“[…] he said, ‘C’mon guys, let’s show the world that Laramie is not this kind of town.’ But it IS that kind of a town. If it wasn’t this kind of a town why did this happen here? […] And we have to mourn this and we have to be sad that we live in a town, a state, a country where shit like this happens. I mean, these are people trying to distance themselves from this crime. And we need to own this crime. I feel. Everyone needs to own it. We are like this. We are like this. We are like this.” -Zubaida Ula, as quoted in The Laramie Project

                “Don’t come to Mississippi this summer to save the Mississippi negro. Only come if you understand—really understand—that his freedom and yours are one.” -Bob Moses, civil rights activist, 1964

                Back in 2016, I told my friend America was becoming something I didn’t recognize. She said: “It sounds like this was your wake up call. But America has always had this side. You were just lucky enough that you didn’t have to look.” I’ve spent some of today reading about civil rights activists like Bob Moses and Fannie Lou Hammer. As I read about how openly and brutally hate, fear, and prejudice stepped up to shove them down, I thought back to that friend. We are the kind of country where white men violently storm the Capitol yelling “this is our house.” We need to feel that. Look in the mirror, own it.
                And keep working on it.
                Because we are not only like that. We are also like Stacey Abrams and Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, like Judy Heumann and Zubaida Ula and Bob Moses. Of course there are some obvious ways where “my”—my sandwich, my money, my candidate—can mean “not yours.” But there are so many more ways where “my”—my health, my peace, my freedom—and yours are one. That’s a different kind of ours. That’s the one I choose for our house. I’m working to understand, so I can help with the work.

                “Out beyond ideas of wrongdoing and rightdoing,
                there is a field. I’ll meet you there.

                When the soul lies down in that grass,
                the world is too full to talk about.
                Ideas, language, even the phrase “each other” doesn’t make any sense.” -Rumi

                “Each other” doesn’t make much sense to me. More and more, these days, I don’t feel like an ‘individual.’ The metaphor that keeps coming back, instead, is one string on a guitar. Sometimes it’s a replacement string, left alone in the drawer of this quiet apartment. Not much happens. I’m curled up. Still. Waiting. Sometimes I pick up a book, or look out the window, or water my basil plant, or listen to someone, or write to a friend, or go for a walk, and there’s a guitar again. The bridge and the headstock, the frets, the other strings, and we’re singing. 
                This morning felt kind of fuzzy. Thinking about that now, I don’t mind. I can like the resting times, curled up in the apartment. Then I was standing on a friend’s porch, cold-toed because I’d worn sandals in the freezing snow (I wasn’t there for long). The air wasn’t still anymore. It vibrated. A harmony. We talked about cookies and hot chocolate and plans, and I was more of me in not being only me. The shake of that sound has stayed with me all day, and now it’s back in writing this to you. For a moment, when you read, we’ll be a chord played together. Maybe we always are?
                Looking for “me” on New Years’ Eve, 2017, I walked up into the hills above Santa Rosa, CA. Through trees. The shadows of leaves. Past stones. A rising moon. I walked to a lake, the ripples soft along the shore, and turned back. Stars. Clouds. Hills. The city lights. On my way back down, at midnight, I could hear people cheering. I could hear a tree creaking as it leaned against another. What if the struggle isn’t to ‘find myself,’ but to move past the eggshell of how I imagined ‘myself’ as all this hatches to another moment?

“I had expected her to sink or get swept away
But she became stuck in a tide pool
Swirling between the rocks”
                -Ali Liebegott, The Summer of Dead Birds

                As a kid walking along the beach, I’d pick up pieces of driftwood and throw them out into the waves. I kept expecting them to float away. To go off into the wildness and mystery I somehow felt, out in those swells, and not come back. Then the rolling whitewater pitched them up onto the wet sand. I was surprised. As surprised, maybe, as when someone first told me that the smokestacks which went in my drawings of ocean liners and factories didn’t actually clean anything. They pushed the smoke higher up so it would come down somewhere else. So that we, standing right next to it, didn’t have to smell or feel what was happening. Instead we got that beautiful cloud feathering out into a clear sky.
                I think I wanted things to go away. To be lost, let go of, to disappear. In her poem, Liebegott is throwing into the sea the body of a dead bird. Sending it, maybe, to the land of the dead. I remember wondering, the first time I went to a funeral, what all the heavy stone was for—as though these who had been our loved ones would get back up if we didn’t weigh them down. Hold them where we’d put them, away and out of sight. Untouched. Unspoiled. Forever. But this is the land of the dead, isn’t it, just like it’s the land of the living.
                I wanted things to go away, but I wanted to keep them, too. To hold onto them, this campfire with my family, this friendship, this taste of ice cream. I wonder if both these desires—for things to go away, to be no more and be forgotten; for things to go on, unchanging—come from a place in my heart that is struggling with transformations. That is still learning that there is often also here, that the bodies and the bones don’t go away, though they crumble and come apart and become part of other things. And just now that doesn’t feel like a sad thing.
                The ocean, maybe, was teaching me. Just look at the sand and the driftwood. The wind. The grass growing up along the dunes, flickering, like low flames on old coals that once were branches.

