Grand Old Fantasies

There's been a lot to analyze and think about in the results of our recent election, but what I'm finding most fascinating right now is the astounding wrongness of Republican predictions on the eve of the vote—or, to be more precise, the stubborn adherence to wrongness by a whole lot of smart people in the face of overwhelming evidence.

       Without exception (as far as I know), prominent Republicans predicted a Mitt Romney victory while nearly every nonpartisan analysis of the polls put the probability of an Obama victory at 80 or 90 percent. And this wasn't just let's-predict-victory-to-keep-our-spirits-up cheerleading. These were serious prognostications. Some expected a Romney landslide, when even the most Republican-leaning state polls showed him trailing in nearly all the swing states he needed to win.

Nor were these just the usual Fox News gasbags like Dick Morris. They included seasoned observers like George F. Will (who a few months before had written a sober and sensible analysis of why Obama was going to be very hard to unseat), strategists like Karl Rove (whose credibility would seem to require a realistic grasp of the facts), and, worst of all, the very people who should have been most realistic about what was going on with the electorate, the pollsters working for the Romney campaign.

        I heard three main arguments from these people as to why all the nonpartisan analyses were wrong. The first was that the polls were "skewed," especially that they were "oversampling Democrats." Even though 38% of voters identified as Democrats and only 32% as Republicans, several pundits insisted that voters from the two parties should be sampled equally, even hinting (at least on Fox News) that the greater number of Democrats was the result of the pollsters' own political biases. This seemed to spring, on the one hand, from a certain paranoia—why on earth would pollsters and odds makers whose livelihoods depend on accuracy intentionally publicize inaccurate information to express a political sentiment?—and on the other from the juvenile but deep-seated resentment that we hear so much of from the right wing lately, that the world is unfairly ranged against them. Republicans should be sampled the same as Democrats, damn it. Otherwise it's just no fair!
       The second argument was that Romney was riding a wave of momentum that had started with the first debate, so that he just had to pull close enough by the final weekend of the campaign that his momentum could carry him over the finish line. That ran against all the evidence of the public polls, which showed that his momentum had stalled out at least two weeks before the election and that the incumbent was actually pulling further ahead by the end. (The GOP apparently produced a few polls on the final weekend showing Romney gaining again, but everyone in that business knows not to trust weekend polling.) In the face of that, members of the campaign talked about the excitement of the crowds wherever they went, a feeling of momentum that couldn't be denied. That one was just wishful thinking.

       The most reality-based of the arguments was the one that held that while the polls' projections of turnout among young and nonwhite voters were based on 2008 results, the truth would surely be that those groups would only turn out at 2004 levels; in others words, 2008 was a fluke because a mad passion for Barack Obama made black people and twenty-somethings behave in a way they never would again. There was actually some evidence to support that one: pro-Romney voters expressed distinctly higher levels of interest and intensity than pro-Obama voters. Still, interest levels have always been an unreliable measure; organized get-out-the-vote operations have proven to matter more, and no one doubted that the Democratics had that part down. The non-partisan poll analysts had the same basic information and didn't bother much about the "intensity gap."
       The New Republic ran an article a couple of days ago breaking down the Romney camp's internal polling and dissecting just how this delusional group-think evolved. But it doesn't answer the other question: why? Why were so many experienced analysts and strategists willing to fly so boldly in the face of so much contradictory evidence, to assert so confidently that they alone had the "real polls" (to quote Dick Morris), to imagine that they had exclusive possession of reality?  
       This was a triumph of mutual self-deception, a vast collaboration on a shared fantasy. Not the sort of thinking one expects from a lot of smart grown-ups with decades of experience in the real world. I'm sure a lot of elements came together to make that happen, but I think the biggest one is also the simplest: We don't like pain and fear, and when they're intense enough we'll do almost anything to squirm away from them. As organisms, we may be able to think in the long term, but we feel in the short term. It's how we evolved: pain and fear are so hard to bear that we bring all our resources to escaping them. And if we can't escape the situation that inspires them, we bring those resources to adjusting our own thinking so the feelings diminish.
       Usually, group wisdom keeps us grounded in reality even in those situations. But when the group is united by an especially agonizing anxiety, then the members may start encouraging each other not to an uncomfortable acceptance of reality but to a mutual soothing of the pain. When the group feels cut off from other people and is already inclined to distrust what it hears from outside, then those strategies of reassurance can zoom like a welcome virus through the mass conversation. Think of the Nazi high command believing that the war could still be turned until there were Russian tanks in Berlin. When we give each other a veiled choice between amplifying our anxiety together and creating hope together, we're primed to choose the latter.
       Republicans had spent years working each other into the terror that an Obama reelection was the worst thing that could happen to them. Then they spent months encouraging each other to believe that that fate could be averted. And, of course, all along the way they continued to reinforce in each other the conviction that the liberal media was ranged against them and couldn't be trusted. When the evidence kept stripping them of their hopes and leaving them naked against their fears, they did the human thing: they came to one another's emotional defense.  
       In times like those, no matter how experienced we are and no matter how complex are our mental gymnastics, we're all like kids again: doing whatever we can to comfort ourselves through the night, but leaving ourselves vulnerable to an ugly reality in the morning.

