It’s hard to collect all my thoughts about this spring and summer into something I can sum up in a single post. This is not made easier by the fact that in Charlotte, where I am now, temperatures are headed for the high 90s (Fahrenheit; that’s really hot, if you don’t know) with humidity around 90%. Also, I have heat exhaustion and a UTI. In the wee hours this morning, I got online and tracked down a crummy motel (SO crummy. The crummiest) that allows pets and has a/c and showers, which isn’t really in my budget but I’m considering it an emergency. Even if baseline survival isn’t on the table in these conditions, I can’t keep going through 3 or 4 outfits a day purely because of how much I’m sweating. So the cranial gears are not clickety-clacking in quite the way they could be, is what I’m saying.
The photo is of me (sitting on the floor in the front, if the long hair with the mallen streak doesn’t give it away), along with Jesse and Richard, the owners of the farm where I stayed all spring and most of the summer, and Jesse’s brother Raiden. Raiden, Jesse, Richard, from left to right. Had the seasons gone as planned, there would be another guy in the photo. He’s not there for reasons that are terribly ugly as well as entirely his own fault, and that’s all I really want to say about it for now.
Jesse is my best friend. At this point in my life, there’s nothing in my personal lexicon that I’d call a higher term of endearment than that. They’ve stuck around in my life as long as just about anyone has, largely because we have a number of highly specific things in common. Those commonalities fall all over a spectrum that goes from “glorious gifts of mind and spirit” to “things that should never happen to anyone.” It gives us a lot to talk about. We’ve seen each other through a number of major transitions in both our lives, we’ve been through conflict and repair together, we’ve had multiple people try (and fail) to divide us, we say “I love you” and earnestly mean it. Standard best friend shit.
They and I both had expectations of what the year was going to look like that turned out to be radically different from what actually happened. I’m confident I can speak for both of us when I say we envisioned a time of harmonious working together on lots of projects related to the continuing work of getting the farm up and running: building and finishing structures, planting and harvesting crops, and, in Jesse and Richard’s case, getting their culinary mushroom business off the ground. In my case, working on Red Leaf Days and two other projects that I failed miserably at limiting to short story length and have become two additional books.
What we ended up with instead was, generally speaking, chaos. I use that word a lot these days, typically in reference to things I’m trying to minimize in my life. Some of these are things we have no control over, like illness and extreme weather events; others are caused by people, sometimes ourselves, sometimes others in our lives, and sometimes far-away oligarchs who make decisions about our lives and livelihoods as if we were livestock. This year, we got it all, we got it in heavy doses, and it’s still coming. In the best case, we will survive it all together. In the worst, we won’t survive, but we’ll still do it together. In the meantime, we’re treading water. Deep water.
Now my time at the farm is up (for now) and I need to set it all aside as much as I can and continue on to the next things. I’m in Charlotte to see my cousin and her new baby, then heading back west to take care of a few things in Colorado, and hitting Chicago for a brief spell after that. Fall is still up in the air but down to two possibilities (one of which is returning to the farm), and winter is looking promising. There’s no way I can weather a winter in the Blue Ridge Mountains without some kind of shelter to park the van inside, so I guess I’m a snowbird for now, and that does mean getting to do cool things sometimes.
I’ve had a lot of people tell me that one of the omnipresent tropes in my writing is lack of closure. Mysteries are never conclusively solved, people fall out with each other and never reconnect, stories where you would normally expect some kind of payoff where the protagonists are successful and/or vindicated abandon those conclusions and focus on the characters’ interior journeys. Looking at times in my life like this, it’s easy to see where that tendency comes from. Closure is something that almost everyone wants and almost no one gets in life, and if you want to be able to live in a way that doesn’t make you miserable then sooner or later you have to learn to get by with or without it.
This is how it’s come to be that, despite all the chaos and sorrow, I consider myself to be happy. Happiness, I have learned, is not about getting everything you want (that’s a happy ending, which is a narrative device and also very, very different from actually being happy). Happiness is built much more around things that no one can give you, and that no one can take away. For instance, loving people, places, things, knowing that they won’t always be here and that we largely don’t get a say in how and when they enter and leave our spheres, because the happiness is in the loving, not what we get back from it. When you have loved and been loved, that is yours forever. Even the briefest moment of it, even just a little glimpse of it snatched from within a miasma of despair, is still forever. If you let it be.
If instead you leave your happiness in the hands of others, dependent on what they give you or don’t, on whether they can and will fulfill the roles you’ve written for them in your head… well, you’re going to be miserable forever. I’ve spent enough time around rich people (including some very rich people) to see that they’re the most miserable ones on Earth for just this reason. So many of them have hoarded all this wealth in pursuit of the idea that if they can just get to a place where they’re rich enough that everyone has to do what they want all the time, then they’ll always be happy and never sad because things will always go their way. In so doing, they give away all their power, all the potential they might have had for actual happiness in their lives. They are cemented in misery and terrified of freedom.
(Leave them alone to do this for long enough, and eventually they’ll end up sinking trillions of dollars into generative AI because they’re convinced that, if everyone having to do what they say doesn’t make them happy, then the solution must be to bypass the need for people entirely and replace them with chatbots. And that’s totally going to work, man, yeah, surely that is going to be the thing that finally sates the bottomless appetites of humanity-starved oligarchs. That’s what’ll happen. It’s a foolproof plan that can’t possibly go wrong.)
Here I go, then, closure-free and pushing along. In a few hours I’m going to go see a baby, created by someone I remember as a baby herself. The travails of my friends and I are far from concluded, but we held and supported and loved each other through it all. And tomorrow we’ll do it all again.