Not all of you are estadounidenses so you may not have a day off to celebrate a foundational myth of a waning hegemonic global power disguised as a day for gratitude.

For those of you with the day off after the θxng who are as alienated from your family as you are from the political electorate—especially in light of events in the last two years—you, saddened and angry and wishing for some escape with this day, taking your holiday to lay on the couch in front of the screen, because climate change has made your θxng a rainy shitshow rather than a crisp autumnal day of Gratitude—may I recommend you spend some time with El Conde?

Released in 2023 by Netflix, this political family farce gets rid of most of the classic lore of vampires except their perverse immortality to tell an allegory of free-market capitalism’s relationship to imperialism and slavery.

Now that the US has chosen its own authoritarian to lead the country as a big fuck you to groups within our country and the world generally, it might be interesting (if not soothing) to compare our present with Chile’s past.

It’s hard not to see the parallels between the President and Pinochet: while Forty-Seven didn’t come to power in a military coup backed by the Deep State of the US government when he assumed the mantle of Forty-Five, he appears to be building the infrastructure for the putsch of Forty-Eight.

A little Chilean history for us Pan-Americans who don’t know much about the world outside of the Northern Hemisphere:

In 1970, Chile democratically elected the first Marxist government in the Western hemisphere, and, through a coalition government, tried to do some socialist stuff: expand free education, get free milk to kids in poor areas, implement minimum wages, and nationalize some key industries, particularly copper mining; it was also working on something like a jobs-guarantee for the poor.1

Rich people and the middle class were pissed (as were others, like truckers and copper miners, but part of the economic woes that sent those people to the streets were the ripple effects of the global economic order), and then there was military coup2, led by Augusto Pinochet, a burgeoning Corrupt Military Dude, that kills a bunch of people.

Unsurprising the socialist President died, supposedly by suicide.

Corrupt Military Dude comes into power, continues to kill people and steal a bunch of money for about three decades in power and has a bunch of children and henchmen who also steal gobs of cash–even from orphans. Like, how could you be such a cliched baddie in the real world? Chile is just a bunch of dumb assholes stealing money and killing people for a long time, and then Corrupt Military Dude dies.

And pretty much everyone gets away scot-free with the money.

This is what I gleaned from several frustrating years in college Spanish, the back page biographies of Isabel Allende’s novels that I never finished and the Roberto Bolaño ones that I did, plus cruising Wikipedia after watching a movie with my Hollywood crush in it. I could be misremembering the details; I’m no HCR.

That background should be enough for you to get into the El Conde. The film is set in the near past of Chile, shortly after the “death” of its dictator, Augusto Pinochet, a vampire with origins in the French Revolution.

Having become bored with living, he says he has resolved to die, but a spate of gruesome murders bring his children to his estate. They don’t give a flying flip about the murders of their countrymen, though; they have come to find where all the loot is and who will get what when he finally goes.

The movie is, IMO, a hoot.

The parallels with our own circumstances may not be uplifting; the movie suggests that Chile is still dealing with the origins and heirs of Pinochet. If there are lessons to learn from this movie, if us Pan-Americans are capable of learning anything from history or fiction, they may be:

• ain’t nobody who can manipulate corrupt daddies walks away without become corrupt themselves and;

• we will never move past the demons fighting to suppress the ideas of the Enlightenment if we are organizing ourselves in lefty-righty political units.

So fuck the familial unit organized around a dumbass daddy, property ownership that transcends a single lifetime, and despairing about the macro.

Time marches on and the best you can do is close your laptop before the sun sets and get outside–unless of course, the climate is shitty, unlike here, in sunny San Diego.3

Thankfully not a bloodsucker literally (but maybe figuratively?),

X

I’ve been thinking about something you wrote last year, about how history writes the future and about recovering your personal history as an American; of Irishness subsumed into the North American notion of Whiteness. You wrote, “Whiteness is the eradication of culture in exchange for a nearly infinite amount of privilege.”

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2 years ago · 83 likes · 2 comments · Margaret Killjoy

That privilege for our ancestors was the freedom to navigate the American landscape. You also shared about recovering the rebel history of your Irish ancestors before they emigrated to America and how that has connected you to a wider sense of inheritance, looking for those around the world who share your values.

Let’s be clear about the whiteness that our immigrant ancestors were absorbed into: the culture of the White Anglo Saxon Protestant minority of migrants, or WASPs, who founded the country and have had an overwhelming influence on the economic and political decisions since then. Irish people weren’t even considered white by the WASPs until increased Slavic and Asian migration to the North American landmass. This “invasion” forced them to stop gatekeeping Catholics out of whiteness to figure out what this country was in the new global order.

I hope you don’t mind if I draw on my ancestry. My ancestors on my father’s side, Scandinavians, were immigrants during the last major immigration boom (the late 1800s), when the share of foreign-born residents in the U.S. was over 14% of the population, comparable to our present moment.1 Those Scandinavians were the first model minority. The Scandinavians were seen as good, hard-working additions, not pollutants. This is most likely due to the long Anglo tradition of fetishizing Scandis but also because they were Protestants.

It was easy for them to succeed, though, because post-Civil War America shared similarities with their homelands. Trade was managed by an upper-class minority (the Dutch and Germans). There was an indigenous people who were being pushed off their land (the Sami). European Protestants asserted their concepts of property rights to extract resources necessary for a regional elite to participate in the global mercantile economy.

Why would they leave their homeland if they were doing so well? It was the failure of a particular New World crop that enabled larger, healthier families—like many Irish immigrants, the Scandinavian migrants left their homeland because of hunger.

Having spent a few hundred years perfecting the separation of their public personas from their private lives, when they came to this continent, they weren’t concerned with getting ahead: they knew they just had to get along. The halo effect from Anglo infatuation might have enabled the model minority perception, but to maintain that standing, the group had to engage in “self-policing.”

This meant that when a member of the Scandi community acted in a way that cast the community in a bad light, consequences were swift from members inside the community to “correct” the bad behavior.

Think of a family—migrants are always bringing their families along—that’s how these Anglos got here, right? Chain migration! Here my ancestors are a great example. John O. Ekster came from Scandinavia shortly after the Civil War and turned an abandoned mill into a homestead where he raised nine children. Some of those children were smart and emulated their father’s example (perhaps they were all right-handed). They woke up early, said their prayers, tended the fields, milked the cows, went into town on Sunday, and dutifully sat in boring Protestant church (there’s no images of the Mother of God as a sexy babe in Protestant churches), never thinking about the people who were on the land before them.

Imagine now one of those children twisting the words of the prayer or spooking the cows or starting a fire that burnt the family vegetable patch. Public punishment of the offending child could provide instruction in the risks of breaking the rules to the others; John O., like so many western fathers before him stretching back to pre-Christian Rome, could use violence to teach the lesson. The teenager caught napping in the fields might be kicked to alertness by their father.

Just kidding! Scandis were like the Wendat, reserving violence for outsiders. What do you think four hundred years of raiding the British Isles and the European mainland was about? Walking away from a fight at home. Scandis loved their families so much that not only did they avoid physical violence, they avoided overt emotional violence as well.2

The rebuke of the child squirming in the pews of church? The lesson wasn’t taught with a hiss into her ear or a pinch to the leg reminding here that soon, they will leave God’s house. It was a raised eyebrow, then a low, gentle laugh to remind that child that she should be good, like everyone else. There was nothing special about her that would allow her to disrupt the service that others might be enjoying. This child, though beloved, would not be accorded any special privileges to act any differently than anyone else.

Hence, Minnesota Nice was born. Then ruthlessly enforced.

There are other ways to learn the rules in a new system, though; and in it, it can serve as the opening salvo to negotiations, generally. Think of a family again—new family, not John O’s but some other family with less regard for the safety and autonomy of their children than your average Scandi family had. This family has worked a hard day on the homestead together. It is the oldest child’s turn to say the prayer before the meal and he dutifully thanks God for his family members and their contributions that helped put food on the table. When ending with his youngest sibling, a toddler born two harvests ago, the child, upon hearing her name, purses her lips to make a raspberry, a fart escaping from her rear as well.

There are many ways that the family can react to this sacrilege, to instruct our girl in the rules. They can ignore the sound and the odor and say their amens. They can scold the toddler, wagging fingers in her face or take her food away or pinch her or—there are so many ways to use violence on children, do I need to name them all? Or the family could choose to acknowledge the absurdity that this great gift from God could ruin a meal and consecrate it with a heart-felt laugh.

I can’t know if humor was one of the ways that that the Scandimericans navigated the rules of the Anglo world—part of being fetishized by the Anglo mainstream is that once you’re deemed good looking, you don’t need to be funny. The erasure of Scandinavian comedic potential is visible in the lists of Famous Scandinavian Americans: the politicians, scientists, athletes, actors, models, and Bond Girls are all remarked upon without comment; anyone who made their money making people laugh is marked as being “3/16th Norwegian” or “his paternal great-grandfather emigrated from Finland”.

But Margaret, I can’t even relate to these Scandimericans. Their success in procreating exceeded their ability to hoard inheritable wealth. My Scandimerican grandparents had to leave the North American Danelaw where marling and cow calling were celebrated past times.3 The connections I have to this culture—my heritage, by the look of my last name—born from long winter nights and summer dips in the icy waters of fjords are a love of sauna culture and an intense attachment to “Take On Me” by A-HA.

Foundational to my inheritance than my actual ancestry was the national (and global) dispersion that occurred in the first half of the twentieth century in response to the economic ramifications of the world wars. You see, my particular ancestors were not good at hoarding inheritable wealth.

My grandparents had to go into exile from the American Heartland to make their lives. In exile, though, they found a place for themselves that gave them another avenue for advancement: enlistment in the US military--or marriage to someone who had.

Enlistment in the US military meant tutelage in strict hierarchical behavior codes and the use of violence. Indeed, one of the job functions of an enlisted soldier is to act as a symbol of the threat of violence when not actually perpetrating it.

My grandfathers didn’t have good work-life balance; they took the physical violence and rigid hierarchies of work home with them. Being only enlisted personnel (it’s quite hard to make it up through the meritocracy of the US military without a Bachelor’s degree), they didn’t know how to explicate the rules before they enforced them. Or even that there were rules to the use of violence.

If you were a dependent of a soldier honorably discharged as an E3, unschooled in the ways of the military, every utterance brought the chance of violence. And there was a lot of violence in these families. In a household like this, play, improvisational and creative, was used to highlight the rules in effect for the day.4 The next day, though, the boundaries of conduct might be different; something new might provoke the smack or the choke, or a laugh and a smile.

Humor, in this way, infected both of the family cultures of my parents. In my mom’s family, the sick burn was king. I attribute this to my grandfather never being the true head of the family; my grandmother (the daughter of Swiss immigrants) made more money in her role as a purchaser for the Navy Exchanges in Southern California than he did running a small convenience store post-discharge. Thus, the easiest rebuke for him punching you was to remind him that his wife was the breadwinner, implying that he wasn’t actually a man. The rub: he could reveal his fragile ego and react with another hit, or he could pretend that he was unbothered, maybe even laugh.

Thus, a strange intimacy was formed in the household; everyone could say aloud each other’s deepest insecurities and most shameful fears—that their acne made them unlovable, that their boyfriend was only interested in them for sex, their girlfriend for the money they earned from smuggling drugs or that they struggled to read—and in this teasing, you could find a home if you chose to respond with a laugh rather than a fist or storming out the door. Worse than beating someone up for the joke was getting butthurt about it.

Most of the ribbing in Nancy’s family became creative riffs on how stupid each other was. While studying AAVE in college, it clicked for me: my family engaged in a practice not dissimilar from the dozens, or ritual insults. Our insults, though, were almost always personal, unlike a your momma joke. These insults helped us feel closer to one another. If you could have your ego flayed and not flinch, if you could laugh it off and come up with your own verbal volley that provoked a guffaw, you knew you loved these people and they loved you. To have your deepest insecurity spoken aloud took some of the sting out of it, too; in laughing at it, it didn’t feel so shameful.5 The shared laughter about these shameful fears became a powerful antidote to overcome them. What higher expression of love could there be, to help someone overcome their shame of who they are?

In my father’s family, the Scandi descendants, the humorous counterattack to the violent tentacles of imperialism strangling the family bonds took the form of the prank. In the year that I’ve been ruminating on this letter, I’ve struggled to theorize what the pranks in this household were trying to do. Were the pranks an attempt at FAFO, crude provocations to learn the boundaries of the household? Or were they hopeful projects of connection, meant to flush out a smile and a hug? It’s hard to say; Danny has shared no loving memories of his father, only an Aenic6 piety for the man.

An example of the rule-breaking mischief executed by my father was when he and his sister decided to bring the horse, a revered symbol of grandfather Ekster’s exile from the golden fields of the American Danelaw, into the house. The horse, happy to be led through narrow corridors for a carrot, got stuck in a hallway where, despite their best efforts to coax it out, it stayed stuck until the patriarch came home. I don’t recall Danny telling me how the horse got unstuck, but I do recall him sharing that, once the horse was removed from the home, he was beaten. Yet he was still proud of the prank.