        

Thankful

I spent Thanksgiving morning straightening out rewrites on The Undressing of America. I just didn't want to leave the work until I was needed to help cook and devour family food. It's not that I don't like Thanksgiving or enjoy hours of doing nothing; it's just that I like writing even more, especially when a big, complicated project is coming together so well. I'm grateful to have a job I want to do even when I have a perfect excuse to blow it off.

       I know I'll be doing this forever, too. At an age when more and more of my peers are talking about retiring, I'm looking forward to another few decades of hard work. There are practical reasons for that: freelance writers don't get a pension, and the boom-and-bust nature of the job doesn't give you much chance to build up a big retirement account. But even if I have the money to stop, I won't want to. Most of my writing heroes worked until they dropped. I like thinking about the 75-year-old Edith Wharton falling to a stroke with the uncertain end of The Buccaneers stretching before her, Joseph Campbell letting go at 83 with not even half of his colossal Historical Atlas of World Mythology finished, P. G. Wodehouse just about to revise another Blandings Castle novel when God plucked him into the sky at 93.
       I'm thankful for this career path with no finish line, this competition with no laurels to rest on. I look forward to leaving my own unfinished manuscript someday. You know: the one that everyone says would have been among my best work if I'd only had time to finish it. 

Don't Ask, Don't Tell

I stopped following the news a few weeks ago. It was the election that did it—but I didn't stop so I could get away from politics, I did it so I could focus better on politics.  
       Not the media version of politics, that Frankenstein of sports reportage and fabricated hysteria, but the politics where I can actually do something useful: phone banking, door knocking, whatever. The news industry depends not only on keeping us seat-belted onto the roller coaster of anxiety but also on keeping us transfixed on details, on poll numbers, momentum, and supposed turning points, on graphs and gaffes, like a chicken on a snake. No, not a snake. Snakes pose active problems to chickens that require responses. Most election news is just a finger-drawn line in the dirt that the poor dumb bird—and I—only think is a snake.

       The one newsy website I've allowed myself periodic visits to, when I want a soft-spoken overview that calms me down instead of churns me up, is Nate Silver's FiveThirtyEight. As Silver points out, his statistics-based, algorithm-driven forecasts for the winners in the presidential election for every one of the fifty states are exactly the same now, on November 1, as they were when he rolled out this year's model on June 7. We won't know for a few days if those forecasts are right, but it suggests how little all the blips in the news cycle and squiggles on the poll graphs have amounted to.

       When I let myself worry about those blips and squiggles, when I start following the hyperlinks like bread crumbs endlessly into the tangled woods of information, I become less effective. Maybe I slack off because I think I know the future or maybe I freeze up because I think it's too much for me to handle, but more likely I just fall under the spell of the Need to Know. No matter how much I learn, I become convinced that if I read that one more op-ed or one more poll analysis I'll capture that last piece of information I need to make sense of it all.
       Which isn't innately a bad thing. Except that the time I spend reading or watching or listening to the news is time I'm not spending making a phone call or offering a carless voter a ride to the polls. And, although I may sometimes fool myself into believing the contrary, that information isn't going to inspire me to new action or tell me what I need to do. I know what I need to do. News geekery is just geekery, and geekery is for when there's time to kill. 
       I got some vindication for this when a friend of mine who's been helping with big fundraisers asked one of the campaign's main finance people how he stayed so cool and upbeat in the midst of all the post-first-debate hysteria about tumbling poll numbers and shifting momentum, and he said, "I just don't pay attention to it."

       I've decided that there are three reasons to learn a thing. One, because it helps me do something I want to do. Two, because it enables me to have conversations I want to have. And three, because it's just fun to know. 
       But following the news cycles doesn't help me do anything but follow more news cycles. And I'm sick of the conversational cycles that cycle around the news cycles—after a couple of weeks there's nowhere they can go but hand wringing, impotent fuming, and sighs of despair. And I finally caught on that the roller coaster of information was only making me anxious. Which is a problem, and not just for selfish reasons: I'm a lot less effective at everything, but especially at encouraging other people, when I'm anxious than when I'm upbeat, energized, and focused on what matters.
      It would be different if something I learned from the news might change my mind about the big issues, but I don't have to go searching for that. I mean, if anything happens that's big enough to make me want to see a different party in the White House and Senate (I don't know what that could be, but if), I'll hear about it without clicking on Google News six times a day. What I need to know is what my job is right now, and for that the news won't help me at all.
       So I guess if I'm going to spin out a life lesson from the last few weeks, it would be this: It's good to know the big stuff that shapes your goals and the little stuff that tells you what to do next. It's the in-between stuff that'll kill you.  

Not of a Feather

This ran a while back, in a slightly different form, in 7x7 magazine. I was reminded of it when a friend asked me, in a recent conversation on the Writers Grotto's participation in the upcoming Litquake, how I would describe the cultural identity of San Francisco. I still can't describe it, for the reasons explained below.

