As the asteroid streaks past, I just had a sudden telepathic insight into how Douglas Adams began his career. He was scuffling his way down the street one day feeling low and down on his luck and contemplating turtle cosmology:

A well-known scientist (some say it was Bertrand Russell) once gave a public lecture on astronomy. He described how the earth orbits around the sun and how the sun, in turn, orbits around the center of a vast collection of stars called our galaxy. At the end of the lecture, a little old lady at the back of the room got up and said: “What you have told us is rubbish. The world is really a flat plate supported on the back of a giant tortoise.” The scientist gave a superior smile before replying, “What is the tortoise standing on?” “You’re very clever, young man, very clever,” said the old lady. “But it’s turtles all the way down!”

Only he thinks to himself about the girl who just dumped him and suddenly goes: “Red herring, more likely.” Then he amends the story “Don’t get smart with me young man, it’s red herring all the way down!” Instantly he had his inner sunbeam back again and the rest is history.

I’ve just had a rough go for a week with my sleep. This is nothing new: it recurs like celestial clock-work. Sometimes worse, sometimes better, but always the same. Yesterday afternoon the fog became so think I finally capitulated and whimpered off to the bedroom, curled into the foetal position under a giant mound of blankets, planted the white flowers, and hoped for some kind words if anyone missed me. I crawled back out sixteen hours later feeling like a whole new egg, to put it mildly. My pseudonym is truthfully one jigger of Sister Helen Prejean–stirred not shaken–with one jigger of Lady Macbeth, who might perhaps not be the bottommost cold fish in my personal Pan Galactic Garble Blaster. What a difference one letter makes.

Asteroid Day. I can relate, and under this ominous sky chart perhaps shed some light on the Steve Tambellini question from the other day, as I see it. It’s funny, because while I write fast enough over the keyboard, but I’m rarely able to jump into the discussion with any kind of “summing up” when LT fires off his question of the day. Oh, you want the integral and not just some grab bag (or garble gab) of unruly derivatives. That will take time. Come back in a day or two.

I experienced an asteroid impact in my early twenties. Nothing special, strictly the usual suspect: a woman. But I took it hard and spent the next three years in Mordor. As much as she presided over the lighting of the fuse (it was a joint ceremony), the actual keg of dynamite was entirely my own baggage–and I pretty much knew this right from the get blow. You see, I had this ring on my mantelpiece from my childhood years. No one really knew what this ring represented … ah, but I see you’ve all heard this story before, so let’s move on.

I figure there must be at least a dozen different ways to have great sex. It’s a higher dimensional space. If you’ve never been there, try beer and peanuts. Later you’ll discover easier methods. Such as asking. But, you know, with the right tone of voice. So this was long ago, and I still had a short list. What we had together was great because we had such a reliable Hollywood dismount: drenched, flushed, squeezed out and exhausted. But apart from that, it wasn’t that good, really. There was much release of tension and pretty much no release of conflict. I don’t think either of us had good role models from our parental units on that last item. But then, we just made up the sex ourselves, and that had worked out just fine, so what’s the big deal?

Things became weird and a bit uncomfortable the summer she was preparing to leave and study abroad. I went on a bicycle trip for a couple of weeks toward the end of summer with one of my old college roommates. She met me in Montreal when I returned. This was supposed to be a kind of romantic renewal before she departed a few weeks later to a rather long list of question marks. But she was all strange in small ways and I didn’t understand her mood and whatever connection we made was shimmering more like a transporter booth than the old reliable E.T. saucer beam of dimensional unfolding; and apart from the bedroom, the portents and tracks marks across the sky were bold but puzzling; if only puzzling to me at that age with less of the map filled in.

It happened that I’d been replaced in my absence by an emergency spare tire. Not a terribly reliable spare tire. He rolled off to rescue some other distressed damsel a few months later. But in the meantime, he did manage to show up outside my front door on moving day to assist with the luggage. Portents aren’t supposed to ring the doorbell, no matter how clueless one might be. That’s a violation of the hockey code if I’ve ever seen one.

Now the upshot of this is that my departure for Mordor was awkward: in my distress I had the canoe pointed the wrong way around. I also had two Sméagols and no Samwise, but that’s another matter. For sure, Mordor was on my own head. No blame there. The second Sméagol was debatable, but probably also on my own head. Paddling to the far shore with the canoe inverted–that made me royally pissed. For years afterward I would dream of her absentmindedly stepping off a sidewalk in front of a bus (somewhere in London most likely), a bus with no intention to stop, and I just stood there silently and watched: saying nothing, doing nothing, and feeling nothing.

