Jay Rodan's Blog

Cristiano Ronaldo’s career-hobbling interview with ghastly celebrity bottom-feeder Piers Morgan, in which the Gelled One denounces just about everybody in the Manchester United orbit as being guilty of the grave sin of under-appreciating Cristiano Ronaldo, comes as the latest in a long line of similarly petulant outbursts on the part of rich and powerful men. This most delicate of entities, the Aggrieved Male Millionaire Ego, is having its moment, and it isn’t pretty. From insurrections, to invasions, to racist invective and corporate suicide, the millionaire’s meltdown generates radioactive fallout that has very real effects. From Trump, to Putin, to Kanye, to Musk, Ronaldo has contributed to the brain-melting toxicity of what may one day be described as The Age of Grievance. What characterizes this ear-splitting era? To begin with, a certain infantile narcissism. Not a boot smashing a face, but a cigar-chomping baby gushing crocodile tears, forever. Much maligned on the part of right-wingers as a symptom of identity politics and wokism out of control, the cancer of complaint has metastasized to every inflamed organ of society, including those on the right side of the body politic. These men, all conservative, are reflecting in their gilded mirrors precisely the politics of animus that is supposed to animate the campuses and streets of the nation. This strange state is our new Leviathan, a self-regarding era of internet capitalism that has made literally everyone a narcissist. The Age of Grievance is the resentment of all against all, and proves that, if nothing else, at least resentment is bipartisan now. Or, to be more accurate: ressentiment is. And it is everywhere.

Ressentiment, while similar to its cousin, resentment, has slightly broader shoulders, as popularized by Nietzsche. It is more systemic in nature. It is a revolt against privilege on the part of the disenfranchised. Nietzsche sees it as a product of Judeo-Christian morality, a principled revolt against power that he dubs slave morality. Listen to Fox News, and America has apparently perfected this Nietzschean slave morality, this ressentiment. From campus safe spaces to cancel culture, it has become axiomatic on the outraged right that outrage and sensitivity to offense is a strictly leftist phenomenon. And, let’s be clear, it is that too. But what then are we to make of this new figure, the ranty millionaire? Let’s call him Grievance Man. His is the discourse of ressentiment rendered in the service of his unbounded narcissism. He feels justified in speaking not because of his lack, but precisely because of his abundance. In an era in which the Supreme Court equates money and speech, he speaks his world into submission. Or he feels he should. And when it doesn’t listen, there’s hell to pay.

Where ressentiment functions among socially fragmented movements as a tool of revolt (despite often feeding capital in that process), the new ressentiment is conducted by the wealthy on behalf of power, as a tool of subjugation. Which is to say, this new ressentiment works for capital itself. It might be called capitalist ressentiment. What separates plain old resentment from true ressentiment is that the capitalist ressenter claims that his grievances, while personal, are actually also universal. They are being conducted in the service of the people. This is the element of supposed principle required to systematize grievance into ressentiment. Grievance Man claims to be populist, to be working for the masses, while in reality he is in it for himself. But in his populism, the ressenter may actually raise some good points. Trump’s criticisms of a rigged system, Putin’s impression of being goaded by Nato, or Musk’s complaints about dwindling free speech might have a basis in validity, but none of these are their actual objectives: these are the cover. Their objectives are strictly narcissistic. And they break things in the process, because the widening gyre of their ressentiment always spirals out of control. Thus Ronaldo’s complaints against the Glazer family’s rapacious evisceration of a storied club are fair enough, but it doesn’t follow that he should savage everyone else too, including his talented manager, who has done an extraordinary job of maintaining sang-froid in the face of the striker’s failing form and flailing tantrums while ushering him kicking and weeping toward retirement, or Saudi Arabia, or anywhere else that will pay him half a mill a week to miss goals he would once have scored in his sleep. He has decided to burn the house down, which feels an awful lot like Trump’s assault on Congress, Putin’s assault on Ukraine, whatever it is Ye is doing, or Musk’s assault on (sorry, purchase of) Twitter. There is much to be said about capitalist ressentiment, but its howl is getting louder, and increasingly dangerous. To the narcissist, to speak while wealthy is to shape the world. When the world refuses to be shaped, the speech becomes a scream. Or in Ronaldo’s case, it becomes a pouty scream into the doughy pillow of famous Piers’ ample bosom, forever.

This is Cannes. Here in the white-hot maze there is only one law: the law of film. And only one being: the being of film. Here, the hallucinating denizens are melted into one many-limbed mass: the young filmmakers in shoes of cracked skin; the lascivious producers attached to immaterial makeshift funds, windy-worded rulers of unruly craft; the director who hates the films he isn’t making and haunts every party like an anemic ghoul; the actors who stagger swaggeringly, gushing with scruffy neuroses, hoping to be discovered past life’s now-hobbled prime aboard slowly-sinking ships — all congealed into one vast, virile, wounded chimera.

Here you will find the sales agent dressed as an Armani bell-boy, while his assassin-double disappears in the middle of the mad night to rendezvous with the even madder financier. Here in Cannes, on the blue-sickled bay that scythes ambition like stale blood, are halting beauties drifting between parties with hazy expressions. Here are murderous lemmings goading anxious documentarists with films about time’s cliff-face and suicidal tribes. Or grinning documentarists who have been to outer space and sleep alone at the North Pole under lonely and engorged stars. Or the man with the film poster on a sandwich board, wandering around as if he lost a bet, which he has, forever, hawking either an unmade film or a mirror of hunger. In this celluloid, despoiled jungle you will find many such radiant screens crackling with impossible subjects. Regiments of directors bivouacking together in the polyamorous hills, their digs spilling over with fast food, slow agony, and delayed tumescence. Salaried employees of film companies from cold climates dancing dementedly at the sweltering wedding of secret and unmet relatives. It’s all one big adulterous party swooping from lubricated streets to slick abandoned rooftops where no one is sure how they arrived, and no one knows how to leave. Armies of desperadoes claiming to know so-and-so who said they could get in, even though they aren’t on any list but St. Peter’s, their names shrouded in five-o’-clock shadow, their tuxedos exhaling humiliation like a dying chimney, powerless and reified among scorning subjects.

Here are starlets being made up in rooms by fawn-faced sycophants. Agents being made up in lobbies by sleek-haired arsonists. The dazzling, golden ones now bursting in extreme slow motion upon the scene. Or the ones who burst long ago, withered as stiffened fruits, dry as dead horns in hands of chalk. Or the local boys and girls of summer lured from scorched hills to parade along the Croisette, clutching each other in sweaty argot. The villains disguised as financiers. The old ones with professionals adorning withered and windfalled arms. The hunter prowling for profane believers. The adulterers that have left wives and husbands outside of cinema’s ever-soiled bed, and lie wrapped here and panting, sheeted in screens, overlooking the oedipal waters, beasts swaddled on yachts in silken commerce like concupiscent dolls. The ones here for tusks of art, discussing books unread with minds hard and ivory-smooth. Or those old horror buffs with ironical gazes beneath ragged hair beside sad, sacrificial partners. This is Cannes: these students with glistening eyes and cigarette-smoke dreams tall as super-yachts; these roots of desire yanked from cracked and wanting earth; these immense dancing fools breaking naked waves in cobbled streets between grand hotels where silent stars gaze with loud longing; this magnificent trembling of unrealized futurity; this sudden swelling of signs upon jewel-edged shores; an apparition of crushed husks oozing soft centers where hummingbirds and crows feed. This: overflowing crater of imagination. This: visceral kiss in the darkness of a screening-roomed submarine. This: swarming miasma of scars and tongues.