Outside the Peet’s Coffee in Potrero Center, there’s a flock of birds who perch on the chairbacks near people sitting and drinking their coffee. It’s easy to take them for blackbirds looking for food, but they’re not. Blackbirds are like New Yorkers, restless, quick, aggressively biting at opportunities. These slower and more patient creatures are cowbirds, who might grab a crumb if it lands near them but are generally content just to sit near people, as if enjoying our company; which they are, in a way. Cowbirds evolved to survive on the insects startled out of the grass by herds of bison and cattle, equipping them with an instinct to hang around groups of large, sedentary mammals. Somehow this flock found its way to a place where there are no cattle, and so they seek out the company of the only large, sedentary mammals they can find: San Franciscans drinking coffee.

      There’s something, as we like to say, “very San Francisco” about that odd, serene scene. It reminds me of one of our best traits, our ability to coexist quietly, perching in our separate realities in a sort of loose mutualism, even a benign indifference. I experience fewer tensions here around cultural or individual contrasts—fewer tensions about anything, really, except parking—than in any other city.

      But I experience something else, too, as I move through the city: some lack of collective identity, a mystery about what it means to be a “San Franciscan.” From neighborhood to neighborhood I feel like I’m moving through herds and flocks of very different creatures, coexisting contentedly but in separate realities. When I drive from Noe Valley to a Hong Kong dessert place in the Sunset, it’s hard to say how I and the guy behind the counter are both San Franciscans except in the literal fact of our residence. This is not about being a native or an immigrant either. Raised in the Santa Clara Valley, I feel very Californian—genial but cautious, with a certain mellow, all-weather slowness. But by that very fact I feel like a perpetual visitor in this foggy island that feels as far from California as anywhere else.

      I could say similar things about any diverse city, of course. But even in New York, as heterogeneous as a place gets, there’s a sense of what it means to be a New Yorker—someone who, whether his ancestral tongue is Italian, Yiddish, Spanish, or Southern Black, has been molded by the city to a certain attitude and speed, a particular way of pronouncing “R.” Here, we don’t even agree on how to pronounce our street names. On my way to Candlestick Park, I drive past Kay-sah-dah Street, but the people ignoring my car live on Kyoo-say-duh Street, although we all clearly see the sign reading "Quesada." (And don’t even get me started on the East Coast expats who still talk about Jew-nipero Serra Boulevard.)

      There are native San Franciscans. My former doctor was one, proud to be sending his son to Lowell, his own high school. His San Francisco, though, is a city of tract homes on quiet streets inhabited by low-profile Asian professionals, a city I’ve barely come to know in three decades here. There are even old-soil, multigenerational San Franciscans. But most of them live in San Bruno. Drive down Mission through Daly City until it becomes the El Camino and you'll eventually pass the San Francisco Police Officers Credit Union building, a breadcrumb on the trail to where the people who wear the name of our city on their uniforms have been driven by housing prices. The people whose ancestors lived in a town called Frisco are mostly an invisible substrate; and when they do call attention to themselves, it’s likely to be some unfortunate demonstration of how the city has left them behind, like trying to save Army Street from the unstoppable waves of American change.

      Recently, a friend of mine took off on a rant about the Bridge and Tunnel Crowd, those invaders from San Ramon and Novato whom she only grudgingly tolerates in her San Francisco. She is the very image of one version of San Francisco, riding her bike in her canvas high tops and Peruvian knit cap. Except that she just moved here from Pennsylvania five years ago, while I’m sure many of her despised B&Ters grew up within 20 miles of here.

      What most of us consider “San Franciscan” is constantly being rewritten, usually by newcomers. Again, I could say so is New York, but there, a continuing culture of publishing and galleries that molds new influences into an umistakably Manhattanesque shape. The New York literary community is full of out-of-town immigrants, but most seem directed by a sense of being New York Writers, with the ghosts of Max Perkins and William Shawn also lurking in the corners. In the SF Writers Grotto, where I feel like something of an oddball for being from the Bay Area, I can’t say what distinguishes us as SF Writers, except maybe a relative lack of vanity and competitiveness. Which is often how we define SF, not by what it is but by what we’re not; specifically, not New York or LA.

      Maybe that indefinability is one of our great virtues. This city is less an entity than a stage, a benign and beautiful setting in which we all have the freedom to create our own, separate San Franciscos. Like the Peets patrons and the cowbirds, we exist side by side but in different realities. The woman with the latte may never understand that the bird perching on the next chair is really there for her, not her scone, and the bird may never catch on that the woman just isn't going to stir up that long-desired cloud of gnats. But the sun is out, and the breeze is soft, and who needs to worry?

      In that quiet coexistence there is deep comfort. We all perch together in the diluted sunlight of a San Francisco morning, lost in our own contemplations, nomads at rest, waiting together for the universe to serve up its largesse. These can be the city’s sweetest moments, these tentative encounters between two locals both feeling like eternal visitors, no one having any proprietary claims or any particular roles, pausing for a moment in our separate migrations.

