9.11.2026 - Bone Anniversary
Some of you will receive a business electronic mail from me next week. This is not a space for business. This is where I dump excess refuse for your entertainment. But I have been working on a business thing and the time to introduce it is nigh. So ready your bi-noculars for that. I hope you’ll read what it says, at least.
-JA
Dear Tom Skilling how do you predict the weather when there isn't any? It's either friendly here or fog.
The local grocery store closes today. Appropriate. The last few times I’ve gone entire sections are emptied out, the freezers defrosted, there’s a real [insert your post-apocalyptic franchise reference of choice] vibe. Can’t even buy a pickle in this town. One is tempted to compose an elegy or an ode or encomium or dirge.
My mom wrote and recorded a song about the Real Nine Eleven that was famous for a while. I thought it would be hilarious to have her set up out front of Lucky’s (in the Great Lakes grocery stores all get possessives – you got yer Kroger’s, your Goff’s, your Meijers’s) and perform like she did at the Pentagon Memorial dedication (there’s a CSPAN clip somewhere of that; military families and Gold Star John McCain supporters came up to her afterward and told her she should go on Rush Limbaugh; she drove all the way back to Ann Arbor that night without stopping and discovered she’d sold every copy of the CD she had in stock) but she has better things to, apparently.
If I were sticking to this theme, which I’m not, this would be about emptiness and loss, which it isn’t, at least not all about that, that would be a drag, and even if I feel the drag I also feel full and joyful and sometimes the needle hovers around the middle.
It feels like I should have more to say, it’s been so long, but the more time away from here the less I want to talk about myself. I have multiple therapists for that. One encouraged me to be an editor of my feelings.
He was obsessed with wringing substance out of nothing, like he wanted to be the Big Bang, creator of the universe, like he found a speck of dust on his chin and said hey what if I crack this thing open how much destruction could I unleash? I heard somewhere that each of us has enough potential energy stored inside us to level Chicago, which is how it felt sometimes when I lived there, I was so pent up and tense with all these layers like plaques inside and outside and whatever I did there was always this sharp hunger, it made me restless, made me pour things into my face and seek out adventure, is what I’m saying, and in the end sometimes when you look back on your life it’s easy to only see it as a trail of destruction and half-realized relationships and you realize you don’t even have phone numbers for most of the people you knew but then you just sort of met up, didn’t you, we didn’t need obsessive planning and to-do lists, we just did things, we saw each other at band practice and on the kickball field and at each other’s bars and it wasn’t always the healthiest way to live but it was a way to be alive. Sometimes I would encounter someone who was living like a sober person and doing normal and productive and even impressive things and wonder how the hell one gets like that.
His internal monologue slipped in and out of voices and it never shut up.
Johannsen told me when he first started to realize he might be autistic it was because he didn’t have one of those. God it must be nice, I said, all that peace and quiet. No wonder you’re so good at meditating.
He craved chaos and wabi-sabi and unnevenness. He wrote short fiction that sounded like the stories in his head and almost nobody understood them. These things too he thought of as contributing to the Greater Good. The needs of the many. It was the anniversary of Star Trek and he was surprised that he’d mostly forgotten that, and maybe that was good, considering he'd once gone through a phase when he wasn’t doing particularly well where he made memes, if you can call them that, and one of them got a like on social media from George Takei, at that time his greatest achievement.
He sat in his girlfriend’s back yard on a difficult morning and stared at her garden like he was willing it to do something interesting and he wrote about the way a seed can grow and twist into a recognizable shape or something asymmetrical and wrong-looking, an anti-plant that in certain light resembles something fearful and with more agency, the creature you remember from when you were sure everything was a creature, when you assigned personalities to all living things and even inanimate objects, the alarm clock that ticked so loudly in your bedroom, for instance, or the pile of thirty stuffed animals you arranged at the foot of your bed every day and who had their own dramas and conflicts and romances, and you were sometimes the mediator, rarely the judge and wasn’t there a plant metaphor in here somewhere? The nice thing about those is you can use them for just about anything, they’re all purpose, like duct tape or self-sealing stem bolts.
There was this person on my bus going on about how she didn’t have her baby anymore and picking fights with other passengers and then she passed out with her head against the window. Everyone was relieved. What they didn’t know was she was the victim of a government conspiracy, a scientist who’d been working on cold fusion and UFO shit, and that they’d driven her insane by slipping a megadose of LSD into her matcha. Then they really did take her baby. Excessive, if you ask me. But this isn’t about me.