Conrad Bishop's Blog

—From EF and CB—

It’s fall, and the trees are commencing their lesson in how to let go. That time has come for us and this blog, and we want to say thank you for visiting. This will be the final post here but we will continue as usual to post on Facebook under our own names. The site contract with WordPress requires long-term advance payment, so the site will still be here until 2027. All past posts will be retained as an archive, and the merch sales will stay available.

I thought that as time went on things would become simpler, but it doesn’t work that way. We’re both doing an immense amount of writing, and the routines that accumulate with age and health issues are more demanding. Whenever we’re moved to write these essays that will still happen, but only on Facebook, or whatever comes along that is a more tolerable platform.

Here are our email addresses, should you wish to stay in touch.

indepeye@gmail.com (Conrad Bishop)
lizful70@gmail.com (Elizabeth Fuller)

With love from the damnedfools

—From CB—

Last Thursday, the day of my getting cut open.

I’ve had an inguinal hernia, right side, for about a year. I’ve put up with the inconvenience of wearing a truss in the expectation that I might die before having to spend a week in the goddamned hospital, but it was getting worse and I showed no signs of immediate death, beyond having trouble with balance and slowing down on my typing speed. I was greatly relieved, in my advance talk with the surgeon, that it could be done as an outpatient procedure, although I was startled when he said that they held the incision together with glue. But times change.

In preparation: the night before, I couldn’t have any alcohol. Okay. And the next morning, no food. I could have black coffee, but that lacked an appeal. So I checked the email and news and Facebook, and took my antibacterial shower. The day before, Elizabeth picked up my anticipatory pain prescription and a recommended bar of soap, and popped in the door with, “I’m back with your soap and your dope!”

Now I have to fill two hours before getting carted to the hospital to wait and to wait. I’ll spend the time writing, of course, perhaps reading the new New Yorker or listening to my audiobook, and trying to keep my mind off food. It does no good to let the mind wander to starving refugees: they too must be thinking of food, and they can’t listen to an audiobook.

I hear a sound like a meow, and I think something’s wrong with my breathing. Then I see one of our cats walk by. Perhaps it’s an out-of-body experience. I’m rattled.

But I shouldn’t be. This will be an outpatient procedure, the surgeon is highly recommended, and I’ve had much more serious damage. I’ll be home by late afternoon and can eat. Yet I’m rattled by a meow. I’m a cockroach scuttling across the counter for cover, bent on survival. I want to ask the cat, in those haunting lyrics from The Medium, “Was it you? Was it you?” But I’d never hit the high notes.

My whole life is blaring back. Our two years in South Carolina. There, they weren’t called roaches, they were palmetto bugs, and they were huge. They wouldn’t have to scuttle for cover; they could just stand and fight like Stonewall Jackson. And one summer, moss grew in the wax on our dinner table, regardless of their stomping. Those were our formative years.

So today I get driven to the hospital. After the ID checks and the check-in, to make sure I’m who I say I am, I’m sat in a chair and carted back to a bed. The same questions I’ve been asked a dozen times, and then it’s time for inserts. The thin shaky nurse has some trouble finding a vein, but at last she does, “a little pinch,” and I’m free to read—an article about ethics, another on spy operations in Norway, lots of chatter from nurses outside the drawn curtain (“So we were going up to Oregon, but…”).

At last, after two or three hours, the surgeon appears (“It’s not going to be long now. Any questions?”), and soon they wheel me away. At the surgery, someone holds a mask to my face (“Breathe deep.”), and I’m out. I wake up. It’s done, and I missed it all. They wheel me back.

Tubes out, and they ask me to pee in a urinal (“We need to make sure that everything’s working.”). I can’t, having just peed before surgery, but it’s possible that things are not working. They give me a sheet of post-op instruction, instruct me that if I haven’t peed till bed-time to come back to the ER. They remove the IV, I dress, and they summon Elizabeth by cellphone to drive up front. I’m hustled into a wheelchair and carted to the door. She’s brought me an egg salad sandwich, and I gobble it.

#

At various stages, I recall the surgery on the other side of my groin when I was sixteen or so. It put me in the hospital for a week, and here I was out in six hours. Medical science has improved a lot, or at least it’s speeded up. What hasn’t changed is the boredom of endless waiting.

Which means I have no excuse. I hereby rejoin the human race, for whatever that’s worth, and all its moral dilemmas, its crimes, its comedy. And after drinking a cupful of water, I even pee.

