Phthursday Musings: Well Seasoned

I am very happy to announce the release of volume 12 of So It Goes, the literary journal of the Kurt Vonnegut Memorial Library, this year including a piece from… yours truly!

This year’s theme is “Core of the American Experience”, and that core is education. My short story “Radio” was selected for inclusion, and this week the early copy arrived in my mailbox:

I very much encourage people to go to the KVML store and order a copy, and while you’re at it, hey, why not order a copy of Player Piano? We’re going to read it together in the near future, I tell you! (If you’re moved to order a shirt, heed this warning, the sizes run a little small.)

This is the first time since my high school literary journal Kudos where I’ve had a piece of fiction included in a print publication. Though even there I’m not sure if the stuff I wrote for Kudos was fiction so much as it was just silly sentences strung together…

In recent years, even when I’ve tended to read more, I’ve not tended to read a lot of fiction. But I’m looking to use a particular confluence of events here to kick off something a little different. And maybe that something different is something a lot of us need…

The Texas Rangers won their first World Series last night, by winning their 11th straight road playoff game. Arizona was game, but in the end, well, this is why you spend the money, right? Corey Seager is now a two time World Series MVP and if he can stay healthy over the next five years, he’s on a Hall of Fame path.

And I think I speak for a lot of people I know: We really needed this season to be over.

I watched a lot of games, went to six games even (!), was pretty well into everything that was going on, but damn, it gets to the playoffs, it’s a little exhausting… maybe a lot exhausting.

People say that the regular season in the NBA doesn’t really matter, it’s all about the playoffs. Sure it is: the NBA playoffs are so damn long that it’s totally exhausting to be completely invested in the regular season. And that’s a bit of where MLB is now. And I do think that’s a shame, but whatever, we’re here, so be it.

And now the season is over. And so too is the fall soccer season (where the Cheeto Puffs went 6-1 and have been very easily the best team I’ve ever had the privilege to coach) and it snowed on Halloween and, well, a season ends, and the next season begins.

The season we’re now in is what Kurt Vonnegut called “locking”, something that exists between autumn and winter. One way to think about locking is settling in, by which I mean, settling in to a somewhat different routine. And this is what I’ve been thinking about:

While I’ve done a lot of other things this year, one thing I’ve been terrible at is reading. I’ve finished only a couple of books and have even had a hard time sitting down and reading a magazine. My primary reading time is right before bed, and what I’ve tended to find is that I’m either going more or less straight to sleep when I get to bed (probably because it’s late), or I’m futzing around with the phone, or some combination thereof.

But I think there’s a commonality to all of that, and that commonality is an ongoing low level anxiety. This isn’t new. It’s come and it’s gone for years. What often typifies that for me is a need to thoroughly exhaust myself before going to bed; and the inability to read is closely related. It’s not jitters exactly, though I guess at times it might feel like that. It’s more so that I can’t shut down without completely shutting down. For some reason messing around with the phone still works for the mind, but reading, I’m either not shut down enough, or too shut down to handle it.

I’m going to push myself into changing that with the current locking season. I don’t have the excuse of a baseball game running to 10pm. Even after the clock adjusts, it’s still going to get dark earlier and earlier. I’m going to try and have the discipline to not eat anything after 8pm, to have multiple things at the ready to read, and to not get distracted by chasing some silly Words With Friends quest or whatever.

The other thing I think I’m going to try, which I haven’t done in years, is focus on reading more fiction.

This is a suggestion from my pal Malmö, having a lot to do with how The Times We Live In are such conveyors of anxiety, and how the idea of snuggling up with a good book about climate change is not always exactly the best course of action. It’s not that we shouldn’t read those things, but rather… if I look at what I have read over the last few years, it’s overwhelmingly something in the nonfiction realm. And I think we could all use a little down time from reality.

He actually recommends science fiction, and I think it may be a good time to veer that direction. Most of the science fiction I’ve tended to read has been from the likes of Vonnegut or Bradbury… what passes for science fiction anymore I really don’t know. Could you imagine Kurt writing about TikTok? I certainly can.

I’m sure I’ve mentioned it before: Years ago I set up lists on Airtable (an app I never hear about anymore) and one of them is a reading list and it’s full of all kinds of stuff I’ve been “meaning to read”. I’m thinking of going back to that list and prioritizing anything which might be “lighter fiction”. Most of the list seems to be… “serious fiction”, or books about climate change, or… at this point things that seemed particularly important for me to read years ago. Are those things still important? How important can they be?

And then I’ve just got a healthy backlog at home, of books people have bought for me, books I’ve bought, etc. I’m especially looking forward to finally reading Howard Bryant’s book about Rickey Henderson. Baseball season never fully ends, right?

As ever though I long for actually reading and then sharing notes. I don’t know if that means a book club, that’s a bit more than I mean in most cases, but it still feels weird reading dozens of books and finding nobody I know has read any of them. It’s bad enough that when it came time to find places to live we all seem to be to be in different states or at least different area codes. C’mon guys, can’t we, you know, just read the same dumb novel from time to time?

I also feel inspired at the moment to sit down and listen to an even wider palette of music than usual. Right this minute, I’m listening to psychedelic cumbia. This was triggered by my friend Borås explaining how he’s spent the last two weeks obsessed with the album La Danza del Petrolero by Los Wembler’s de Iquitos, a Peruvian band dating from the ‘70s. The movement they were part of, Cumbia Amazonica - commonly known as Chicha - well, I can’t claim to know a lot about it. But the sonics can be mesmerizing. Several years ago Smithsonian found and recorded them:

There’s something extra intoxicating about the original recording. It’s a comparison which make not make sense to anyone else, but there’s a tonal quality that reminds of Big Star’s “September Gurls”, where the guitar sort of sounds like it should be highly annoying, but instead it’s mesmerizing:

Sitting around listening to Chicha, reading some sort of slapstick science fiction? ‘Tis the season, I suppose.

As I wrap this up I should note that I’m in beautiful, chilly Vermont, and therefore not able to go find an old copy of Kudos. What I did find though was a Substack about snacks where a few months ago an entire piece was devoted to the Kudos bar:

If you don’t want to read that whole thing, well, first, what’s wrong with you? But once we get past that, this is probably the best part, so I’ll just share it too:

On a final note, not too especially related to anything else here, I was remiss for not sharing last week this picture from Hamlet’s 2nd birthday party:

Hamlet is an incredibly weird creature. Being a hamster, Hamlet relies more on smell than on sight or sound. Nevertheless when literally placed next to his cake, instead of recognizing its presence, he decided he needed to try and explore the rest of the table. It took picking him and the cake up together to get him to realize that the best thing ever was available to be eaten. Yes, even better than a Kudos bar.