And somewhere in all this, yes, there are films. Tiny films brimming with schools of thought, or fantastic films stuffed with mountains of motorcycles. Big films with planeloads of sublimated bullets that seek victims’ hearts like critics. A cinema of slow donkeys devouring root and branch, bulb and stamen, petal and pistil; a cinema of swift pistols and slim-shanked shamen. Flowers of light devoured by hustlers, hit-men, hopefuls, the happy, the hateful; hatfuls of charlatans, stained with salt and sugar. Yes, this grand almanac of narratives slung on the sloped shoulders of legionnaires marching sad-souled into the blood-warm sea, chanting to czars of the ambush of art and all these capitalist wounds exquisite as roses. This, this is Cannes: mutant guardian of the last labyrinth of cinema.

Act Two. A Cowboy in Space.

(Or, Parenting in the Apocalypse, Part Four)

Scene 1) Alien Vandal Sex Truants

My daughter and I were discussing ideal neighborhoods to live in. I suggested the 6th Arrondissement. She suggested the planet Venus. Because there’s more space, silly.

It made me think of our cosmic neighbors, and the Pentagon’s bizarre publicity stunt this year in which it released videos of supposed UFO’s during a global pandemic. Because it’s clearly so relevant to this moment. After all, in the videos, the aliens pop up at a safe social distance of several miles, staying just far away enough from the camera to remain obscure fuzzy dots, before they shoot off at whiplash-inducing speeds. Despite the clear and present danger posed by quickly disappearing fuzzy dots, it raises questions.

Firstly, are aliens just reptilian pranksters? Is E.T. joy-riding through our atmosphere with no object other than to mess with us, one long green middle-finger extended playfully out the window of the space-voyaging equivalent of his dad’s Camaro? And if so…er, why? Don’t they have anything better to do?

Presumably, these aren’t the same aliens who conduct all the experiments on superior beings like David Icke? Or are they? Are these Pentagon videos then filled with drunk alien doctors who have run out of samples and are tired of hitting alien golf balls off the deck into hyperspace while sipping Spiked Gatorade? Dude, get the landing craft, let’s go buzz the Shaved Apes!

Secondly, if these are our cosmic neighbors, one has to ask: are they idiots? Why do such stupid shit? Who goes to the physics-baffling trouble of inventing a spaceship to travel clear across space-time to another civilization only to fuck off really fast when spotted? Did they steal that UFO? Or are they actually all truant teens high on some hallucinogenic interplanetary fauna scraped off of random asteroids?

Perhaps other planets are over-stuffed with boneheaded kids stealing their parents’ spacecraft at midnight and joy-riding thousands of light-years to cruise our atmosphere’s main drag shouting insults. Up YOURS, earthlings! Your evolution SUCKS!! If so, I’m pretty sure some of those reptilian pranksters were masquerading as humans at my high school.

Okay, I admit there may be more purpose to these visitations than that. They may be parking their spacecraft behind the moon and getting it on. Perhaps it was the embarrassment of having seen alien sex-fiends behind our satellite that caused NASA to stop sending us there. Damn, how do we explain this? And if the earth is just a nice view for some alien heavy-petting I’ll bet they’re going to feel really silly when they sneak back to their home planet, prepared to hang up the keys to the UFO on the clothes hook, only to find that their solar system has been devoured in the roaring death-throes of a Red Dwarf.

Anyone who believes we are not alone in this cosmic neighborhood has to explain why the neighbors are so damn quiet. Aside from dot-like apparitions at high altitudes, they are neither seen nor heard. They are the equivalent of old humbugs on Halloween who sit in the dark with the lights out rather than talk to the kids. When we do finally locate intelligent life in the universe, we should do the same to them. Ring the doorbell and run away. Maybe leave a turd on the porch. Payback time, Grandpa.

A more charitable view would be that proposed by David Bowie. That our cosmic neighbors are just really thoughtful and considerate. After all, the last thing anyone would need is a rager taking place on Mars for, like, millennia. Or maybe it did, and the UFO’s we see contain the aliens who didn’t get laid, and now they’re streaking across our front lawn with their balls out and are destined to rush screaming like fools covered in Sharpie-scrawled obscenities into some invisible black hole while lost on their way home.

Ufologists need to explain all this, along with the name Ufologists. But I suspect urologists would have more cogent answers than Ufologists. After all, they’re paid to study the behavior of dicks.

I grew up around psychics and those who were certain that we had neighbors not of this earthly realm. Astral neighbors. Invisible others. These neighbors supposedly inhabit a nebulous realm just beyond this physical one. We can’t see them, and we can’t prove they exist. They don’t talk to us any more than the aliens do, but every now and then we see them getting into the elevator at the end of the metaphysical corridor. Or closing the door to the broom closet. Then we can’t see them again. Which raises more questions.

For example, why exactly would a ghost bother haunting anything? What’s the point of scaring humans shitless, other than for giggles? If they really wanted to impart for some reason that, say, a grisly murder or something had happened somewhere atmospheric, why not just visit during the day with a bunch of flowers and a note? “Hi! Just wanted you to know, there was an ax murder in this bed. It was me, but I’m immaterial now, so it doesn’t matter. Just needed to get that off my phantom chest. Anyway, have a great night!”

Our cosmic neighbors are clearly shy. And quiet. And weird. Like serial killers. Perhaps they are on the run. Or perhaps the apartment building is actually empty, and we’re the only tenants. How are we supposed to know, unless they bloody well speak up? Imagine you lived in a small commune of squatters on the ground floor of an empty apartment building. You never saw anyone else around, but you heard creatures rummaging through the empty rooms above you, and you were told by the wild-eyed Cat Lady that they belonged to other tenants that only she can see. Would you assume she’s right? Or would you just think you might need to get out of the commune before it’s too late?

My aunt was schizophrenic, and most of her neighbors existed in her head. I lived with her when my parents would leave me for periods with my gran in Durban, South Africa. My gran lived in a tall tenement building built around a central column where you could see across concrete balustrades to the neighbors. Sometimes you saw the neighbors being dangled off the balustrades by other neighbors. Once, it even happened to me. And those were just the neighbors you saw.

The unseen neighbors in the apartment were what my gran, who was psychic, called poltergeists. The real neighbors were bikers and chain-smokers and kid-danglers who came over to listen to vinyl disco records that my DJ uncle played before he went to prison, but it was the invisible neighbors who made a racket and kept us up all night. By rearranging the pots in the kitchen.

I don’t know why they did this. No one gave a credible explanation. When I saw Spielberg’s movie of the same name, I realized that they just wanted you to live in the cosmic background radiation of the cathode ray tube, and this made a kind of sense because that’s where people spoke to my aunt from.

Later, I came to believe that the dim nether-realm where poltergeists dwell is filled with frustrated interior decorators who can’t visit revenge upon working-class psychic families that have beads instead of kitchen doors, and so spend all night shuffling kitchenware from one cupboard to another and then rattling the cups to keep them awake out of spite. Then I realized that was just television in general. I’m still looking for answers.

Scene 2) Close Encounters of the Garbage Kind.

