9.30

[Airbnb is sponsoring five volunteers (practically randos, they assure us) to go on a trip to the Antarctic plateau to look for evidence of microplastics. I saw the advertisement and nearly fell down. I have already submitted my application. It reads thusly:]

I am under no illusions that the proposed research trip is easy. I anticipate that it would be the most difficult thing I have ever done. I have read a half dozen books about polar explorers and research expeditions, watched documentaries, and perhaps overwhelmed with questions an Antarctic research pilot I happened to meet. Apsley Cherry-Garrard is a hero of mine. Some of my best anecdotes are about Shackleton. I know that our southern continent is inhospitable and terrifying, and yet not thirty seconds passed after I learned of this opportunity before I started writing this application.
There’s a reason why I felt I had to fill this out. I work with kids. I’m a teacher during the school year and a summer camp worker during the summer (I can’t get away from it; I’ve been at camp for ten years now). And every time I tell a student or camper that they’re capable of more than they could dream, I have to believe it. But to say a thing is very different from living it. I want to be able to tell my students that, when the opportunity showed itself, I ran full-bore at the most unachievable dream I had. If I can do that, I can implore them to do the same, to believe in themselves, to believe that other people will see their worth, that with a dash of luck even the stars are within reach (metaphorically).
Three years ago, I did something I believed to be similarly inconceivable. I piled everything I had onto a bicycle and set off from Massachusetts to get to California in three months. I was alone, with no direction and less cycling knowledge. Every day was a battle with fate, a desperate flailing for control of my life in an unfeeling world. It’s cliché, I know, but the sudden end to my marriage and a barely-constrained self-loathing had manifested in a four thousand mile journey to, I suppose, “find myself.” I didn’t. There’s nothing mystical in doing something grand and difficult. There is no secret to such a thing, only luck, privilege, and sacrifice. My battle with fate, giving in to luck and giving up comforts and company and money more and more every day in the pursuit of a wild dream—these things do not get easier. Certainly, they are difficult, but they merely are.
In short, the science is fascinating, the ideas are aspirational, the results likely to be troubling. The trip is worthwhile in itself. But as much as I would explain my scientific bona fides, as much as I would explain my outdoor acumen, it would simply eclipse the larger truth. It has long been my unspoken dream to travel on the Antarctic plateau. I scarcely dared breathe of such a thing for fear that even the possibility of it was too fragile, that my saying such a thing out loud may destroy the reality of it. I breathe it now.

[Hey, you should apply too. Why not? What could you possibly lose but time, and you stand to gain a dream. That's a trade I would take every day.]

9.26

I wrote a poem about a poison fish, as a pun in French. It was only slightly clever, but it was mine, and my phone deleted it. I saw it on the screen as I reopened this app and then—
Into the ether. Gone.
I will be the only human who ever reads that poem, which was a unique combination of words and sound shapes. I am treated to an endless string of beautiful moments that are useless and worthless, and I think it is better far to enjoy them than to throw my phone in rage.

9.25

Fortune favors, he told. Four coons savor the bold.

Poltroons quaver and fold.

9.23b

[I just watched Arctic with Mads Mikkelssen. It joins All is Lost with Robert Redford in a list of grueling survival procedurals that hold a very special place in my heart (not least because I love polar exploration stories and thinking about sailing).]

But I want a grueling survival procedural about a woman, please, and don't feed me any of that Hunger Games trash, please. And I've already heard Adrift isn't up to snuff, The Shallows misses on all my favorite silent procedural nonsense, and Wild . . . I don't know, friend. I may give it a shot.

I'll tell you what I want.

A frontier family. The last wagon out of the high mountain valley before the fall snows close up the pass, and the visitor says "I'll be back come June." Maybe she sends them away with a big jar of peaches from the orchard that has shown its first fruit this summer.

Fire.

I picture that she spends the first night maybe hunched over in the burned up husk of their house, curled up with her head on her knees. I imagine that she claws through the ash for the shovel and has to make a crude handle just to bury whoever was taken by the fire. I imagine that she takes the horse up to the ridge where she can see the pass, maybe she even tries to ride through, and she has to turn back. She has a month, maybe, before the snows will kill her.

I imagine that she slowly reassembles a life, buoyed by little bits of her old life that she finds in the charcoal, and sometimes she'll pull out something simple and inexplicable like a big jar of peaches and she'll just weep. I picture her meticulously setting snares in the woods and felling trees and learning how to build a fire with nothing.

I see her losing the horse.