Puer Aeternus

I've just come back from volunteering at the Democratic National Convention. I was in the formatting squad of the Press Distribution team, so most of the time my job was to take speeches scripted for the teleprompter (odd punctuation, stage directions, no paragraphs) and format them to look like written English. When there was no formatting work I shifted to the "running" team, which involved getting the hard copies of those speeches to journalists scattered all over the Time-Warner Cable Arena.
       There's a lot I could say about the work itself (one tidbit: Bill Clinton originally planned to say "math" but changed it to "arithmetic" on the podium). I could also say some things about the politics of it all (I now know a great deal about moving forward by growing an economy that lasts, from the middle out, not the top down), about the strange culture of that world-within-a-world, and about my brief love affair with Charlotte, North Carolina. But what I'm thinking about right now is the unexpected joy of being a novice again.
       In my professional life I usually manage to come off as something of an authority. It's true that I've chosen to take on new skills a few times in my career: At 30, after starting as a humorist and pop-culture commentator I tackled the odd media of comics and screenplays, then at 40 started teaching myself to write some fairly serious nonfiction about psychology and cultural history, and around 50 started teaching writing classes. Even with those changes, though, I still always managed to be the guy who knew a lot about writing, who got his name on his books and classes, who ran his own show and got to pick his own learning curves.
       The convention was a different story. There I just had to show up and do what I was told. And if I didn't know how, I had to learn. Not that I was a novice at the art of punctuation or knowing where to break a run-on sentence; but because we were formatting for journalists, we had to match the AP Style Guide, which I didn't know. My supervisors also had special protocols they needed followed. And I had no idea in hell how to use Word for PC.
       So I had to be a rookie, a very green rookie, for the first time in a long time. I had to learn to ask for help, to get through the embarrassment of making the most elementary mistakes (sometimes twice on the same mistake), and to know I was the one who was holding the whole show up because I had to go back and redo everything I'd gotten wrong. I even had to suffer my comma-placement decisions being overridden by an 18-year-old intern.
      There was no glamor in it, either. I always like being the bright light in the room: my name on the book, running the class, tossing out references to my publishers and producers. But we worked in a narrow, dark, cyclone-fence-and-garbage-bag cage in the basement, next to the forklift ramp. In small talk we team members found out all the interesting careers and impressive accomplishments we brought in from the outside world, but none of it mattered when the work came in. We were all of us interchangeable and anonymous. My boss kept calling me "Jeffrey."

       I did begin to find my way in formatting as the days went on. There was a value to my decent knowledge of grammar and that experience dicing and splicing sentences that the obsessive writer will develop. But whatever special glow I thought I was building up within my team was instantly snuffed when I shifted to the running team. Suddenly it didn't matter in the least what I knew about the English language. All that mattered was how fast I could get my 55-year-old ass up four flights of stairs and find the right room. I had to learn to be a good delivery boy. Granted, I was a special sort of delivery boy. There is something more glamorous about bursting through a door and saying, "I have the Clinton speech," than bursting through a door and saying, "Did you order the pepperoni and mushroom?" But that didn't change the fact that nothing I'd ever learned as a writer meant squat.
       But the thing is...I liked it. I felt more fulfilled than I ever thought I would. What had sounded like a sacrifice to make for a greater cause turned out to be a reward. I'm already looking forward to 2016, and I find myself returning with a noticeable resistance and resentment to my ordinary life of autonomy, expertise, and distinction.
       One gift of it all was feeling that I belonged to the group. When I was younger I never felt I belonged to much of anything, so to compensate I took up a career that I hoped would make me stand out as something unique and exceptional. But of course that becomes a loop, because being exceptional can be a big barrier to belonging. Being inept freed me up to seek camaraderie instead of admiration, to let myself become truly part of a body whose overall success mattered far more than my own.

       Then there was freedom—that paradoxical freedom that comes from knowing exactly what we have to do and having to suffer no anxieties of choice. Kind of a heavily diluted version of that radical spiritual freedom Dostoevsky writes about in Karamazov: The more free I was from prioritizing, anticipating, managing, and second guessing, and the more free I was from caring about credit or blame or staking out my personal turf, the more free I could be just to show up for what I was living.
       But another gift of being a novice was feeling, as the etymology implies, new again. I've spent so much of my adult life trying not to feel the uncomfortable emotions of the young novice—insecurity, embarrassment, helplessness, panic, humility—that I forget how vivid those emotions are, how much I learn about myself in wrestling with them, and how generously they set me up to feel so much triumph for the smallest improvements. Every day I walked to the arena, I knew I was going to come out knowing vastly more by the time I staggered back out. Every time I was handed a new job, I knew it would scare me and beat me up and laugh at me but then, in the end, leave me changed for the better.
       When we talk about wanting to be young again, we usually mean being free of back pain or filled with more energy or blissfully ignorant of the workings of a 401K. But this felt like the real thing: all my fears and triumphs tumbling over each other in a forward rush, mastery and maturity always ahead of me and not ringed like a fortress around me. A beginner again, cracked wide open and taking nothing for granted. All the way in the present, for better and worse, in a way I'd nearly forgotten.