I’ve been blessed with colorful neighbors. I’ve had a neighbor try to kill me while high on PCP and a neighbor save my life by smelling a fire. When my wife and I first moved to LA we rented an apartment near the beach in Venice. The guy downstairs wore low-cut skinny jeans and never, ever, a shirt. I mean I actually never once saw him wearing a shirt in an entire calendar year.

Sure, he was shredded, but he overplayed it. I kept forgetting his name, so I called him Asscrack, because it was one of the two memorable things about him. Asscrack was in training for American Idol and came home to practice Poison’s masterpiece ‘Every Rose Has Its Thorn’ on a home karaoke machine at 2AM every night. For hours. Cut it out, Asscrack! I’d yell. We got a baby up in here, man! I could literally have said to him that we had a particle generator for all it meant to him.

When my second daughter was born, I decided we couldn’t spend years here, watching Asscrack’s abs slowly become gelatinous and his toned butt start to bulge over the top of his jeans like icing being squeezed in a pastry bag. I envisaged a bearded, flabby, forty-year-old, shirtless Asscrack singing Every Rose in his living room at 2 AM, and instead of becoming angry, I just became sad. I couldn’t let my daughters see that. It was time to move on.

We’ve lived in the Santa Monica mountains ever since. Now that we all live and study and work at home, those same daughters appear and disappear in the house like stage magicians conjuring trash. They’re really good at it. With more trash than our bins can accommodate, I naturally thought about sneaking some into the neighbor’s bins. Isn’t that why you have neighbors? What else are they for? For God’s sake, there’s a pandemic on. We have to pull together. We’re all in this together, people.

There are three mysterious bins on our road whose origins are obscure, so I planned a lightning strike. I had to hit the ground running, like Operation Entebbe. I pressured the seven-year-old to keep watch. We prepped our excess trash, hand-signaled that it was Go Time, and I rolled out onto the dirt road SAS-style. I found myself staring at a masked man in his sixties with heavily dyed black hair, holding a trash bag. My mouth opened and closed silently.

I’m Barry, he said.

Hi, I said, hoarsely. Jay.

Taken a while, he said.

You could say that again. It’s taken thirteen damn years. It’s taken three presidents, two dogs, and one Apocalypse.

I live on the other side of Dan, he said.

Oh? I said. I guessed someone lived there.

The rest of the landscape is populated by trees, coyotes, and a jogger named Trent who wears very short shorts and no shirt, just like Asscrack didn’t. The main difference is that Trent owns things, including a truck with a bumper sticker declaring him to be a lifetime member of the NRA. He still wants to lock Hillary up, presumably for her crimes against internet servers. What he ignores is his egregious crime against shorts. They didn’t ask for this, and they don’t deserve it. Trent does more harm to male shorts than the 1970’s ever did, and that was a lot.

Barry and I sort of shrugged at each other like chimps. I returned to my daughter, who was looking on with a puzzled expression. Who was that, she asked? That, I said, was Barry. Is he our neighbor? Yes, I said, that’s our neighbor. But we don’t know him, she said. Silly, I said, you don’t know neighbors. They just exist in an abstract neighbor-void of pure potentiality.

But I know Valeria, she said. That’s the new Russian neighbor who moved in next door. That’s different, I said. We bumped into them when they were moving in. That’s how you meet neighbors. By accident. But didn’t her father come over with a fish wrapped in newspaper? she asked. Well, yeah, but who knows? I said. That might have been a threat. Like when you threatened the Easter Bunny? she said. Oh come on, that was just for everyone’s safety, I said. You were sharing chocolate eggs and I had to point out that if the eggs contained Covid-19, the Bunny could technically be arrested for conspiracy to commit an act of bioterrorism. He could get renditioned at midnight to Guantanamo Bay where he would languish in caged limbo in a stress-position for the rest of his life, while his bored captors played Megadeth and kept randomly flicking the light switch and taunting him with carrots. Is that what you want? No? Then no egg-swapping. It’s the neighborly thing to do.

Later that same night of the Trash Convention, my daughter and I went out and looked at the stars together, as we like to do. She can identify the planets, while I can identify the sky. She pointed out Venus. I asked her what exactly made it the perfect neighborhood? Well, it’s nice and bright. It’s nearly one thousand degrees Fahrenheit. It’s got a huge cloud of sulfuric acid around it all the time. And the atmospheric pressure might crush you. That sounds horrible, I said. Yes, she said, but you’d have it all to yourself.

Recently, my seven-year-old daughter pointed to my skin and said, I thought that was black. What do you mean? I said. I thought that was black skin, she said. It’s tan, I said. But aren’t you from Africa? Yes, I am. And do people from Africa have black skin? Well, generally, yes they do. So, she said, looking at me triumphantly, it’s black. You just invented a syllogism, baby, I said. Aristotle would have been proud.

This brought to mind another situation, years ago, when my oldest daughter was in elementary school. She was telling me a story, and in the story, she was trying to identify a fellow kid who was African American. She searched for adjectives. She’s tall, she said. She’s funny. She has curly hair. She has nice teeth. Blue shoes. Pigtails. My daughter ran the gamut of adjectives. It never occurred to her to call the kid black, because, to her, the kid wasn’t black. She was something else. Mahogany, perhaps, but definitely not black.

Blackness, as an idea, didn’t exist yet. The category of Black didn’t exist. For her to understand shades of skin color and their connection to an intricate web of historical power structures clustered around ideas of White and Black, she would need to be ‘educated’. The rules of how categories like White and Black work are not personal. They are social. They are formed over hundreds of years. Regardless of how little sense they make, it falls to parents to pass the bullshit on. It’s part of the job. The drivel that is taken for normal in a given society flows through parents like wine and garlic. In this case, the parent was me, and my society is America. In the words of William S. Burroughs: Thanks, America.

Anyone who has tried to explain race to a child knows it isn’t easy. To define whiteness and blackness as categories requires examples and variations. Yes, but is so-and-so black? Why is tan not black? At what point is mahogany black? It’s appalling to see the whole machine of separation settle upon a young child’s mind. It’s worse to feel that one is the conduit through which the system flows. What system? Racism. Because while the concept of race as an identifier of tribal or local affinities is ancient, the concept of race as an external category, as meaning grouped into the “White” or “Black” skin-shade spectrum, evolved in the seventeenth century, in tandem with the slave trade. The slave trade was what European Imperialism, especially British Imperialism, was built on. White racism, as we understand it in the modern world, is a function of White Imperialism.

The roots of racism run deep. The very concepts of White and Black are loaded in Western Civilization. They come with implications cultivated in the binary opposites of our mythologies and languages. Light and dark. Good and evil. Man and woman. As Jacques Derrida, a French Algerian Jew, demonstrated, these binary opposites are not neutral. They are pillars that support a power hierarchy. In each case, the first element is the supposed superior category, and the second the supposed inferior. Language is not neutral but is part of a system of control. This control, via the binary opposites, is baked into our thinking. Thus, when Europeans started colonizing the world, they had a ready-made metaphysics in place with which to justify their capture and enslavements of entire peoples. Hey, they were White and the slaves were Black. Makes sense! Their race justified slavery, no less than Aristotle had when he stated that some people were natural slaves, and some weren’t. The same logic was deployed by British slavers two thousand years later. The same logic undergirds Western Civilization.