                “’No!’ That’s my new philosophy.”
                -Sally in You’re A Good Man, Charlie Brown

                Three weeks ago, I went out to the living room where my flatmate was working away on a big assignment, and said, “I don’t wanna anything.”
                She said, “Maybe you don’t want to one thing.”
                “I don’t want to finish an Uproar post.”
                “Maybe you should find a quote that says, ‘I don’t want to,’ and then you can write, ‘I agree.’”
                We laughed about that. Then we laughed about different quotes, and looked up songs, and ended up listening to You’re A Good Man Charlie Brown. Then we reminded the cat that there are a lot of good reasons not to chew on power cords. Then I washed some dishes. And I realized, I wanted to do all of those things. I wanted to go for a walk (though sometimes it’s hard to get started), I wanted to wonder through You’re A Good Man Charlie Brown again. I want to talk with you. I want to keep working on my book, keep teaching, keep finding ways to help. I want to lots of things: I just didn’t want to one thing, or more specifically, I didn’t want to one thing the way I thought it had to be done. As a teacher, I saw a lot of young people who didn’t want to write the paper. I also saw a lot of students who judged themselves by their productivity (like I do, and am learning to stop doing), and I started to hear in their no an insistence that there had to be another way to write. To learn. To be.
                I hear a lot about powering through. I hear less about abandoning the paths that don’t work. And I think sometimes it’s the no, the refusal, that makes space for a new choice. No. That’s a good philosophy.

                “Everyone is a part of a story. What they want is to be part of something worth recording. It’s that fear of mortality, ‘I Was Here and I Mattered’ mind-set.”
                -a character in Erin Morgenstern’s The Starless Sea

                “And may you be in this house
                as the music is in the instrument.”
                -Ursula Le Guin, “For The New House”

                For the last month I’ve been living with a cat. Almond. He sits in a chair differently than I do, like the cushion’s grass and he’s the kind of dew a late sun leaves. The other night, when I was lying in bed and not yet falling asleep, he came and sat near my feet. For a moment I thought it would be the first time he curled up and slept there. Instead he sat, attentive. If my toes had turned into mice he would’ve been ready.
                I’m looking forward to and dreading Winter Break. Today I had my last scheduled classes, and soon my flatmate and Almond will be off to visit family. I’ll be here, these same two rooms. And then Le Guin starts me thinking of the different ways to be in these rooms. My shoes, by the door, are little drunks, scattered and happy to stay sprawled until someone nudges them along. Except when I set them up, toes to the door. Then they’re in the room more like a paddle’s in the raft when you’re setting up at the edge of the river, but haven’t pushed off yet from shore. And I have a basil plant in the window. Its quiet in the sunlight is totally different from Almond’s: it is, in this house, more of a kite lifting then a shadow draping itself across the cushions.
                Once I start thinking about it, I see examples in all the people I’ve met. I had a friend who, sitting in a room, drifted along like a branch in a river. I remember my grandpa, a taut, attentive string as the air filled up with opera. A professor who sat in her office like a razor blade, intent on what she was reading, then turning to me to cut through my mumblings toward what I meant. If I’m not careful, it’s easy to think that being the main character is the only way to imagine my story. That being here means I’m the one who was Here and Mattered. But that’s not the only way. It’s not even the one I usually prefer. I could be in this place as a drift of leaves in a creekbed. As light in a prism. As the side character, the one who bakes the pie the heroine eats on her way to the mountain. As the music is in the instrument, the basil in the ground, a cat in a smudge of the sun.