After grandfather Ekster’s death, the pranks continued, but the responses soften. Still, though, there was always an edge of danger to them. My dad’s sister poured red dye into her husband’s bath when she grew tired of his hours-long bath/naps occupying the only bathroom; he awoke thinking himself bleeding to death.

One Halloween in the nineties, my dad convinced my stepmother to show up at his sister’s house, masked, and pretend to rob her at the door. She, believing her worst fears to be true, pulled a gun on them. They ripped their masks off and she put the gun down.

I think she spent the next seven years plotting her revenge: a fake lottery ticket, given to him at his favorite restaurant during his fiftieth birthday, that claimed he had won $50,000. Even though he was only a year away from retirement (government workers) he was elated and, possibly to gloat that he had won this large sum of money, he took the ticket to the lead singer of the house band.

“Redeemable at your momma’s house” the singer read to the crowd and Danny slunk back to our table, apologizing that he had offered to pay for my college tuition.

It’s been a prank detente since then.

We make so much of heritage in this country, Margaret, yet we both know that as white people, there are more important determinants than the cultures of our “ancestors.” More important determinants for any difference in power between us7 is how the last three generations of our families of origins have navigated the systems that distribute power and segregate labor, ie, work.

When I try to ascertain my inheritance of history, my way into the good fortune of whiteness, I find a legacy of imperial violence that infiltrates the home. But I also believe that the home can be a site where this violence can be countered.

I think of my families and their twisted senses of humor and I hear the stories they tell of their parents and their rage. I see, though, a rebellious streak channeled into humor. Sometimes a good belly laugh is the only way to get over what you fear but cannot change. Telling a joke that makes someone angry or butthurt illuminates their vulnerabilities.

My proclivity for finding ways to tell jokes or pull pranks hasn’t made life easy for me. I’ve lost friends over jokes and at least once its affected my means of employment. But jokes and pranks have also drawn me closer to strangers and converted friends. And the person that I laugh the most at is myself.

Margaret, I know that many do not have the freedom that I do to poke fun at as many groups that I can—part of the privileges of being a [redacted] woman in a [redacted] marriage is that I can crack on my privileged intersectionality in public spaces with only a small amount of fear of violent retribution. If there’s something that I hope is retained in our changing world it would be the Anglo/white tradition of the jester speaking truth to power.

Jokes are important both in relationships and in societies. They might not lessen the sting of injustice, but there is a satisfaction in pulling a face for the crowd and farting a little in the jailers’ faces if you’re stuck in the stocks. Sure, it might risk further violence, but sometimes it’s a risk I’m willing to take, for the laughs. That’s my inheritance.

Your sister in Race Treachery,

Auxie

PS: If you felt any sense of disgust or even revulsion at my jokes-guess what, my girl? That’s the third leg of the reactions to humor: anger, laughter and disgust, as noted in the footnote. In the game of ritual insults, though, its still a W.

PPS: I think the thing I really want to engage with in my project is, uh, how anglophone privilege is the third most insidious privilege, and that might be the privilege that I’ve benefited the most from in my life.

PPPS: If you made it this far (and stats say most people don’t—look at you bucking the trends!), hit subscribe.

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November 16, 2024

Dear Current and Potential Magical Germ Corinthians,

There is a big thing that I want to talk about—a thing the world has been all about, perhaps for the last 500 years or so: dominance.

No, I don’t mean in the sexy way that some of you might assume, primed to read my every utterance as some salacious innuendo (I’m a married lady now and I save that for my husband). When I write to you of dominance, now, outside of our group chats, I am trying to speak plainly about the thing that I have gotten shrill about in the chat. Since Haitch and I cashed in our coolness and bought a house we could afford in the suburbs, dominance has been on my mind.

Having a house, I thought that we would make time for each other; it would be easier to say these things to you IRL. I thought (silly me, all this thinking that I did) in the fall of 2019, our relationship, grounded in the group chat, had the seeds of a real communitarian collective. I believed that once we joined you in property ownership (one of the things that united our Founding Fathers to give George III the revolutionary middle finger)1, we’d take turns hosting each other in our respective homes, one of us having a pool (sadly, only our uber-rich friends have them, and are stingy with their pool invites). We’d be the type of friends who would offer mutual aid in the care of our property: help with the minor projects that our retired boomer neighbors outsource to migrants with retirement accounts that won’t exist for us.

We did not get together in person. Sure, there was a big speed-bump for some of those years—we were good citizens through the pre-vax phase of the pandemic, even past it. There was also Haitch’s [redacted] and then of course Mike’s time in [redacted]. I thought, in the early days of our multicrises, that we would form the bonds that would become the foundation of a deep and lasting friendship. Crises tend to do that to people, or so one of my heroes writes. In my wildest imaginings (and I have always been prone to them) our neighborly camaraderie would become the model for the commune of Nuevo San Carlos, which would be the inspiration of a new utopia, Alta California. Mostly, though, I thought we’d figure out a way to barbecue together every month or so, even with some of your dietary restrictions.

I remember fondly how years ago at Seth’s & Cynthia’s—founding members of the OG Magical Germ Corinthians—we had a fire in their backyard, on Guy Fawkes Day. We joked beforehand, Mike thinking that we were celebrating Karl Bergman, whoever that was. Around the firepit, we explained to Mike, the Southern transplant (who really should know more about Anglo culture than us West Coasters, since he grew up in a state named after an Anglo monarch), what Guy Fawkes Day was, him never having seen V for Vendetta. The Brits call it Bonfire Day, we said, patiently walking him through the absurdity that this was a celebration of some Catholics trying to blow up the House of Parliament, oppressed by the Protestant majority. The Brits for centuries since have celebrated it by burning in effigy the Guy who planted the bomb but didn’t originate the plot. And then we laughed and joked about Karl Bergman Day, deciding we’d celebrate that on Presidents’ Day.

When Haitch and I bought our house, I hoped we would have more times like that. I imagined we’d go out hiking occasionally and then grab a drink and josh each other about silly things we said on hikes years ago, more jokes about Guy Fawkes Day and Karl Bergman Day. Maybe we’d actually make those dioramas, illustrating the different Karl Bergmans we’d found on the Internet: the Swedish biathlete who’d taken home a few Olympic medals before retiring; the hydro engineer responsible for designing a few minor dams in Europe; the heavy metal drummer who shot himself. Maybe we’d even get you all on a camping trip, something we only managed to do once with some of you to celebrate our marriage.

Somehow, with all those hikes, camping trips and laughs, it would have been easy to ask each other for help. Help with caring for each other and help with the house; for instance, that you’d begrudgingly agree to help clear off our solar panels or dig out a twenty-year old irrigation line (one of ours recently broke and our Southern California heritage succulent garden is now desiccating) in exchange for some grilled food and a beer (non-alcoholic even, for some of you).

But alas, here we are, post-Guy Fawkes Day 2024, five years from me achieving the American Dream, and we have not gone on hikes. We have not barbecued. You hired a contractor (who probably was paying migrants under the table) to redo your yard.

I am writing you now from another fire in the Anza-Borrego desert. Haitch and I are here, celebrating a milestone event: the cats’ first camping trip. Here we are, with these furry little fuckers who’ve been pining for the outdoors after a lifetime held captive in our ranch-style home (the “cat terrarium”, as Little Mikey calls it). These guys cry in front of doors and open windows, Porkchop darting out occasionally to roll on the concrete driveway. In an attempt to alleviate their middle-class cat ennui, we decided to macrodose them with the outdoors.

Now, as I sit beside the folding metal fire pit Haitch purchased off the Internet two days before our trip, the cats cowering beneath my legs, leash ends looped around my right wrist as my left hand drags over the paper, ink staining the side of my palm, I realize that I had always pictured you here in this moment.

Tonight, Haitch and I have built some dreams together: we’ve talked of which of you we would pitch to have join us at [redacted] Film Festival and what our “evil” plot would actually be once we got you there. We talked about which of you we both would like to have join us on a Cat Camping Trip, and which of you would ruin the experience due to a need for loud noise, either in music or in the plurality of voices.

The thing that I love about camping that I think I only showed you once: one person talks at a time. It’s kind of like my writing group, but out-of-doors with food. I realize what I hate about our world, and why we struggle to spend time together: it’s never just one person speaking at a time.

Haitch and I have been through the ringer these last four years; I reckon, though, that you have too. They haven’t felt easy for anyone, based on what happened this last Guy Fawkes Day in America. As I sit by the fire, realizing that this is an experience I wanted to share with you, I wonder: why is it so hard to hang out with you?

Look, I’ve always had a rich and active fantasy life. As a kid, I developed elaborate alternate scenarios with people I loved while I played alone in my yard, mashing manzanita berries and mud in moteros my father had to leave behind in the divorce. I fantasized about a time where I might one day be living with all my family and friends (how few I had then) in one place, peacefully.

Even as a kid, I knew that this was a desire that could never be fulfilled. It was a little story—a fiction—that I made for myself, to feel less alone in the sparse world that I was powerless to change. But when I dreamed of us, C&P MGC, camping in the desert not far from some of our houses, I thought it might actually happen.

Yet it didn’t.

I know, I know, you’re throwing your hands up in the air, ready for another episode of “Auxie being an asshole by telling me I’m an asshole for not hanging out with her all the time when the phone works both ways.” I do hold my friends to high standards. That you’ve made it this far in our friendship should be a testament to your character, especially your tolerance for the assholery that I’m always doing, the flights of fancy that I take, imagining amazing adventures for us and you always dropping the ball by not getting them on the calendar.

Recently, though, I’ve had trouble discerning the possible from the fantastical. I need grounding and better boundaries. So help me. Enlighten me.

How crazy was it for me to imagine you here? Let’s put it on a scale of other ideas I’ve had. Was it on par of irrationality of:

1. China spying on my husband and me via my hearing aids?

2. Glamis Camel Days 2026?

3. Getting that job at the marketing agency?

4. Seeing you in person ever again?

5. You subscribing to my Substack?

I have been going crazy this past decade in the States. I did better living abroad. Perhaps you’ll tell me, those of you with your years in recovery, that the desire to go back to the past is just another way to pull a “geographical”. If we were together and you said it, I would threaten violence. Jokingly.

My jokes: the thing that we struggle with. This is where I feel the yawning difference between our upbringings, our classes. You don’t think it’s appropriate to point out people’s flaws, you feel that it’s a violence. I grew up in a household where all we could do was joke about each other’s shortcomings to thicken each other’s skin. When we left the house, though, these jokes inured us to the barbs that the world had for us as working-class folk trying to eke out our lives in the hours allowed to us. It was training to keep our souls.

Joking threats of physical violence served another purpose: to draw lines in the sand of our relationships. Because we thought that outside our home the only pain that could cow us would be the pain that could be inflicted on our physical bodies. We were wrong of course — that there were weaker, more cowardly people than us, afraid of so much less than their bodily integrity—but that’s why we joked about violence: to steel ourselves against it when our lines were crossed. That’s why I do, at least.

This is the thing that violence does: it dominates. The punch or kick across the lines you drew against others can obliterate your will to protect it. Violence allows, at the simplest level, someone to have power over another. Now, after November 5th, domination through violence feels incipient in our world.

People like us, C&P MGC, don’t talk about violence or our privileged freedom from it. We believe in that Anglo-Saxon-European fallacy, that forward motion is better motion, and that with enough progress, you’ll arrive at righteousness. You know the quote, “the moral arc of the universe is long, but it bends towards justice.” We believe those things, never realizing that it takes action to bring about justice and “progress”. Instead we talk about how stupid people are.

We laugh into our hands, expectant of the inevitable harm from their choices, shirking the work of understanding why these people are choosing the opposite of us. What about them is so aggrieved that they are willing to risk violence to themselves? We think that they are oblivious of the risk of violence embedded in their choices.

Let me explain it to you: they already feel they face the risk daily in their lives. We couldn’t have talked about that on this trip, friends, because we don’t think about the horrors that would bring violence into our lives. Frankly, we think the horrors of others’ choices won’t be that bad for us.

Tonight, camping with my cats, after Haitch and I started to talk about the fears we have about the future, we also talked about what our hedges will be against it. Like so much of my life in America, I find myself saying “maybe” to things that before were hard “nos”. I’ve wiped clean the lines that I navigated the world with, and Haitch and I find ourselves drawing new ones. We are revisiting an issue that had been, for most of our relationship, crossing a line of mine: if we will have guns in the house.