#

The experience? Surely not a joy in the hours of waiting, the pain of the “little pinch,” or the next day’s discomfort, even though it was eased by Acetaminophen and didn’t require the heavier dosage of an opioid prescribed if needed. It wasn’t even in the relief that came from the repair, as the area was still swollen and I had to protect it from the cat’s feet, which pay no mind to the advances of humankind. Yes, I do look forward to a life without discomfort till the next thing waiting in line says, “Me now!”

But I joy in the tiny advance of human skill. Surely we haven’t advanced much in preventing people getting blown up, or preserving the planet, or avoiding massive exploitation, even in waiting two months for an appointment. But just the joy of getting repaired after a blow-out: car tires and then me.

I have to celebrate my luck. Other friends have died of colon cancer; others have had breasts removed; others have dropped dead of sudden stroke. I’m still alive, for whatever good I can do. Not much, but some. I’ll try.

20th, I get up at five a.m. to stumble to the bathroom. It still works. On the way back to bed, I totter against the wall, and my wife asks, “Are you okay?” I mumble something reassuring. I feel blest for having someone to ask me Are you okay? and to make the morning coffee. Later, drinking the coffee, I thank her for all the added things she does for my nursing care—perhaps it comes from the fact that my son was a nurse for a while, and I doubt he got thanked much. Maybe the larger paycheck now (for software) makes up for that—we don’t thank people much if they’re getting paid, even if it’s something sorely needed. I need to remind myself, on the follow-up visit, to thank the surgeon.

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—From EF—

Sometime around 1998 I decided I should try to do something about my fragmented inner self, and I created a series of seven integration rituals. I’d been given a big hint when a song downloaded itself into my brain during a long drive. “Seven sisters, each one an only child, crowded in a room where no one has the key.” It described each sister in a phrase, but left one out—Blanca.

There’s a hidden pocket of my mind I call Blanca’s Cave, and it contains a list of tasks I haven’t dealt with. When I’ve delayed something past some magic line, it goes into Blanca’s Cave and disappears from my memory. It sits there in the dark and sometimes itches, but mostly it’s hidden from me until something reminds me.

I’ve had a harsh flurry of these in the recent past. I don’t know if it’s because I’m stirring stuff up with internal family systems therapy, which I’m loving, but it does keep surprising me. I came home from a brief jaunt to Italy and had plenty of time to write this by the weekend. Missed the deadline. Tried again, missed again, and Blanca got it. I managed to grab it by the tail and thought, “What am I gonna write about?” (I never pre-plan these things), and then of course got the answer. Write about Blanca’s Cave, dummy.

So with this out of the way, I need to move on to whatever Blanca’s got, deal with it, and insist on thanking myself. I’ve got a backlog to deal with, but the trick is to reinforce success, one damn puddle at a time. I think I’ll start with the morning glories, which have decided to take over the whole yard.

Onward.

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—From CB—

I’m writing another book. Don’t know if I’ll call it a memoir or novel, but the title will be “Joy.” A novel has the advantage of leaving things out or telling flat lies, whereas memoirs are expected to tell the whole truth, though they rarely do. The first part will be the “He” section, the second the “You,” the third the “I.” I’ve written the first two (there’ll be many rewrites, of course), but the third—a search for the joy in living at age 82—or 83 by the time it’s finished. I’m keeping a diary of small things, and it makes me appreciate being alive.

But I can’t keep my mind from chewing on the election. I remember Carter’s “malaise” speech: surely one of the most honest and most disastrous speeches in political history, falling victim to Reagan’s can-do smile. But its message is now repurposed: a candidate is saying America is doomed but “I can fix it all,” and this is taken by millions as the answer to the fact that the world is changing, that not everyone is a blllionaire or even respected. But the candidate is respected for his courage in telling obvious lies.

I know we’ll live through it, me or at least my kids. It’s been worse, and life has gone on. The election might even turn out fine, to my taste, though I’m not a betting man. My politics are frankly way left of center, though I’m constantly critical of the rhetoric of my tribe, and ideologues don’t like to be nit-picked. But I’m trying to chronicle the small moments, since that’s mostly what life is. Not that life’s not affected by politics—you don’t have a great time if you’re starving or getting blown apart or even if you’re living, in Thoreau’s phrase, a life of quiet desperation.

