These three essays ended up belonging together in a way I didn’t plan. One is about reluctantly admitting that I’m actually a pretty good writer. One is about the quieter skill underneath a lot of that writing: knowing how to read closely, or in my case listen closely, for what language is doing. And, the third is about computer camp, a lemonade-jug bong, children’s Tylenol, and the long collapse of whatever I once thought being cool meant. Taken together, they make a strange little argument for paying better attention to the life and abilities I actually have instead of whatever imaginary version I thought I was supposed to become.

Apparently, the result is not especially glamorous. I write a lot. I read carefully. I have three kids. I barely drink. I know where the medicine is. I spend an unreasonable amount of time thinking about sentences, Cormac McCarthy, AI, and whether some minor annoyance deserves its own essay. And, increasingly, I think this all counts as turning out pretty well.

1. Fine. I’m a Pretty Good Writer

Every once in a while, I say something to Christa that apparently sounds much less revelatory to her than it does to me.

“I actually am a pretty good writer.”

Her response is usually some variation of:

“Yeah. Of course.”

Not wow, what a breakthrough. Not I’m so glad you’ve finally recognized this dormant gift. More like I have announced that the refrigerator is cold.

Yeah. Obviously.

I find this mildly irritating.

I also think she might be right.

The Uncomfortable Compliment

I have already written an entire essay calledHearing Myself Before the Machine, in which I managed to say the even more uncomfortable version directly:

I am a very good writer.

Then I spent the rest of the essay carefully explaining why I was allowed to say it.

This is apparently what confidence looks like in my hands. I make a positive statement about myself and immediately convene an evidentiary hearing.

Still, I meant it.

And, lately, looking at Open Doors as a whole has made the conclusion harder to dodge.

I am not an expert on most of the things I write about. I have made that point pretty aggressively too. InTastes, not Titles, I practically confiscated my own credentials before anyone else could ask to see them. I am interested in Buddhism and other nondual traditions, but I am not a scholar of them. I write about AI without being a computer scientist. I write about medicine without being a doctor. I write about astronomy without being an astronomer. I write about Cormac McCarthy while remaining, regrettably, not Cormac McCarthy.

That last deficiency appears permanent.

But, expertise is not the only thing a writer can bring to a subject.

There is curiosity. Attention. Taste. Synthesis. The ability to notice a strange connection and stay with it long enough to find out whether it means anything.

There is also the sentence itself.

I think I’m pretty good at those.

An Increasingly Difficult Website to Summarize

Open Doors has become a strange place.

That is partly deliberate and partly what happens when I am left unsupervised with a website.

I have written about the writers who shaped me inEight Writers at the Desk. I have written about how AI has become a kind ofthinking room, and about how the essay itself has startedopening into songs, images, poems, and other forms.

I have written about disability and the strangequiet luxuries hidden inside certain losses. I have written about short poems and compression inSeventeen, Thirty-One, Twenty-Two, Six.

I have also established aPetty Office for complaints that absolutely did not require publication and assembledan archive devoted largely to documenting the irritating frequency with which my wife is correct.

Range.

This is the word serious literary critics use when a writer can discuss consciousness and then become angry about a sun visor.

I could keep linking things here, but at some point this essay would become less an argument than an aggressive guided tour of my own website.

Although, maybe that is what Open Doors is now.

Welcome. On your left, metaphysics. On your right, an essay about mugs. Please continue through the corridor for neurological disease, marriage, artificial intelligence, Cormac McCarthy, fatherhood, solar storms, meditation, petty linguistic grievances, and songs in genres that should probably not exist.

The gift shop is currently closed.

And, Then There’s the Fiction

This may actually be the part I have the easiest time saying something nice about.

I really like my fiction.

Not all of it equally. I can hear the younger writer in some of the older stories. I can see places where I would make different choices now. There are sentences I would tighten and instincts I would trust more.

That is normal.

But, when I look atWhere They Wander now, or theother fiction I have gathered on the site, I don’t feel embarrassed by it.

I feel proud of it.

That is surprisingly difficult to type.

I am not putting myself beside the writers in Eight Writers at the Desk. I have read enough great fiction to know what great fiction looks like, and one useful consequence of having Cormac McCarthy living permanently in your head is that it becomes difficult to accidentally conclude you are Cormac McCarthy.

My ego has many talents. That particular delusion has not yet made the roster.