At the Pass

I’m writing this from the shore of Two Medicine Lake in Glacier National Park, Montana. I’ve just come down from Dawson Pass, where my brother and I, accompanied by my son, scattered our parents’ ashes to the high-mountain winds.

This Two Medicine area has been the axis of my family’s world since before I was born. In fact, it’s part of why I was born. In 1955, my parents were living in San Francisco, in an apartment they both hated, and not sure if they were going to stay together; my mom had blown things up with the most dramatic of her love affairs, and although the affair was over and my dad had moved back in, the emotions still ran high and dark. To get away, my father applied for a summer job with the National Park Service. Then he landed a new regular job, teaching high school English in the Santa Clara Valley, where new suburbs were spreading like fescue, uprooting old cherry and plum orchards. Whether his wife would follow him there was their lives’ central question, and that summer apart—he caretaking a campground in the quiet of Glacier, she and their nine-year-old son staying behind in the city—became their chance to answer it.
       In the end, they moved as a family to drowsy Los Gatos and started saving to buy a ranch-style tract home. They also launched a reconciliation baby—hence my existence. My mother was eight months pregnant with me when my father drove the family back to Glacier the next June.
       So it was that my first home was a log cabin, the caretaker’s residence in the middle of Two Medicine Campground, heated with a wood-burning stove and regularly invaded by mice, shrews, and weasels. That my mother would take that on with a newborn—after spending the preceding few years trying to establish herself as a sophisticated city girl—was a testament to her strength, her dedication to the new family agreement, and the masochism that got her through so much of her life.
       I spent my first six summers in that campground, and in my early memories it’s far more vivid than the pastel stucco world where I spent the other nine months of every year. My father had to give up the job after that, but we still returned to Two Medicine for at least a few weeks nearly every year into my teens. I suppose most of my real growing up happened in California—all the social and academic development that’s shaped who I am outwardly—but it was in that alpine quiet, skipping rocks alone over the glassy surface of Two Medicine Lake, that I discovered an inner self, learned the power of solitude, and first got it in my head that I wanted to spend my life telling stories. My memories took on a lonely depth that’s turned most of my wanderlust toward cities and valleys instead of mountains; but still, I went back to Glacier for my thirtieth birthday and my fortieth, and I took my son there as soon as I thought he could appreciate it.
       My brother’s life began there too, although not quite so literally. After being bounced around among neighbors and relatives while our parents fought, never fitting in at a blue-collar city school, Two Medicine became the first place where he truly felt he belonged. He started hiking the trails, at first with our dad but then on his own, and discovered an autonomy and liberation he'd never known. He exhausted the local trails and started heading off cross-country. He became a legend among the park staff as "that kid who hikes everywhere," and by his second summer there, at the age of eleven, he was selling his services to tourists as a trail guide. When our father let the job go, Ray got his own job with a Glacier Park trail crew, and from that time on he owned the park, and it owned him, more than any of us. It’s been his well-spring. His stories about it are endless. He can turn the telling of its geological formation into great drama. He raised both his children to love it, and this trip his eight-year old granddaughter came too. Like anyone who's spent any time in the glow of Ray’s radiant love of the place, she wants to go back.

       For our parents, Glacier was the source of a peace they seemed able to find nowhere else. It was the one place where I felt they were living shared lives and wanting the same things. My father had always craved quiet and solitude and liked knowing that he'd gone as far as possible from (as he liked to put it) the madding crowd. My mother could be frenetically social, at least in her manic phases, but she was high-strung and sensitive, and too much human society would tip her into her self-isolating depressions. In the campground at Two Medicine they both found an equilibrium, with each other and with the world. My dad was present and approachable in a way he rarely was at home; the closest I ever felt to him, at least until I took care of him after my mom died, was the summer I turned ten, when we two made the Montana pilgrimage alone. My mom was simply and profoundly at peace. She hardly drank. Her words were rarely bitter. And I believe that the good later years of their marriage began when my dad retired from teaching and retook that lost, idyllic summer job in Two Medicine campground that he’d had to let go of two decades before.
       Whatever spirituality I have springs ultimately from Two Medicine. The only deities my family ever honored were the mountains ringing the lake. Their names, a hectic mix of Blackfoot titles, some translated and some not—Rising Wolf, Lone Walker, Sinopah, Painted Teepee, Never Laughs, Appistoki—invoked a mystery in me from my earliest years that I think I’m still trying to comprehend.

       Rising Wolf so dominates the campground with his monumental mass, flashing light from his terrible cliffs in the morning and burying everything in his shadow by late afternoon, that I grew up unconsciously looking away from him as much as I could. My father and brother tried twice to climb to his summit and were turned back by pounding storms and unscalable masses of stone before, on their third try, he finally let them reach the top. (Even then, they never spoke of "conquering" him.) Sinopah, gazing at us serenely from across the lake, was our one real object of veneration. My father took thousands of pictures of her over the years in every light and every mood. As many times as we’d looked at her, the words "come look at the light on Sinopah" would bring us all tumbling out of our cabin or trailer.
       Dawson Pass holds a special place in that family mythology. It’s a short, steep, beautiful hike with a breathtaking consummation. The trail starts from the lakeshore at the foot of Sinopah and climbs along the shoulder of Rising Wolf, from a swampy, creek-watered valley of lush-leafed plants with fragrant blossoms, through a forest of firs that stand tall and majestic at the bottom but waist-high and wind-twisted by the top, and finally to the cavernous amphitheater of the high country. There, suddenly, as you push through the constant wind and cross over the pass, you find a whole new world of jagged peaks and plummeting gorges stretching away from you in every direction.