I believe, C&P MGC, that most of you would be on the side that I was: hard no. Since this last Guy Fawkes Day, since Americans have decided to light the fuse that will blow up the world, I find myself glad of having options about guns. I had been a hard no because of the risks (most gun deaths are accidents, suicides, or uxoricides2); it seemed like a bad idea. It seemed like inviting violence into my home. But then I remembered that the second amendment comes from the Bill of Rights, and before those OWGs, the American Founding Fathers, put to paper, “we need to keep our muskets”, they first thought, “We should be able to say whatever silly shit we want.” I want to keep that right, say all the silly shit I want, so long as it doesn’t cause a panic.

I don’t have any strong opinions about those OWGs, but one of the things that I see in them, with the Bill of Rights, is an ability to admit that they made some mistakes. That is what I’m finding now, as Haitch and I talk about how we will make it through this moment, what fears we might have and how we might need to change in this moment, is that I am looking for those who can admit that they were wrong. Especially those who made choices trying to protect their perceived dominance.

That’s the other thing that those OWGs did: they figured out how to make common cause with people that they disagreed with on some fundamentals. Sure, no one really took the opportunity to condemn slavery (the Three-Fifths Compromise being the lame excuse that allowed Southerners to deny Black people basic rights afforded to whites and get representational power from them, too) or promote women’s rights (to be fair, though, the Constitution was composed three years before the publication of A Vindication of the Rights of Woman.) But, thankfully, some of those missed opportunities were rectified in revisions.

In the aftermath of Guy Fawkes Day 2024, I will be looking for people who are willing to change their minds and redraw their lines. It’s not just Second Amendment Fetishists, though; I’m willing to entertain making common cause with some people you loathe: [redacted], [redacted], Cross Fit Enthusiasts, Coal-Rolling Conversion Prosletyzers, [redacted]—fuck, even Mormons.

I’m not talking about converting to their ideals: I’ve been saying no to Mormons since Chanelle Weldy tried to convert me through the chain-link fence of our adjoining back yards in fourth grade. It was tempting, to trade my soul just to get access to her family’s pool. It even had a slide. However, what she was selling—an extended community through plural marriage in heaven/space—didn’t jive with what I believe. I didn’t want to wait until I was dead to have community.

What I am talking about though, is listening to what their freak outs are about in the next two years, and if it rhymes with mine. Ours. And if they do, if it’s about power and care and the lack of it, then maybe we can set aside our dietary preferences and insistence on secret handshakes through curtains to figure out how we can get on the same page about power. And care. And public pools.

I’m optimistic about the long-term prospects, but maybe I’m just riding the high of real change in my personal life. I feel obliged to tell you that Haitch and I, after these rough past years, are doing much better. While the [redacted] tugged against the fault lines in our relationship, we’ve had some breakthroughs in communication.

You may recall all my complaints about [redacted]. I get it now; when you’re right-handed and all the world is made for you, you can’t understand how a Sinistralist like me needs more information. It is work to think about your body in that way, and then to take that work and think about the differences in someone else’s body. You could say it’s just empathy, but empathy is hard, we learned on Guy Fawkes Day, for a lot of people.

Tonight, though, we had a communication breakthrough. While coaching me on how to adjust the logs on our campfire, incapacitated due to the cats sheltering under the fortress of his body folded into one of our chairs, holding the [redacted], reminiscent of The Dude (in middle-age I see sexiness in his gentleness), he coached me on how to adjust the fire and rearrange the wood for optimal heat. In his coaching, he thought, not in how our bodies were different, but how they were the same:

“Lift the log with your dominant hand.”

That made a world of difference.

I want that for us, Magical Germ Corinthians, Current and Potential, to spend time together, talking to each other in new ways, redrawing our lines together.

X

PS: Of course, I know where one of my lines is drawn, in the conflagration of the old norms:

I really can’t live with my parents again. And they sure as fuck can’t live with me.

PPS: Listen, you know I have nothing against migrant workers—I was one for all those years. I’m jealous that some of them get to make a living doing the thing that my Scandi ancestors came here to do, that I’m always longing for: move soil.

PPPS: I think I’m going to have to pivot the business, to get those butthurt billionaire dollars.

Thank you for your response to my email regarding my name. I didn’t think you would read it, but I am saddened to learn that you have a similar trauma around your birth—your mother’s Christmas re-telling of the story of her grief when the ultrasound technician pointed out your penis really hit a nerve. As Phillip Larkin put into verse, family fucks you up. I know my own family did, and that was one of the reasons why I left them.

Do you ever feel vertigo to think that we used to be younger, drunk most nights, and now we’re parents? I can’t recall exactly, but I feel like you’re one of those guys who always wanted to be a dad. And now you are one! And you’re a husband, but that doesn’t surprise me.

Most of my life, I was apathetic about parenthood. The only time I felt strongly that I might want kids was after I taught in that Korean Kindergarten for two years. Yet when I was living out of a backpack in Colombia and Ecuador, any desire I had for children dissipated. I wanted the freedom that I was feeling then to last forever. I told one boy in those long nights of freedom that what I really wanted to be was a step mom. Amazingly, not long after I returned to the States, that’s what I became. And more.

Look, when I went off about food systems, I was not well. I was really struggling with the responsibilities of being forced into a care giving role after [redacted] as well as the immense pressure I was feeling in my job during the pandemic. And then I read The Dawn of Everything by David Graeber and David Wengrow with some other FMWs.

Reading it, I felt like the scales had fallen from my eyes. It was the same feeling I experienced when I was first exposed to the ideas of feminism, specifically the phrase, “the personal is political”. I know that there is controversy over the authors’ interpretations of the cultural power arrangements based on the archaeological remains and historical records that they examine, but I don’t think that invalidates their main arguments.

I never thought deeply about what makes a state or a government. I knew that jail was bad yet was willing to risk it for the right adventure, taxes were inevitable and dealing with any government-run bureaucracy will entail interminable waiting. I also knew that I had to save for my own retirement and take care of myself, because I am an American, where at least I know I’m free.

I have, though, thought a lot about group dynamics and I’ve often struggled to find balance within my social affiliations; of how much time I was willing to give those people to have relationships with them; of how constrained I felt in most social groups, hesitant to disagree, or to leave, or to even say to these groups—friends, co-workers, writing groups, book clubs, supper clubs—“This isn’t working for me. I want to change this.”

In a book that has the academic goal of overturning the existing system of classification of societies and social groups of the soft sciences, arguing that its currently a binary disguised as a spectrum of complexity, I found a truth, a political thing that was personal. The Davids (Graeber and Wengrow) proposed that all group arrangements constrain at least one of three “original freedoms”: the freedom to move; the freedom to disobey; and the freedom to create new or transform existing relationships.

And here it was: this had been my anxiety in all those social groups! All those times that I was a big jerk, doing an Irish exit at a bar or a noraebang, I was just exercising my freedom to move—or on the interpersonal level, leave. When you all accused me of being sassy about splitting the bill when I barely drank any of the five bottles of beer and no soju, I was just exercising my freedom to disobey—but because we were all equals—to disagree. All those times you thought I was being excessively confrontational about the discussion of my sex life? Just me trying to transform our relationship into one in which my sex life was not a topic that you could bring up—but yes, I could.

CM, I see you now taking one of your big theatrical gulps, your tell that some statement I had made triggered feelings of revulsion that you would overcome because of our friendship; that action, coupled with the reflexive gesture of pressing your hands down on your knees—I see you girding yourself for some Auxie bullshit—“buckle up for this nonsense”—but I also remember that this tell never stopped me from sharing my view, that you would in fact stay with me wherever I took the bullshit. Stay with me here, Mike, just like you used to.

These three freedoms were revelatory to me. I looked back on my life, a life that I had previously considered of limited accomplishments—no prestigious degrees, publications, renown, talent or even beauty—and saw now a history of a woman who had numerous opportunities to live these freedoms. The moves from San Diego to the East Coast, to Denver, to Korea—all that freedom of movement! The verbal altercations with roommates about what was actually too loud or when we couldn’t have a party—freedom of opinion! The roommates who became best friends who became frenemies who became people who I never texted back—freedom of social transformation. So much freedom. And such an asshole: me.

In my interpretation of their ideas, the Davids argue that group arrangements constrain these freedoms; the question is in what ways are members willing to have them constrained. The ways in which societies constrain freedoms becomes their basis for classification. But that’s a topic for another email—or a beer shared on a hot summer night in a backyard.

There is one thing that they underscore: “Sacrifice is the shadow lurking behind the concept of civilization: the sacrifice of our three basic freedoms, and of life itself, for the sake of something always out of reach” (432). And here, too, I was learning this intimately in my marriage when I had to become a caretaker.

Some people are willing and grateful recipients of care, no matter how shoddily given. My husband was not. I will spare you the gory details of our difficulties; suffice to say I sacrificed my freedom to leave for the hope of a transformed future relationship.

But in this morass of caretaking, I started to connect all the other ways that people who serve as caretakers give to others that can never be reciprocated. And I thought of all the people who were unwilling to constrain their freedoms during the pandemic—the freedom to move—at the expense of so many lives. I questioned if we truly lived in a civilization or if we are just a landmass of assholes constrained only by our economic means.

There’s more that I learned from The Davids and Dawn of Everything, that I would share with you, because as a parent of a toddler you don’t have much time to read for leisure. But I look at us, the descendants of a long line of European jerkasses who’ve exercised their freedom to move all over the world and in doing so destroyed so many other ways of being, and how you and I have settled into caretaking without chafing too much at the things we sacrificed--I am hopeful for the rest of us whites ruining the world.

X

PS: I wonder, too, if reading DoE while navigating being a caretaker and a full-time participant in the workforce, I didn’t find in some of their interpretations of archaeological evidence an echo of the utopia that I’m looking for.

Got to be honest: when I declared that I would redo the challenge and invited you to join, I was a little bit [redacted]. The intention was there—to let someone else tell me what to do—but life came at me, hard.

There was the client, with their deliverables (the difficulty of moving from employee to contractor is that I’m far more obligated to keep my word); there was life. Maggie’s senior year is pummeling us like a hurricane of angst and frustration and anticipation.

I don’t know if I’m a good parent, but if there’s a lesson I hope Maggie has learned from me, it’s that you can feel two things at once. You can both want to be a “boyfriend girlie” and not want to be; you can be both excited for the end of high school and dreading the unknown of what happens next. You can also want to do yoga every day for thirty days and at the same time, not want to.

I came at my 30 Day Yoga Challenge with the intention of seeing it through—I sensed through the sequences that the end goal of the challenge was both to increase squat depth and perhaps get into bakasana. I love bakasana but in my work of sitting and letting the ball of my cranial neurons fire, I’ve let the muscles that pull my legs in get weak.

So one day, I didn’t do the practice. And then another. I know you saw; Mikkelina a paragon of discipline with her early morning posts, my responses in the evenings, and then one day no response. Then another.

To resume the practice, I got creative with it. Every yoga class for beginners will tell you that the Sanskrit word for yoga also means to “yoke” or “join”; the next cliche of beginner yoga for white people is that we are “yoking” movement to breath in our practice.

In trying to yoke my intention back to action, I stopped using [redacted]’s practice. Letting a lithe brunette with a throaty giggle who had leveraged her win of the genetic lottery into an income stream suddenly felt like a betrayal to my body.

A confession: I am not flexible. I have never been flexible. What drew me to yoga was the call to stay with the moments of rigidity in my body or my life and that if I stuck with the breath, the moment would pass. In time, I’d get a little unstuck and feel ease.

Around this time, my thinking had gotten stuck on the number twelve (maybe it was all the [redacted]). In trying to get paid, I found myself struggling to determine at what threshold of minutes do I bill for and then where do minutes come from—what can we do in a minute that could be so valuable that we need to measure it? Does it match with any natural rhythm of the body? And then I realized that sixty is a high number you can count on your hands without reusing digits—you count the phalanges of fingers on one hand, touching with your thumb to get to twelve, and then you uncurl on your other hand each of your fingers, including your thumb—five cycles of twelve gets you to sixty.

This exploration of time and the body got me to twelve and I decided to focus my practice around twelve: twelve days of “yoking” myself into a moment with breath.

You saw the first one: I did a yin yoga practice—long holds with micro-adjustments— from an app. Then the next day I did all the poses from the practice that I had wanted to spend more time in.

Day 3 I explored spinal movement and external and internal rotation of the legs.

Day 4 I did seven minutes of hip flexor stretches.

Day 5 I did cat-cow in a mirror and then explored my hips while laying on my back.

Day 6 I laid in the sun, listening to my husband talk to me about our garden.

Day 7 I moved as slowly as a could, thinking about qi gong and if I should actually be learning that.

Day 8 I danced alone in my house, and wrote myself notes that I have yet to read.

Day 9 I felt sore in my core, so I just sat on my couch, breathing and feeling my core.

Day 10 I decided to lay my torso over my counter and stretch my low back until Maggie came and asked me what I was doing.

Day 11 my shoulder was sore, so I just laid on the floor and used a strap to stretch my legs.

Day 12 I came back to those yin poses from Day 2, to see if they felt different.

When I stopped with that, I needed to unyoke myself from the practice.

So I did.

