have to.

    You may have noticed that earlier this season I wrote a tepidly hopeful appraisal of Luis Rivas, in which I pointed out that he was still relatively young and had once been regarded as a promising and fundamentally sound player. It wasn’t too late, I said, for Luis to turn things around.

    I was guilty of wishful thinking. I can see that now. No dice for poor Luis.

    A couple weeks ago I took a pull at the wishbone again, this time in defense of Kyle Lohse. I parroted all the things people in the Twins organization have been saying to me about Lohse for several years. The guy had great stuff, a terrific arm; he just needed to learn how to pitch. I might have predicted that he would lead the team in innings pitched and win sixteen games. I might have. I don’t care to look back, actually, and see what sort of nonsense I might have written about Lohse. Because I was apparently wrong, and I’m man enough to admit that.

    Either that, or maybe I’m to blame. Perhaps these poor bastards just can’t bear up under the weight of my expectations.

    Exhibit –what is it? C? Yes, I think it’s C: Yesterday I wrote an appreciation of Jacque Jones that was probably unwise. Granted, it’s only been twenty-four hours, but Jones was 0-4 today with two strikeouts. He also stranded three runners. Granted, he did draw another walk, but I sense I’ve done him a terrible disservice.

    As I pointed out yesterday, Jones burned me bad last year, and I have no idea when I’m going to learn from my mistakes. I won’t be at all surprised if his average dips below .250 by Memorial Day, and I’ll have no one to blame but myself.

    My sincere apologies to anyone who might read this and might conceivably care. I think I’m going to start paying more attention to the National League.

    Speaking of which, have you noticed that the Arizona Diamondbacks are now 14-8 and in first place in the NL West, this despite the fact that they’ve scored 100 runs and given up 105? That’s sort of interesting, don’t you think?

  • Whistle While You Work

    It is certainly true that music magazines remain committed to music criticism without a lot of strong evidence that anyone is all that interested anymore. But I couldn’t let Pete Carbonara’s dismissive comments about our mutual former employer go unanswered. Someone needs to defend Spin’s honor, I think.

    First, no one expects Spin to be The Nation or the New Yorker, and yet they still make an effort to publish a certain amount of “real journalism” in every issue. (And, with some honor, try to enter the Ellies every year, where sister pub VIBE regularly hogs the glory.) While I was an editor there, the magazine published the first major article on a little-known drug called Oxycontin, for example. Spin published the first national article on satellite radio, and it was the first periodical to exhaustively explore the legal, social, and cultural ramifications of digitized music. If memory serves, it was even one of the earliest-maybe the ONLY-national (non-gay) magazines to have a monthly column on the HIV-AIDS epidemic. And yes, there were always a few CD reviews thrown into the mix. Things may have changed after Carbonara left, but no one who has worked at Spin in recent years would argue that there is a lack of editorial rigor under the able and even legendary hands of Alan Light, Sia Michel, Will Hermes, and many others. (A young man named James Truman got his start there.)

    One of my personal frustrations with the music mag business was the albatross of newstand sales, almost always tied to the alchemy of predicting which current release will be a massive hit with the kids, in order to maximize newstand sell-through. In other words, a large part of the feature well, and much of the rest of the magazine, was dictated by which albums (films, games, gear) were in current release. True, that is an insidious way to run an edit meeting… unless your passion, your beat, is popular music. Unlike other media, music magazines had the space, time, and interest to cover a lot of material that would otherwise get no press whatsoever — so for the true music enthusiast, it was a presumably a salve.

    I too left Spin under unhappy circumstances, but I don’t blame Spin — I blame myself, for inexorably growing up, having kids, not listening to enough music or seeing enough shows, and not continuing to be very good at my job as a result. But it’s not fair to suggest that journalism and music journalism are mutually exclusive. Hopefully, my departure — and Pete Carbonara’s — made a little room at the bottom for someone like Krystal Grow. (In my experience at Spin, Spin’s interns were some of the finest young journalists of their generation, many feeding directly from Medill and Columbia and all the other canonical j-schools. I think Grow’s main problem is not recognizing just how difficult it is to make the cut — and if you’re not both a serious journalist and pop-culture enthusiast, you really HAVE dodged a bullet by not gaining one of the prestigious vacancies. There is a funny story from a few years ago about several enterprising young people just showing up at Spin claiming to be “the new interns.” I don’t know how far they got with the managing editor — I heard they’d claimed a couple of empty desks — but it’s good evidence that Grow is niether the first nor the last desperate applicant.)

    I notice that good old James Poniewozick—one of the great unsung heroes of populist criticism, and an old friend—has weighed in on this matter as well. As ever, putting me to shame with his lean and powerful prose.