I want a story that drives her just exactly to the brink and then tips her over it again and again, just like these stories should, and she reacts in exactly the way she would—not masculine, exactly, but a sort of feminine strength that usually plays badly in films because the person writing has no idea what they're doing, or perhaps they think that being strong also means being an asshole, or maybe because they don't let the actor have space to actually be strong. I want the actress in the situation with the solution and to let the actress play how she would play it. Not strident and soricine. Not standoffish and mean. Not an asshole. Who would she be these things to? There is only her. Hollywood can't ruin her by making her an uncomfortable send-up of herself. But we would see something distinctly feminine, perhaps, in actions that are taken for necessity because they are the only actions to take, even though they are the actions that anybody would take to survive, whatever their gender presentation or identity, in such a situation. I want to see it because I wonder what the actress would do. I want to see, isolated, idealized and impossible, strength on a feminine palette.

I see her giving up, starving to death, laying down to die, and seeing that jar of peaches again where it rolled back into the corner of her rough shelter, and she eats them, the whole jar, with her hands, the juice running down her elbows and freezing on the floor, and she's shaking and her eyes are deep in her gaunt cheeks.

The peaches are the turning point she needed.

I believe that when the spring roars back to her valley, she hears three gunshots from up in the pass shouting welcome back, and she just sprints. She drops the adze she fashioned from a piece of the old sink or whatever and she just runs pell-mell up the trail towards the returning visitors. She rounds a bend and just collapses in the road, and she says something courageous and expansive and overwhelmed as their wagon rolls around the corner ahead of her. Something breathed, something from an unfamiliar voice that hasn't heard human speech in seven months, something like

I lived.

And maybe, if we're very unlucky, the visitors will bundle her up into their wagon and place her again firmly in her role as the feminine, and we will be left with a scene of her being laced into a borrowed dress in the house she built with her own hands while the male visitor takes all the credit for emptying her snares and the female visitor degrades what she's accomplished with her stark disbelief. And our hero will cry, and the female visitor will grasp her hand and say "I know, dear, I know." And she won't, not at all, but we will, and we will cry, and nothing we can do will fix it because catharsis belongs to the author and he has withheld it from us and he is a vicious beast who wants to make us suffer even in the heart of salvation. He wants us to taste the bitter ash of living.

That's all I want. Is it too much to ask?

9.23

There was, somewhere in Nathan's bag, a solution to the current problem. He just knew it. Maybe the pencil sharpener in the front most utility pocket, or the metal straw in the water bottle, or the small pocketknife on a lanyard at the bottom of the bag. All these were useless to him now that he had thrust the bag into the lair's front entrance, not counting on there being a back entrance.
"Oh, bother," he said, and he felt it was a very keen understatement indeed.

9.22

Dream, 22 of Sept, 1884
It seems to me, now, that the divorce was ever among my chiefest sorrows. Even at my blackest moments, I found I could rely on her to bring on a deeper darkness still. And she was game for it! I could not escape her all-too-familiar silken cloutch.
Imagine my surprise, then, when on the night of the twenty second of November of last year I was harried from my bed by a frenzy of banging on my door. Even as I stepped to the threshold, the clatter increased to fever pitch, and throwing the latch and door together, I espied there upon the manor grounds and well into the carriage path besides nothing; save for this single porcelain feather laid in great haste and still spinning slowly upon my step in the gloom. I closed and relocked the door, gripping my key with ghostly knuckles and pallid face, and, returning to my bed, was greeted by her sudden reappearance in my life as a corpse. Of course, I called upon the police immediately, and they have called upon Scotland Yard, and Lieutenant Cuthings has called upon you. The remainder of the case should be familiar to you if you have maintained a familiarity in the past four months with any of the major newspapers, save these scant details: first and chieftest, that as a bachelor, of course I maintain some household, but the cook has always slept in some outbuilding built by Spanish immigrants in the last century, the maid takes her leave until well into the midmorning and changed her schedule none that day, but, as the papers could never have gotten wind of it excepting to his shame, my valet had taken to occupancy of some mean hovel just down the carriageway while he and I worked out a petty labour dispute. It was, in fact, his place that I called second, and that is why he arrived, just as sergeant Andrews did, to find the front gate barred and the porcelain feather still spinning softly in the icy blast of ill wind that curled around my front door in the fell autumn wind. We have managed to keep little else out of the papers, but I have hope that seeing the body and the estate will bring you further clues than even those insatiable newspapermen were able to unearth, and to do so without ruining the reputation of my servants, such as they are, or of my recently deceased ex-wife. For myself, the damage is done, come what may.

Yours,
Sir Carlton Weigton of Lambraith Manor

9.16b

Whether I write here or not is just fine. Whether you read it or not is just fine. Any outcome is meet and good, and all have either been preordained or completely unseen, and either way is indistinguishable, and both would come to an equivalent end. This is what is meant by zero.