This month, without fanfare, I did another 30 day yoga challenge. And rather than try to push into some achievement, I decided that I would do the same sequence of poses for 12 minutes, yin-style and be in the sensations. I would repeat this for as many days as I wanted, but hopefully I would do it 30 times in a month with 31 days.

This, Yoga Challenge Group Chat members, was what I needed.

Yin yoga is a challenging practice for my fellow Americans: it’s not going to “tone” you, or increase your cardiovascular fitness through a million sun salutations moving through chatturanga push ups. Though similar to restorative yoga, it is not restful; you are in no danger of falling asleep.

A good yin yoga practice is about stillness in the body while chasing sensations. It’s about exploring gravity’s effect and feeling your nerves fire in unexpected ways. There can be sparking, electric feelings, nerves sending chemicals in the gaps between them for the first time in years; or tugging, crystalline popping as the small fibers of fascia and muscle that were adhered to each other finally become unstuck. It is an experience of the body on the microlevel, challenging if you view every unexpected sensation as a flag for danger.

In some ways, yin yoga mirrors the equanimity that I want to approach the second half of my life with: when so little in my life is new on a day-to-day, year-to-year basis, I’ll find the novelty that kept me moving through the first half in these small moments, these microtears of tissue that will stimulate an immune response, rejuvenating those same tissues. It is a practice that I feel ambivalent about: I can hate the sensations that I’m experiencing, but I choose to stay with it because the next day I feel safeguarded against the indignities of aging.

Honestly, it feels like knowing that I’m in the top quintile of my age group for retirement savings or that my credit score is in the 90th percentile. A difficult achievement that I have yet to realize the gains from, but that I’m sticking with, out of hope for it paying off.

I hope Maggie can learn this from ambivalence. I also hope that our generation, Yoga Challenge Members, can deliver her a world in which being ambivalent about the future but persistent in optimism for a positive outcome bears out, no matter what kind of girlie you end up settling on.

That has been where I’ve been putting my body, along with lifting weights, riding my bike around town, and a brisk walk or two a week. I feel, having done it 25 times in the last 30 days, more in possession of myself, that I can feel myself more. Also, I cut out the [redacted] for now, after Haitch got frustrated with me for wanting to talk about the number twelve.

Meridianally unblocked,

AE

I want to thank you for the care that you’ve provided me during these confusing years. I’d like to reiterate that while others around me have been worried by my behavior, I’ve been fine. Thank you for your patience as we try to work through what may be “wrong” with me.

I know that I have strongly resisted pathologizing my experience and while this has frustrated some of you, I hope that out of respect for my intelligence and long history of coping without medical intervention in my life, you will hear me out. I have a theory regarding my recent experience. It is not that there is something wrong with me that can be “corrected” through modern Western medicine, but rather that some aspect of my neural connectivity makes me especially resistant to conforming socially. You see, I am left-handed.

As medical professionals, you are inclined to see that many of my problems are based in the physiology of my body, and I am not discounting that; I am leaning into it. In my research across mammals, where a preference between sides can be discerned, it splits much closer to equal parity between left and right preferences.1[ ] However, since the Paleolithic Age less than 10% of the human population has been left-handed.2

I don’t think any of you are students of evolutionary biology, but I think an argument could be made that this extreme right handedness of our species is the result of extraordinary selection pressures.

I see the shadow of those selection pressures in my daily life in the simple tools of being a homeowner and caretaker of a family. I have struggled to effectively use our weed whacker because the ergonomics of it don’t align with my body. I had some difficulty using a hand-forged knife my husband purchased for our house. When we examined it closely, it has a warp with a right-bias. It appears that the knife’s craftsman checked if it was true by holding it in only his right hand on his right side. Lastly, my husband recently bought a specialized spatula modified to both scrape and lift. But this, too, has a right-hand bias built into the object; the flattened lifting edge is on the left-side, causing the user to move the tool from right to left, which is a pushing motion towards the midline of the body in the right hand, while in the left hand it’s a pulling motion away from the midline.

Right-handed spatula in question.

These biases of design in common tools occur in industrial tools, making manual labor and careers in construction come with a heightened risk of acute and cumulative injury for left-handed people. But the bias against left-handedness doesn’t end with tool design; there have been more overt, cultural pressures. In 2019, when geneticists discovered some of the genetic markers associated with left-handedness, they calculated that perhaps only 25% of left-handedness could be attributed to genetics, while the rest of the causality they attributed to “other factors.” “Other factors” encompasses a wide range of causal associations from fetal exposures to home environment. However, I think a key causal factor for left-handedness is societal pressure-or rather resistance to it.

As a species that generally exhibits bilateral symmetry as well as a dependency on tool use, many different cultures throughout history have both grouped individuals based on handedness and set one of these up as the better option, the other as the worse. And the worst option has often been to be left-handed. Indeed, it is from the Latin word for “left” that a modern synonym for evil is derived: sinister. And the English word for left derives from an Anglo-Saxon word that means “weak”. This confluence of influences has meant that just being left-handed was enough to be convicted of being a witch—and executed.

Other cultures from the Middle East to South Asia have retain notions about the hygienic nature of the right hand, while assigning tasks related to defecation to the left, and thus the left side—and left hand—are viewed as unclean. In China and South Korea, left-handedness is still seen as bad luck.

Just a mere hundreds of years ago, people spoke seriously about the increased criminality of left-handed people. These cultural biases across a variety of societies have disincentived children from being left-handed. And apparently, given the low rates of left-handedness and those vague “other factors” many people “choose” conformity. They choose to mirror those right-handers around them, facility with tools, ease of social situations, sitting at any spot at a table without insisting that they are left-handed and need room.

These pressures to choose in a false binary of handedness (even I, a person with extreme dominance of my left-side, still cut with my right hand and use a right-handed mouse) the better option, the one that nine out of 10 people choose. What does it say for the brains of people like me, who choose differently?

Here I must digress from my attempts to stay evidenced-based and delve into the imagination. I imagine myself, a young child, being instructed in how to eat with a fork and color with a crayon and being encouraged to use my right hand, the right choice. And I imagine myself, in my choice insisting that despite everyone using their right hand, the implied notion that left was less or worse, that there was a third option: it didn’t fucking matter.

Here is where we must return to the notions of evolutionary theory. Part of the great “genius” of our species is our incredibly cooperative nature. Individuals are very vulnerable on their own—to accidents that maim our fragile limbs or predation from animals further up in the food web. It’s only in groups that we are successful in reproducing. And these groups compete with other groups. In order for groups to be successful, though, there needs to be a shared sense of similarity. And one of the really easy way for this to happen is by everyone having the same handedness.

And that’s why all the moralizing across cultures, that left is bad, evil or wrong and right is, well, good and right. I’d even argue that the dichotomous division of the world in many religions between good and evil is an outgrowth of our bilateral symmetry. But then there are assholes like me, the ten percenters—the Sinistralists, let’s call them.

When I think back to little Auxie, choosing her handedness, I see her intuiting a third thing, beyond rightness or wrongness, this false duality in picking sides: I can be different than you, act differently than you and we can still belong together and be the same.

Of course, societies and groups of affiliation draw their lines arbitrarily of who is in and who is out. When I look at history and cultural movements, many times and in many other ways, there have been Sinistralists, unconcerned with doing what was expected. In fact, these ten percenters were often the vanguard of changing mores and innovation—and more, if they had power. People like Aristotle, Alexander the Great, Julius Caesar, Joan of Arc, Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, Napoleon Bonaparte, Simon Bolivar, Thomas Carlyle, Fredrich Nietzche, Marie Curie, Mark Twain, Mahatma Gandhi, Fidel Castro, James Baldwin, Jimi Hendrix, David Bowie, Ruth Bader Ginsberg, Johnny Rotten, Oprah Winfrey, and Mark Zuckerberg, to name a few.

I have seen this in my own life—my history of being okay with being different, with being the foreigner and the weirdo. That in any population, a certain amount of people can feel both that they are a part of the group and be comfortable with being perceived that they are also not. They can mediate it. And the question I have for you, as we look back on your efforts of intervention to get my thinking “right”, who were we trying to soothe: me, the woman with “disordered” thinking; or you, uncomfortable because of my difference?

Of course, sometimes I think this difference I have, being okay being different–it just meant that people like me evolved to leave.

Sinistrally,

A. Ekster

I’m giving [redacted]’s Yoga Challenge another shot. It’s mostly, though, for a client.

My husband has just had his tenth surgery post-[redacted] and it seems to be taking.

He decided that he would hobby grow bulbs—

I’ve always thought that lilacs were bulbs, but they are shrubs, like the shrubbery of my home turf.

Chapparal: what covers the city park that I drive by beside two dumps on my way to the ocean, not quite getting there—

—out of locally produced compost that quickly becomes dead land, breeding memory in this snowless land.

In April, the cruellest month—that my husband doesn’t even know the Wasteland—we almost share a birthday. It’s one of the ways that we’ve made a family, overwriting what’s historically been the worst day of the year for me with days we share, joyfully.

363 days out of the year, neither of us is very good at sharing (though he is better than me). Two days in April we get it right. This leap year three, our second together.

Maybe we should measure the depth of relationships in leap-year cycles and other astronomical events. He and I have shared another: the annular eclipse.

There’s thirty days in April and so far in 2024 I’ve forgotten the hedonic leisure of trusting someone to tell me what to do with myself for 17 to 30 minutes out of 1440 in a day. I can’t even give myself over to someone for 60 minutes without thinking what I should be charging.

Anyway, I’m doing a yoga challenge in April. I’ll be posting my thoughts in the chat. I’ll be soliciting others to check in with me daily regarding the tough pleasures they cajoled themselves into having and felt grateful for afterwards. Maybe not just yoga—remember, it’s really just breathing and moving—it could be afternoon napping or chatting with a neighbor or eating lunch in the sunshine, even though it’s chilly because it’s lovely to be outside for now.

For now.

And afterwards, on May 1, I’m going to start to listening to Foucault’s Pendulum.

hopefully leisurely,

AE

Welcome to the group chat, “These are the Mikes I know I know”. Since we’ve reconnected, some of you have asked me, “Auxie, why Human Resources? How did you, with the pottiest of mouths and most vulgar of humors, end up doing Human Resources?” Driving home from a new client last week, it occurred to me: I have a pretty high tolerance for risk.

You knew that already from the travel I did that you would never dream of doing. Mikkel, I gave you a metric ton of shit about how your exotic travel was following your girlfriend to Goa, a place that whites denuded of danger in the 60s and then invented trance. Those two weeks we all spent on the East Coast of Taiwan, surfing and being mystified by the menus in the night market? The worst things that happened were we ate too much Subway out of convenience and I got poison ivy from sightseeing in a canyon. Remember, CM, eating makguksu before you left Korea and you were agonizing about what anti-malarial to take for your trip to the mountains of Thailand—Thailand, the Disneyland of the world, if you ask me, so easy is it to explore—and I called you a pussy in front of your mom? She agreed with me, too.

Mikes I know I know, when it comes to danger, you’re all pussies. How many of the Former World’s Most Dangerous Cities did you visit in your travels? I count five: Capetown, Johannesburg, Medellín, Bogotá and Caracas. Many of them still rank regularly on the list of the Top 50 Most Dangerous Cities in the World, based on homicide rates. I traveled solo, sans a Mike like you. I didn’t choose those places because of the danger, but when I weighed the pros and cons, I didn’t give the increased likelihood of violence as much weight as you did. But then I was raised testing the value of my life.

My stepdaughter, Maggie, gets frustrated sometimes when she tries to complain to me about our expectations for her. “Are you going to tell me another story about how Danny Ekster almost killed you?” It’s true; I have a certain class of stories that begin, “Let me tell you about this one time my dad almost killed me.”

You’re all knowledgeable about geography. My natal city shares a border with a city ranked on the current list of World’s Most Dangerous. Many Mexican border towns do. Danny Ekster, though, got the taste of the rutted roads and empty beaches of Baja, surf breaks where solitude could be had. And once you’re out of the towns and cities, there’s not a lot a law enforcement. There’s not a lot of anything. You could crack a beer behind the wheel and enjoy a long drive with a malt beverage with few fears of repercussions. The laws that had to be obeyed were physics, not legal codes.

Maybe it was the beers or his belief that it is a father’s job to toughen his kids rather than to protect them, but there wasn’t a lot of softening of his Baja pursuits when he brought my sister and I along. The trip would always take at least eight hours of driving. We would see at least three wrecks on the way and there would be a crisis regarding our route—the safer road would have a bridge washed out or a town’s gas station was shut down and we would have to make a choice: the route we had planned or a different, less reliable route? One place had two ways in: a circuitous route around the foot of a coastal mountain range, with long miles backtracking north above bluffs overlooking the Pacific; or a rancher’s pass through those mountains, scraped into the rocky slopes that he called the “Road through Hell”. As a shortcut, it shaved two hours off the drive time. Some trips, there were reports that the shortcut was washed away and he’d tell us we’d have to go the long way. Other trips, we’d be offered a choice. Sometimes, we willingly chose the Road through Hell.