  • The Best of the Best

    It would be a bit silly to come near the end of this month of poems without hearing a bit from the Bard. Here is Sonnet 116; a little bit from Antony and Cleopatra that once struck me hard; and the famous speech from Henry V that lent title to a damn good book about World War II.

    Note the common theme of death, entwined, like the asp, with that of love. Great stuff.

    Sonnet 116 by William Shakespeare

    Let me not to the marriage of true minds
    Admit impediments. Love is not love
    Which alters when it alteration finds,
    Or bends with the remover to remove:
    O no! it is an ever-fixed mark
    That looks on tempests and is never shaken;
    It is the star to every wandering bark,
    Whose worth’s unknown, although his height be taken.
    Love’s not Time’s fool, though rosy lips and cheeks
    Within his bending sickle’s compass come:
    Love alters not with his brief hours and weeks,
    But bears it out even to the edge of doom.
    If this be error and upon me proved,
    I never writ, nor no man ever loved.

    Cleopatra’s death speech from Antony and Cleopatra, Act V

    Give me my robe, put on my crown; I have
    Immortal longings in me: now no more
    The juice of Egypt’s grape shall moist this lip:
    Yare, yare, good Iras; quick. Methinks I hear
    Antony call; I see him rouse himself
    To praise my noble act; I hear him mock
    The luck of Caesar, which the gods give men
    To excuse their after wrath: husband, I come:
    Now to that name my courage prove my title!
    I am fire and air; my other elements
    I give to baser life. So; have you done?
    Come then, and take the last warmth of my lips.
    Farewell, kind Charmian; Iras, long farewell.

    Kisses them. IRAS falls and dies

    Have I the aspic in my lips? Dost fall?
    If thou and nature can so gently part,
    The stroke of death is as a lover’s pinch,
    Which hurts, and is desired. Dost thou lie still?
    If thus thou vanishest, thou tell’st the world
    It is not worth leave-taking.

    Finally, the more masculine warrior, Henry V

    If we are mark’d to die, we are enow
    To do our country loss; and if to live,
    The fewer men, the greater share of honour.
    God’s will! I pray thee, wish not one man more.
    By Jove, I am not covetous for gold,
    Nor care I who doth feed upon my cost;
    It yearns me not if men my garments wear;
    Such outward things dwell not in my desires:
    But if it be a sin to covet honour,
    I am the most offending soul alive.
    No, faith, my coz, wish not a man from England:
    God’s peace! I would not lose so great an honour
    As one man more, methinks, would share from me
    For the best hope I have. O, do not wish one more!
    Rather proclaim it, Westmoreland, through my host,
    That he which hath no stomach to this fight,
    Let him depart; his passport shall be made
    And crowns for convoy put into his purse:
    We would not die in that man’s company
    That fears his fellowship to die with us.
    This day is called the feast of Crispian:
    He that outlives this day, and comes safe home,
    Will stand a tip-toe when the day is named,
    And rouse him at the name of Crispian.
    He that shall live this day, and see old age,
    Will yearly on the vigil feast his neighbours,
    And say ‘To-morrow is Saint Crispian:’
    Then will he strip his sleeve and show his scars.
    And say ‘These wounds I had on Crispin’s day.’
    Old men forget: yet all shall be forgot,
    But he’ll remember with advantages
    What feats he did that day: then shall our names.
    Familiar in his mouth as household words
    Harry the king, Bedford and Exeter,
    Warwick and Talbot, Salisbury and Gloucester,
    Be in their flowing cups freshly remember’d.
    This story shall the good man teach his son;
    And Crispin Crispian shall ne’er go by,
    From this day to the ending of the world,
    But we in it shall be remember’d;
    We few, we happy few, we band of brothers;
    For he to-day that sheds his blood with me
    Shall be my brother; be he ne’er so vile,
    This day shall gentle his condition:
    And gentlemen in England now a-bed
    Shall think themselves accursed they were not here,
    And hold their manhoods cheap whiles any speaks
    That fought with us upon Saint Crispin’s day.

  • Maybe This Year It's Not A Tease

    It’s not really a surprise to me, but Jacque Jones has quietly become a better player –certainly a better hitter, and I’d argue a better all-around player– than Torii Hunter. Jones is as competitive and driven as Hunter is easy going, and he works as hard as anybody on the team to get better. He can be moody and defensive in the clubhouse, but his moods are driven as much by team failure as personal frustration, and he can also be one of the most thoughtful and engaging guys in the game. In a clubhouse full of relatively mellow and gregarious characters, his passion for baseball and his determination to play hurt and be a better all-around player stick out like a sore thumb, and right now this team could use a lot more of his fiery personality.

    I wrote those words on May 28th of last season, and Jones immediately proceeded to make me look like a complete idiot. I’m accustomed to looking like a complete idiot, but I was nonetheless disappointed in the extended swoon that ruined what was at the time looking like a breakout year for Jones.