The categories of White and Black are essential to Western Imperialism. The categorical violence of racial definitions is part of the apparatus of colonialism. Colonial laws defined the categories and what they meant. This then passed into newly independent nations that no longer had a colonial framework to justify the racism upon which they were built. To preserve it, new institutions had to be developed. The battery of laws passed from 1950 onward in South Africa, for example, sought to codify the racism for a new, freedom-loving Republic. The Office of Race Classification was set up to determine whether a person was Black, White, Coloured (mixed), or Indian (South Asian). These definitions were the key to where you lived, what education you received, what economic status you could expect, and most importantly, the level of violence you could expect to receive from the state. It was the same old system, updated for the Age of Eugenics.

But, just like explaining race to a child isn’t easy, neither, it turns out, is explaining it to an entire nation. It doesn’t take at first. We are more messy than we initially appear. Our genetic inheritances too intermingled. Our social histories too intertwined. The best the Office of Race Classification could manage was that White people were those who were considered white. And Black people were those who were considered African and not Coloured. And Coloured people were neither White nor Black. This tautological genius actually reveals a lot about racism. Race exists because everyone agrees that it exists. A board was established to oversee who was considered what race. It carried out its grim task with results that might be comic if they weren’t sickening. For example, when a child was sufficiently tan, a member of the board might conduct a so-called “pencil test”, in which a pencil was inserted into the child’s hair. If it stayed in place, then the child was considered Coloured. If it fell out, the child was considered White. Congratulations, mom! May I have my pencil back? Of course, even the good burghers of the Race Classification Board fucked it up every now and then.

My father is from Scotland. He has sandy hair and blue eyes. My mother has darker skin than I do. She has thick black hair and brown eyes. When she was a child in South Africa she would sometimes be refused access to White buses. She tells a story of her mother calling her away from some “Coloured” kids one day, saying, ‘they’ll think you’re one of them.’ (Children of different races often played together. They didn’t know yet know how things worked. That awful realization awaited them, along with Boer music, cricket, and taxes.) My mother’s father was a jazz musician who died young, and his background was shrouded in an intriguing mystery. So I did a DNA test and discovered that, while my father is all Celt, my mother is a blend of Dutch, Spanish, French, Malay, and African. We have Malian blood, Khoisan blood (Bushmen), and other lineages. Since my grandfather went too early, there is no way of knowing if he would ever have been categorized as Coloured. But clearly, not to be defined as Coloured meant everything. To be defined as Coloured would have been to be subject to greater state violence. To have horizons erased. In sociology, this is called hypodescent. The automatic assignment by a dominant culture of lower status to children of a mixed union.

These are categories grouping humans loosely around ideas of White European ancestry and Black African ancestry (the same basic logic applies to any alternate melatonin reality that Europeans have found themselves in). Defining race this way is an existential act. Humans are not born White or Black, they are made so in the social arena. To be made so, the subtleties of ethnicity, of appearance, are negated. In practice, White and Black as categories are achieved by denial. They are negative. It is perhaps the categories themselves that inaugurate the violence by which they are preserved. They mean separation, which is what Apartheid means — separateness. Recuperating definitions of White and Black therefore means existential survival.

In South Africa, once the review board had done its work, the new racial identity was considerately printed on identity cards. On buses and water fountains. On beaches. In the social sphere. The police’s task was to enforce the categories. The police were a post-colonial instrument. They were the fearsome power of an expansionist state turned inward, toward a subjugated population. All former colonial powers follow this script. The police in South Africa, like those in America, like those in Brazil, follow this script. They are still subjugating the Black population. It is actually their primary job, because while police are called upon to do everything from checking vehicle registrations to settling domestic disputes, most of these functions could be performed by, say, social workers, therapists, robots, accountants, or trained monkeys. Armed police signal something else entirely to the populace. They signal social control.

America was born of an Empire and became one itself. It continued Great Britain’s sordid legacy of White Supremacy. Its equivalent of the Office of Race Classification were the many versions of Virginia’s Racial Integrity Act of 1924, which was codified into law in multiple states of the old South in the 20th Century. It upheld the one-drop rule, by which a person with even one Black ancestor was considered Black, thanks to the magical category of “invisible blackness”, and therefore subject to greater state violence. Because when slavery was abolished, the idea of White Supremacy didn’t go away. It lingered in the social sphere. In language and mythology. In categories of White and Black that were merely adjusted. The scale was slid. The violence acquired another form. It moved into policing, into economic terrorism. The externally colonized people were made into an internally colonized people.

It hasn’t changed much. If you want to know what a colonial interaction was like in Jamaica in 1840, or Australia in 1880, or South Africa in 1910, you need only watch a routine traffic stop of a Black man by a White officer in one of the countless examples on Youtube, in America today. Every expansionist state has its own internally colonized races. A nation that will dominate the world must believe it has the right to dominate the world. It needs to believe itself superior. So it finds an internal population to subjugate. Jews, Gypsies, Irish, and others have served that purpose through European history. The violence against Blacks in America is the violence of a colonizer toward a subjugated people. This explains the tone of the interactions in all those videos. It really doesn’t matter if the cops involved are considered racist or not. These are not ‘bad apples.’ This is a sick tree. These cops are shock troops of an Empire built on subjugation. The aggressive tone, the immediate escalation, the hand on the weapon, the needless death, are hard to understand otherwise. But it would be immediately apparent to any colonial master. It’s in the DNA of Western Civilization. We’re civilized, and you’re not. We have immunity, and you don’t.

I remember being around twelve years old and living back in Durban again, albeit briefly. I was sitting in the passenger seat of my mother’s black Ford Escort, and we were stuck in traffic, moving slowly up the highway toward our new house in a very White neighborhood in Pinetown. By the side of the road, a Black man was kneeling, while a White man beat him with a whip. No one intervened. He did it because he could. He did it because he was entitled to do so by a racist society. No doubt, the passersby rationalized it. The Black must have done something to deserve it. I hear the same sort of rationalizations in American media today, every time a White officer shoots a Black man in the back, or strangles him on the floor, or shoots her in her own home. The anchors and experts pour over the previous ten minutes of body cam footage to work out what the Black did to deserve it. They rake the Black’s background to find out whether he had ever been arrested before. Whether she had taken drugs. As if these things are to be reasonably taken into account when discussing a summary execution.

To watch the killing of George Floyd is to watch a cold-blooded murder by someone who knew he was entitled to do it. Chauvin knew no one would intervene. He knew he would be protected by his fellow cops, by the police union, by Qualified Immunity (a legal principle that would be familiar to any slave owner). Chauvin stayed firmly on the neck of George Floyd until the man didn’t move anymore, and he and the others knew he had murdered him. The video is appalling. But one has to watch it. Firstly, because violence of this kind is taking place every day, in every city in America, against Blacks. Secondly, because Chauvin clearly knew exactly how to do what he was doing, which suggests he had done it before. Thirdly, the look on Chauvin’s face. The look that says, ‘I’m killing this guy and you can’t do a fucking thing about it.’ Nobody did anything that day in Minneapolis in 2020 for exactly the same reason no one did anything that day in Durban, in 1985. It was assumed that the White had a right to do what he was doing, because he was considered White, and the man on the floor was considered Black. He was civilized, and the dying man was not.