The journeys were a lot more comfortable for my sister; as the oldest, she got shotgun unless she had a friend. I was relegated to the covered cab of my dad’s four-cylinder Toyota Truck. I forget that none of you, Mikes I know I know, are Truck Guys, and if in middle age you’ve developed an appreciation for cars, it is for their fuel efficiency and value retention as an asset.

Art by Nick Vargas

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To clarify: my father drove hundreds of miles on roads notorious for lethal conditions in a truck smaller and lighter than your modern sedans with one of his kids bouncing around without a seatbelt in the back. With mostly luck, we didn’t die.

I’ve lost the plot, as my South African friends would chide. On these trips, Danny Ekster primed me to have low expectations of safety. And then there were the actual near-death experiences, of which I am so fond of telling people.

Let’s recap: when I was six, there was the time that he took my sister and I on a Zodiac raft in head-high swells with no outboard motor and the raft flipped on us, no one wearing life jackets. I was trapped under the raft rather than sucked out to sea. I remember the roar and the noise and bubbles and then I remember being out of my body, watching from the shore a towheaded child wailing, splayed out upon the bottom of a raft being pulled in from sea by two adults and two teenagers.

At seven, there was the time we returned home from a spot that the only route in was the firm sandy beach at low tide—the other side was hundreds of square miles of sand dunes. We timed our exit poorly, the tide coming in quickly and liquefying the driving surface. The Toyota Truck become stuck—it couldn’t have been self-rescued without a winch and fixed surface—water soon swirled in the wheel wells and up to the axles. Amazingly, six Mexicans with shovels appeared from the dunes and dug us out, Danny repaying them with the only hard currency he would spare, a six-pack of beers.

At eight, there was the time he borrowed a friend’s quad, who I remember explicitly giving the instructions that he had to be careful on any steep sections because it was a manual transmission (do any of you Mikes know how to drive a manual?) and would stall. Driving in the sand dunes, we came upon what I thought was too steep a section and pleaded with him not to go. Halfway up the hill, he tried to downshift but, as warned, the engine stalled and the quad’s front end lifted, tumbling us over, then onto us, then taking us down the hill. I nursed a sprain wrist for weeks and distrust for my father to this day.

Yes, he almost killed me, but the key here is “almost”. He taught me how to assess the risks for myself, and that the higher the perceived likelihood of death the more rewarding life would be on the other side of the gamble. Other people’s tolerances and constraints weren’t mine and often weren’t very accurate to the real dangers. Just because you shouldn’t do it—maybe it was even illegal—it might be fun. And the social capital of a good story might be worth the potential loss of life.

I hear you shaking your head at me, thinking, “Yes, Auxie, we remember that you being raised by an oblivious drunk with poor impulse control is one of the reasons why you traveled to all those places we wouldn’t have dared to go. But what does this have to do with your career in Human Resources?”

Well, it’s addicting, that rush of adrenaline, especially when the stakes are as high as your life. The only other way to get it is gambling. I’m not attracted to gambling with my money; I’m not attracted to the possibilities that large sums of money bring. I hate losing generally (that’s why I never joined your Game Nights), but the loss of my freedom from having too much debt terrifies me.

But gambling with other people’s money? Sign me up.

And that’s what I do in Human Resources: I gamble with other people’s money. A company comes to me with situations and desired outcomes and they ask me what I think its going to cost them if they run afoul of the laws and regulations. And I assess the risk, the regulations and case law, but more importantly, the protected categories of the individuals involved, the emotional temperament, their individual volatility. I tell them what they could lose if they get caught (sued) doing it the way that they want. And then I tell them what I assess is the likelihood of that.

It’s not all dirty stuff in my career—I have educated employees about their rights and when applicable, government programs to assist them in certain cases, like unemployment, food stamps, and disability, and I feel of service when I am in the role of social worker—but that’s not why I keep choosing this role. I have some standards: no client has asked me if they could do anything that I find is immoral—animal smuggling, human trafficking, slavery, forcible rape and murder; and I don’t tolerate businesses who are explicitly discriminatory, though unwinding “disparate impact” is usually why I stay.

And I stay because the people I work for are like me. They have found themselves at odds with other people’s tolerance for risk, or that their desire for freedom and to do what they want outweighs the security of a regular paycheck obtained by selling five days out of seven, every 50 to 52 weeks. They see themselves as the embodiment of the American dream: Entrepreneurs. They’ve built these companies that have provided jobs to mostly good people and so they see themselves as mostly good people. They just need some guidance. To know, really, what the stakes are.

Assessing the legal risk isn’t difficult; the judicial system in America is quite literally stacked against the individual. But, my god, the time of preparing to defend a case, the arduous process of collecting documentation, of going through mediation, of preparing to be deposed and then being deposed, and then to actually go to trial (or in most cases, arbitration)—it’s quite a collection of hurdles for both sides to go through. It’s only the most motivated people who will put a company through this, and they, like me, are usually not motivated by prospective financial gains but strong, negative emotions.

This is where I excel in my role, assessing the emotional tenor of the alleged grievance as well as how attractive an attorney might perceive an aggrieved employee. That is what I apprise my clients of. You didn’t really do anything wrong, I might say, in the eyes of the law, but this person is really pissed. They expected, based on your stated values, how other people have been treated in your organization, and their cumulative lifetime experience of trading labor for money, that you would have acted differently.

It’s been me, too, whose acted as the Agent of the Company. Guys, that is when I’ve really felt the adrenaline pumping, that familiar feeling of bumping down a washed-out road going too fast without a seat belt. This may be the most surprising thing to learn about me, based on what you know of my personality: I am surprisingly adept at keeping my cool. I’ve made it an art, I think. I let the aggrieved rage at the unfairness and I listen calmly and label their affect to show that I understand what they are feeling. But as the Agent of the Company, I calmly resume that we will not be doing what they want us to do and engineer the end of the conversation.

Afterwards, at home, after the buzz of control and victory has left my arms and legs, I sip some whisky and contemplate if I should use these powers to dismantle the systems that enable Corporations to shield selfish assholes from their callousness.

But you know me, Guys, Mikes I know that I know, I’ve always been comfortable with contradictions, with being different.

Your sister in risk,

XX

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I regret that I haven’t reached out in a while. Since we were last writing together, coming from our disparate lives weekly or monthly to discuss our writing, much has changed. Only one of you has gotten moderately famous with your writing. I see the rest of us still posting in our various social media, the choice indicative of where we are in life. I see you, Michael, posting on [redacted] about AI in education, and I see you, Kayla, on [redacted] with photos of great drinks and inventive meals. I don’t know if you’re still writing. In all those months that we were talking about writing, we never got into the motivation of it, why we felt compelled to string words together so that someone could read it and capture an idea that we had. What drove us to be so enthralled with what we wrote? And also: what drove us to need another human being to grok the ideas that we thought those words hinted at?

The thing that I miss from our sessions together (other than it meant I was writing) was the recommendations. While we shared very little about ourselves in terms of personal history (well, Mia, you and I did get deep into our backgrounds in our tipsy subway rides after the meetings), we did reveal our tastes and preferences. Kayla, you introduced me to the TV show [redacted], a show that I didn’t even watch until the pandemic, shaking my head at why I resisted TV this good for so long. Michael, you introduced me to some great science fiction writers (as well as Miguel who I met up with in Bogota and who tried to help me find a job when I was trying to live there). And then there were the articles! I believe it was from someone in this group that I brought back articles about hipsters and emerging adulthood. The recommendations from youse guys was how I came to trust you as critics. I trusted your taste and thus your feedback on how to improve my writing and myself, in part. I hope that I was able to introduce you to things that brought you wonder and joy and deepened your understanding of the world we live in.

While I am no longer writing—rather, the writing that I am doing is in service to a business that I am starting—I hope that you don’t mind if I, after this long silence, offer a recommendation.

Perhaps you are still writing and perhaps you’ve been published, though not to the fame that [redacted] has achieved. Or perhaps whatever was driving you to write was a wound that you’ve healed over time. But I think our greatest gifts, collectively, wasn’t the production, but the reading and the interpretation, the excavation of meanings in others’ words. I hope you are still doing that, with people you care about.

And if you are not, I hope you don’t mind my unsolicited recommendation: do it, but do it in a group chat.

If you are not a part of a group chat, and need some convincing, all I can say is that a good group chat is as vibrant as the discussions we would have about each others’ writings and about our recommendations. And if you are a part of a group chat and you hate it, well, that’s probably because it’s on SMS and it’s your family of birth trying to organize gatherings. (I have one of those, too, and it’s awful; I tried to get them to do a google sheet for their shit, and the organizer—my big sister—said that she liked it this way. I think they started a new chat without me and now I’m not invited to things anymore.)

Get yourself a group chat on an encrypted messaging service (Whatsapp and Signal are two that I have) that allows people to leave the chat and also mute the chat for periods of time. Either try to reconnect with people from another time in your life (your old hagwon coworkers, or the people you lived with in a flophouse at 22) or mix some people from various times based on common interests you had—cooking, surfing, traveling—and share some stuff with them, and ask them how they are. On a regular basis.

Hopefully they will share with you. Hopefully they will share what they are reading and what news is heartbreaking or worrisome or uplifting. Or what is making them laugh or news about the people they care about it. And you can be there, across the distances as a witness but also a demonstration of how to care for people. You can both affirm their consternation or pride and push at those feelings as well.

You were all so good at pushing me to be better through your gentle questions and your honest perspectives in our writing groups. I know there are people in your life outside of whatever you’re doing for money that might appreciate it. I think they need it in writing. They also need to learn from someone what tone is and the difference between implication and inference. They probably intuit these things, but how rarely is the implicated and hinted at made explicit. They also need someone who can be patient with them and the other responsibilities and concerns they have. They need the time that writing gives to consider and reconsider. I think a good group chat gives people that.

I hope you’ve already got a good group chat. I hope you’ve got several. I hope you send each other memes, but also complain about local sports and maybe you even get into politics a little bit—not the big national or international stuff, just the annoying stuff, like your local councilman going on a leave of absence for addiction right before a legal claim about him having an affair with a junior employee comes out or how a college football team that received senatorial intervention to make it to the play offs got creamed in the one game they played. Or broken elevators on a commuter train platform that serves as the closest stop to a local hospital. Or how fishing licenses are no longer calendar year, but a rolling year from the date purchased in your state. Or how your employer insists on you coming to work five days a week, but doesn’t have onsite charging for an electric car and isn’t near public transportation routes. The small annoyances need witnesses, and irritation needs coaching to grow from complaints to action.

If nothing else, get into a group chat with me. Maybe I can be those things to you.

Cheers,

Auxie Ekster

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I’m only asking for one thing. Can we read Umberto Eco’s Foucault’s Pendulum and talk about it sometime before the fourth Thursday of November in 2024?

You can even listen to the audiobook.

I might.

Cheers,

X

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This is probably the worst time of year to come to San Diego County to decide if you want to live here. The two weeks after Daylight Savings Time ends are the roughest. The days are shorter and growing ever more so, but unlike in more northern latitudes, there isn’t much cooling in the day time temperature or deciduous trees flaming into winter dormancy. My outfits still consists of t-shirts, shorts are a plausible option most days and the landscape is still blanketed in verdure. Nothing but the light’s quality and duration seems to change. It’s discombobulating to my Northern European genes.

When I left this place, fall was the thing that I enjoyed the most about living elsewhere. I loved the crisp evenings that necessitated whole additional categories of clothes I could own: sweaters, scarves, and coats. Coats became an obsession: I was enthralled with the ways that a good, interesting coat could transform me into a stylish, well-heeled person. With the right wool coat—one with clean lines and expensive buttons, I could look like a person who belonged walking underneath the trees of the university that I went to, not some bumpkin from a rural nowhere 3500 miles away. The right coat could allow me to pass in some spaces as a person whose family discussed the evening news and whose high school curricula included classic Greek and Roman literature in translation.

Growing up in San Diego County, the holidays and the traditional food seemed like a torture devised by the judge who mediated my parents’ divorce.1 There was the obligatory two Thanksgivings in one day, in which all parties would be insulted if we didn’t eat a full plate at both meals. The food was better at my dad’s family, the heritage dishes of lefse and rømmegrøt my only exposure to Norwegian-American culture. The conversation with my mom’s family was more entertaining, sick burns flying from my teenaged cousins at the adults and returned third degree by my mom. My mom always overcooked the turkey, but she roasted those boys to perfection. Neither family ever thought to serve the meal outside, despite the strong likelihood of a perfect day to do so from year to year. It would have made the day less a holiday and more a backyard barbeque, a thing we did many weekends, without pumpkin pie. It would have made it a thing I could have said “No thanks” to, and read a book instead.