Oddly, my purpose was reinforced by watching a 1973 film Visions of Eight —eight short films of the 1972 Olympics, each by a leading director. It chronicled the winners, of course, and the tremendous strain of the competition. But also the losers: the massive weight-lifter who can’t quite make it and lets the barbell fall; the boxer who rants in defeat; the stretcher cases in track and wrestling. And the marathon runner, long after most have finished the race, running in the dark, determined to finish. These are never seen, and must be.

I feel that many of us lead lives of defeat, made so by our expectations, born of our culture’s values. Not that we shouldn’t all shoot for the moon—just that if we get no higher than clearing the bar on the pole-vault, we deserve respect (and self-respect) for the vault. In eighth grade, there was a city-wide track meet. I ran in the fifty-yard dash against other eighth-graders. I came in last. When I caught my breath, I went on to other things.

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—From EF—

I’m about to embark on a 5-day solo trip, the second one this summer, and probably the last for quite a while. This time it’s to Italy to see our daughter, her wonderful man, and spend time in their 14th-century stone mill house while it’s still their abode. It’s beautiful, and they put their hearts and souls into giving it better plumbing, heating, and electrics. (We think differently now from those millers of long ago.) But the time has come for them to say farewell to the twisty twenty-five minutes of driving narrow mountain roads it takes to buy an aspirin or go to work. I need to be there one more time—to hug Fra, celebrate Jo’s magnificent cooking, and put my bare feet on a flagstone floor that was crafted before Columbus sailed.

And I’m going alone. CB and I have traveled to Europe together more than a few times, but it’s not his favorite thing to do any more, and he’s happy to stay home and console the cats. I’ve prepared and frozen a large array of delicious dinners, things I know he loves, so I’ll still have a daily presence.

When Johanna relocated to Italy in 1998 I began what is by now a 26-year chain of transatlantic journeying, most of it solo. I love it. All of it, even the wild things like finding myself on the streets of Rennes at midnight without anywhere to go—Air France went on strike and my flight to SF was canceled. I’d thought I could hang out in the train station, but nope. By luck and grace I found a businessman’s hostel that was full up but they were just kicking somebody out for misbehaviour. They didn’t seem to care that I wasn’t a businessman.

There’s a beautiful little island off the northwest coast of France, Belle-Isle-en-Mer, and it has called me back for many many visits. Ten miles long and five miles wide, with sandy beaches on the east and wild rocks on the west, and over five successive years I managed to hike the entire perimeter, fjords and all, plus the north-south line and the east-west one. Alone. Well, not really. The earth there speaks to me.

I love the trains, and the old-style coaches best of all, the ones that don’t exist any more. My favorite train was the night train from Amsterdam to Paris. Each car had a series of small six-person compartments, three seats facing three, with a corridor that ran the length of the car. It was always a crap-shoot whether there was a jerk or two there, but over the years I learned enough tricks to have a good chance at having a compartment to myself, which meant being able to lie down flat to sleep.

I had a good friend in Amsterdam, theatre colleagues in Zurich, Johanna in Italy, and the stones in Brittany. For many years a rail pass was affordable and easy to use, and the idea of just being able to jump on a train at whim was a lot of fun. Once it got me into trouble, though.

In Amsterdam the day before my return, I had time to kill and hopped a northbound train to ride to the end of the line and back. At the northmost station I had urgent need of a restroom and made it in the nick of time. However, I had all my travel stuff with me and didn’t do due diligence in reassembling myself in the dark little cubicle. What I missed was, of course, the smallest and most essential bag, the one with my passport, money, and plane ticket. I ran back to the station, but it was already gone. I made a police report, and a sympathetic conductor let me back on the return train.

The next morning Theo took me to the Consulate, where I was told by a curt front-desk lady that I’d need fifty dollars and it would take three weeks for a new passport. She wasn’t impressed by my dilemma: “My plane leaves in five hours, and you really don’t want me hanging around your country with no money.” I sat down in a corner of the waiting room and prevented myself from crying. A kindly lady sitting nearby came over. “I heard your problem. Take this thirty Euros, it’s what I can spare. Good luck.” Just then the head consular official showed up for work, and listened to my story. He gave me five Euros to take to a place down the street that would make a passport photo, then manufactured a temporary passport right there in his office. I still have it. The face on that photo is a perfect blend of stress and joy, a fitting emblem for solo travel.

