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It's been a long time since we played. When we first started playing on the street I was still in college and the older brother Daniel in middle school. Now he towers over me and plays on his high school's varsity team. They made it to the state finals on Saturday. I had half a mind to go cheer him on, but it's on the other side of the city, an hour and a half away by car.

To temper their good news about the state finals I tell them I'm moving to New York again soon.

"For good?" the younger one Mal whines in disbelief. His curly hair reaches midway up my torso now. "Can't you stay forever? Or at least until I graduate high school?"

I laugh. I'll be in my thirties when he graduates.

"I wish," I say when I manage to catch my breath, which is not a full untruth. Of course I'd rather be in New York, but I do wish some part of me could stay behind and kick around with them forever, in the same way I wish I could still cut class with friends or rehearse with my old ensembles. Alas, I can only be in one place at a time, and this is not the place I need to be right now.

"Did you get a new job? Where will you stay? Won't it be dangerous?" I know Daniel's grown from the kinds of questions he asks now. Their image of New York as a crime-ridden slum makes me wonder if they've ever actually visited.

Mal asks the harder questions. "Will you visit? Can you send us mail?"

"I'll try. Of course I'll write." I mean it. I always write, even though the postal service ate the postcard I sent them last summer. Judging from the way Daniel and Mal use their dented mailbox as a goalpost, I'd be surprised if anything I send them ever shows up.

I've watched them grow up in front of my eyes these past few years. When Daniel and I play ones¹ we know all of each other's moves. I know he'll step over and cut right before even he does, and we've both learned to keep our legs closed to avoid getting nutmegged. Even if his teenage ego has inflated a bit too much for my liking, I'm going to miss him. He and his brother seem to get taller every time I see them, and I know they'll be grown before I know it.

Then I realized: it’s not a what, it’s a who.

Him. The one I married, the one I made these children with, the one I moved to Puerto Rico beside. He’s not here. And now I’m here, with our children (so much older, so quickly!) and we’re going back, we’re retracing our steps, revisiting our past, and he’s not with us.

My day-to-day life doesn’t feel void of a person or empty in anyway. It feels full (sometimes too full) and it feels rewarding and also stressful and overwhelming but good, and whole. I feel complete, as a person. I have moments of loneliness. I carry grief but it’s a marble in my pocket. Sometimes it gets heavy and I sit down, take it out, cry. Then back in my pocket it goes and I move forward.

When we left Puerto Rico in 2020, it wasn’t to move away. The plan, such as it was, was to go on an extended road trip over the summer. We’d planned to make lots of stops, visiting friends and family. With COVID we shifted, decided we’d do more camping, visit national parks, explore the country, stay mostly outside and away from people. It was very early still, in the pandemic experience, in what we understood of it.

We rented a big van and took off. 6 people, 26 states, 8 weeks. It was chaotic and unhinged and desperate but I couldn’t see that at the time. Most of our marriage had unraveled in 2019. Early in 2020 I thought we were knitting ourselves together again, but we weren’t. I was just holding on to those last few connected threads. During that road trip they snapped apart, too.

The first week of September I called it. It was a cool gray morning. We were in Wisconsin. My skull felt like it would explode. I thought my brain was melting. I put my hands on each side of my head to try to hold it in place. I think I was really close to a mental breakdown or something similar, but I didn’t know what to call it, didn’t have the language or context to understand what was happening. I was the strong one, I was the caretaker, I was the one who held things together. It couldn’t be me falling apart. But it was. I was lost. I was drowning. Blankness and noise at the same time.

I stood in the parking lot beside the van and looked at him and said, I can’t do this anymore.

There was a mythology he’d created and I’d bought into. I was trying so hard to believe it. It seemed like believing it, really, was the key to everything. The key to holding our family together. The key to saving my husband from whatever was happening to him. The key to getting through the chaotic shitstorm our life had become. The key to stability, the key to peace, the key to making it work. You had to believe it, for it to be real. You had to really believe it, and then it would be real and it would work and we would be okay. And if it wasn’t working, and things weren’t okay, it was because you didn’t make it real by believing enough.

And I knew it was my fault. My fault that it wasn’t real, that it wasn’t working.

Because he believed it. He was earnest, he was zealous, he would talk for hours as I stared out the window and we drove through New Mexico, California, North Dakota, Kansas. The sound of his voice wrapped around me and the space grew tighter and I tried so hard. But to believe it, to believe him, I had to turn off so many parts of me. I had to disconnect from my intuition, doubt my intelligence, ignore my analysis, dismiss my feelings. I did it carefully, little by little, because I’ve never wanted to lose myself in someone else. But I was so afraid to lose him. It seemed like the price I had to pay. I thought if I went slow, razor-thin, skimming a bit here, a piece there, then I could hold onto enough of myself.