That is Imperialism in action. The people considered Black are still colonized by such violence, in this American Empire. By contrast, the people considered White are hurt too, but in a different way. They have categorical violence done to their minds.

In the same year that I sat in the Ford Escort watching a Black man being beaten within an inch of his life, military vehicles could be seen on the roads. South Africa was being led by a strongman, who was expected to announce reforms to quell the growing unrest in the Black townships, the perpetual glow of burning ghettos, somewhere just beyond the horizon of White privilege. It was a highly anticipated speech. Perhaps he might affirm the inherent dignity of Black people. Perhaps he might ease restrictions, and signal the impending release of Nelson Mandela. But Botha was known as The Crocodile. He was stubborn, authoritarian, and contrary. Instead of announcing reforms, he doubled down. On August 15, 1985, he gave a speech announcing that South Africa was “Crossing the Rubicon.” (An allusion to Julius Caesar’s breaking of the ancient Roman prohibition against an unelected official bringing an army into territory directly controlled by Rome, thus triggering a Civil War, and leading to Caesar’s dictatorship.) Botha affirmed and extended the State of Emergency, which in effect meant the militarization of policing, the suspension of due process and civil liberties, detention without trial, censorship of the media, the curtailing of freedom of expression, etc, etc. This is, of course, the playbook for strongmen. It’s what they learn in strongman school, along with how to wave their hands around while talking, and how to confidently free-associate gibberish in public.

That glow on the horizon is the glow of a burning Empire. Of the end of colonialism. At least in its external form. When my daughter asks me what race is, that is what I think of. I think of a monstrous thought-system that, when it collapses, breeds monsters. I think of the negative categories supported by violence, and what must be lost to regain the vast subtlety, dignity, and nuance of human experience. And then I think, damn the categories. To hell with Western Civilization. You cannot unpick the slave master’s whip. Better to burn it altogether. It is time to think otherwise. To see otherwise. So, what is race? Race is an idea we who are considered White came up with to take other people’s stuff and make them work for us. Baby, race is the reason there’s a revolution.

Act One. The Bear in the Woods.

(Or, Parenting in the Apocalypse, Part Three)

Of course, I knew neighbors existed. I just didn’t have anything to do with them. Why should I? The world is full of people. The fact that some have chosen to temporarily exist nearer to me isn’t all that special. Driving my car I’m surrounded by people who have chosen to take the same road, in the same direction, at the same time. Does that make us close? I don’t think so. I don’t exactly roll down my window and ask if I can borrow sugar. Try shouting ‘you got any sugar?’ at the car next to you in LA traffic. I dare you.

Anti-sociability is a family tradition. For the first decade of my life, the concept of neighbors didn’t exist. Of course, there were Others who occupied the dwellings adjacent to ours, but we moved so often that the whole thing was inverted. Although it was we who moved into their neighborhoods, it happened so frequently that it was really more like they were moving into ours. And what neighborhood was that? Call it Temporary City. We knew it wasn’t going to last, so when Others arrived in Temporary City, we treated them with suspicion.

My parents weren’t the types to go over and introduce themselves with a bottle of wine. They were more the sort to avoid going over while passing a joint. I assumed this was the norm. The reason we didn’t talk to anyone was that they were all sitting at home, stoned, in a haze of Bob Marley and incense, just like us. Temporary City was a really chill place.

The Others were shadowy figures of fascination. The first ones I can remember appeared when I was six years old. One of the really incredible things about following a Swami was that my parents had improbable peers. Cults are great social equalizers, which is one of the under-discussed reasons that they are successful, and were particularly big in the ’80s. Actually, the whole of the ’80s was like a cult meeting led by Gordon Gekko.

By drinking the same Kool-Aid, we counted among our circle nice folks who had actual houses and bank accounts. This is how we ended up in the leafy village of Chipstead, in Surrey, outside of London, in 1979. It was a great big house in which we occupied a room for an entire school year. My parents had the bed and I slept on a mattress on the floor.

The house had a central apple tree in the garden that was continually spurting apples onto the lawn where they would immediately rot. I assumed this was why God had ordered Eve not to eat the apple. It might have rotten bits. It was less of a cosmic no-no than a helpful public service announcement. Of course, this was the same period in which I thought rain was Santa relieving himself on the world. Clearly, my belief system was already crashing.

I could walk to school. The (to me) regally posh lady of the house had a nineteen-year-old post-Mod son with a shaved head and Ben Sherman shirts. He listened to Ska and parked his bedazzled Vespa PX125 outside. I thought it was the most incredible thing I’d ever seen. I couldn’t work out why on earth you’d need so many mirrors, but I liked the way it created a kaleidoscope of images of the road you’re leaving behind. Come to think of it, being a writer is a lot like riding your own Mod scooter through life, minus the skinheads.

My dad had a job as a milkman, which is extinct now, but was once a kind of Amazon delivery of the same thing at the same time every day. It was simpler then. I’d go out in the electric milk float operated by the local dairy at 4.30 every morning. These were once a staple of British life. They were first manufactured in 1901 and for a long time, Britain had more electric vehicles than the rest of the world combined. They were brilliant. In our float, we’d collect crates of aluminum-foil-topped bottles from the dairy to deliver to cozy English houses.

I loved these rides. It felt like we were on a mission together, like a pair of commandos. Delivering the milk acquired the importance of a solemn responsibility. The milk float didn’t have any doors, and although it only went 15 miles per hour, I once fell out of it when my dad took a sharp corner. I landed in the middle of an empty cross-street, but still got up to deliver the milk. After all, without milk for the morning tea, what was left of the British Empire was doomed.

On days when I wasn’t at school, I’d watch the Girl Next Door. She was around eleven and had a blonde ponytail. She lived in a big house with a tennis court. Everything about her existence shimmered in a dewey light. It was like gazing into an incredibly clean Olympus, where groomed, doting parents sipped Pimm’s and cheered a lithe goddess bounding over the court like a gazelle, flinging her racket at balls in super slow motion.

The only place I could get a good look was from the balcony. Up here you could gaze directly into her yard. So I did. Every day. Afternoons were for tennis, and I’d sit on the balcony, following every serve, backhand, and forehand, like an umpire on Center Court. Now, I call this watching, but really it was like stalking. If she knew of the solitary little creep who obsessively spied on her from the balcony every day, she didn’t acknowledge it. On one occasion I actually peed off the balcony rather than go inside and miss a moment. With the benefit of hindsight, I was obviously some kind of pervert, but at the time it just seemed like a logical thing to do.

Living in Chipstead was like being teleported to a Famous Five book. Only there was only one of me. So it was more like The Unknown One. But everything else was the same. The hedgerows with wild berries. The narrow roads and the parish church. Ruddy-faced classmates with names like Giles and Pippa and Roger. One day we abruptly left The Girl Next Door and started renting a room in Edinburgh from a thickly mustached army officer who was seldom at home. When he did return he would do nothing but polish his boots and smoke a cigar and smile at me pitifully, as if to say, stay young, kid. It’s horrible out there. I do my best to pass this look on to other kids to this day.

An ever-changing cast of extras moved in and out of Temporary City. When I was fifteen Temporary City was called Vancouver, Canada. The next-door neighbor was called Mad Mike. He was nineteen and worked in construction. He liked Van Morrison and the Doors. I’d drop by there occasionally to listen to music or hear his stories about working construction. A year later I got a job in construction too, and we’d compare notes. Since he actually knew what the fuck he was doing, the comparisons were pretty short.