###

—From CB—

I fart a lot. More than I ought to. I guess it comes with age, though I haven’t noticed it in other geezers. It may be that somehow you just don’t worry so much about it, or that it’s not as noticeable as it seems. True, you don’t want to add to usual complaints about the old: we’re either crotchety or spry, we’re forgetful, we’re stuck back in the 1900’s, we’re hanging on to milk Medicare. Indeed, writing a blog about it won’t win any friends, influence people, advance the career, or even get out the vote. It’s just one of the messy features of getting old instead of buying the farm, like so many of my friends.

Not that it happens all the time. I can sit through whole spans of time without the tell-tale tail blurt. I can go to concerts or poetry readings with confidence that I won’t disrupt proceedings with eruptions. Yet sometimes the bus comes out of nowhere when I’m walking or rising or just looking at the trees in the wind. Suddenly, I’m all too human.

It’s a sign of degeneration. Like the speed with which I type, it draws an unusual focus. It excuses me from thinking deep thoughts. It’s little different from walking over rutty ground: I once did it without thinking, but now it requires a focus on balance, like stumbling onto my legs learning to walk at eighteen months.

It depends so much on whether there are other people about. It’s expected of a baby, but you’re long since out of a diaper. And people proliferate: what once would have been a walk among trees, you likely encounters hordes of fellow humans, forming tours of tourists, wedding parties, or football teams on an outing. The populace proliferates.

All you can do is look the other way. You can look as if you were moved to ask, “Who farted?” but had the good breeding to pretend not to notice. But it takes you back to grade school. Next stop will be kindergarten’s nappy time, when you get your sleep-mat from your cubby and lie there twitching until it’s time to get up and fingerpaint.

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—From EF—

In December of 1967 we were rounding the last lap of our two years in Columbia, South Carolina, the first job after Conrad finished his PhD. That year a classic movie hit the screen wherein another new graduate was facing the prospect of his first job and was entrusted with the key to success: Plastics. Dustin Hoffman didn’t take that advice, and neither did Conrad Bishop. However, legions of movers and shakers took it very seriously, made obscene fortunes, and are now drowning all life on earth in an unending flood of plastic garbage.

The raw material for most plastics is petroleum. Since the awareness of climate chaos and rising temperatures hit mainstream consciousness, we’ve all been exhorted to do what we can to minimize a major culprit, the use of fossil fuels. Alternative energy sources are no longer a silly joke, and this is a danger signal for those whose revenues might be impacted. A high proportion of the oil pumped from the ground ends up being burned as gasoline for cars and trucks and power stations, but if that market slacks off because too many people are turning to wind and solar and driving less, new advances in the use of plastic are compensating.

We’re supposed to take comfort in the advent of recycling and the little triangles that tell us how to sort, but there isn’t enough money to be made in the products of recycling so the bins of stuff go where they would have gone all along.

I’m old enough to remember when buying a package of safety pins didn’t require tin snips to open the package. I also remember the gash I gave myself when first coping with the new hard-plastic shells that suddenly enclosed flashlight batteries, once they figured out how to weld the cover to the new backing that has a little hole to hang from a store’s hooks. I remember how recently the produce shelves started selling pre-washed salad in dishpan-sized hard plastic coffins. And now the meat departments display their wares pre-sealed in thick tough bags that have been vacuum-sealed, often swimming in marinade. The poundage of salty liquid sells at the same rate as the meat, and those who are supposed to avoid salt can simply not buy anything and save even more. When I searched long enough to find a package without marinade, I found that my kitchen scissors could neither penetrate nor cut that pouch. A clerk helpfully told me she uses box cutters.

Our local (wonderful) non-chain independent market changed hands recently. Now marinade pouches gleam like polished Buicks on the shelves, and many of my favorite little dodges for making rice into a tasty main dish are gone now, replaced by more pre-processed convenience meals—packaged in plastic, of course. And many of the friends who’d kindly fetch me bags of chicken necks for stock don’t work there now. Fewer men are needed when the distributor delivers the product already cut and packaged—in plastic. How nice. It stays fresh longer, and if it doesn’t you can’t tell anything from texture or smell any more.

I’ve seen the claim that what shows up on the grocery shelves is mostly controlled now by only four or five giant corporations distributing things under a variety of sub-labels. Kroger, Safeway, Vons, Albertsons, Pavilions, Ralph’s Pay Less, Pick’n’Save, Fred Meyer—that’s all Kroger wearing different hats. Try complaining to that monolith about plastic packaging.