In a latitude where the weather cooled with shortening days, of course you’d want to stuff yourself silly: the thickening of body fat provided insulation through the cold winter. And talking with people over food was essential; with chilly evenings and long cold nights, storytelling seemed de rigueur entertainment. The holidays and their attendant rituals of gathering and eating made more sense to me living in places with true autumns.

And though the rituals of autumn are ones of gathering and settling in, I enjoyed moving through the newly changed landscapes, too. How a park that you had spent summer evenings lounging in its grass under the shade of two-hundred-year-old trees could be rendered foreign, carpets of browning dried leaves covering the grass and the bared branches hinting at the architecture of evolution, the fractal codes hidden in our genes. Fall in those other places hinted that dormancy wasn’t wasteful, but necessary for future production—of leaves and words and dreams. Rest comes in many forms and some lucky organisms take a full season of it.

Here in my natal latitude, though, the shortening of days as the sun makes its path through a more southerly position awakens only the need to move in me. I grow restless, concerned that I’ve not moved enough, still stuck in this place where the few deciduous trees won’t give up their leaves until January, and then immediately go into bud.

I enjoy one thing about fall here, a rare experience you can see nowhere else: the feral parrots move away from the coast, roosting noisily in palm trees inland. Catching a flock on the wing at sunset, cawing and screeching away, I’m comforted that these animals, the descendants of escaped pets smuggled from the equatorial regions, have also made a home here so far from the environment where their green wings and red crowns were adapted. You can be at home here and not from here is the lesson I receive from the parrots.

Potential future San Diegans, if you love your autumn colors and crisp breezes, now is not that the time to visit me. Come in February, when you need a break from winter and want to see some green. Come when the tropical plants that thrive here on our imported water bloom and when the hooded orioles flash their mustard-colored breasts amongst our palm trees. Come then, when this place feels the most like the paradise that those first East Coasters wanted to make.

Until then, though, we should talk about the stories that will get you through these next months of long nights. At the very least, I think I’ve got some movie recommendations for you.

Your formerly migratory friend,

X

Thank you for joining me in the thirty-day challenge using [redacted]’s videos from 2022. This was my third attempt at a thirty-day yoga challenge this year and the most successful for me. I know that your successes with the program varied, but your presence in the group chat, in commentary on the classes (I really appreciated the warnings about the particularly sucky core-focused ones) and photos of your practice spaces in different locales across North America helped create a sense of community that I haven’t felt since some time before March 2020.

I’m sure it comes as no surprise to you all that I struggle with care, both for myself and others. Several years’ worth of therapy pinpoint my struggle of caring for others from my upbringing—or lack of one. I’ve internalized, too, from the dominant cultural narrative that neglecting one’s own needs is a prerequisite for being perceived as a good caregiver. It was, though, being forced into a primary caregiving role two years ago (yesterday was the two-year anniversary of [redacted]) that forced me to take a hard look at those ideas.

When a traumatic experience happens, people often tell you, “You need to take care of yourself.” What does a person need who is suddenly thrust into the role of decision making for all the meals seven days a week as well as attempting to do the household tasks that two people once split, however unequally? How do you “carve out space for yourself”, as you’re encouraged to do, when not only have all these responsibilities shifted to you, but you also have to help a grown person, bereft of their independence, perform simple acts of personal hygiene like bathing, and also assist in their medical care while helping to comfort them when they are in pain? Oh, and parenting? Yeah, I could write a book about being thrown into parenting someone else’s kid.

Having experienced the pressure to sublimate my needs for my husband for weeks at a time after each successive medical intervention since [redacted], I’ll tell you what a person needs: someone to show up at their doorstep and say, “I’m here. I got pizza. You go take care of yourself.” Or “Let’s go for a walk.”

In the two years since my domestic life got turned upside down, I don’t recall my friends here doing that. Maybe it was me; perhaps I accidentally refused help or attempts at intervention and people thought I was fine and didn’t need it. It couldn’t be because I seemed like I was holding it together; being told by my boss that he’d have to serve as a material witness if anything happened to Haitch isn’t what holding it together looks like. And then I had my nervous breakdown.

Or maybe they thought that, since I’m from here and my family’s here, my family was helping out and interventions from non-relatives weren’t needed. The reality is that you don’t get to the rugged individualism that I embodied in my world travels before my marriage by having a supportive family. My family’s response after [redacted] was to ask me if I thought about paying for a caretaker to come in and help out. Even if we could afford someone, I know that Haitch would have loathed the idea. This was the “in sickness” that we vowed to each other when we eloped so long ago. Having offered that suggestion, my family disappeared, texting only every few months.

Perhaps, though, it was the timing of [redacted]—just as we were “coming out” of Covid—right when deaths spiked to their highest levels. Maybe my local friends felt unsafe “dropping by” to check up. It could be a weird cultural phenomenon too; that the spontaneous hang-out doesn’t happen anymore. Maybe how once we all became homeowners, the disparity in our incomes fractured us just enough geographically to make the fifteen-minute drives between our places too burdensome for spontaneity.

But maybe, too, they did do those things, but in the gray fog that my life became when it was turned upside down by events that I could not control—and that did eventually push me beyond my breaking point—I cannot recall their attempts. Maybe I needed ten times more what they attempted. I needed it as if they were my next door neighbors.

I wasn’t totally isolated; I was still going to work five days1 (or more) a week, and my coworkers were sympathetic to the pressures that I was under. But there, too, I felt that any care I received, patience from both my boss and the people I managed for my late responses to their requests and small crying jags, was a violation of what the workplace is and my role in it. How strange that the place where I felt the least entitled to care from others it felt the most freely given.

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All of this is to say that self-care does not take place in a vacuum. You cannot carve out space for yourself amongst the competing duties of living and caring for others without people willing to remind you that you too are worth caring for. For thirty days in June, you four did that for me. Thank you.

As a token of my appreciation, I want to extend to you the invitation to come visit me in my hometown. I want you to learn why I love this place, despite the shitty family and the car-centric infrastructure that stymies neighborliness. I want to take you on hikes near where I grew up and bike rides through the side streets and barrios, grabbing a cafecito or a beer along the way. We could even cross the border, if you were up for it. You could imagine yourself living here, the real place of San Diego, not the sliver of coast that most people imagine when they think of this place.

Think about a visit. Think about thinking if you could be my neighbor here. And baring that, maybe we could do another fitness thing together. All this taking care of people has made me realized that I want to hold onto my physical health as long as I can. Have you thought about lifting weights?

Namaste,

X

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Thanks for the response to my text, telling me you’ll have some time to get together after St. Valentine’s Day. I don’t know if you read the article that I sent you, the latest in a dwindling production in the how-to-fix-the-restaurant-industry-post-Covid-op-ed supply, but I thought that you’d be interested to read it and recognize your ideal restaurant model that you’ve been selling me since we started being friendly outside of the workplace in 2018. Your idea was full-service as opposed to counter-and-prepay model, but I do want you to think about those pages I texted you from Down and Out in Paris and London about servers, especially the part about them being snobs and rarely ever being Socialists. You can’t have a model that relies on everyone pitching in to do all the work if some people think themselves better than others.

I know that you’re sighing at me, remembering that I’ve only ever been business support and that I’ve never worked in any position of a restaurant—not prep cook, not dishwasher, not even host. I also know that you’re too savvy, trained after a career of working in the service career and seeing bad chefs have their teams turn against them because of their emotional outbursts, to ever let your disdain for me show. Chef, I know how good you are at controlling your own emotions.

Because you are so different from the stereotypical chef, that you’re open to your staff’s failings, you end up working so hard and so much. It’s the curse of competency. Your people feel confident that they won’t be punished for mistakes that they’ve made or for feeling overwhelmed by a new urgent issue, like drawers not holding temp; they know that they can just put these things on your plate and you’ll fix them. It’s not just that you’re competent, it’s also that you are the textbook definition of “reliable”. And you’ve gotten good at juggling the load, somehow having the capacity to only have “one to two days off a month.”

Chef, I’m worried about you, but not just you—it’s everyone that works in our industry. And yes, I’ll claim it; the restaurant industry was the first place I worked that the business in and of itself wasn’t exploitative, wasn’t somehow a con. (Granted, one of my first jobs was facilitating cons, but that’s another story.) It’s only that our American society can’t bring itself to pay for the value of a meal eaten out.

I didn’t even know what that value was until after [redacted], when I became the primary caregiver in my household. It was not until all the food-buying, meal-planning, meal-prepping and cleaning-up landed on my plate 7 nights a week that I saw the importance of a restaurant. It is caring. It may be the first industry of care, making food for people.

Here you are, selling your time so that others may enjoy a meal, either innovative—an explosion of experiences for the tongue, nose, and mind— or comfortingly familiar; you are working in the kitchens, coaching your line cooks on presentations so that your guests can have a conversation with someone they like, can focus on the people sitting around the table with them, can listen without a worry about if they will like the meal and which of these fuckers is going to the dishes. This offloading of the labor of sustenance to create the space for leisure with others is, as the commercials used to say, priceless, especially for those of us who struggle with the load.

Chef, all I want is that the people who help take care of others in this place have a little time to themselves for their families and their passions. It would be great if they could have healthcare and childcare, too, but let’s start with what’s solvable now: everyone should have time for leisure in a city that luxury travelers rank as one of their top choices to visit. The dishwashers and bussers and pantry chefs should get a taste of that server life: four-day-workweeks at the very least, if not the twenty hours of working. The snobs might be onto something about work-life balance.

This place that you and I call home—a place that the rich have been terraforming into a tropical paradise with water stolen from the desert—shouldn’t we all get to know it as well as those readers of Conde Nast Traveler? Shouldn’t, if we are part of making experiences that make this town so wonderful, we have the time to enjoy them?

But really, Chef, the thing that I want most is for you to have a free night so that I can host you and a few other people I know in my home, make you a drink, ply you with food that my husband has made now that he’s recovered from [redacted], and get you in a room with people who will want to know about the books you’ve been reading and tell you funny stories about their travels. I want to show you the care that the restaurants you’ve run have systematized into an experience that can be purchased at the right price: human connection. I want to share this experience because it was you, Chef, who taught me how to make these spaces, and how delicate these spaces are. That was, for me, the lesson I learned from the pandemic.

Maybe with enough shared meals, enough human connection, we can figure out how to make a four-day workweek with a living wage feasible for service employees. I’m already solving other major systemic issues in my bi-monthly feminist consciousness-raising pool party.

Cheers,

X

Have you ever found yourself in a situation and were struck with the realization that the root of this mess was some unfulfilled fantasy shit from your childhood?

I had been in Colombia five months total—two months to learn the language and tour around, trying to hook up with a communist I thought was a drug dealer but was actually a journalist who convinced me to meet him in Venezuela while he was covering the election after Chavez’s death; two months to have that come to an end, fail to find another migrant worker gig, decamp to the Pacific Coast to try to read a novel in Spanish, and end up on a permaculture farm in Antioquia where I took up with a young hipster from the States; one brief month to enjoy that and, when that ended, take a break from slashing at bananas with a machete with a weekend in [redacted], a small town in the southern part of the department—when I decided to take a horseback tour to see some nearby caves. It was there I realized that perhaps I hadn’t come to Colombia to master Spanish after so many hours practicing with you, but to realize a childhood fantasy of pretending to be Joan Wilder—THE Joan Wilder—digging in the silty water of a grotto that looked somewhat like this one to pull out a figurine containing a giant emerald.

When I was a kid, my favorite movie to watch was Romancing the Stone. I can’t remember how it came to be, for four-year-old Auxie, my favorite movie. I have a memory that feels more like habit of going to the cabinet where the VHS tapes (many bootlegged recordings from my aunt’s cable gifted to us on visits to Town) were kept; of riffling through the tapes, looking for the box with the handwritten labels; of crawling—not because I couldn’t walk, but because I preferred not to—across the tiled entrance of our house, to the front room with wall-to-wall carpeting where the TV stand was, to shove the tape into the player.

I’d fast forward through Footloose to start the movie.

Released in 1984, Romancing the Stone is a romantic comedy of how a timid but best-selling writer of romance novels, Joan Wilder (played by Kathleen Turner), is forced to travel to Colombia to rescue her kidnapped sister by providing a treasure map that her brother-in-law mailed to her shortly before he was murdered. During the journey, Joan Wilder has several misadventures of travel, meets a handsome white stranger played by Michael Douglas and learns several lessons: how high heels are the most impractical of shoes to traipse around the Global South; dancing leads to trust, love and sexual pleasure; and that within her is a brave woman who can find her own damn treasure, defeat the baddies with a little light mutilation and murder and take the biggest risk of all—trusting a (white) man.

Just writing that synopsis, not having seen the movie since sometime in 2012, when I forced my Platonic Life Partner (PLP) to watch it in a hostel in Taiwan with me, I’m slapping my forehead with the similarities to my Colombian misadventures. That’s not why I’m writing this to you today, amigos queridos—that story is for a later date. I want to explore the idea of why a four-year-old towhead liked this movie instead of Footloose, The Goonies or even Raiders of the Lost Ark. And what it has to do with work sucking.

