Ride Me to the Moon

My dream self wrote a song. Or it wrote the chorus to a song, at least.

I dreamed that I was somewhere—I can’t be more specific than that—and near me were some soccer hooligans, or another sort of British loud guy. The boys were drunk. Over and over they shouted, “You should have seen her when she had her beautiful hair!”

I recalled the tune they sang this to when I awoke the next morning. I like to awake in the mornings.

As soon as my eyes opened, I searched for those words online and found they don’t come from an actual song. Not one I could find, anyway.

Will I write a song in waking life, one that will accompany the chorus from my dream? No, I will not. I don’t know how to do that.

I could use generative AI to write the song that goes with the chorus. Six months ago, I might have done that. But I never really liked AI. What would it even mean to “like” AI?

Everything I ever made using AI, as a lark, as a diversion, seems to me now like an abomination. I thought it was fun, not long ago, to make a theme song using AI that I could play at the start of my newsletter audio recordings. Now I realize that playing with AI because it’s kind of fun for a minute or two is like rubbing mercury into your skin for a minute or two. It sticks to you. It gets in there and doesn’t come out.

The dream I had about the chorus to a song that’s not real is not the only time I made something in my sleep recently.

I wrote to an old friend of mine, recently, who does the screenprinting at a t-shirt shop in West Virginia, Kin Ship Goods. I have bought many of their shirts. I am wearing one now. About half of the ones I have say WEST VIRGINIA across the front, and I wear them often because I live in Kansas City but I’m from West Virginia. If I ever have amnesia, and I’m out somewhere and don’t know who I am anymore, due to head trauma, or a dissociative episode, I want to be able to look at my shirt and find out what state I was raised in.

Last month, I was at a Samantha Crain show with my daughter. I wore a Kin Ship Goods shirt, and a fellow West Virginian approached me when I went to the bar to close my tab. I hadn’t been drinking; I had bought a sparkling water for myself, and an orange Slice for my daughter—she’d never had one before. The woman from West Virginia who approached me said she grew up in Charleston and lived in Florida. She was in Kansas City to grade essays from high school AP exams.

All I’m saying is, Kin Ship Goods shirts bring people together at Samantha Crain shows.

But the reason I wrote to my screenprinting friend was that I’d had two ideas for West Virginia t-shirts in my sleep. I will tell you now what they are.

One of them would look like a quiz you might take in kindergarten, or first grade, I’m not sure which, where you have to match words with drawings. You also have to do that on Duolingo; maybe it would look like Duolingo.

On one side of the shirt would be a couple of drawings, one placed above the other. On the other side would be words.

The words on the word side would be “sled” and “toboggan.”

The drawings on the drawing side would be of a sled and what people who aren’t from West Virginia might call a stocking cap.

A person looking at the shirt would have to mentally match the drawings to the words, and would have trouble, because to most people “sled” and “toboggan” are synonyms.

This is a t-shirt that only people from West Virginia would understand. In my home state, a toboggan is not what you call a sled, it’s what you call that kind of hat that you wear to keep your head warm. Like a beanie, I guess—except no one in WV would say the word “beanie,” because you don’t need to say that word when you can say “toboggan.”

The other shirt idea I had is simpler. It would have someone on it driving a car through outer space to the moon. It would have the words “Ride me to the moon!” across the front.

This is another West Virginia thing. In WV, you can ask someone, “Could you drive me to the Moundsville State Penitentiary?” And people will know what you’re saying. But you can also say, “Could you ride me to the Moundsville State Penitentiary?” and no one will object to that phrasing, or be confused. They will take you to the Moundsville State Penitentiary. In West Virginia, the words “drive” and “ride” are in some contexts interchangeable.

I will be interested to see what my dreaming mind conjures up next.

Maybe it will think of a way to solve the problem of a federal government that has gone criminal, by doing a series of unforgivable things. They include: openly supporting the mass murder of civilians, many of them babies and children, in a place far from here that has furthermore been bombed to dust using munitions manufactured in places like Illinois and New Mexico; organizing a widespread program of kidnappings that end with people who haven’t been charged with any crimes being relocated to, and in some cases dying in, prisons in distant countries; filling the Supreme Court with ideologues who are determined to bend the Constitution until it breaks, which may have happened already; and deploying Marines to Los Angeles, to help execute warrantless arrests. Among other things.

Seriously, though. What’s next? What are we going to do?

I don’t know what to do. And I am surrounded at all times by people who don’t know either, or who are asking themselves different questions, such as, “What are all these people online complaining about? Isn’t everything fine? It’s almost the Fourth of July. Let’s rock!” and, in some cases, “How soon shall I unlock my gun safe and start helping to get rid of everyone here who is not on my side?”

I know I sound like I’m having an episode. But people are already getting violent, and it’s been happening now for some time.

I have been thinking of the civil wars that were fought during Michel de Montaigne’s lifetime, in France in the sixteenth century. From what he writes about it—and I only know about it what he wrote—several decades went by in which violence could break out at any time, and it did break out with some frequency. Montaigne’s estate was nearly ransacked; he managed to talk the soldiers out of it.

I’m not in enough of a panic to say we’re already locked in a civil war. But there couldn’t be a better time, it seems to me, to have a new chapbook coming out. And I have a chapbook coming out.

It’s called “Beaver Fever.” It consists of one short story, called “Beaver Fever,” plus an essay in which I explain where the story came from and what its deal is. The story is about a brother and sister, somewhere in their thirties, who grew up in my hometown of Wheeling, West Virginia, but who for one reason and another have moved back and taken up residence in the big house their grandparents lived in until they died of COVID. At the start of the story, the brother announces to his sister that he has beaver fever, meaning: he wants to have sex with a woman, and his sister must help him find one in Wheeling. She reluctantly agrees, and a series of things happen, as they tend to do in short stories.

You can preorder the chapbook here. It costs only $5.30.

And it’s a good story! I didn’t write it in my sleep. I was awake for the entire process. I worked hard to make it good, and I want everyone to have a great time, all the time.

When I work with clients to help make their short stories, novels, essays, and other texts as good as they can be, I want them to have a good time.

I was talking to a client, recently, after editing her novel. I was giving her advice for revision, which is one way to have a good time.

I admitted how tricky it can be, to calibrate the things I write so the reader experiences them the way I hope they do. I may, for example, want the reader to feel sad, but I don’t want to be maudlin about it. I may want to infuse my work with humor, but I don’t want anyone to see the joke coming, or make my work utterly ridiculous. Though I’ll admit I do sometimes want to make my work ridiculous.

It is one of the hardest parts of writing, to ensure that the effects you’re going for are at the right volume, to determine when you are and aren’t overdoing it, and when you’re not doing it enough.

I had to learn, at some point, to get over my fear of being heavy-handed about things. I had to give up on making things subtle on my end, because when I did things subtly they didn’t register at all for other people.

As a writer, I told the client, you make all this noise in your work, but the reader doesn’t hear the noise. They hear the echo of the noise. So to ensure they hear you at a normal volume, the noise as you perceive it has to be loud. It has to be, to your ears, too loud, if you want the reader to hear it at all.

She liked this way of putting it, enough that I worried she was going to write it down and pretend she thought of it first. I am relaying it to you here so she can’t do that.

But I’m honestly not even sure I’m correct about this. The things I write tend to be pretty unsubtle. But I hope everyone understands what I’m trying to say.

One of the things I haven’t yet tried to say is that I tried starting the migration of this newsletter from Substack over to beehiiv. I want to do this for several reasons. But beehiiv wants to charge me something like $500 a year to have a newsletter there. And I don’t want to spend that kind of money on this. I don’t understand it.