OK, all you FB activists, if you know about any locally effective movements to pressure for less plastic, please share. I talk to the folks behind the counter at my stores, but they shrug and tell me it’s delivered to them in the plastic. Not their fault, nothing to be done.

Anybody?

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—From CB—

Don’t take this as expert opinion. I’m just your average dumb assertive citizen.

We’re mostly a nation of immigrants. This comes up in political debates on immigration, but otherwise not. But to my mind, it has multiple ramifications.

Immigration is not easy. Until this era of air travel and instant communication, it’s meant cutting ties with friends, family, and the culture that you’ve grown up in, You don’t understand the language, and you don’t understand the jokes.

Nor do you flee your home to “seek a better opportunity.” More likely it’s to save your family from starvation, enlistment in an army or a gang, or being shot in the street. Coming to this country, you face an absolute unknown: you may have family here or find help through an agency, but more likely you’ll face an unknown language, hostile people, and a future that soon proves to be a toss-up.  

It results, naturally, in clannishness, what my grandpa, who was Germanic, accused Norwegian farmers of—he avoided specifics. But you want to be with your own people, people who look and talk like you, out of safety concerns. Does that result in racism? Of course it does.

These thoughts come about largely because we’re the richest country in the world, certainly the most powerful, yet also the most fearful. What dominates our politics?—who can raise the most fear. If it’s not fear of invasion, it’s fear of change, fear of the new, fear of the absence of fear.

The other thing that flows from the trauma of immigration—not only from that, of course—is the rage that comes from the frustration of hope. We’re told from childhood that the future has all possibilities, that we’re in the land of opportunity, that all it takes is hard work. Then you find yourself compared to others, find yourself accused of racism, sexism, exploitation three generations back, and accused of stupidity for backing Trump, who at the very least is likely to shake thing up.

I’ve seen in social media lately lots of posts that sound left-wing, saying that anyone who votes in the coming election is a fool, that it’s only a plot of the international order to perpetuate the intolerable status quo, that we all need to get our souls readjusted to support the perfect candidate, who doesn’t exist. I resist that. Over the years, I’ve voted for many severely flawed individuals, some like JFK who was elected, some like McGovern, who wasn’t. In all, I’ve never voted for anyone who might deliver pie in the sky. I wish I could. Maybe some day…

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—From EF—

I took a trip to the Midwest last week, the provocation being a high school reunion of the class of 1957, and I spent five days being a weaver. Each day was centered on a different part of my life, and weaving that yarn into a pattern was intense and beautiful. My core is still humming.

I was born in Brooklyn, not the Midwest; my mother was “sent east” to deal with my unplanned arrival. I was eleven days old when my adoptive parents picked me up at the hospital and handed me to their housekeeper to make the plane ride back to their Indiana home. (They had driven to Brooklyn, but a three-day car trip back through February ice was not a good idea for a newborn.) I landed, grew up amid cornfields nine miles from Valparaiso, and never knew that my birth-mother was less than a hundred miles away in Wisconsin.

I had a hard time with my adoptive mother, and my real bond was with the surrounding woods and fields where I roamed freely as a wild little girl. This trip was a reunion with my classmates, yes, but much more with the land that had always welcomed me. On the first day of my trip I was driving down the old country road toward a childhood neighbor’s home and was a bit unsettled by the number of semi-suburban new homes that had popped up. Then I found John’s address by a familiar driveway, turned in, and was immediately in a different world—enclosed by a long narrow corridor flanked by tall sunlit trees. I stopped the car for a minute to breathe the cool clean air that I remembered so well.

I spent the day was with John and his family, who still lived on the farm that had been my own family’s closest neighbor. During a road-trip stop in 1995, I impulsively dropped in on him for a brief afternoon chat. He stunned me by saying that his parents knew that my home life was painful but had no way to intervene. What he told me was life-changing: I hadn’t made it up, it was real and witnessed. Last Thursday was a long afternoon lunch shared with his wife and younger daughter, trading stories of those years, and fond memories of those now long gone.

Friday was spent with the couple who bought my old home years ago. It has been beautifully renovated and is brightened by the energy of their two children. I got the grand tour of the house, and then we went out to walk the trails that they’d cleared and marked in the woods. I took them to the site of the old apple tree that had been my favorite refuge, held safely in her branches. In her old age she became sickly and was taken out, but in 1995 I was given the opportunity to dig for her roots. I brought back with me the glowing reddish chunk of heart-root I’d found, oiled and smoothed, and all four of them took turns holding it close. They plan to plant another apple tree.