No one in my family remembers watching this movie with me or even enjoying it; it was my own peculiar preference enjoyed in solitude. I imagine that a child who had as much solitude as Lil Auxie did would like this movie, though; she identified with Joan Wilder.

Joan Wilder is not like the Disney princesses in Cinderella and Snow White, both VHS options in the Ekster household. The first seven minutes of the movie establishes that our hero is a single woman capable of great imaginative power but incompetent in the traditional feminine arts. She fantasizes about an ideal partner, a lean cowboy protector who removes her from danger, but she’s far from being any man’s idea of an ideal partner. Her apartment is strewn about with clothes, she has no food in her fridge and her only ward, a cat named Romeo, has to naggingly meow at her to get his basic needs met. Her life is not in the world that she lives in, but in her imagination. So incompetent is Joan Wilder at adult responsibility that the one that her livelihood depends on—meeting her editor’s deadlines—is never successfully done.

It may have been Joan Wilder’s flouting of social expectations that drew Lil Auxie to her; Lil Auxie was a difficult child, a little asshole. She wanted to do what she wanted to do, which was playing alone in her imagination, press-ganging members of the neighborhood clowder to be unwilling participants in her play when she needed others. She was already a reader and understood that books were made by people. Romancing the Stone gave her a view of how books were made: in longed-for solitude. It also gave Lil Auxie a glimpse of the possibilities of adulthood: of being allowed to do what you wanted and not doing what you didn’t want to, such as shirking dish-washing by tossing your ceramic flatware into the fireplace.

In my latest rewatching, I could see that Joan Wilder was a caricature of the feminist monster that conservative men are afraid of: incapable of performing the traditional wifely duties of homemaking even when she is only homemaking for herself and a cat. She’s no catch to men and thus in the scene with her drinking with her editor (played by Holland Taylor, a favorite of Lil Auxie) Joan’s rejection of all of the men without even talking to them is laughable. Would they even be interested in her?

Wilder’s adventure is initiated by a threatening phone call where she is informed that the caller has kidnapped her sister and is ransoming her for a map to a hidden treasure that Joan Wilder has just received via international mail. She goes alone to Colombia. While there, she’s so clueless speaking Spanish (and the people are poco amable, very unlike every Colombian I met), that she is easily misled by a dark stranger to getting on the wrong bus that heads not to Cartagena but to the jungle.

We can go here to an imperialist reading of the movie, and other people have already done it, but for the sake of the therapeutic reading, this device engineers the meeting of our couple. After an indeterminate amount of time, Joan Wilder suspects that she’s not going the right way, and tries to ask the bus driver if they are going to Cartagena. Attempting to pay attention to this foreigner who doesn’t speak Spanish, the bus driver fails to see a jeep parked in the road, and crashes head on into it, rendering the bus inoperable. While the other passengers walk away (helping themselves to cages filled with birds on the jeep), the same dark stranger who told JW to get on this bus, tells her to wait and that another bus will come soon. He then pulls a gun on her and demands the map.

Here, a tall stranger walking along a ridge hears the tussle and drives off the dark stranger in a shoot out. Lo and behold, who is walking around the mountainous jungles of Colombia? Just some lean white dude in a safari hat, played by Michael Douglas.

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And here is the meat of the story which Lil Auxie was obsessed with: the Pride and Prejudice-esque story of two people who overcome initial mutual distaste to like and then love each other. Amigos queridos, why was a four-year-old interested in romance? I suspect that Lil Auxie was comparing the relationship arc of Joan Wilder and Jack T. Colton (“the ‘T’ stands for ‘trustworthy’,” he tells her) to that of her parents, Nancy and Danny Ekster.

Lil Auxie’s parents were on a different story arc: fractious dissolution. Trust was not had between them. At this point, all they did was fight. The protagonists of RtS were saying things like her parents were saying to each other:

“You’re nothing but a liar!”

“You’re not a real man.[.…]A real man is honest, forthright, trustworthy.”

“What did you do today? Did you wake up today and say, ‘I’m going to ruin a man’s life today?’”

Romancing the Stone nurtured for Lil Auxie the hope that you could say those things to another person and still believe in their essential goodness, still want to be with them, to make a life with them.

My parent’s story is not one of a romantic comedy: their marriage became just another statistic of rising divorce rates of the late twentieth century, post-second wave feminism. My parents missed the message of all the cultural tropes of jealous fathers and overworked single moms being shit parents and forced my sisters and I to live through the cliche. Yes, their divorce was the incipient trauma of my childhood.

I still returned to Romancing the Stone after my father moved out, though; fairy-tales are nice, aren’t they? In retrospect, the main characters became the role models that Lil Auxie needed. She needed to be reassured that there would be time enough when she was a grown-up to be as brave as her family hounded her to be. She need to know that you could be adventurous and not care too much for material needs. She also needed to know that you could not listen to your parents’ advice and still turn out okay.

And here is where we must return to the story of my parents’ post-divorce lives. The wreckage of their marriage had forced Nancy, a stay-at-home mom with a high-school degree, into the workforce, into service work, which happened to be running a convenience store in a small border town. The hours were long and she’d come home too exhausted to cook or to speak with her children about anything but the state that her home was in and how unacceptable it was before she fell asleep on the couch to Law and Order reruns. Nancy didn’t sell being a parent. She also didn’t sell hard work in exchange for money. We were poor as dirt.

So I chose differently. I got a college degree and learned to force myself to do scary things; mostly without the airport bottles of liquor that JW used. And while I wanted to be like Joan Wilder, queridos amigos, it turns out that the character who I imitated wasn’t Joan Wilder, slaving away at her typewriter. It was the character who “was into shortcuts”, Jack T. Colton.

The shortcuts took me to the hair replacement clinic run by mobsters, the temping that led that to human resources, the one-year teaching contracts abroad, yoga teaching and manual labor in exchange for room and board, trying to get to the ocean to get better at surfing, to live the 1-4-40.

It was love that made me clean up my act before I hit the low of animal smuggling. And for love, I tried to find the realest job available to me after a career of least resistance. That led me to the service sector—the work that stole my mother from me. Only I ended up in an even more soul-draining flavor: doing HR for restaurants.

un fuerte abrazo,

X

Hey! Long time no email, even though we swore we’d keep up. I was thinking about you all the other day, and our time abroad—so many good times we had! Supper Club! Red Tent Weekend! Jocks VS Nerds Surprise Party! Weekends at Min’s in the mountains! Now that we’re in middle age, I reminisce, but I don’t want to recreate them. There are other things that I miss from our time abroad. I just don’t know who to talk to about the experience. For instance, the one thing I’ve missed the most since I’ve come back is not having to explain my weird-ass name to people.

This might be surprising to many of you; of course I have a strange name, but didn’t our host country residents think my name was strange? Yes, but they also thought I was strange before they knew my name; we were foreigners, after all. Remember just walking around, minding your own business, and hearing someone exclaim in the local language, “Look! A foreigner!”? Just our appearance was extraordinary, sometimes disruptively so. If it ever got to my name (which it rarely did), it was just part of my obvious foreignness and there weren’t a lot of questions about my name.

Back home, in Anglophoneland, when I meet people, they think I’m normal until they get to my name. “Moxie?” They question, and then I correct them to my actual name—a nickname, because no one but my cousin Mike has ever called me by my first full name. Later, when they try to recall, they call me “Trixie” because it’s the closest thing to a normal name that’s been used before. Yes, I’m talking about you, Canadian Mike, but you weren’t the only one.

Sometimes they attempt to flirt and say, “Oh, like Foxy”, which is so disgusting and has actually turned me off from people I was interested in. Sometimes they’d even do the “Foxy Lady” dance from Wayne’s World—so gross—and also didn’t even occur to me until after I turned twenty-seven and Wayne’s World had been out for almost two decades, so it made me feel real good about both how I looked then, and the ten years before when no one did it. And I’m sure that some of you fuckers did it, too, and look where it got you.

I could also talk about the teasing I got as a child for my name, but I don’t want to be too ranty about my name from before we lived abroad, so let’s skip over that.

When people encounter my full name on paper, it’s a craps shoot as to what they will say. In fact, I’m sensitized to both my name and other names that someone might try to say as well as words that might sound like my name. In college, I had the same instructor for two semesters (Excursions in Mathematics I and II) and he called me Alexandra the whole year. I just couldn’t figure out how to correct him.

There’s also how every customer service call I ever make takes 10 times longer than with a normal name because I have to spell my name and English letters all sound the same. And you’d think that I would learn the telephone alphabet thing, but I just do one that I’ve made up with regular words that I use all the time, like “I as in ‘ice cream’.” I do love ice cream.

So there’s that. There’s sitting in interviews at jobs, and, of course, using my full name on my resume because everyone’s supposed to be enlightened now and not racist (but I can tell you that is not true, which I’ll get to later) and listening to them attempt to pronounce my name, “Ah-OOK-see-eh…da…da?” And then I have to correct them, a potential boss. The very first thing I have to do is tell them they’re wrong, and actually, just call me Auxie, no, I don’t write it Oxy. Not a great first impression on someone you want to give you money.

Then there’s the question about the source of my name. I’ve developed a standard lie that it’s a family name, but people get their own ideas. One friend, a bit younger than me, asked me if I was named for the drug OxyContin. I think he was joking; he either didn’t realize how old I was or that the drug was relatively new, a modern marvel of exploitation.

Younger people than me are a bit more understanding; they have those funky spellings of Ashleigh or Katelynn. But I’m of an age and race where people just didn’t have made-up names. And the source of my name is traumatic. If my parents knew what was best for me, I wouldn’t even know how I got it.

The truth was—and I don’t think I’ve ever told any of you, Former Migrant Friends, because it was so painful—is that my parents didn’t think of a name for a girl until I was born. They thought I would be a boy. For some reason, ultrasounds to determine gender weren’t available to them at Kaiser Permanente in 1983. I came into this world with a vagina and no gender-appropriate name (not that I’m big into that, but they are). My father, drunk in despair, getting ready to go to work, thought of things he loved: his dog, Rusty, and trips to Baja, and threw out a word he knew in Spanish. My mother, who taught me how to spite people, changed the spelling to go with my sisters’ “Au” names, because our names all had to start with the same letters. This is also one of the reasons why I hated celebrating my birthday, but not the only one.

Not having to be asked to think about that history by every person I meet is one of the reasons why I miss our time abroad.

It took me a long time to find an appropriate professional name; again, my parents didn’t do me any favors when they decided to honor my grandmother Erma with my middle name (and yes, I know you didn’t know that either), but I’ve gotten one for my new venture. It’s silly that it took me this long; I guess I just stubbornly believed that people were better than they actually are, or was willing to take that chance over and over again.

I have to say now that I don’t go by my weird legal name, people are a lot nicer and respectful to me. Beforehand, when I showed up with my legal name for a job interview, they treated me like I was a grifter with no skills. They’d try to catch me in lies about where I went to school, my teaching or professional experience or principles of my profession (yes, I know how to administer benefits). Now that I go by a normal Anglo name, they just assume I’ve got all these skills on my CV, and the conversations are so much easier. They trust me so much more. Finally, in my home country, I get to taste this flavor of white privilege.

Former Fellow Migrant Workers, I know many of you wouldn’t go back to our host country—we could have stayed but we didn’t! By golly, though, I sure miss not having to think about how fucked up the country I come from is every time I tell people what to call me.

I already lost Canadian Mike, because he’s surely deleted this email grumbling, “Just go change your legal name!” Or, “Why didn’t you change your first name as well as your last when you got married?” Well, it’s a big pain in the ass to change your legal name (like $500 for just the paperwork) and, in the US, you can only change your last name for free when you get married. And I didn’t. Because I like it.

It could be a lot worse, though: I could have an equally hard last name to pronounce, so I have to go through the spelling and correct pronunciation with that name, too. Ooh, or I could have a first name that’s a homophone for some concept of utopia in the white supremacists’ ideology and then be as off-putting to ethnic and religious minorities as I am to white people with my legal name.

The rest of you that made it this far, hope you’re well and I’d love to hear how you’re coping now that you’ve been back in Anglophoneland for a near decade, too.

Cheers,

X

I hope this note finds you well. It’s been some weeks since our last poolside meeting, after which I was thoroughly refreshed. What is it about sitting around with people (usually women) discussing books and ideas with a drink and gorgeous food that makes my heart feel full in this damned world? Pure leisure and I love you for it. Thank you for making the experience; I appreciate the book suggestions and even more appreciate that the very thorough discussions regarding those ideas allow me the opportunity to skip over some of these texts, such is the quality of the discourse amongst us Pool Party Members.

I had some news that I wanted to share poolside, but somehow the topic never seemed appropriate: I am starting a business. The “business” is really just selling the skill set that I’ve honed over 20 years working in the US labor market. In our time together you have witnessed my exhaustion at participating in the workforce; you’ve felt it too.