                “They can’t breathe on their own, so they absorb the essence of the world breathing around them.”
                “If you give them just a tiny bit of yourself…”
                -Raina Telgemeier, Ghosts

                In Telgemeiner’s book, Ghosts can’t breathe for themselves. But they remember, and she describes Dia de los Muertos when many of them visit. By giving just a tiny bit of themselves—a puff of breath, a blown kiss—the living share life so everyone together can share in the celebration.
                If you give them just a tiny bit of yourself…
                It’s a different “yourself” then I’ve usually heard described. The story trope I’ve heard more often might go like this: so-and-so lost a bit of himself somewhere. A curse, a deal he made, some magic accident. And the loss eats away at him, an empty splinter where a bit of his soul should be. Wherever he goes, however happy he seems, he’s always a little lost and a little hungry. Bit by bit he turns, his imperfection growing, until…
                Sheesh. I like Telgemeiner’s story more. I like her idea of “self.” It’s easy to hold onto things, to hopes and possibilities, to images of how I expected life to go, to my me-ness, as though there’s only so much (and barely enough) and I have to save it up. What if, instead, yourself is a little windstorm. A bit of breathing that will stop one day, sure, but along the way could lift up kites in blowing, could share songs in breaths that won’t come back and don’t need to. What if you give away a tiny bit of yourself and you’re still you, the loving, sharing you, in a world surrounded by Ghosts who felt the breath you shared. They’re dancing, and inviting you to join.

                “There was a moment there when we were all together in the same room.”
                -Richard McGuire, Here

                McGuire’s book unfolds my ideas of time and place in beautiful, provocative ways. I highly recommend it. I’m not going to try to explain that unfolding (it’s still happening in my head, and besides, he does it better), but my flatmate and I did spend most of the day making and delivering pies to friends in the area. Apple, pumpkin, and cherry. I left one on a porch bench swing and one on a chair and two on doormats. I handed others over, both of us smiling behind our masks. One friend laughed that she could tell I was smiling from my forehead. And I was.
                Like so many of us, I won’t be able to see my family this week. I won’t be able to see them over the winter holidays. Missing them is a breathless space on a cold day, but threaded through missing them is the realization that, in this moment, all of them are doing something. It’s like I can see my little brother smiling mischievously while he picks up his guitar, and my older brother holding one of his giggling daughters. Like I can see my dad, looking back over his shoulder at a sunset, and my mom, pausing to listen to the wind. And then I can see my niece as she was a year ago, while we walked across the street to look at the twinkly lights. I can see one of the pies I baked, sitting on a friend’s counter, and the cookies my friend had waiting for me. I can see the kitchen where she baked them, today, yesterday.
                Or not see, exactly. Our culture’s so focused on sight. Feel? Hear? When I touch the wall, smooth against my palm, the paint and the sheetrock and the space inside the boards starts to feel like here. The apartment next door feels here, and the neighbor I’ve only waved to, and the trees who’ve let go of their leaves for the winter. And the winter, and last summer, and the coming spring. My niece a year ago, leading me to look at those lights. My little brother and I years and years ago, sitting on the carpet playing, and my older brother helping me swim across a river. And you. 
                Maybe there’s a moment, here, when we’re all in the same room together.

                “Don’t for heaven’s sake, be afraid of talking nonsense! But you must pay attention to your nonsense.”
                -Ludwig Wittgenstein, Culture and Value

                A few of you reached out to say you liked last week’s “nonsense questions.” To be honest, I liked last week’s nonsense questions. So I’ve been thinking about them, and dreaming up some new ones. I wouldn’t usually ask if my words today were more a creek or a hillside, but if I did ask, I’d say I wanted them to be clean water, running somewhere, quick and clear, but they actually felt more like mud. And when I managed to dig down into the mud and start trying to polish an Uproar draft, my words were more like rock. My hands kept scraping against them.  Scraping and fumbling. I talked to a friend, and she suggested a rock might be something that roots could wrap around and hold onto as they grew.
                If you asked if resting was more a watch that had stopped ticking, or a book on a shelf, I’d say that sometimes I lie down on my bed and do something when I should do nothing. Nothing is so wonderfully much: the light on the wall, the pull of my breath, the patter of someone walking by—a squirrel, a friend. When I watch something or listen to something, I miss that. So it’s the metal in the watch, I guess, whether the watch is ticking or not.
                This week’s a little different. I’m asking you for a question. The rules are simple, and a bit wonky: it should be a nonsense question. It should blur edges, dapple light, mix water with mischief. You can Facebook it to me, text it to me, send it to Azlan.Uproar@gmail.com. If I get some questions I’ll post them here for all of us, and answer at least one in the following weeks.
                And here’s one more for you: what does planning taste like?