Still, there is an enormous distance between I am not one of the greatest writers who ever lived and therefore I should shrug at the work I have made.

That second move is nonsense.

There are stories on this site that I think are genuinely good.

There are essays where I think I found exactly the sentence I needed.

There are jokes I still like after hearing them repeatedly, which may be the highest standard available to a person who edits his work by listening to it over and over until everyone in the house has indirectly heard the same paragraph seventeen times.

I know what I’m trying to do on the page.

Maybe I should occasionally give myself credit for knowing how to do it.

The Body of Work Problem

The strange thing is that I almost didn’t make most of this.

I wrote recently inTrying Again, Again about how many times Open Doors went quiet, and how improbable this current period of writing would have seemed from the outside. I have more physical limitations now, more fatigue, three young children, less easy access to sight and speech.

And, somehow, the site keeps expanding.

For a little while, I even managed to kill the essay backlog, an event I commemorated inThe Backlog Is Dead, Long Live the Backlog shortly before naturally creating another backlog.

The important thing about that essay was not really the backlog.

It was the realization that there was a body of work.

Not a hypothetical one. Not the collection of things I would write someday when circumstances improved.

The work was there.

It still is.

Maybe this is just a down-night essay. Maybe I needed a small corrective and decided, as usual, that the reasonable response was to publish it on the internet with a title, image, meta description, poem, and probably an unnecessarily elaborate song.

That possibility should remain open.

But, the mood does not make the evidence false.

People have told me before that I am talented. Christa seems almost confused that I regard this as disputed territory. I have an MFA. I have been writing for a long time. I have read seriously, thought seriously, revised obsessively, failed plenty, written things that went nowhere, written things I still love, and developed a voice that I can recognize even when the tools around it change.

At some point, refusing to acknowledge any of that stops being humility.

It just becomes inaccurate.

I’ll Take It

I don’t need to decide where I belong in some imaginary hierarchy of writers.

Almost nobody belongs among the greats. That is what makes them the greats.

I don’t need to be an expert on every subject that catches my attention either. I can keep doing what I have been doing: read, listen, research, think, ask questions, make connections, admit what I don’t know, and try to write from the right altitude.

Then I can make something out of it.

That part, I know how to do.

I can write fiction.

I can write essays.

I can move from something ridiculous to something sincere without always breaking the thread. I can write about a large idea and sometimes find the small human thing inside it. I can write about the small human thing and sometimes find that it opens onto something much larger.

I have taste.

I have a voice.

I have a body of work now.

And, yes, fine.

I’m a pretty good writer.

Christa already knew.

2. I Can Read Too

Having already written an essay in which I admit that I’m a pretty good writer, I would now like to make the considerably less impressive announcement that I am also good at reading.

Thank you.

Please hold your applause.

I realize this sounds a little like bragging that I can use a fork.

A substantial portion of the human population can read. Children learn to do it. There are standardized tests devoted to confirming that you can look at a paragraph and determine that Susan went to the store because she needed milk.

I am not claiming unusual mastery of Susan.

What I mean by being good at reading is something different.

And, in my case, “reading” usually means listening now anyway.

The eyes are increasingly optional.

The attention is not.

Literacy Is not Quite the Same Thing

There is a difference between being able to read a sentence and knowing what to notice in one.

Most of us understand this intuitively in other forms.

There is hearing music, and then there is hearing what the bass is doing.

There is watching a movie, and then there is noticing why the camera stayed on someone’s face two seconds longer than expected.

There is eating something good, and then there is being able to tell that the acidity is doing more work than you initially realized.

You do not need the second skill to enjoy the first.

But, it changes the experience.

Reading works the same way.

A word is not interchangeable with every synonym the thesaurus places beside it. Sentence length changes pressure. Paragraph breaks matter. Repetition matters. An image that appears once may be decoration. An image that appears four times probably wants your attention.

A writer can tell you something directly.

A writer can also arrange six seemingly unrelated details around an absence and let you discover what none of the characters can say.

That is reading too.

Or, at least, that is the kind I care about.

This Is Also Thinking

This becomes inconvenient because close reading is not really a separate activity from thinking.

It is thinking with evidence.

You notice something.

You wonder whether it matters.

You keep going.

It happens again.

Now you have a pattern.

Then the pattern changes once, and suddenly the exception matters more than the repetition did.