My time in Mordor was an odd business. It’s true the world went seventeen shades of bleak, but the bleakness was far from uniform. It was rough. After busting my hump on the squash court for an hour and half, I could pump enough endorphins into my system to crack a smile, or maybe a joke. The gleam of sunshine lasted for about half an hour, then it all went back to those weary shades of grey. I read a lot of Primo Levi and things like that. It’s not that I was seeking misery. It was simply that these were the happiest books where I could make a legitimate emotional connection. It takes a very wide lens, I’ll admit, to find any happiness in Survival in Auschwitz. But the truth is, it was a survival story, and more than that, it put the sand into a very important new word in the world consciousness: Hilter, and all he stood for. It’s a horrible thing we ever needed to have that word. But now we do, and anyone out there who might like to retrace his ignominious steps discovers themselves terminally and fatally labelled when people speak behind their backs before they can so much as grow a proper mustache. It’s a form of social immune system. In another generation or five, we’ll forget what the word really means, and perhaps civilization will end up baring a buttock to the booster shot from hell, but so be it. Small steps. Such as I was at the time, I was very receptive to the silver lining. I’m going to quote a little excessively from the copyright perspective, but this is bigger than copyright, goddamn it.

Hope and despair in Auschwitz

Sooner or later in life everyone discovers that perfect happiness is unrealisable, but there are few who pause to consider the antithesis: that perfect unhappiness is equally unattainable. The obstacles preventing the realisation of both these extreme states are of the same nature: they derive from our human condition which is opposed to everything infinite. Our ever-insufficient knowledge of the future opposes it: and this is called, in the one instance, hope, and in the other, uncertainty of the following day. The certainty of death opposes it: for it places a limit on every joy, but also on every grief. The inevitable material cares oppose it: for as they poison every lasting happiness, they equally assiduously distract us from our misfortunes and make our consciousness of them intermittent and hence supportable.

October 1944

We fought with all our strength to prevent the arrival of winter. We clung to all the warm hours, at every dusk we tried to keep the sun in the sky for a little longer, but it was all in vain. Yesterday evening the sun went down irrevocably behind a confusion of dirty clouds, chimney stacks and wires, and today it is winter.

We know what it means because we were here last winter; and the others will soon learn. It means that in the course of these months, from October till April, seven out of 10 of us will die. Whoever does not die will suffer minute by minute, all day, every day: from the morning before dawn until the distribution of the evening soup, we will have to keep our muscles continually tensed, dance from foot to foot, beat our arms under our shoulders against the cold. We will have to spend bread to acquire gloves, and lose hours of sleep to repair them when they become unstitched. As it will no longer be possible to eat in the open, we will have to eat our meals in the hut, on our feet, everyone will be assigned an area of floor as large as a hand, as it is forbidden to rest against the bunks. Wounds will open on everyone’s hands, and to be given a bandage will mean waiting every evening for hours on one’s feet in the snow and wind.

Just as our hunger is not that feeling of missing a meal, so our way of being cold has need of a new word. We say “hunger”, we say “tiredness”, “fear”, “pain”, we say “winter” and they are different things. They are free words, created and used by free men who lived in comfort and suffering in their homes. If the Lagers had lasted longer a new, harsh language would have been born; and only this language could express what it means to toil the whole day in the wind, with the temperature below freezing, wearing only a shirt, underpants, cloth jacket and trousers, and in one’s body nothing but weakness, hunger and knowledge of the end drawing nearer.

In the same way in which one sees a hope end, winter arrived this morning. We realised it when we left the hut to go and wash: there were no stars, the dark, cold air had the smell of snow. In roll-call square, in the grey of dawn, when we assembled for work, no one spoke. When we saw the first flakes of snow, we thought that if at the same time last year they had told us that we would have seen another winter in Lager, we would have gone and touched the electric wire-fence; and that even now, we would go if we were logical, were it not for this last senseless crazy residue of unavoidable hope.

When it rains, we would like to cry. It is November, it has been raining for 10 days now and the ground is like the bottom of a swamp. Everything made of wood gives out a smell of mushrooms.

If I could walk 10 steps to the left I would be under shelter in the shed; a sack to cover my shoulders would be sufficient, or even the prospect of a fire where I could dry myself; or even a dry rag to put between my shirt and my back. Between one movement of the shovel and another I think about it, and I really believe that to have a dry rag would be positive happiness.

