So much clutter.

There is so much clutter everywhere. Material clutter. Circumstantial clutter. Digital clutter. Mental clutter. Schedule clutter. Memory clutter.

— § —

I am ripping apart my last decade.

It’s part of a remodel, to turn what was my office into a bedroom for one of my children. It has been ongoing for weeks—in the process of being ripped apart for weeks.

Because when you stick an academic in a small office for years, things accumulate. And when you stick a senior manager in a small office for years, things accumulate. And when you stick an adult person in a small room for years, things accumulate.

All three of those people, being me, were in that small room for ten years.

It’s not all clutter, and it’s not all furniture. It’s clutter intermixed with furniture, in highly dense, rational, and inbuilt ways. It’s taking a long time to tear it back down again. The amount of shelving and desk surface littering my driveway right now is insane as I pull it all out.

— § —

One reason that people who live alone die sooner is that there is nobody around to find them after the heart attack, after the stroke, after the fall down the stairs, after the bookshelf falls on them.

They lay there until someone stumbles across them, often too late.

Someday, that will be me. It has been several years since I had a guest of my own in the house. Nobody stops by. Once the kids grow up, we plod on until the event happens, and then at some point the neighbors inquire about the smell.

It’s easy to say “you should have some friends over” but all of my friends live in other states.

It’s easy to say “you should make some friends” but I have a distinct aversion to having friends in my own state, especially friends that come “over.”

— § —

When you’re feeling in a dark place, it’s an important thing to make a little bit of progress in something. Any progress. Any amount. In anything you’ve been working on or could be working on.

I wish I could say that making that bit of progress feels good, but really it doesn’t.

What it does do, however, is feel less dark than just sitting there, and that’s often enough.

— § —

Tearing apart what I and the kids have long referred to as “the office” has been a kind of archaeology of the recent past, of the past decade.

Thing is, the last decade has seen the absolute worst times of my life in it, by a very large margin, along with some of the best. But it’s the former that hits you with the force each time you stumble across a significant artifact.

There have been a lot of significant artifacts.

— § —

Not everyone can say that they have a stack of letters in which a previously trusted person threatens to entirely destroy the lives of them and their family over and over again in a variety of ways—much less from someone that is actually positioned to carry this threat out—and less still when that person is, by virtue of outward apparent affinity, the last person anyone in the world would suspect of such a thing.

I have such a stack of letters. I haven’t looked at it, or wanted to look at it in a long time. I still haven’t looked at it. But I’ve laid eyes on it again, and that was enough. Risks of archaeology.

Experiences like that—like receiving a stream of such letters over time—change a person and the way that they relate to the world, and to other people.

They cause you to become that strange person, the one who’s always a bit standoffish, who can’t quite be nailed down, who won’t let anybody in, who seems just a bit dangerous.

They leave you unwilling to cope with having friends in your own state that might actually come “over.”

— § —

I was never much one for self-defense, or for playing things close to the vest when I was younger. It’s interesting to see how much self-defense clutter I’ve accumulated in recent years—material, circumstantial, digital, mental, schedule, memory, etc.

There is a strand of conventional wisdom—which is nearly always wrong—that says that it’s bad to be on the defensive against other people.

“Open yourself up,” it says, “what have you got to lose? Only love and friendship!”

Like all strands of conventional wisdom, it throws its hands up when the worst happens and says “well… it’s not like there can be any promises…”

Thing is, I have children. My life, now, belongs to their protection until they are launched.

Hopefully launched.

In a way that I and so many in my generation and other recent generations never were.

Until then, it’s silence and archaeology for me in the in-between times.

— § —

I’m not a weak or timid man, but there are nonetheless many things in my life that I can’t bear to look at, am unable to stomach, can absolutely not stand to see.

In the whole wide world, all of them lie within 25 feet of me and where I dwell, day after day, and they have done for years now.

Someone once told me I should burn them.

I couldn’t make them understand that being haunted by the ghosts of archaeological terror is no better than being surrounded by its corpses.

Weekend in early September, world generally falling apart. Dark, 70 degrees outside. Aquarium slightly low on water against south wall.

— § —

South. That means that if you continue to go in that direction for long enough, you’ll end up in Mexico. And if you keep going long enough after that, you’ll hit ice.

At least that’s what they say.

At this particular moment, it’s hard to believe any of that exists, mainly because it doesn’t. The world, the one that’s falling apart, doesn’t exist anyway.

Because it’s 2020.

— § —

There are times of elation, times of stagnation, and times of suffering.

This time is somewhere between the latter two, perhaps encompassing both of them. The time is out of joint. The center cannot hold. Use whatever phrase you want.

— § —

This returns in echoes for me, at a personal level.

I don’t have one of those even-keeled lives.

— § —

It’s dark in this corner of the house that I do not own living something rather other than the life I had planned, with my own children elsewhere and no particular projects or life goals underway.

Middle age waiting for my late twenties to begin.

There are times when I’m elated and times when I’m stagnant and times when I indulge in suffering.

The last several months have been somewhere between the latter. The time is out of joint. The center cannot hold. Use whatever phrase you want.

— § —

I will never retire. I will never own a home. I will never grow old with anyone. I will never get tenure. I will never be rich. I will never have one of “those” yards. I will never have one of “those” vacations. I don’t remember any of the plans I made. I don’t remember the things I used to do.

— § —

In Oakland and in New York they are marching through the streets chanting “Death to America.”

Twenty years ago I’d have assured you I’d be among them. Ten years ago I’d have been bewildered but patient with the whole thing.

Now I think they ought to be tried and hanged for treason.

— § —

Naivete is a hell of a drug, and you ingest rather a lot of it while you’re young.

Then, you age.

The end begins to race toward you, or you toward it, and you can see it and it grows and gets bigger and bigger and you begin to realize that soon you’re going to crash into it and you don’t have time to react much less to make plans much less to dig up the plans you already made much less to execute on them.

The lawn isn’t even mowed.

— § —

In the corner of the room, in the dark, you can’t hear them thousands of miles away as they chant “Death to America” and you can’t hear the laughter of your children enjoying life without you with some other family that didn’t even give them any genes.

You think about how evil people are, and about how evil society is, and about how the Catholics and the Orthodox had it right all along all these thousands of years, and about how many people that ought to have been hanged never were.

And you reflect on how other people, clueless, naive, and maybe, just maybe, evil—though naturally, of course, naturally, of course, you don’t ever, ever judge any of them, oh no—would think less of you for a thousand reasons, some of them your intrinsic properties and some of them instantaneous judgments of the kind that you never, ever make.

And you also think about how the fact that it’s now mid-60s in the room and falling, and how it will continue to fall in the months ahead in a world without a world, an inside without n outside in a pademic, means that fall is coming and the wheel is turning again.

— § —

The race toward the end.

You always said you’d either become a professor or you’d head south, south to South America, where you’d open a tin-roofed shack of a bar and duck under the flying bullets and flying bottles.

But you didn’t become a professor.

And you didn’t go south.

— § —

Sixty degrees and falling.

And still they march.