"Between the wish and the thing the world lies waiting."

(quote: Cormac McCarthy, video: Sasquatch! 2009 [some friends of mine appear])


You know a person is a hermit because they talk about their cat, animals that matriculate to their backyard, queer things they've noticed about neighbors. They carry very little gossip around with them, not out of strict disinterest but ignorance. They have inside jokes with an audience of one. They name things in their depopulated world, assign superfluous superstition to things to mystify what is otherwise routine. I'm gradually drifting that way and have been. My brain is being rewired to run on silence and the detritus of my third-eye. The extrovert that I was for my formative years waits for my free night of the week. It doesn't even tap its feet anymore, it has learned that its time will come. I've taken to saying lately that I enjoy getting older. That when people groan about their birthday they should be grateful, for each day that passes is a day in which they are more themselves. And maybe it doesn't work that way ubiquitously but I find that as I'm getting up there in years I am gaining some scant wisdom, a longer fuse, a realignment of my self-consciousness from paralytic to snide content.


The Observer Effect my metaphor for everything now. I've been researching the means by which we measure personality, a desperate urge for one of the characters in the long-form book I'm working on now, and it seems many of the methods involve self-reporting. The individual taking them knows they're answering questions intended to gauge their empathy quotient, or systemization style, or Autism Spectrum score, or Briggs-Meyer profile. And even if consciously every answer is honest, the fact that one is reporting on themselves introduces such margins of error as to undermine any credibility. Taking the test the second time is like not taking it at all. The basic unit of our personality is the individual choice, no matter how small, and even in the act of answering one simple question we are further defining ourselves. The measurement appeals to ideals and envies and disappointments. And in coming to further understand this, and realizing that my character would need to reach this same conclusion, it occurred to me that narrative is the only real personality test. Stories qualitatively define aspects of an individual, this function perhaps their primary value in the post-Survivalist world. And they are scalable: even your top drunken anecdote says something meaningful about the person you are. At the opposite end of the spectrum, a well-researched biography may be the best technology we could concoct to model the testee's brain. Fiction on the other hand designates archetypes, filling them in with conditioning that could only happen in the setting's environment, forcing decisions on them in unique arrays and documenting the results.



I've been studiously editing a couple short stories (and just finishing up a first draft and a finalish one of two pieces that comprise nearly sixty pages) and feeling the process become more careful and open-ended. I concern myself less with getting a few pages edited than I do spending a couple solid hours at it, whatever the results. And so I read a paragraph three times, or four, and change a comma or add an article or delete one. Or the whole paragraph goes out the window in favor of a new one. Recently a friend sent me a copy of a book self-published by a guy I know from years ago. A guy I'm happy has survived. It was a cool moment to open that envelope and read that first page. I haven't got to all of it yet, and can say little about the content so far. But there was a glaring typo on the first page that made me cringe. My anxiety over the typo (not in this blog so much, but in fiction) keeps me up at night, and I almost imagine them as I read. I plan to self-publish a book later this year, a collection of short stories, and I'm phobic about the misspelled word, or the poorly chosen comma. And yet the process seems interminable, like picking through weeds for broken glass.