       It’s also the first saddle in a longer hike, the Dawson-Pitamakan Loop, famous among hikers as one of the most spectacular trails in North America. That trail was essentially created by my father and brother. When Ray was eleven, our dad discovered a trail marked on a 1938 USGS map that had apparently never been built, connecting what were in fact two dead-end trails to Dawson and Pitamakan Passes. So they headed out early one morning to reconstruct the original, hypothetical route across the slippery scree around the back of Mt. Morgan, building cairns along the way to mark the safest passage. After a few trips cut short by wrong turns and unexpected cliffs they had a trail marked out. My father then drafted a proposal, including a hand-drawn map, and sent it to park administration. It took quite a few years, but the trail got built.
       Almost nothing has changed in Two Medicine since then. I want to say that going back there stirs up old memories, but it's more than that: it’s as if the memories become my reality and everything I’ve ever experienced there is present again. It’s the life I’ve lived outside the park that feels old and distant. Timelessness is the soul of the place. The mountains themselves are made of ancient stuff, Precambrian mudstone heaved up over the much younger ground of the prairie. When you hike up to Dawson Pass you take a journey forward through time, from the green mudstone of the oldest stratum to the tawny limestone of the youngest; but the rocks are so old that after you've climbed upward for miles, at the very top of the trail, you find the ground strewn with stromatolites, stone remnants of the colonies of cyanobacteria who became the first creatures to enter the fossil record about a billion years ago. (No, my brother and I weren’t the first to mark the passage of time by scattering remains on the pass.)
       In another way the trail moves in reverse, a rapid hike back through time. Spring comes earlier to the lower reaches of the trail, where the snow melts first, and in the time-tight ecology of the high places that makes a difference: we found that the beargrass stalks near the lakeshore had already shed their blossoms, but two miles up they were in full bloom and two miles further were covered with buds. Right before the treeline, along the runoff from still-melting snow patches, we found a few that hadn’t even sprouted stalks. In a couple of hours we had marched a month backward along that timeline held in the bodies of plants.
       And, of course, there’s another way in which we journeyed through time, because we were climbing back to a time when our parents weren't dead. Among the unchanged monuments of stone and endlessly recycling organisms whose names I had begun to learn before I could write my own, they were there. When Ray and I looked back over the deep valley we'd just climbed out of and reminded each other yet again of some memory we'd created together half a century before and had been polishing on every trip to Glacier ever since, Mom and Dad may just as well have been barely out of sight around the bend of the trail ahead of us or waiting in the campground below. I could hear their voices: How was Dawson today? Any huckleberries?
       The ritual itself, when it finally came, was comfortingly casual. We settled in on the pass, meditated on the view, told Nicky the names of the mountains and glaciers, took some pictures, ate sandwiches, and finally came to the business of the two small, heavy bags we’d packed all the way up. We said a few unrehearsed words to our parents, welcoming them home and thanking them for giving us Glacier. Then we dug our hands into the ashes—Dad’s light and crunchy, Mom’s dense and powdery (and I sense a metaphor there about their lives and characters that I haven't found yet)—and started tossing.
       Although it took us a few handfuls to admit it, the tossing itself turned out to be invigorating. Fun, actually. The wind caught the ashes and sent them sailing over the pass, back toward Two Medicine Lake, as little clouds. Pretty soon we were positioning ourselves against the wind and tossing them as high as we could so they would twist into the air as animated vertical columns, looking like the ghosts in images of Victorian seances. Nicky had the camera, and soon the challenge became timing our throws so he could catch a picture of the perfect ghost. We admired how pretty they looked against the stark tallis and shadowed top of Flinsch Peak, and we laughed about how our parents would have loved the game and how our dad would have insisted on trying too if he’d been able to reach back across the Styx to grab a handful of his own ashes.
       But the moment when we each, simultaneously, tossed our final handful of ashes into the air—me the last of our mother and him the last of our father—we fell silent. We looked out where the white clouds could no longer be seen and listened to the constant wind of the mountains telling us that the longest story of our lives had finally ended, and that it would never end at all.

    

Silent Choice

Life is full of hard choices. Should I take a chance on being a writer or stay in college and find a normal career? Should I go on living for my work or learn what it's like to be a parent? Should I send my son to a private school or have a tiny bit of money left to retire on?

      But life has never thrown a tougher choice at me than the one I face this month. For 28 straight years I've attended the San Diego Comic Convention. For 14 straight years (minus one) I've attended the San Francisco Silent Film Festival. Together they've filled my birthday month with a double celebration of visual narrative, cultural history, and esoteric connoisseurship. 
      This year, though, some cruel, cruel person in San Diego decided to move Comic Con a week earlier and place it directly up against the SFSFF. My 55th birthday present turns out to be an agonizing decision.