Saturday was the reunion, about thirty of my classmates gathered in the sunny meeting-room at the back of a pizza parlor. They knew I’d tried to come last year but got re-routed to St Louis by a storm that closed O’Hare, so this year we made up for lost time. Sixty-seven years re-sculpts faces and bodies, but it was fun putting the puzzle together. I felt welcomed now in a way that had never happened in the fifties, and I had fun being somebody who could now hug and laugh. My coke-bottle glasses, braces, and panicked introversion were long gone.

I then drove on to visit my one high school chum and convey the greetings from the reunion she had planned to attend with me. Her bones suddenly said “no” and now she has three screws bridging a spontaneous fracture and is in a rehab facility. In spite of the pain she could give a good hug, and we traded stories for a few hours—wishing it could be longer. When we were in school, neither of us had known that the other was suffering abuse. Life is strange, but we cherish and celebrate our long friendship and the amazing lives we’ve led.

Sunday I was with my brother and his wife, who have welcomed me into their home as many times as possible since we found each other through DNA in 2018. Dan is three years younger than me; I was the “oops” and he was the welcome result of marriage. Time only sharpens the many traits and quirks we have in common, and our visits are a celebration. He reminds me that no, I wasn’t ordered on-line and delivered in a box, I’m real and have blood family.

Monday was a whole day with Flora, part of my life in theatre since 1967. She was a mainstay of the ensemble we were part of founding, Theatre X, and is known and beloved by Milwaukee audiences for the many roles she has played and created over the following decades. It was the kind of quiet lovely day that only happens with decades of closeness: breakfast, a second cup of coffee in the living room, a walk in the nearby wooded park, my making myself at home in the kitchen preparing a huge Salade Niçoise, an evening reading our current novels, punctuated by scenes from the Men’s Gymnastics.

Tuesday I returned home, to a delighted CB who appeared to have thrived. If anything, he looked stronger and livelier than when I left, and he’d eaten every bit of the multiple meals I’d cooked and frozen for him and for our son’s two-day visit during my absence. We both had agreed that the risks of my absence were worth taking and could be navigated OK, and that was true. What was woven is warm, lovely, and enduring.

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—From CB—

A friend wrote a post on her personal questioning of why she was alive. It elicited this:

That raises the questions for all of us. I’m 82, faced daily with multiple maladies and appointments with specialists; my last novel (which we think is really good) sold exactly two copies; my voice goes down to a whisper; I have two kids, but I rarely see them; the art I’ve practiced my whole life, theatre, I don’t practice now. I could complain all day.

I do have a long-term mate, which makes a huge difference, and enough money to live on if I don’t live too long. Right now, I’m writing a novel with a character who could’ve written this post: he’s 36, about to become well-off so he’s just quit his hated job as a substitute teacher, but is asking that exact same question. What am I here for? It almost drives him nuts.

He encounters a homeless derelict whom he steps over daily at the portico of his rooming house:

“As I came to know him, he viewed life in simple terms. He tried to keep warm and dry. He looked for something to eat. He found places to do the duties demanded by nature in as an elegant way as he could. He did his best not to hurt anyone. If disease came upon him, he would suffer and die, no sweat, since that was only the price of being alive for a while. The merry-go-round would finally stop its tuneful rounds.”

#

That answers no questions, or perhaps it does. For me at least; I didn’t post it to my friend, as I avoid unasked advice. For me, the essential purpose of life is to live. When you die, you’re dead. If I find otherwise, I’ll adapt to the surprise.

There are any number of ways to “give it meaning”: to make a bundle, to serve God, to serve humankind, and so on. It probably helps to do something that lasts a long time and keeps your memory alive in other minds (unless it’s a major atrocity). And it helps a lot to do something you love, to have someone with you, to have money enough.

I once wrote to make a living, and there came to be at least a chance of fame. Now I write to write.

But (a) there are countless people who never ask the question, and (b) you’re definitely and undeniably going to die. The question is uncomfortable, as we live in a culture that already makes us question our function. And the other part we want to avoid even thinking about, just as the tiny ant scuttling across the counter tries to avoid my looming thumb.

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