This Year of My Life I Choose the Path of Benevolence, Goodwill, and 110 Percent
birthday; I recorded myself; 43; they mutilated Miller's Crossing more than I realized before
Today is my birthday, which means of course that for one day I get to treat everyone in my life as poorly as I want to. I can yell at them, I can smear their faces with dirt. I can send them to spend the day alone in the woods. They can’t stop me. No one can stop me.
But as is our tradition, here in America, I will do no such thing. I will not be mean to people. I will be nice to them. I will acknowledge my annual right to be harsh and cruel, in a formal ceremony that entails bloodshed and speaking in tongues. But I will walk the path of kindness.
I am forty-three years old. I live in America.
Recording
On Thursday, I traveled to Columbia, Missouri, a couple hours from where I live, to read from my work to a crowd of people with the poet Jenny Molberg, whose most recent book, The Court of No Record, is at this moment a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize in Poetry. It’s a good book! I recommend getting a copy and reading it. The great thing about having a book is that you can read it.
At this event, I had more time to read aloud from my work than I usually do. Often, when I do this sort of thing, I’m one person in a lineup of like ten other people. I’ve got to read something short and then haul ass off the stage.
I started with my very short essay “Oh, You’re a Mean, Old Daddy,” which was published last year in Brevity.
Then I read “A Night without Armor,” a short story of moderate length that I wrote about a first date between two divorcees. It was published some time ago at X-R-A-Y magazine.
People liked it.
I told the crowd before I read it that I had reservations about it. And that was true. If you read the story, or listen to me read it aloud, it might make you think I harbor some kind of odd discomfort with the reality of menstruation. I promise that I don’t, at the same time that when I reread the short story it seems very much like maybe in some obscure part of myself I absolutely do harbor an odd discomfort with menstruation.
It isn’t out of the question. I mean, you can be perfectly fine with menstruation as a reality for lots of people, but also still remember how outlandish it sounded when you were a kid and you first found out about it. That initial reaction can emerge in a short story, in a way you don’t intend it at the time you’re writing it, but which looks incredibly obvious once it is written.
Your younger self can surprise you, from time to time, by peeking his head out of your current, present self, and reminding you he’s still buried in there, despite what you might think.
Before I left for Columbia on Thursday, to read at the reading, I read the story to myself and timed myself reading it, to see if it would fit into the allotted minutes. I recorded myself doing that, and I’ve put the recording on SoundCloud, in case someone out there wants to hear the story. Here it is:
Is it a good recording? No. It is not. I didn’t plan at the time to share it with anyone, so I didn’t try to make it sound good. If anyone likes this recording, maybe I’ll make more. Maybe I’ll include one with every Substack. Maybe they’ll sound good.
Maybe this is how it will happen, the next thing that’s going to happen.
It’s possible that something extremely embarrassing happens on the recording, like you can hear me chewing loudly the three-sausage sandwich I was devouring as I read, drooling as I chewed, dropping soggy crumbs of bread and pieces of the sausages on my lap. Maybe it’s the wettest sound anyone has ever heard.
I wouldn’t know. I can’t listen to that recording.
The sound of my own voice is to me like the sound of myself dying. I want to hear anything but it. Anything at all.
“43”
Other than that, it’s a little exciting to be forty-three. It’s supposed to be the biggest year of your life, isn’t it? When you find out who your friends really are, when the scales fall from your eyes and you achieve a kind of clarity you never could before. It’s supposed to be the year when your enemies crawl away to suck the blood of beasts you never have to see or hear, when the planets rotate through the sky like cogs in a great machine, singing your praises, wishing you many more years to come. I know we’re off to a good start, because our cat Oscar kept rubbing his body against my legs when I was peeing after I woke up. He knows that good things are on their way. He was trying to tell me that good things are on their way.
What else?
I spent a night alone in my house recently. Two members of our family were spending the night with a girl scout troop. Another spent the night with her grandmother. That left me alone in the house for the first night, I think, since we moved in seven years ago.
I didn’t know what to do with myself. I tried to do everything. I couldn’t sit still for more than twenty minutes at a time.
I spent time reading. I don’t remember what book I read. It may have been The Razor’s Edge, which I read recently for the first time.
I played Cyberpunk 2077, which continues to surprise me, and be an interesting thing, despite how I still don’t think it’s very much fun to play. I think I just don’t understand what I’m supposed to be doing. I feel like when I move my guy around she should move faster than she does. She keeps getting shot by guys with machineguns.
I really was, like, beside myself all that evening. I wanted to do everything I like to do at the same time. I wanted to do yoga with a book in my hand. I wanted to listen to podcasts and watch Miller’s Crossing simultaneously.
I did watch some of Miller’s Crossing. I’ve seen it so many times before. I just wanted that Miller’s Crossing feeling. You know? That unmistakable feeling.
I watched enough of it, on I don’t recall what streaming service, to learn that it’s been more heavily edited than I’d realized. When Albert Finney comes to Gabriel Byrne’s apartment, he says, “Sorry for the hour,” or something like it, twice, and the second time he says it Byrne says, “Yeah. You said that.” But apparently he doesn’t say that anymore. I waited to hear him say the line and he didn’t. Watching the movie again was like watching the repeat performance of a play in which an actor forgot one of his lines. Only it was a movie, and that’s supposed to be impossible.
I knew they’d cut other lines from the movie. At least one other line. I didn’t know they’d cut that one.
Why did they do it? Who did it? When? I don’t understand.
I wrote a blog post about it, back when I was writing blog posts. It continues to be a popular blog post. Every other day, it seems, someone from planet Earth clicks a link and goes to that blog post. I’m not kidding. According to the Squarespace app, people from across America and all over the world go to that blog post, at least a few times a week. It’s been there for two years, and it might be the most-widely-read thing I’ll ever write.
So sorry to miss this!