Eighteen months later we were preparing to move again, and Mad Mike let me in on his big secret. He had been stealthily building a cabin in the woods on Mt. Seymour. On public land, just across the water from Burnaby. He had done this by patiently stealing construction materials for years and carting them up the mountain on his back, and his camouflaged retreat was now complete. I realized at that moment how he got his first name, but it sounded like utter genius to me. He invited my girlfriend and me to go up there for a night to celebrate. If it seems like the premise of a horror movie, that’s because it is.

My girlfriend Nicky and I drove with Mad Mike to a clandestine spot, parked in the woods, and hiked like sherpas for an hour through dense undergrowth. Mad Mike navigated by tree-tell and path-marks, like a tracker. He had chosen an impressively inaccessible spot. The sort of place you could happily strangle folks in peace, I joked. He laughed. Nicky didn’t. We found the cabin camouflaged in branches. Inside was a well-made safe house. You could picture Jason Bourne growing old here while waiting to be activated. It had an upstairs landing, a bedroom, and a giant stuffed bear.

Mike brought beers, and after a couple of these, he produced the LSD. I had never taken LSD before, but I was reading The Doors of Perception by Aldous Huxley that I had been given by the resident psychic in my mom’s bookstore, so clearly it was preordained. Sure, we were in a murder cabin in the woods with a possibly insane construction worker and there was a giant stuffed bear in the room, but what is the right time, exactly?

When the bear began making faces at me, I wondered if this was the best idea I’d ever had. When the bear began dancing, I felt awkward. Should I dance, too? It would seem impolite not to. So I got up and danced. For possibly two hours, I danced with the Spirit of Stuffed Bear as it explained its totem power to me. I understood with crystal clarity why shamans wore animal skins during ritual initiations. Years later, in the caves at Lascaux, I half expected to see a stick figure of Mad Mike scrawled among the bulls, equines, and stags, holding a beer and a tab.

Bear and I got along well, but when the music slowed it got weird, so I suggested to Mad Mike that we go outside because Nicky had disappeared. We found her hugging a tree that was explaining the whatness of trees to her. We ran naked through the woods and ended up on the structurally unsound roof talking about parallel worlds. Mad Mike said he existed in another dimension as a First Nations medicine man, and with his little hut and his totem animal, I still don’t have a shred of doubt that it’s true. It was a special night. Despite his name, he was one of the sanest people I’ve ever met.

One of Mike’s gifts was to introduce me to the idea of Others as neighbors. Someone who you share an experience with. Even if it’s an illegal cabin and a banned substance. I’m not advocating the use of mind-altering substances, far from it. I’m just saying. If you don’t know your neighbors and have just met them due to quarantine, hallucinogens might be a great ice-breaker. When the world stops ending, show your appreciation by dropping by with a warm “Howdy Neighbor,” and a cup of peyote. It may not be a beautiful day in the neighborhood, but you sure won’t forget it in a hurry!

It’s a strange time when distancing means proximity, and isolation means community. My oldest is nearly at the same age I was when we hiked into Mad Mike’s lair. Her city is not temporary, it’s virtual. She is permanently enmeshed in a digital swarm of others. But the fundamental truth is the same. We don’t simply exist around other people, we carry lessons for them, as they do for us. Hopefully, I went up the mountain that night so she won’t have to. Ever. Seriously, sweetheart. Don’t even think about it…

(or, Parenting in the Apocalypse, Part Two)

Here’s a scary thought. The way things are going, the future of our species just might depend on my ability to impart knowledge to my young daughter. In a few year's time she may be leading a band of brave humans in their bid to re-establish culture while fending off The Infected. And that’s a problem. Because I suck at teaching. Here’s a sample exchange of a recent English lesson: She: farter. Me: No, father. She: That’s right, farter. Me: No no. It’s th… it’s father, you know, like Thor. She: farter, farter, farter!

Forcing a writer to home school is like forcing a chef to teach cats how to make meatballs. It’s a matter of time before she swallows twenty of them and chugs a gallon of beer in an attempt to explode. For the first few days, I was in denial. Don’t you know this stuff? I tried to get through everything as fast as possible. Like speed dating for grammar. Right, fifteen seconds in front of the verbs. Got it? Thumbs up? Verbs are in. Moving on!

Being both impatient and didactic, I typically want to give a really long explanation for everything, but can’t be bothered. So speed-teaching didn’t work. I became a kind of politician instead. I promised rewards I couldn’t deliver. I blamed the previous administration. What the hell have they been doing with my tax dollars? After the democratic phase of my teaching career came the dictatorial phase. I was like a North Korean Cultural Education instructor, indignant that you didn’t know the Supreme Leader shits rainbows. How dare you?

Sure, the dictatorial phase pleased my Inner Gaddafi. Because he could cleverly turn it against me. Look, face it, you’re ruining her, buddy, he says with a shrug. Shut up, I say. None of this matters. We’ll be eating grubs and navigating by the stars soon, so who cares? I’ve noticed that speaking this way to your Inner Child often provokes silence in a room. It makes people uncomfortable, I guess. In such quiet moments, Baby Gaddafi doubles down. You really should be able to teach, you know. Plenty of writers have been teachers. Robert Frost, Stephen King, Kurt Vonnegut, George Orwell. You’re better than those guys? That’s different, I say. It was their job. They were paying The Man. You know, they didn’t actually care about teaching.

Baby Gaddafi smirks and slowly lights a cigar, maintaining eye contact. When your seven-year-old beats you in an argument, you can pretend you’re letting her win. When your Inner Child beats you in an argument and flips you off right after, there’s nowhere to go. So I confess that, fine, I’m bad at teaching. But what do you expect, when I was never any good at learning? I never asked a question in class without trying to make a point. I once fell asleep after five minutes of an art film featuring a lonely monk walking around in the woods. I woke up near the end and he was still in the woods. During question time, I lectured the director about Soviet cinema, despite that I literally hadn’t seen his film. What I should have said was, do you realize your film is a medical marvel? It’s an actual anesthetic. You could license it to hospitals.

Ironically, I learned to read at home. Or not ‘home’, exactly. During that period we were itinerant. For a while, we lived with my gran in government housing in Edinburgh. She was a wonderful lady who gave me slices of white bread with butter on them and a thick layer of white sugar poured on top. My first best friend stole my parents’ savings from under the bed. He was caught because he was playing the big man and buying people bags of chips. My second best friend thought he was Superman and I had to talk him out of jumping off the roof of the council flats. That’s right, Batman talked Superman off the ledge. Later that day, a couple of older boys threw him into a fountain for laughs. Stop that, I said lamely. You want to go in too, Batman? Not really, I said. So Batman watched Superman get sloshed about in a fountain. I caught his eye while this was going on. Coward, he seemed to say. You should have let me jump.

My friends in Edinburgh were thieves and lunatics, but my parents were devotees of a Swami, so when I was six they moved us from the gray council building to the acid trip that was India. I’ve been quietly tripping ever since. From the actual crowds of begging kids, to the sacred cows taking dumps in the street, to the sublime potato rotis, to the monks with fruit dangling from hooks shoved through their cheeks, my imagination lit up like the eyes of an arsonist on Diwali. We traveled from what was then Bombay and woke up watching the sunrise over the Taj Mahal. We took a train filled with extras from Gandhi and a taxi driven by a convict. We arrived in Rishikesh at midnight and took up residence in an ashram.