                “Let the most absent-minded of men be plunged in his deepest reveries—stand that man on his legs, set his feet a-going, and he will infallibly lead you to water, if water there be in all that region.” -Herman Melville, Moby-Dick

                A friend and I once designed a series of “nonsense questions” for students. I don’t remember most of them now—you and I could spend a few hours, sometime, coming up with new ones. Something like:
                “Is your thinking more sunlight, or moonlight?” 
                “Where would you look for last winter?”
                “Have you ever heard a quiet that was loud?”
                I’ve been remembering them, and thinking about thinking. I’ve been making up silly taxonomies about how my thoughts have learned to move. For instance, if the choices are earth, water, or air, I’d say my culture’s thinking is pretty earth—here, that’s the first step, and here, that’s the second. Solid and ‘real.’(Interesting that fire thinking didn’t make it onto my list). Or to come at things from another side, I think we’re a culture of seers—not that we see the future, but that seeing is believing. Not hearing. Not even touching. Where are the oracles who taste what might happen tomorrow?
                We’re earth thinkers, I would have said. Or maybe metal thinkers: an emphasis on precise, on clean, on strong. Or maybe ore thinkers, trying to refine what we have into something we can sell at a profit. (That’s how it looks to me, at least). And then Melville reminds me of water. I remember sitting by the sea, watching the swell roll in, watching it breath spray over the rocks. I remember college, when I would walk through the forest to the lake, and walk around its water, frozen or quiet dark. I remember just earlier today, the touch of the tap when I turned it on, and how for a moment I was outside the apartment—streams to rivers, rivers to oceans, oceans to skies, skies to rain, and which part of all that was for a moment tickling me? I’ve gone to earth, too, burying my fingers in it. I’ve gone to fire, staring into embers or licking flames. I’ve gone to sky, standing on a hill as the world rolled in. Though to be honest, that wide sky has always felt a little like another sea. Melville mutters to me, and I remember all that, and I wonder a little what I’m looking for at the edge of the water. More than that, though, I’m happy there’s water in these regions. And I want to go back. “Back,” which will of course be “here” once I’m a-going.

                “[My company’s $137 billion cash pile] isn’t all that huge when you think about worst-case possibilities.”
                -Warren Buffet in May, 2020

                When I was thirteen, I wanted happiness to be something I could hunt and catch and nail up on the wall. I wanted it to be achievable, to be permanent: aha, I have it now, and have it forever. Of course it doesn’t work that way, but sometimes I still want that kind of certainty. That kind of safety. I imagine a rock that’s huge enough to lift me above the rush and crash of changing waves. I imagine a castle with unbreakable walls. In the last months, I’ve sometimes felt the urge to stockpile food and lock my door and be safe, alone, behind it. I’ve imagined having. Then I look outside the window, I feel the door and realize it’s only a little piece of decaying wood. I started volunteering more.
                I wonder if Warren Buffet’s right, at least in a way. On the one hand, $137 billion is more than I can conceptualize. (I’ve been trying. I still can’t. It sounds a lot like $136 billion, except the difference between those two is more than all the wealth of all the people I’ve ever met who are “wealthy”). On the other hand, maybe $137 billion isn’t “all that huge when you think about the worse-case possibilities,”  at least not if you mean as a wall against a pandemic and global climate change and, let’s say, a revolution. It probably isn’t enough.
                I wonder if having is a madman’s game.
                The doors of power and privilege are stronger, but I don’t think they’re unbreakable. I don’t think anyone can lift themselves, forever and ‘safely,’ above their community. You can’t build that science fiction city above the clouds. Trying to collect that much works for a while, we’ve seen that, but perhaps we’ve also seen that it won’t work forever. And perhaps that way lies madness, and cruelty. If we give up the fantasy of having, of bulwarks big enough to “protect someone” from the worst-case scenarios of what might happen, then we’re back living in what happens. Back seeing everyone as touched and effected, hurt and healed, supported and unsupported and (when they choose to help) supporting. Instead of trying to stack apples back behind our walls, we’re back caring for trees. For each other. For ground, water, and what we all are together.