Might let the Devil win
"We'll always have Paris"
In another life, I’m a Foreign Service Officer. In another, I’m a JAG attorney. In yet another, I’m a comic book artist. If 2nd grade me had been surrounded by a different set of circumstances, if he’d proceeded along the path whose end he could then see, I’m an architect.
My thoughts have, over the past several years, tended toward the multiversal not out of idle speculation but rather out of the very real, very immediate yet faraway appeal of retirement. In a Hot Ones interview, Kid Cudi declares that he plans at some point to leave music; Tyler the Creator, another of my favorite music artists, has said in the past that he intends to leave rap. When Tarantino announced that his next film would be his last, envy shot through me. As a Millennial, part of that breed that entered the job market at the height of The Great Recession, retirement as commonly understood is forever an illusion, vapor on the wind; I’ll be 52 before my student loan balance is eligible for forgiveness, and if there’s any planet left by then, the same will not be said of Social Security. But to retire from a profession? To put down one’s camera, one’s microphone, one’s pen? The older I get, the more gilded the idea becomes to me.
As a young buck, heavy in my Mixtape Era, there was a burn-bright-burn-fast energy to the hustle. Pages spilled out of me. A single semester late into film school had me spit out three separate feature scripts. That summer, I would write a 120,000 word novel. An impatience with short stories meant I spent high school pumping out 400+ pages of prose a year outside of class. Blistering, unsustainable, but thrilling. Hairpin turns at 160 mph. Daring to die.
Right now, at this moment, I’m writing this newsletter as a distraction from a non-writing obligation that is, itself, a distraction (in a way) from the yet-unannounced books I’m in the middle of writing. And over these months, every second spent away from those books has made me sick. All those yes’s of last year coming due 365 days later to stand suddenly between me and my Happy Place. The mind fogs, the stomach curdles, the temper shortens. Too much longer and the delirium tremens begin to set in. Time spent among the Sick and Suffering has taught me well enough what withdrawal symptoms look like.
I don’t know, and may never know, that moment when writing turned from a thing I loved to do to the thing I couldn’t do without, the way liquor stops being the thing that helps you adjust to a situation and becomes the thing that keeps you upright. Sometimes, it takes a decade; sometimes, it takes a day. In this light, retirement looks less like riding off into the sunset, gray-haired and loved, and more like taking that first step, shaking like a leaf, into a church basement. In Chariots of Fire, Harold Abrahams likens running to an addiction. In the same film, Eric Liddell says that running is when he most feels God’s presence. No matter the path, it seems the Three-in-One is always there to intercept me.
But there’s a softer side to this. I like endings. When both Succession and Barry announced that their 4th seasons would be their final, there were, on my part, no attendant feelings of loss, no feelings of having been short-changed. There was a rightness to it all. Going out on their own terms. The perfect and perfectly intentional button at the end of a paragraph. Twisting in the air is not the thing that gets you the Gold Medal. Landing on one’s feet after having twisted in the air is the thing that does. If my prospective schedule holds (lol), I’ll have published 10 (or 9 or 11) books in 10 years.1 2027, the closer I get to it, has more and more the look of a finish line. It has made the current work-in-progress my button, the whole thing a stretched-out landing of the dismount, and a reminder that I never envisioned myself drafting novels at the age of 82. This isn’t to say I don’t already possess the requisite number of ideas to demand novel production up to that age; it’s only to say that nobody’s 40 and still a running back in the NFL. Sometimes, you just need to sit across from your best friend and chief antagonist, tell him “we dug coal together,” and leave it at that.
It’s not all feelings and inclinations and prayer and wishes, though. There are the nuts and bolts of it, the dollars and sense. The truth running like a third rail under all of this is that the pieces ain’t hittin’ like they were half a decade ago. The advances ski downhill, you and a public high school teacher in your state have reached pay parity, and it becomes increasingly difficult to justify doing all the things to your body, mind, and soul that writing a really good book demands. Especially when your interlocutors on Zoom calls can see your certificate of admission to the Bar hovering over your shoulder.2 On occasion, I peek out from my writing bunker to see a beautiful and enceinte life happening around me, and there’re things out there I’d like and like to do, hopes and dreams wholly unattached to writing; it’s perfectly all right if writing doesn’t build the bridge to get me there. Lord knows, it ain’t financing that construction project.
This thing I’m working on now, this thing I’m gleefully play-wrestling with, has reminded me of all the things that fascinated and enthralled me in college and immediately after. It’s reminded me that I was a Poli Sci major, not an English major. 10 books will have been a career and—to some, I’m sure—an enviable one. I will have produced a veritable “body of work.” An oeuvre. I might not have gotten all the things I wanted or ticked the box next to every Bucket List item, but I’ve lived the dream. The thing is, though, that when the Dream starts to live you, it becomes a coma.
But who knows, ultimately? Should I still be able once the AMPTP decides pure avarice and denigration of labor is bad business, there’s plenty of storytelling to be done outside of the novel.
Related, there’s yet more from me to come. I have shorts in two separate anthologies that, I hope, will make your hoodie season even more enjoyable.
The first:
My short, entitled, “Déjà Vue,” is collected in the anthology, The Book of Witches from the inimitable Jonathan Strahan. Out Aug. 1. It’s a gorgeous collection and an honor to be listed in that Table of Contents with such esteemed authors.
Secondly:
Out There Screaming, edited by the one and only Jordan Peele and the indefatigable John Joseph Adams, is out October 3, 2023. My story, “Origin Story,” is one of the most unhinged things I’ve written but also maybe a Top 5 short from me. And, hey, if it could earn me the anchor spot in this book of absolute masters of the craft, well…
Let this be proof that I’m not done yet. And, hey, as committed as I am, right now, to, in short time, drop the Black Album and back out, Nas is gonna be 50 this September and, last week, he dropped his 16th album.
Currently reading: [redacted]
Currently listening: Ataraxia - Free Flow Lava
Goliath is no. 7.
In another life, a darker timeline, I’m a corporate attorney doing deals for planet killers.