By now it would be impossible to be wetter; I will just have to pay attention to move as little as possible, and above all not to make new movements, to prevent some other part of my skin coming into unnecessary contact with my soaking, icy clothes.

It is lucky that it is not windy today. Strange how, in some way, one always has the impression of being fortunate, how some chance happening, perhaps infinitesimal, stops us crossing the threshold of despair and allows us to live. It is raining, but it is not windy. Or else, it is raining and is also windy: but you know that this evening, it is your turn for the supplement of soup so that even today, you find the strength to reach the evening. Or it is raining, windy and you have the usual hunger, and then you think that if you really had to, if you really felt nothing in your heart but suffering and tedium – as sometimes happens, when you really seem to lie on the bottom – well, even in that case, at any moment you want you could always go and touch the electric wire-fence, or throw yourself under the shunting trains, and then it would stop raining.

There were times in Mordor I was temped by the electrified wire. I would say to myself “this is about as bad as it can get” and then hardly two beats later, some little part of my brain with a shard of clue remaining would go “Dude, snap out of it!” I didn’t need a dry shirt, I just needed the bleak fog to lift. I was really just in Mirkwood Forest, masquerading as Mordor, as convincingly rendered by some horrible dark art of the human condition.

Here’s the thing about Tambi: It really doesn’t matter if he’s a wet shirt or a dry shirt. People who think that letting Tambi go will import a brighter caliber of sunshine are perseverating on local misfortune. It doesn’t take much to construct a null hypothesis that Tambi’s replacement would amount to nothing more than a distracting wash. Here’s one way to frame a null hypothesis: that the organization as a whole has come to believe (picture Ahab visiting their dreams) that bringing in fresh faces through a spinning door often does as much harm as good.

By the third year, my mood had improved enough that one day when the sun refused to shine yet again I finally said “Fuck it! If the sun won’t shine, the sun won’t shine.” Then a small bush caught fire in front of my feet and a goat spoke to me, and I saw for the first time a scuff mark in the dry dirt winding its way up the steep cliff face, and I began the slow process of dragging myself back to where the sun does shine, freed at last from the invisible cage of wanting a dry shirt.

During those three years, I made no additions to my short list. But then, finally, I got back to business, and started to discover there was a lot more to it than the steamy Hollywood dismount. This is hard to put into words, but imagine if The Sixth Sense had been about sex instead of metaphysical loose ends. People have monkeys. You end up covering different terrain if you’re not ignoring the monkeys; less lush in one dimension, but far more interesting in many others. I find there’s no better sport than capturing one of your partner’s monkeys, tying a blindfold around its eyes, spinning it round and round, then pushing it off to stumble and crash into a wall. “Hey, you hurt my monkey!” “Oh, were you fond of it? I thought it was a royal pain in the ass … and you only ever complain about it … and didn’t we have the most amazing time while he was passed out on the bedroom floor for half an hour?” I guess you’d call it an acquired taste.

The monkeys show up to help us cope, but they have a bad habit of hanging around when they’re no longer needed. For example, you might be in a panic about flunking out of school, but also having difficulties in a relationship. Enter the monkey: emotional multi-tasking. Monkeys and shirts really aren’t so different. At some point you have to say “Thank you Mr Monkey, you were a big help back then when I really needed you. You can go now. Goodbye. If you get all teary eyed, you can send me a xmas card, but no phone calls. Ever. Ciao, have a good one.” Of course, that’s easier said than done. Be grateful, but firm.

So here’s the thing. Many of us have things going on IRL that make us wish for a dry shirt. The problem is, we sort of know deep down that the problem might be bigger than a dry shirt; it might have roots, say, all the way back to when we were seven and our parent’s were having a tough go after dark. But we want so much to believe in the dry shirt. So we fire Tambi–offer him up to the gods of shirt dryness.

Yeah, so that’s what I really think underneath all those herring, if such a place exists.

I’m still pretty angry about the backwards canoe. “That wound will never fully heal. He will carry it the rest of his life.” (How did I ever live before Fran Walsh came along to give voice to my agonies?) Would it have made any difference if I had entered my personal Mordor in rocking canoe style? Hard to know. I’d like to think so. For some reason in my rage against the nested dimensions of life, I’ve burned the shirt, but not the canoe.