    I spent the rest of the season trying to figure out what went wrong. I picked Jacque’s brain, and talked about his struggles with Torii Hunter and hitting coach Scott Ullger. Everybody just kept saying he was going to turn it around, but from where I was sitting it looked like he slipped back into some bad habits. When Jones is heading into a slump you can see it coming from a mile away. Pitchers start working him in and out, get him tentative and off balance, and then when they get ahead in the count –and Jones is always trying to battle back from pitcher’s counts when he’s fighting himself– they get him to flail at fastballs up in his eyes or sliders in the dirt. When he did manage to work the count in his favor, pitchers knew they still didn’t have to throw him a strike because he was swinging at anything. It was an ugly thing to watch, particularly since I know how hard the guy works to get better and how frustrated he gets when he can’t seem to figure the game out.

    Last year there were a number of aggravating circumstances that contributed to Jones’ rough season; his father was dying, he’d been the subject of trade rumors for two seasons, and Jason Kubel was breathing down his neck.

    I’ve never liked to believe that impending free agency can somehow motivate guys to play better –or not necessarily motivate, because, sure, the motivation is certainly there, but actually push them to play better. That seems counter-intuitive to me, particularly for a guy like Jones, whose struggles have always seemed to be precisely a product of pressing. I’ve also seen Jones have enough hot streaks to know that it’s never a good idea to read too much into these stretches.

    This year, though, seems to be different from other years. You sense that maybe something has finally clicked for him. It’s apparent in the clubhouse, and it’s becoming equally apparent on the field. The guy is tied for the team lead in walks (and has walked as often as he’s struck out), and I don’t ever recall a stretch where he’s taken so many pitches. He’s been terrific against lefties, and is more balanced at the plate than I’ve ever seen him. All of his old anxious movement is, at least for the time being, gone. He’s keeping his hands still, and staying behind the ball, rather than jumping at pitches out of the strike zone. Watch the way he keeps his head down right up until the moment he starts his swing. This approach has resulted in a much quicker bat, and the ability to hit the ball where it’s pitched.

    Particularly encouraging has been the way he follows a bad at-bat –and he had a couple rough trips to the plate tonight– with a good at-bat. He’s still diving for those balls on the outside corner in the dirt, but I can’t recall an occasion so far where he’s screwed himself into the ground trying to handle that high and tight pitch. There have been times in the last few seasons, extended periods, when you pretty much could gauge the kind of game Jones was going to have after his first at-bat. So far he looks like a completely different player from the guy we saw in the second half last year. It’s been fun to watch, and I’d be thrilled to see him put it all together and sustain this kind of productivity over a full season, even if it ultimately means he goes somewhere else to make his millions.

  • It's My Ball, And The Game is Over!

    You know it’s a slow week in news when the journalists are arguing amongst themselves about the cheekiness of interns. But that should not distract us from slightly less yawn-inducing progress of the Ship of State in its inexorable approach to the iceberg of international irrelevance.

    The good senator and Viagra spokesman Bob Dole writes in today’s New York Times op-ed pages that Democrats are violating a longstanding tradition by filibustering—or threatening to filibuster—judicial nominations. The much-talked about Republican “nuclear option” would entail the majority party simply eliminating the filibuster. (For an interesting angle on why this would, in the long run, actually play into Democratic interests, read Rik Hertzberg of a few months ago.) Dole’s appreciation for the sacred precedent of history and the rights of the minority are admirable, but it’s interesting that he doesn’t really explain why Democrats would be so desperate to obstruct Republican progress.

    The standard line, of course, is that Democrats just can’t deal with being the minority dissenting party, and they have not stopped trying to sabotage the Will of the People. Of course, a whiny elitist Democrat would tell you that this is the price of a majority’s tyranny. If you’re going to change the rules to ensure that you win without compromise, then we’re simply not going to play the game anymore. More to the point, the downside of Republican hubris and triumphalism is the inevitable backlash that is the normal death rattle of the ideologue in power.

    On the face of it, Speaker Dennis Hastert’s offer to reconsider house ethics committee rule changes that favored the GOP looks like an olive branch offered to Democrats—who have been letting Tom DeLay rot on the vine (and to test Republican wagon-circling arrogance—yup, still there) as they refuse to hear any ethics cases. The high road is surely the road of self-interest, and Hastert probably recognizes that the GOP can’t win without first losing. (Does he really believe the compromise will help “clear” DeLay’s name? Well, we guess we may yet see new heights of hubris.) All now seem to be lining up for the clash over DeLay’s dalliances and transgressions. The only remaining question is whether the party lines will hold as everyone seems to believe they will—with no clear indication of why DeLay’s skin is worth saving.

  • Sentience and sensuality

    This one was suggested by a friend of mine who happens to be a Catholic priest. It seems at first a bit voluptuous for a priest’s taste, but as a friend once said, “They can think about it, they just can’t do it.”