This is one reason I have never been especially interested in the idea that literature is a puzzle with a correct answer hidden in the back of the teacher’s edition.

Sometimes the curtains really are just blue.

Sometimes they are blue because the writer has spent eighty pages quietly associating that color with death.

The trick is not assuming either one in advance.

You pay attention.

You make a case.

You stay willing to be wrong.

That is basically the entire intellectual project, just with better sentences.

The People at the Desk Again

I wrote inEight Writers at the Desk about the writers who shaped my own work: McCarthy, Wallace, Carver, Chiang, Dostoyevsky, Chekhov, Gogol, Borges.

That essay is ostensibly about influence.

But, looking back, it is just as much about reading.

I cannot say Carver taught me restraint unless I can recognize restraint.

I cannot say Borges taught me how an idea can become narrative unless I can see where the idea stops being a proposition and starts becoming a story.

I cannot say Wallace showed me that sincerity could survive irony unless I can hear the tonal shift when the joke stops protecting the speaker.

And, I definitely cannot say McCarthy changed my understanding of the sentence if all I know is that his sentences sound pretty.

They do, incidentally.

Very pretty.

Sometimes while describing a mutilated corpse.

Literature is versatile.

But, the point is that admiration gets more interesting when you can begin to explain it.

“This writer is great” is a reaction.

“Here is what this writer is doing, here is how it works, and here is why it affects me” is reading.

McCarthy, Obviously

The most absurd example is probably my ongoingMcCarthy project.

I decided, for reasons that made perfect sense at the time, to go back through essentially the entire body of work of one of the greatest American writers and write about it book by book.

This has not been an efficient hobby.

Before I draft one of those essays, I spend a long time with the book.

I listen carefully. I track characters. I notice repeated phrases, colors, objects, gestures, changes in tense or point of view. I pay attention when a sentence suddenly becomes stranger than the sentences around it. I notice when an image from an earlier novel reappears years later in a different form.

Sometimes I stop because something seems important.

Sometimes I stop because something is funny.

Sometimes I stop because McCarthy has written a sentence so good that my primary critical response is approximately:

Oh, come on.

Then I keep going.

By the time I actually draft the essay, much of the work has already happened.

The essay is the visible part.

The reading came first.

Why Is he Good?

I wrote a short piece calledWhy Read These McCarthy Essays? partly to explain why I think the project belongs on Open Doors at all.

McCarthy is one of the greats.

That statement is easy.

Knowing why is harder.

It is easy to say Blood Meridian is extraordinary.

It is harder to talk about the biblical cadence without reducing it to “sounds biblical.” It is harder to notice how physical description becomes metaphysical pressure, how violence changes the texture of the language, how the Judge’s speech operates differently from the narration around him.

It is easy to say Suttree is beautiful.

It is harder to hear how the novel moves between grotesque comedy, tenderness, degradation, dream, and grief without breaking itself apart.

It is easy to say The Passenger and Stella Maris are strange.

It is harder to notice how they echo one another, how ideas migrate between characters, how absences become structural, how late McCarthy pares certain things down while letting other questions expand almost beyond the books containing them.

That is the part I like.

Not proving that McCarthy was good.

The case has been made.

I like finding out what “good” consists of.

The Useful Irritation of Word Choice

This probably also explains why I can spend an unreasonable amount of time changing a single word in my own essays.

If you read closely long enough, language stops feeling neutral.

You hear when a sentence has one beat too many.

You hear when a paragraph ends a sentence after it should have ended.

You hear when a word is technically correct but spiritually irritating.

This is not always a gift.

Sometimes it means spending ten minutes replacing a perfectly adequate word with another perfectly adequate word and then changing it back.

Art.

But, it also means I know that form and meaning are not cleanly separable.

What an essay says matters to me.

So does how it says it.

That is true of the fiction too.

A story is not merely a container carrying plot from one end to the other. A paragraph has shape. Dialogue has rhythm. Silence has placement. The order in which information arrives changes the information.

If I did not know how to read those things, I could not reliably make them.

Which is why this skill is related to writing but not identical to it.

You can understand a machine without being able to build one.

You can build something by instinct without being especially good at explaining how it works.

The two capacities overlap.

They are not the same.

Reading With my Ears

There is another odd wrinkle now.

I do most of this by listening.

That has changed some things and sharpened others.

I may not see the paragraph sitting on the page the way I once did, but I hear rhythm constantly.