This was 1980. Thatcher had just been elected. Reagan was about to be. Mark David Chapman had begun stalking Lennon. The mood was changing. Hippies were not what they used to be. A year later, Bagwan would move to Oregon and get a Rolls Royce and a DIY bio-terror kit. Idealism became tinged with another flavor, something considerably more sinister. I loved Rishikesh because it brimmed with odd characters. One of them was a blonde Swedish pilgrim who I’ll call Isabella. She had been asked to hike to the top of a mountain with an Indian yoga instructor I’ll call Raj. She clearly didn’t trust Raj, and for some reason thought that a) it would be a good idea to still go and b) it would be great to bring a six-year-old child with her. As her wing boy. Probably because an ashram isn’t a tremendous place for a young child not content to meditate for six hours a day and smoke weed the rest of it, my parents agreed. Raj arrived with food and water and an appreciative eye for Isabella’s hiking shorts. On the way up the mountain, we passed a dead man with a horseshoe on his chest who looked very peaceful. Should we do something? Isabella asked. No, no, Raj said. It’s too late for that. He was eager to get to the summit, where he had planned everything.

Upon arriving at the simple one-room dwelling atop the mountain, we ate Raj’s food and then he and Isabella got high. He suggested that they do some après-diner yoga together, but she declined. He thoughtfully tried to help her limber up, which is difficult when your subject is squirming. Eventually, he desisted, we rolled out three mattresses on the floor, and the lights went out. For the next two hours, the sounds of scuffling and Isabella’s flat refusals were punctuated by her lilting Swedish accent saying, “Jay, turn the lights on!” I’d dutifully rise and find the switch, illuminating grim tableaux of sweaty Raj in his wife-beater, gazing lustfully at Isabella, who had mummified herself in blankets in an effort to thwart him. This went on until I passed out. I don’t think Isabella slept that night. She woke me around dawn fully dressed and insisted that we leave without Raj. In retrospect, she was clearly trying to escape. But Raj woke anyway, and making no mention of the previous night’s ardors, sullenly dressed and followed us down the mountain, sulking.

I didn’t speak a word of Hindi, so my parents put me in a tiny Indian school. During classes, I would wait until the teacher turned to the blackboard. Then I’d jump out of the window and run around the entire building, climbing in the other window and returning to my chair before she turned around. When I was naturally expelled, my parents faced a dilemma. Wasn’t it more hippy to raise an illiterate unwashed feral child than force the fascist rigors of sentence structure upon him? What would Timothy Leary do? My saving grace was that they were working-class hippies. Hippies that could see the eighties looming on the horizon like a giant inflatable missile wearing shoulder pads and neon pink socks. Hippies that felt the mood shifting too, and wanted in. By the time we returned to Durban, South Africa, where my mom and I were born, I had read an entire cartoon cycle of the Bhagavad Gita and was looking forward to Real School. I was in for a shock.

Firstly, there were only white people in the school. I hadn’t seen so little melanin in one place since the Royal Edinburgh Tattoo. The principal of the elementary school was a guy with a fish decal on his bumper who was always red in the face and screaming at the walls. When the boys misbehaved he made them take their pants down and whipped them across their naked buttocks with a cane. So there was that. And the boys misbehaved a lot. They beat up a Special Ed kid once. They hid the wood-working teacher’s whiskey so that he got the shakes while operating a lathe. Religious instruction consisted of a priest explaining why the Bible supported Apartheid. Broadly speaking, school was a disappointment. I read Frank Herbert’s Dune series instead, and found Arrakis far preferable to Durban. My companions became books. I started social distancing way ahead of the curve.

When South Africa’s innovative blend of Neo-Colonialism and Neo-Nazism started to go up in flames and conscription loomed on the glowing horizon, my parents moved to Vancouver, British Columbia. I expected joyful liberation from an absurdly brutal system and found Vancouver instead. It was like if Hong Kong and Seattle went to a Halloween party dressed as The Lost Boys. There were the Chinese gangs and the Italian gangs. There was a ninja who threw eggs at the blackboard when the teacher’s back was turned and the Hungarian twins who joined a Latin street gang. My mom opened a metaphysical bookstore and got mugged at knifepoint. You know, for all the swag just lying around in those joints. When I learned that Philip K. Dick had moved to Vancouver while experiencing visions of a pink beam of light that he called Zebra who exposed the hidden truth of reality, it made perfect sense. After all, this was the city where William Gibson invented the notion of a vast consensual hallucination called cyberspace. That was just another name for Vancouver.

See, reading science fiction helped me understand a world that I otherwise wouldn’t have understood one fucking bit. And pleasure in reading started at home, with my parents. I was worried that I had spoiled this legacy until I saw my quarantined oldest reading Sylvia Plath’s The Bell Jar the other day. That’s the spirit! Who needs friends? I’ve been practicing anti-social proximity most of my life, and look at me, I’m fine!

So yes, those writers cared about teaching. Because they cared about language. I’m slowing down and learning how to teach it, and becoming a student in the process. Not just of words, but of how they shape us. How they bind us to one another. It’s beautiful, and a privilege. And the stakes are huge. After all, if my youngest daughter does lead a band of survivors across the empty plains of post-viral America, who knows? One day I might be considered the Farter of the Nation.

(or, Parenting in the Apocalypse, Part One)

For years, I lied to my daughter. Sure, call it unsavory. But it remains a fact. To complicate matters morally, it’s a fact of which I am quite proud. Not the lying, that was wrong. But the quality of the deception was so artfully done, it’s hard not to feel a workmanlike satisfaction. These days, you have to find the upside.

It went like this: in the morning I’d dress like a professional. Put on a nice shirt and sweater. Belt my jeans and pack my bag with computer, books, headphones, wallet, and phone. Illusion complete, I would hug her at the door. Kiss her tenderly on the cheek and tell her that daddy had work to do. Grown-up things. Difficult things to understand. Then I would stride purposefully up the garden path, to Do Things. This was always the most delicate part. I knew she was scrutinizing me skeptically from the doorway. Really? What are these things? What do you even do, exactly?

I didn’t look back. Everything depended on whether or not I had heard the door close by the time I reached the corner. If not I would have to actually walk out the gate, close it behind me, and stand there awkwardly. Occasionally, a neighbor would pass by. It was disturbing for both of us. I never explained what was happening, because how could I trust them? This was on a need-to-know basis only. I was a hustler with one mark: my seven-year-old daughter.

If I had heard the door close before I reached the gate, then I just walked straight up into the treehouse. Not just any treehouse. An insulated, painted, decorated, furnished treehouse. The very thing every small child falls asleep each night dreaming about. It’s perfect. It’s electrified. Two decks. Two stories. A view of the surrounding hills. Cedar shingles on its sides like it belongs in a fairy tale. Curb appeal. It has it all. Kids walk by and whine that they want one. Old folk stare wistfully. Supposedly, the guy who built it worked for Disney and built Toon Town. You know, the place kids hate. But it was all mine. I wasn’t going to give that up without a fight. So how to keep it all to myself? More lies. Some real doozies.