    But, come down to the last stanzas and see the reconciliation of the body with the philosophy and it makes sense why my friend would like this. He is a man, after all, and a prodigious intellect, to boot. All the better to enjoy all that good poetry has to offer.

    Peter Quince at the Clavier, by Wallace Stevens

    I

    Just as my fingers on these keys
    Make music, so the self-same sounds
    On my spirit make a music, too.
    Music is feeling, then, not sound;
    And thus it is that what I feel,
    Here in this room, desiring you,

    Thinking of your blue-shadowed silk,
    Is music. It is like the strain
    Waked in the elders by Susanna;

    Of a green evening, clear and warm,
    She bathed in her still garden, while
    The red-eyed elders, watching, felt

    The basses of their beings throb
    In witching chords, and their thin blood
    Pulse pizzicati of Hosanna.

    II

    In the green water, clear and warm,
    Susanna lay.
    She searched
    The touch of springs,
    And found
    Concealed imaginings.
    She sighed,
    For so much melody.

    Upon the bank, she stood
    In the cool
    Of spent emotions.
    She felt, among the leaves,
    The dew
    Of old devotions.

    She walked upon the grass,
    Still quavering.
    The winds were like her maids,
    On timid feet,
    Fetching her woven scarves,
    Yet wavering.

    A breath upon her hand
    Muted the night.
    She turned —
    A cymbal crashed,
    Amid roaring horns.

    III

    Soon, with a noise like tambourines,
    Came her attendant Byzantines.

    They wondered why Susanna cried
    Against the elders by her side;

    And as they whispered, the refrain
    Was like a willow swept by rain.

    Anon, their lamps’ uplifted flame
    Revealed Susanna and her shame.

    And then, the simpering Byzantines
    Fled, with a noise like tambourines.

    IV

    Beauty is momentary in the mind —
    The fitful tracing of a portal;
    But in the flesh it is immortal.

    The body dies; the body’s beauty lives.
    So evenings die, in their green going,
    A wave, interminably flowing.
    So gardens die, their meek breath scenting
    The cowl of winter, done repenting.
    So maidens die, to the auroral
    Celebration of a maiden’s choral.

    Susanna’s music touched the bawdy strings
    Of those white elders; but, escaping,
    Left only Death’s ironic scraping.
    Now, in its immortality, it plays
    On the clear viol of her memory,
    And makes a constant sacrament of praise.

  • I Know I'm Not Fooling Anyone

    clothespins 2.jpg

    I’ve gone by a lot of different names over the years, every one of them, I’m sure, transparently phoney. I now recognize that I was laboring under some fairly serious delusions, and harbored the misguided notion that these names I’d choose –and choose carefully, I might add– demonstrated a certain flair. What they actually were, these names of mine, were red flags, and only served to cast underserved suspicion on my behavior and motives.

    You might remember me from the period when I was representing myself as Corporal Bryce Chaparral, and was trying to make a living as an auctioneer here in the Twin Cities. I later tried my hand as a private detective in Sioux City, under the name Aristide LeRoc. I went so far as to take out an expensive advertisement in the yellow pages, and tried to speak with an accent that I imagined sounded suitably French, or at least French-Canadian. I paid a good deal of attention to my grooming in those days, and walked with a cane. Irregardless of my qualifications –or lack thereof– I discovered that there was little market for a private detective in Sioux City. I did manage to pick up the occasional insurance job, which generally involved trying to capture video footage of people with purported disabilities taking out their garbage.

    For a brief period I was also a black jack dealer at a casino in Oklahoma (as Lance Waterhouse), but nothing came of it. I have no idea what I thought might come of it, but I certainly never imagined I’d have to pawn virtually everything I owned, including a Civil War chess set I’d inherited from my father.

    You might be surprised by how easy it is to become anyone you want, at least in strictly bureaucratic terms, especially when people don’t much care who you are. It is more difficult, I’ve discovered, to truly become someone, to make up your mind, as if the mind were a bed, or a bedtime story.

    Make believe     –there’s another useful (and useless) analogy. Also: Wishful thinking.

    You can’t just go to Home Depot and buy an ax to break up the frozen sea within you, if, in fact, you sense there is a frozen sea within you. I liked to think there was, once upon a time, if only because it seemed like a convenient explanation for certain troubling aspects of my personality.

    I won’t go into that, though. Live and learn, I guess, which is just something I’ll say because it’s something people say.

    I’m sorry, I can’t imagine. I just cannot imagine. I was thinking last night how my head felt like one of those snow globes where the little confetti blizzard never settles and the quaint miniature village never emerges from the storm. It almost broke my heart, but then I got to thinking…Oh, good lord, I can’t for the life of me remember what I got to thinking. It’s entirely slipped my mind.