I hear repeated words.

I hear the length of a sentence because I have to travel through it in time.

I hear dialogue as dialogue.

Sometimes punctuation becomes almost musical: the slight suspension of a clause, the hard landing of a short sentence after something long and winding.

This is not me pretending that losing visual access to text was secretly an artistic upgrade.

It wasn’t.

But, attention adapts.

Mine moved toward the ear.

And, the ear learned things.

Not Bad

So, apparently, I am a good reader too.

This remains a deeply embarrassing thing to announce.

I can write.

I can read.

At this rate the next essay will reveal that I am surprisingly competent with indoor plumbing.

But, I mean it.

The things I care about on Open Doors depend on this ability.

The fiction depends on it.

The essays depend on it.

The McCarthy project especially depends on it.

Even the pieces that have nothing to do with literature depend on the same habit: notice what is there, notice what repeats, notice what does not fit, ask why, and stay with the question long enough for something less obvious to appear.

Maybe that is why reading has always felt larger to me than consuming books.

It is a mode of attention.

And, attention, practiced long enough, becomes a way of thinking.

I know McCarthy is great.

I also know some of the reasons why.

That second thing took longer.

I think it matters.

3. Apparently, I Turned Out Fine

Sometime around 2005, when I was in late middle school, my parents sent me to computer camp.

This is already an excellent opening sentence if the goal is to establish that I was extremely cool.

The camp was at the University of Missouri-Rolla, which is now Missouri University of Science and Technology, or Missouri S&T. For a week, I lived on campus and spent my days doing the sort of things one presumably sends a middle-schooler to computer camp to do.

I learned some basic programming. I remember it being mostly visual, although whatever language or system we were using has now vanished so completely from my memory that I assume it has joined floppy disks and AIM away messages in the technological afterlife.

I also built a little car using solar panels and chipsets and wires and other components that made me feel, briefly, like an engineer.

So, Mom and Dad, if you’re reading this: your money was not entirely wasted.

I did learn things.

What happened after dark is a slightly different story.

The Two Computer Camps

At night, the camp seemed to divide itself into two groups.

There were the good kids.

They did the daytime activities, went back to the dorms, behaved themselves, went to sleep, and presumably woke up refreshed and ready to continue becoming productive members of society.

Then there were the cool kids.

I am placing both of these categories in very large quotation marks.

The cool kids stayed up. They wandered around. They experimented with whatever modest forms of delinquency were available to middle-school and early-high-school kids trapped at a computer camp in Rolla, Missouri.

This was not exactly Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas.

One activity I remember involved people combining whatever medications they had brought with them, apparently under the assumption that putting several ordinary pills together would unlock some pharmacological secret unavailable to modern medicine.

I don’t remember what the medications actually were. Probably ibuprofen. Maybe allergy medicine.

For all I know, somebody took two Advil and a Claritin and spent the next hour waiting to meet God.

There was also marijuana.

At one point, somebody constructed what I can only describe as an improvised bong involving a gallon jug of lemonade and a joint.

I have forgotten useful programming concepts from that week.

I remember the lemonade bong.

The brain has priorities.

My Extremely Dangerous Double Life

I existed somewhere between the two camps.

During the day, I was a good kid.

I programmed things. I built my little solar car. I listened to adults explain technology. I presumably nodded at appropriate intervals.

At night, I tended to hang around the other group.

I wasn’t doing much of what they were doing. I wasn’t particularly interested in swallowing mystery handfuls from the combined medicine cabinet of several adolescents, which I would like the historical record to recognize as one of my better decisions.

But, they seemed more fun.

Or, more accurately, they seemed like the people who had been designated fun.

This distinction mattered enormously when I was thirteen or fourteen and matters almost not at all now.

Back then, there were apparently Good Kids and Cool Kids, and some part of me wanted access to both rooms.

I wanted to be the kid who understood the computer during the day and also knew where the lemonade jug was at night.

This may have been an early indication of the same impulse I wrote about inI Never Watched Tiger King (and That Doesn’t Make Me Interesting).

I have spent an embarrassing amount of my life quietly assigning meaning to things that do not contain nearly as much meaning as I would like.

The music you like.

The books you read.

The television you refuse to watch.

Whether you were one of the kids who went to bed at computer camp or one of the kids turning a lemonade container into drug paraphernalia.

Surely this reveals something profound about the soul.