      I've wrestled with this for nearly a year, but in the end I've chosen the silents. Ultimately I suppose it's like choosing the temple over the marketplace. Comics and comics-inspired media are so much a part of the daily texture of our culture that even the biggest comics convention on earth can never manage to feel like much more than an extension of our ambient noise. But that most elegant of film festivals creates an alternate universe that for four days moves according to the rhythms, chiaroscuro, and orchestral textures of the shortest-lived of all the great art forms. 

      Of course there's the argument that comics are still alive and silent films aren't...but I never experience silent films as dead. There are still so many movies discovered that were thought lost forever, so many dug from under decades of obscurity, so many restored so thoroughly that they become entirely new works. And then there's all the new music being performed with them, and the hot arguments between those who want cutting-edge sounds from the Matti Bye Ensemble or the Alloy Orchestra to bring the old images closer to the present and the like-they-were-meant-to-be-accompanied purists. I thought a fistfight was about to break out during last year's music panel.

      The film festival is prettier, too: colossal black-and-white faces enshrined in the Spanish/Javanese/Beaux-Arts hodgepodge of the Castro Theatre instead of crayon-colored Avengers grimacing at the bleak concrete of the San Diego Convention Center. It sounds better: I'll take avant-garde mini-orchestras and sumptuous old-school organists over hyperamped videogame soundtracks just about any time. It's for a good cause, too, supporting the rescue and restoration of those vanishing films.
      When even all that failed to bring me to a decision, though, I fell back on professional rationalization: I've written many comics in the past and will surely write more in the future, but right now I'm finishing up a book about the cultural upheavals and moral revolutions of the early 20th Century, the birth of new patterns of communication and even a new kind of individual out of the first wave of mass media. And that, more than anything, is what the silent movies themselves were about. This year, those four days under the spell of century-old light will be my celebration not only of being a year older but of drawing The Undressing of America, at last, toward its close.

      I confess that I'm going to cheat on this a little: since Comic Con starts a day earlier, I'll pop in for that one day to keep my 29-year streak intact on paper. But then I'll fly north. The silents will still know that they've won my heart.
      The festival, once again, is presenting some rare and magnificent works, including a new restoration of the breathtaking Wings, another Ruan Lingyu heartbreaker from the golden age of Shanghai romanticism, and an Ernst Lubitsch movie (love that guy) long thought to be lost. The schedule is here.

    

Fathers and Days

The last time I saw my father outside a hospital and fairly aware, able to carry on something of a conversation, was Fathers' Day a year ago. That was also the last time my son saw his grandfather at all. Nicky's big news at the time was that, after years of struggling through debilitating migraines, he had graduated high school. My father wasn't able to grasp what that was about, or even quite what his relationship was to this kid, but he understood that Nicky was someone who mattered to him and that something good had happened. 

      Today is my first Fathers' Day without a father. It's also the first in this new era of my own life as a parent, as Nicky pulls steadily out from under his health issues and starts to get his life back, getting ready for a summer trip to New York to stay with a friend and then an autumn in Japan to study, needing me less and less all the time. Today we're going to a local county fair to wallow in pig races, junk food, and Mexican music, a fair we saw together years ago when he was little, the kind of cornball thing my dad would have liked. Meanwhile my father's ashes wait in my bedroom in a little box for the trip to the Montana Rockies my brother and I will be taking next month to scatter him in the place he loved best.

      I never did care much about Fathers' Day as such. Contrived commercial holiday and all that. But I like it as a day to stop and look around, to note where I am on this long, good course.

  

Transparency

I like to tell my writing students that no matter what we're writing about, at some level we're always writing about ourselves. That, in fact, every extensive writing process is a process of self-discovery and self-transformation. And sure enough, it's clear to me now that the huge changes I've put The Undressing of America through reflect changes in its author.
      I always worked behind a curtain. I'd disappear into my writing, not show anyone pieces until it felt good enough, dance around questions like "how's the book going," say little about my inner life, and finally unveil the finished work as the image of me I wanted the world to see. It was a strategy learned in childhood, and it worked well for me for a long time.
      For a while I collaborated on humor writing with Will Jacobs and on comics with artists and editors, but then I consciously turned my career toward books and screenplays I could write alone. I wanted always to be the captain of my own ship, and only to be seen when I sailed into port. (And if possible with time to change into my dress whites before anyone saw me.) Nor was that just in my work life: I worked just as hard to keep my messier thoughts and emotions to myself too, along with some big arenas in my private life.