That morning in the parking lot I couldn’t connect the beginning of a thought to the end of it. I couldn’t find a pattern in my own world, not a single one. I couldn’t touch that place of existence and identity. There was only noise, blankness, noise, blankness, noise, blankness and me grabbing at everything and touching nothing. The only thing I knew was there were two ways forward: to plunge into the noise and release the final bits of myself, let myself melt away. Or scream and scream and scream and scream until I screamed out the noise and heard my own voice again.

So I screamed, as loud as I could. And it came out so soft, almost a whisper: I can’t do this anymore. I could hardly hear myself. But it was enough. It was just enough.

The only difference between a lake with waves and a lake without waves is the wind. A lake would be calm except for the wind. We would be calm if not for our thinking. We can tell how much of a turbulent effect the wind has on the lake by the size and strength of the waves. We can tell how much effect our thinking is having on us by the size and strength of our feelings. The wind is invisible. We can only feel the effects of it. Most of the thinking that affects us is also invisible. Our feelings are the only thing that tells us something is amiss.

– Jack Pransky, Somebody Should Have Told Us!: Simple Truths for Living

Notes:

• Video: DK. April 22, 2024 @ 5:30 am at Cove Island Park.
• Post Title & Inspiration: Aldous Huxley: “It’s dark because you are trying too hard. Lightly child, lightly. Learn to do everything lightly. Yes, feel lightly even though you’re feeling deeply. Just lightly let things happen and lightly cope with them.
• Inspired by: “It is exhausting, dizzying. It is good to feel all sorts of things, even the bad things that scare you, because they, too, push you in the direction of your convictions. — Sheila Heti, Alphabetical Diaries (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, February 6, 2024)
• Also inspired by: “When I look at my life I realise that the mistakes I have made, the things I really regret, were not errors of judgement but failures of feeling.” —Jeanette Winterson, Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal? (Grove Press in 2012)

Once created bots.yml in my Jekyll data directory, I used a loop to iterate through the single items in my robots.liquid source file:

---
layout: none
permalink: /robots.txt
---
{%- for item in site.data.bots -%}
User-agent: {{ item }}
Disallow: /

{%- endfor %}

The end result after a site build is a /robots.txt file containing the entire list of disallowed bots. The rewrite instructions to block AI crawlers in the .htaccess file are the same as suggested by Ethan. Instead of performing a for loop, I just print them inline within a rewrite condition, separated by a pipe character:

# Block bots
<IfModule mod_rewrite.c>
  RewriteEngine on
  RewriteBase /
  RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} ({{ site.data.bots | sort_natural | join: "|" }}) [NC]
  RewriteRule ^ – [F]
</IfModule>

Redirects

Since I was there, I also optimised the .htaccess.liquid source file by creating a further YAML data file with all my redirects, looping through them in a now neat source file:

# Redirects
{%- for item in site.data.redirects %}
Redirect 301 {{ item }}
{%- endfor %}

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This is really badly written, and I had to spend a good deal of my own attention trying to figure out what it’s saying. The quotation from Jac Mullen is hard to parse — I think he’s saying, “I have to try to teach my students that multitasking doesn’t really work, but it’s hard to get them to accept that point.” And if I understand that point correctly, then doesn’t the next sentence contradict it? If “multitasking and its euphemism, ‘time management,’ have become goals across the pedagogic field,” then aren’t teachers trying to teach something (multitasking) that Mullen has just (and rightly) said is impossible? Maybe that’s the point, though. Maybe Heller needs to say that Mullen has problems convincing his students because all the other teachers are promoting multitasking. Also: since when is “time management a euphemism — “euphemism”? What does Heller think that word means? — for “multitasking”? I’ve never thought those words were synonymous. And then the following sentence, about the redesign of the SAT, has nothing to do with either multitasking or time management, so I believe some kind of transition was needed there. The most unclear sentence of all is the last one — I have no idea what it means. I don’t know what he means by “narrowing” or what the phrase “emergency about where we look” could possible denote.

What a mess!

What’s going on here? How did Heller, a professional writer, and his editors let a passage this inept make its way into print? My guess: They don’t want to say that our society is gripped by a “crisis of attention” because that’s the kind of thing that Moms and Dads and Boomers and Luddites and … well, conservatives say, so they disavow that language and try to replace it with something else, anything else. But if you look at the whole paragraph, the only conclusion you could reasonably draw is: Holy shit, we’re in the midst of a crisis of attention!

Because 1999 used Twitter for identity, I couldn't use it. I also couldn't use Radio, because it ran on Windows and a now-obsolete version of the Mac OS. It's made me think that maybe in a few years or even months you might not be able to use FeedLand or Drummer. Then I thought about how I can better future-safe them for users. And that led me to adding a simple feature to FeedLand that will help if a FeedLand server you depend on should go off the air. See the next post, below.