Or, possibly, teenagers are idiots.

The Hard Turn Toward Children's Tylenol

A few nights ago, Charlotte’s leg hurt.

Probably growing pains or something similarly ordinary and miserable when you’re a little kid trying to sleep.

So, we got out the children’s Tylenol.

We measured the appropriate amount into one of those little plastic oral syringes, and I went into her room and gave her the medicine.

And, somewhere in there, the computer-camp memory wandered back into my head.

Which made me realize that my relationship with drugs has undergone a fairly dramatic transformation.

Approximately twenty-one years ago:

What happens if we combine all these pills?

Now:

Hang on, let me make sure this syringe is filled to exactly the right line.

This is what they don’t tell you about aging.

Eventually, you become the narc.

Not even a particularly exciting narc.

A narc with dosage instructions.

I barely drink anymore. Over roughly the past year, I think my total alcohol consumption amounts to something like one bottle of wine spread across ten days.

And, to be clear, this is not a moral achievement.

I have no particular objection to alcohol. I don’t have some grand philosophical objection to marijuana either.

I just mostly don’t care.

This is somehow much less dramatic.

I did not triumph over temptation.

Temptation became inconvenient and I got sleepy.

What Happened to the Cool Kids?

I have no idea.

This is probably important.

It would be very easy to construct a satisfying little morality play here.

The good kids all became engineers.

The cool kids descended into lives of chaos.

And, I, the wise observer standing between worlds, learned the proper balance and emerged decades later as the enlightened father administering acetaminophen.

Unfortunately, reality has declined to cooperate with this essay.

For all I know, the lemonade-bong architect is now a pediatric cardiologist.

Maybe the kid mixing medications runs a pharmacy.

Maybe the good kid who went to bed at nine developed a crippling cocaine habit at thirty-two.

Maybe everyone became accountants.

Life is long.

People are weird.

Middle-school social categories are not especially predictive models.

I don’t even remember most of their names.

What I remember is the feeling of the divide.

One group was responsible.

One group was fun.

And, I wanted some part of both.

A Successful Outcome Somehow

In the essay I’m posting alongside this one, Fine. I’m a Pretty Good Writer., I finally let myself admit something that Christa apparently considered obvious years ago: I actually turned out to be pretty good at this.

Which means computer camp may have produced an acceptable outcome after all.

I learned something there.

I did not overdose on an adolescent pharmaceutical charcuterie board.

I eventually got an MFA instead of becoming a programmer, but these days I spend a suspicious amount of time thinking about artificial intelligence, so perhaps the computers found me again anyway.

I got married.

I have three kids.

I have a house.

I have responsibilities that once would have sounded catastrophically boring.

And, increasingly, I like the boring parts.

Not every part. I am not going to pretend paying bills has revealed the face of God.

But, I like going into my daughter’s room when her leg hurts.

I like being there when someone needs something.

I like the tiny routines that would have been invisible to the kid wandering around the dorms at computer camp trying to figure out which group he belonged with.

That kid thought fun was happening somewhere else.

Someone else had figured out the correct way to be interesting.

The older I get, the less convinced I am that interesting is a particularly useful goal.

I wrote about that with Tiger King, too. Taste isn’t character. Refusing popular things isn’t character. Consuming obscure things isn’t character.

And, apparently, neither is knowing where the improvised bong is.

So, Here we Are

I can still appreciate the ridiculousness of the story.

Computer camp by day.

Extremely low-budget adolescent vice by night.

A gallon jug of lemonade somehow involved.

And, twenty years later, I’m measuring children’s Tylenol into a plastic syringe and heading into my daughter’s bedroom.

This is not where the cool-kid narrative was supposed to go.

Thank God.

The solar car is gone.

The programming language is probably gone.

The lemonade bong, I assume, is very gone.

But, I remember the week.

And, I think I finally understand something the kid moving between those two groups could not have understood yet.

There was never a cool side and a boring side.

There were just kids trying on identities.

Now, I am in my mid-thirties, and most nights there is nowhere else I particularly want to be.

I have a wife I love.

Three kids.

A house full of ordinary responsibilities.

A website where I apparently write enough essays that I now have to publish companion essays to my other essays.

And, when one of my kids wakes up hurting, I know where we keep the Tylenol.

Yeah.

I turned out fine.

Apparently
Writing, reading, and living
Everything worked out

Fine.