      Much of what drew me to the story of Bernarr Macfadden in the first place was his unbendable self-direction, his extravagant, swaggering, bull-headed, frequently absurd but strangely admirable belief that he'd learned from his own experience everything he needed to know about everything.
      But the more I worked on this book, the more a different element of his life and character came to fascinate me: he was a pioneer of the 20th Century passion for self-exposure, offering himself as an example to others not only through images of his nearly naked body but with retellings of some of his most intimate and painful experiences. 
      He embodied that passion in a magazine, True Story, that changed popular culture forever by founding an industry on the stripping away of polite concealment, for the purposes of both titillation and inspiration. Another of his magazines ran one of the first mainstream endorsements of Alcoholics Anonymous and its idea that telling our own stories with rigorous honesty can bring recovery.
      For quite a while I followed my shifting interest and thoroughly rethought the book before I put the pieces together: the focus of the story was shifting largely because my own strategies of concealment were no longer working. Without going into too many gory details, my solitary decision making and compartmentalizing had cost me friendships, nearly killed my marriage, and left me feeling deeply isolated. I'd also slammed into a stone wall on the solitary writing road. I could just no longer make myself go on alone.
      Out of sheer necessity I managed to transform my personal life by pulling down the curtains and throwing open the windows. In one of those twelve-step "rigorous honesty" programs I learned that the antidotes to shame and fear were to tell my whole story, and I found, contrary to everything I'd grown up thinking, that people were more likely to accept me if I showed up before them completely transparent.
      In my work life, though, I was far slower to pry off the lid. I sought a community by joining the San Francisco Writers Grotto, but I resisted admitting how stuck I was on this book. Pretty soon, in fact, I was resisting even showing up there, so I wouldn't have to face too many people asking, "How's the book going?" I found alternatives to isolation—collaborating again with my old friend Will, teaching writing classes, helping with Grotto events—but still kept my struggles with this book very private. 

      I did start to blog about it all, and then to tell a widening circle of friends that this book was "giving me trouble," but that was more translucency than transparency, and colored translucency at that, a Coke-bottle-green version of the truth. But I could never really get this final draft rolling until I was willing to tell the world the one thing I was most afraid to say: that I needed help. 
      Because that's always been the one thing I've never wanted to admit. That I couldn't handle a situation all by myself. That I wasn't in control. That I needed someone else to help me. Hence the appeal of solitary writing in the first place. I could create a project that was all mine, withdraw into it, deflect everyone's concern, and emerge only when I'd fixed everything.
      Except this time I wasn't fixing everything. This time I had to admit that I was powerless against my own confusion and fear, that I needed other people to know what I was facing and help me straighten it out. So, like the Ancient Mariner, I told everyone who would listen how pathetically far behind I was and what a terrifying mountain of work rose still ahead of me. To those who wanted to help I've handed my schedule, made regular  productivity reports (or non-productivity confessions), talked through my confusion, and showed chunks of lumpy prose as quickly as I churned them out. In return, I've offered myself as an accountabilibuddy (to steal a term from South Park) in their work.
      It's worked, too. What I was unable to do alone I've been able to do as part of a community. As we were too fond of saying in the '90s, it takes a village. But village life is not conducive to privacy and self-direction. Everyone in a village knows your business, and everything you do affects everyone else. 
     It was the intimacy and communality that comes with transparency that I'd been looking for all along, and it was this book that brought me to realize it, in more ways than one.

Why I Write (updated)

A while ago I waxed philosophical and autobiographical on why I've chosen to be a writer. Something about solitude and community, I think, and something else about the relationship between creativity and economic reality. All quite valid for when I wrote it, I'm sure, and it will no doubt all seem relevant again. But now I'm going to tell you why I'm a writer today.

     The oven light went out. It's a new oven, and I was annoyed that the light died so quickly. So I went to fix it but, probably because I was annoyed, I jerked the glass cover off the bulb instead of detaching it gently—the result being that the light bulb snapped off at the base. So now an extremely simple bulb change was turning into a chore, which had me more annoyed, at the bulb, at Frigidaire, but mostly at me. I've done this plenty of times before, though, taking a broken light bulb out of a socket by turning the glass rod in the middle. I shut off the electricity, gripped the rod, and turned. Except this time it snapped off in my hand. Probably because I was so annoyed.

     So I went to my next recourse, which I've also succeeded at several times over the years: twisting the bulb out of the socket by grabbing the edge of the metal base with a pair of pliers. I grabbed. I twisted. A sliver of metal tore off. I grabbed elsewhere, twisted again. It tore again. 
     The base was frozen into the socket, and gripping little bits of brass with the tip of my needle-nose pliers was getting me nowhere. Clearly what I needed to do was hold more of the base with a bigger pair of pliers. So I got a flat-head screwdriver, jammed it between the base and the socket, and bent it inward. Then I grabbed a whole hunk of brass with my vice-grip pliers and twisted with all my might. The ceramic ring holding the socket against the back of the oven shattered.

     I saw the good side to that, though: now I might be able to pull the socket through the hole toward me and get a better grip on the whole thing. So I brought the pliers up against the edge one more time—and the socket dropped behind the back wall of the oven. Now it's sitting in there, an open electrical socket leaning against a metal wall, useless and dangerous and unreachable without taking the whole appliance apart. So I can't use my oven until Friday when the repairman comes and charges me a fortune to get me right back to where I was this morning, ready to replace a 69¢ bulb.

    There have been many reasons in my life to make a career of writing: some practical, some daring, some wise, and some reckless. Today I write because I can't fucking do anything else.