I have not been sharing my deep self with you. That takes time, and time is valuable and valueless, and I also don't currently feel a burning need to share my deep self with anybody, to be honest. But of course I want to share my deep self with somebody. I just don't want to share it with anybody, partially because that involves the onerous act of sharing it, and also because I don't feel a need for anybody I know right now to have my deep self. And finally, I'm not sure I have a deep self currently, as I interact as authentically as I can with each person as I'm with them and then I don't feel the need to reach back to them when they're not with me. At the end, though I dislike this course of action, it, too, is zero. At some point, everyone I know will no longer count me among their friends, or they'll be dead and won't count anything. This is zero, and also zeroes out the value that may have been, positive or negative.

I hope you understand that I don't want to feel guilt about having not written you long letters and I don't want to feel guilt about having written or writing any in the future. I hope you understand that I don't need to feel satisfied about doing so or not doing so either. It merely is, and the value of either action is zero.

The value of pointing out that something is zero might be negative. I hope you don't dislike that I have pointed it out. But I suppose it is actually zero.

You understand, I think. The two of us are at least Buddhist enough to communicate that much to each other in the overlap of our vocabularies.

Why are yous o concernet with speling everything right <"right" is not an adverp but in that space an adverp need and thus i cock up the senentce

Why do commas , need t,o go an,y whyemr,e,e?

I am concernet that if I told you a word was speled differently than how you had spelet it, you would take my word for it, even if I lied.

I would not lie. By spelling this sentence "correctly," I have told a small lie. Or perhaps not.

Both my concern and the value of your taking or not taking my word for it are zero. You are free to feel whatever you wish and that is meet and just. Whether I lie or not is zero. I will not, and that is nothing. It changes naught.

You asked what question I would ask god, or God, or deity, or numos? I would not need to, unless It existed as an entity to be asked. It does not, and thus I do not. What exists is all that exists, and that is just and meet. But if It existed as an entity to be asked, for the asking, and that was Its purpose and mine was to ask, I would want to know if I should reduce or increase entropy, though I would understand that any answer I received would be unknowable and both correct and incorrect. I suspect I should reduce entropy. I suspect it is the end of religious thought. I suspect it [It] is the most succinct way to explain my own religious thought.

All things will become zero. All things are zero. I will behave as though they are not so that perhaps, for that moment, in that place, they can be, and not zero. And the less zero there is, the more I am, and the more I am, the more there is space for God in it, and the more chances I have to see God. Maybe this is too esoteric and ephemeral, but I want to love others not because it is the right thing to do but because it affirms and repairs their existence as long as I do so, and in that is God. Destroying love or denying existence creates zero, and in that there is no space for God, at least, not the God that I have seen. But perhaps the absence of God and the presence of entropy are both one as meaningless as the other and the entire question is moot and the value proposition between the two is zero, but I have not nor will behave in such a way. I will reduce entropy and deny zero just as I will not lie. Why?

I do not know. It merely is, and this, too, is zero.

9.16

Sam slipped her fingers through the feathers of the ferns, raking the tiny bits of leaves to clear the old, dried detritus from the new, green growth. She sighed as they drifted slowly to the floor of her small apartment. It was nice to have green things about, but now she had to sweep. Tradeoff.

9.12

I squish ants. I comprehend that it is unintentional. I understand that it is meaningless. I function as though it doesn't matter.
But destroying a life feels wrong. But life is merely a complex amalgam of chance events no more meaningful than a series of interconnected switching networks. But life is rare, and rare is precious.

I want to reduce entropy.
I want also to unsquish that ant.

9.10

Quincy

I have often been described as oppressively normal. I describe myself that way, and that's how I know it's true. I read books, but not as often, I guess, as other people do, and my friends tell me that the characters in those books are so often kooky and intelligent that they have become memetic. Ooh, another introspective teen. I haven't read enough of these books to confirm that, but Franky Fish Fingers tells me its true, and she never steers me wrong. Franky is interesting. You would be better off reading her journal to find out why she is named Franky because her father ran away from the military and the Argentinians put out a warrant for his arrest so that he can never go back to South America. But you are not reading that journal. For your sake, I hope that you can at least read this and not think to yourself "another one of those obnoxious smart kids who are so quirky and can't let well enough alone and have to tell you that they're intelligent rather than just being obviously intelligent (Knute tells me this is the main problem with such books and films. A narrator is forever popping up and gushing over how well that ten-year-old can spell or how many equations this tweenager has memorized, as though that's intelligence, somehow, a thing the author can look up and report, and not, as it occurs in the real world, the terrible speed with which the person deduces, connects, indicates, processes you down to a fine powder and then devastates you with one sentence or two. Anyway, that's the kind of intelligence Knute favors and the reason why he's friends with me. I do not threaten him with this. Anyway.) I've double-sided the page and I have room for one more sentence. Miss Turnbill, I would like an A on the [editor's note: here the text becomes very small and turns on itself like an Ouroboros on the last line of the ruled paper] recent test, but I am oppressively normal.