For the first six years of my youngest’s life, I maintained that while, okay, yeah, it looked like the perfect place for a young child to play, it might be the last place that a child plays. Because it was unlikely that the poor ill-fated child who wandered up its infernal stairs would ever return. At least in one piece. It was, in fact, a den of horrors. It was a fairy tale tower all right, if you like your fairy tales Teutonic and bloody. A haven for rats. A breeding ground of spiders. Big, fat, black, venomous ones. It was probably cursed by a witch. One day I saw her run skittishly past it, eyes averted, and was satisfied. My ruse had succeeded. Mission accomplished. As far as I was concerned, those tears were collateral damage.

Twelve years before the current apocalypse, I stood with my wife, two babies, and a perjuring real estate agent in that treehouse. Inside, it looked like the place the Hardy Boys grew up in. Maps of treasure on the walls. Bats and balls and the broken ingredients of trains. Wind in the trees whispering aw, shucks on a loop. Beads and Chinese script indicated that after the boys had abandoned it, ma had exercised her chakras in there. Now it was neglected and green. With actual spiders. It was perfect. Exactly what my inner child had been crying out for. More accurately, it was what my inner dictator had been taunting me about. (You should know that the child within this man is a small tyrant who looks and screams like a baby Gaddafi. Call him my Inner Gaddafi.) I turned to my wife and said, writing den. She looked at me amused and said, sweetheart, we have two children. I realized this was true. Damn it. It was reasonable to assume that in a few years' time the little nymphs would be playing yogis happily in the treehouse, imagining themselves part of a Californian cult. Making themselves cups of herbal tea and gluten-free cake. In their cherubic expressions, I saw the disappearing coast of a long-cherished dream. Over my dead body, I said. It was me, or the kids.

I remember being one myself, in South Africa, watching Carl Sagan wax lyrical about space. As the credits rolled I solemnly promised to dedicate my life to cosmic exploration. I soon realized that I had set the bar way too high. So I wrote poems, smoked Gauloises, and pretended to be other people instead. Actors do this on camera because it’s what we already do off camera. It legitimizes our neurosis. Calls it a career. It’s a fantastic way to not grow up. I succeeded in not growing up all through marriage and early fatherhood. I was still not growing up when I stood in the treehouse.

I had earned this refuge. It was going to be mine. A place to write in my journal and work on my instrument. Then, days after buying the house, I was fired from what turned out to be my last film. It was devastating. I worked out and told myself it was a blip. Then the stock market crashed and screenwriters went on strike. I kept working out. Worked on my craft. Worked on me. Worked on my instrument again. When the economy broke, I was already broke, but in fantastic shape. This is what it had come to. Just another shredded loser in Los Angeles being screamed at by his Inner Gaddafi.

We scrounged together barely enough money to take the kids to South Africa and see my parents. The dreams of my childhood had derailed. It didn’t matter that I hailed from the ass-end of Africa and was an autodidact who had traveled the world and hobnobbed with my heroes. I had acted with Christopher Walken, Ben Kingsley, and Samuel Jackson. I had eaten shellfish with Bertolucci in Rome. Chatted with Sting about poetry in Paris. But the child within this man expected more. Much more. He expected Global Domination. The all-female cadre of bodyguards had yet to materialize. The gold-plated shitter had been misplaced in customs. My fleet of Bentleys had been traded for a dusty Pontiac I could no longer afford. My food taster was on a hunger strike. My inner child was going to purge me. And the irony of it all was, his dreams had also been forged in a treehouse.

We moved a lot, but for a while we lived in Durban, South Africa, in a leaky house with holes in the walls, guarded by a huge Monitor Lizard. It was in a bit of jungle sandwiched between toxic smokestacks. There was a mercenary next door who smoked a pipe and had lots of girlfriends. My dad had put up a treehouse in the jungle. He’s a resourceful Scot who cleverly economized in its construction, and it had bits of doors and car parts. Rotted plywood sheets from the house. A place where logging protesters might dwell. Or squatters. To me, it was a Sky Throne. I trained ninjas in it. I wrote a science fiction short story in it about a jaded operative betrayed by the High Priests of Logic. I hid from Bob Marley playing on stoned repeat for two years straight. And I dreamed big. Imagining what my future self would look like, I saw a Sultan. He didn’t have a treehouse, he had an Ivory Tower. He had a balcony and adoring subjects. He was a big fucking deal.

I was not. Returning to Los Angeles, our Green Card application was denied. I couldn’t work, we had no money, and small children. I wrote a screenplay between bouts of self-loathing. We put a doll's house and tea set in the treehouse. My reps let me go. I couldn’t afford acting classes. My wife kept us going through her photoshoots, and I learned how to produce them. When we finally did get the Green Card, the side hustle became a production company. Aside from one trip to Paris for a baffling audition in broken French, my acting goose was cooked. The company did well enough for us to pay off our debts and take holidays. Not the view from the old Durban treehouse, but it could have been worse. Then, we met Jon Avnet.

A neighbor in Topanga, he had produced Risky Business and directed Fried Green Tomatoes. He knew everybody and his business partner was Rodrigo Garcia. At my wife’s suggestion, he read the script I had written while on suicide watch and suggested I submit something to the Youtube channel that he and Rodrigo created. I did. It became a series I wrote for two years called Lauren. It was nominated for awards and won a couple. It starred Jennifer Beals. Oh, that pleased my Inner Gaddafi. He was almost nice to me for a while. I got a lit agent. I got a lit manager. We had another daughter. I sold some scripts. But I was still reticent to call myself a writer. I hedged my bets. What if it didn’t work out? What if this is all a dream, and I’m really a hobo on LSD tripping his balls off under a bridge in Shanghai? You know what I mean? This could all go up in smoke. That’s what the little shit tells me, anyway. He never shuts up

Roald Dahl wrote in a gypsy caravan. Agatha Christie wrote in her bathtub. If I was really gonna own it, I needed my thing. By now, the older girls had become teenagers and only seemed to recognize me intermittently. The treehouse would be my place to hide. I painted it white and put a desk in it. Like a dictator in his last hideout, it was a refuge to rant in. I started writing a science fiction novel. (When this thing is over, we’ll be able to power airplanes with burning paperbacks. I’m doing my part.) It was somewhere I might at least fail in peace. On my own. Just me, myself, and Baby Gaddafi. I earned this.

Flash forward to quarantine. All three girls at home. Everyone walking around shouting non-sequiturs like it’s an avant-garde play. Going delirious out in the wild like it’s Apocalypse Nah-uh. No longer able to pretend to be professional, I just sneak off furtively before dawn. When I return and my youngest asks where I was, I say I was walking. Silence. Where? she asks, eyes narrowing. In the woods, I say. I was walking around in the woods. Aware that this sounds weird, but hoping it will discourage further questioning. And it works! My powers remain undiminished! Until the other day, when I emerged from the treehouse and saw her looking up at me. Her expression was something between Caesar recognizing Brutus and Newton recognizing gravity. Giddily she raced past me into the rat-free lair. Daddy, she said, you’ve been tricking me. I knew you didn’t do anything!

I told her I’m writing a novel. You’ll be an author? she asked. Yes, I said. You’ll write a series, she said. What are you, Max Perkins? I said. What’s it about? she asked. Well, it’s about this jaded operative, I began…

No more lying. That’s something. We may all be living in storm drains huddled around burning tires next year. Until then, this is what I do.