The demands of our jobs have squeezed us all into these strange spaces, along with the demands of being a woman in a patriarchal society. However, I have decided to bring how my time is spent into my locus of control; I am now willing to take on the burden of paying my own taxes and providing my own office space in the hope that I will gain a sense of freedom over my life. This drive to start a business makes me one of five million new businesses in the US a year,1 with approximately twenty percent of those small businesses expected to close before making the one-year mark.

And yet here I am, having entered a new phase of my development as an American Citizen: the Entrepreneur. In our poolside meetings, we have often mocked the idea of the Entrepreneur. As an Entrepreneur, I am supposed to carry myself with utter confidence in my ideas, firm in my belief in myself that doubters will not tell me to my face that I’m an idiot and that my ideas are preposterous, but will wait until after the networking event to grumble about how full of shit I am. Believers, though, in my Entrepreneurial drive will fall in line. The Entrepreneurial Handbook has no entry on cynicism, especially if you are a woman. You need to have a zeal for your business and your abilities akin to that of Joan of Arc. Considering the primacy of individualism in our culture, Joan of Arc, were she living in America today, wouldn’t have been a religious martyr; she would have been a Founder.

To prepare myself for Entrepreneurship, Pool Party Members, I did a deep dive into recent female Entrepreneurs. You may know their names: Elizabeth Holmes, Anna Delvey (aka Sorokin), and our own homegrown flimflam ma’am, Gina Champion-Cain. You may be saying, Auxie my dear, these are not the texts you should study as you become an Entrepreneur.

I assure you that I am not interested in following these business templates. I’m examining them as precautionary tales. All these women got caught up in the lifestyle of successful entrepreneurship—the private chefs, the parties, the glamorous connections, the magazine covers. As many Entrepreneurs do, they also believed themselves invincible, above the law. I should know: I’ve been in the position of explaining laws and consequences to Entrepreneurs, only to be told, “We can’t do that—it would put us out of business!” Yes, to follow the law.

Points in my favor for NOT becoming a criminal Entrepreneur: I’m not attracted to private jets, fancy cars, or even mani-pedis. You know; I don’t even dye my hair anymore. I do, like you, live in one of the most expensive metro areas in the US and I happen to co-own a house. Having been houseless in the past (in a romantic, feckless sense), I know what the options are. And I like owning property. It wasn’t until I bought this house with my husband that I recalled how much I liked digging holes and doing experiments in them. You can’t earn a living doing that unless you’re an efficient digger (I’m not) or have a Ph.D in something digging-adjacent (I don’t). To allow myself the leisure of hole-digging, I need to exchange my labor for some cash, as we all do.

I am compelled in this free society to join every American and to prove my economic value. And I know that herein is the challenge for me: even when I was willing to be a wage slave, I still struggled to convince interviewers of my value to the business. At one point, trying to escape a company run by a middle-class man trying to keep up with his childhood friends who’d inherited their wealth, I went on forty-five interviews without a single offer. I’m too honest in interviews about my flaws and what I don’t know; remember, I haven’t dyed my hair since 2010. There will be challenges to landing clients in my consulting business and most of the challenges are self-made, inherent to my personality. I believe of all the people who know me, you understand this the best. I am, though, willing to persevere.

If there is a thing that I do want to sell, that I have an Entrepreneurial Zeal for, it’s a lifestyle. A work style. One that’s in line with the ethos of Pool Party. I call it the 1-4-40.

Succinctly, it is:

1 Good Job

4 Days/Week

40 Weeks/Year

When I’ve pitched this to other people, they agree with the four days; studies have shown that four-day workweeks increase revenue and productivity and lower turnover. It’s even a demand with the current UAW strike. But they scoff at the 40 weeks a year. “That’s a teacher schedule!2”, they say, as if teachers are particularly lazy. ([Redacted], we know how hard you’ve worked in your career.) Then they push me to explain how companies would do it and why. Rarely, though, do they ask me why I want to only work approximately 160 days out of the year rather than the standard American 218-244 working days a year (or more, if you work in hospitality, retail, or health care). No one has ever been at a loss with what they would do with that extra time.

Because we all have dreams of how we can spend our time and not all of it is “frivolous poolside chitchat,” as some of our naysayers would call what we do. I know that you, beautiful Members of the Pool Party, have dreams; perhaps it is traveling by sailboat to Belize to take free diving courses to master your apnea techniques that will improve your daily snorkel session. Maybe you want to attend a horror film festival in a small mountain town and you’d like to drive there rather than fly. You may just want to take the time to enjoy this place with its perfect weather. Or you just want to take a few weeks to be at home and re-plaster the outside of your house rather than pay someone to do it? Or work with your neighbors to clean up an abandoned plot and plant a community garden? Or just spend time with your kids when they aren’t in school? Or to have a kid? Remember, we suck in this country about parental leave —twelve weeks is the most you can get under the law. My goal is to give everyone twelve weeks a year, regardless if they have children or not.

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The naysayers always push me to answer how or why “companies” would do it. The short answer I give them is that there are always inefficiencies that eat time in companies; indeed, I’ve made a career out of finding them and getting rid of them, along with the money paid to employees to do the work. The why is very simple. We demand that they give us this time or else we won’t work. We did see how few of us worked in “essential industries” that needed in-person collaboration nearly three years ago; surely they could try to compress that inessential work into 160 days?

You all know that I’m not against work; I like doing hard things. But since returning to America, I have found a false sense of urgency in the world of business, and I don’t get it. Most of this urgency doesn’t benefit anyone in the long-run; we’re selling a SaaS reliant on energy-hungry remotely-hosted servers that depends on rare earth elements mined in dehumanizing and ecosystem-destroying ways or an object that is made of plastic that will spend eternity in a landfill after it was used for two years or less. So little that most of us do for money truly helps improve anyone else’s daily life.

The only thing we are rushing towards in our hurry is climate disaster. And I know that the planet will survive, that life in some dumb form will survive, but shouldn’t we avert some suffering? Shouldn’t we allow people time to care for each other, time for leisure, poolside or not?

So I am trying, in my small way, to see if I can make the 1-4-40. Can I make my one Good Job out of myriad clients? Can I figure out how to only work four days a week for them? Can I find the projects to occupy twelve non-working weeks a year?

Answering these questions are what I’m mustering my Entrepreneurial Zeal for.

As always, I await your ideas and feedback.

See you by the pool,

Auxie

Before I went surfing today, I wrote down the friction points to go surfing.

Friction Points to Going Surfing, AE SoCal Ed.

• putting the rack on my car

• putting the board the right way on my car so I don’t look like a kook who’s just learning

• getting to the beach and worrying about:

  • my board flying off my car because I didn’t put my board on right;

  • that there are so few other people driving in this traffic with boards on their cars;

  • the webbing of the surf rack flaying off my sun-aged repair paint job from whatever accident my car had before I got it with a salvage title on it

• That even though I’ve never been good at surfing, I haven’t surfed much in the past nine years here, so I’m basically a kook

• How surfing always reminds me that my dad wanted a boy and I wasn’t

The list could have gone on or I could have thought about what I had to do during the day or the other things that I spend 40 minutes writing about in the morning, but it was time to decide if I would actually go surfing.

I remembered that my best friend from Colorado will be visiting me soon and not only do I want to take him surfing (if he wants), I also want to take him on a bike ride up the coast. If I want to do both those things with him, I better start doing those things now. Plus, on Friday, when I planned this week, in the Adventure Auxie column, I put “Surfing” as a goal to complete this week, between “Go Rollerskating!” and “ride your bike”.

So despite the fact that going surfing reminds me both that I haven’t made time for my leisure in this near-decade of living in San Diego and that I’ve been a disappointment since birth to my dad, I went surfing.

I drove a different way than I usually go, taking the route that dear old dad, Danny Ekster, showed me this last time he took me to the beach a few weeks ago. I poked a little at the old wound, wondering how my dad would feel that a massive dose of hallucinogens downed in the mountains in Colombia helped me come to peace with our relationship. And following his advice — get a job and a husband—also brought him some peace, but now I don’t have time for him.

I thought that if I saw my dad’s friends at the beach I’d ask them not to tell him they saw me. How very like my dad that was, to ask some people whom I have loose social ties to keep a secret from a person I have close social ties with. I hoped that leaving my house for the morning before I tried to meet my self-imposed obligations (The Get To Do List) would give my stepdaughter some time alone, free from whatever she imagines I think about her when she asks me “What?” when I look at her to acknowledge her presence, time to feel her “effanineffable” self expand into my absence in the space we shared together. I thought that, if she is becoming as like me as I fear, she would appreciate it.

And going surfing was alone time for me. I was coming off a week of having chosen to be in close quarters with a friend, then with my husband, and finally almost a whole weekday (Monday) with my stepdaughter, where I asked her to run errands with me. I needed to be alone or with different people. The different people today would be a summer beach break crowd in a tony part of San Diego that wished to secede from the city.

As I drove through the neighborhood to the public parking lot, I thought how this could have been mine. My dad talked about those beach bungalow housing offers he had when he was younger but thought he couldn’t afford when he worked as a local lifeguard—before he got drafted1 during Vietnam and before he joined the Border Patrol. I looked around and thought of all these lots had once been the foundation of a middle-class beachside neighborhood. There are no more of these in Southern California.

If my father had been smarter about real estate, I wouldn’t have to drive for 40 minutes to get to a break. All that time and money we spent worrying about immigrants crossing the border from the nineties through now when the real migrants the locals should have been worrying about were the short-fingered millionaires from Arizona and the Fortune 5000 CEOs wanting oceanfront property.

I looked at the waves, feeling my namesake. Surfing is hard and I’m so rusty as to be a beginner again. The waves were steep, quick, coming from all over with a fair amount of energy, but holding some shape. A short board day, not a long board day. It wasn’t a great day to get out on the [redacted] foam board my dad got me for my fortieth birthday (#foamiesfor40), but that’s the board I had. And I had to get out if I was going to surf. I decided to surf inside, not futz around with a board that I didn’t know where I balanced on or how it handled; I didn’t want to be knocking some dude off a wave because I couldn’t handle my board. If I can’t be a good surfer, I want to be a polite surfer.

Surfing is hard but I like doing hard things. Anything worth doing should be hard, at least a little; you can choose your level of difficulty, but doing hard things is good for your brain. It’s learning.

When I was kid, everyone told me how smart I was. I didn’t believe them; the things that I did that made them say I was smart were easy. Now that I’m older, I still don’t believe I was exceptionally smart, despite the grade-skipping, the gifted and talented education, the scoring in the ninetieth percentile on the SATs at twelve years old. I was just really good at understanding verbal and written instruction.

All of those things they threw at me to test me to see if I was smart I never felt like I wanted to quit. That’s the measure by which I regard doing something hard: you have to want to quit it at some point.

The first time I recall something in school actually being hard was when I was exposed to poetry.

I was probably twelve. The books in my home were Stephen King and bodice-ripper romance novels. But here were written words that were not instructions, not novels, not something that I could make sense of easily. I knocked my head at it, I went to war with it, I bought a How to Interpret Poetry book from the Waldenbooks at the mall when my mom took me one weekend. Somehow I got that if I was going to understand poetry, I would have to write it. So I wrote poetry, lots of it, all of it bad, thankfully landfilled.

But in keeping on poetry, in learning it by making it, I learned a whole new skill set: how to do hard things. So I kept making myself do the hardest things that I thought I wanted to do: I moved alone to the East Coast, then to Denver; I took a job in South Korea and lived as a migrant worker for five years; I got into traveling and writing and dropped out of the world onto the backpacker circuit. I learned languages, how to cook, what makes me happy, how to be a good friend. It wasn’t until I was 27, in South Africa, that I thought to learn to surf.

Surfing is the hardest. When I surf I hit my head against the psychological shit that is my birthright. I can’t surf like a local because I was born a girl and I never trusted my surfer dad. So I’ve learned from others. When I get in the water, I remember what the hwajangnim of the surfshop at [redacted] in South Korea taught me about balancing on a board in the paddle out. I think of the lessons in popping up that the Balinese surf instructor who I hung out with for a week in Kuta taught me. I think of another migrant teacher, a professional snowboarder from Canada, asking me one Chuseok surf session before he gave me advice, “Can I give you some feedback?”

I don’t remember the feedback that he gave me, but I loved that he asked me. I wished more people had asked me if I wanted advice, these last nine years. I think I would have consented. I would have listened harder to the friends who told me that I was working too hard, that I cared too much about the wrong things.

But people were telling me how good I was, when I was working so hard that I had no time for surfing. They were appreciative of my efforts. Or they were calling me on my days off, soliciting my opinion. That is addicting.

It is no matter now, though. I quit my job. It was hard to do, quitting. I had tried twice before. The hardness of the work was also addicting. I thought I was learning something. I was learning, just not much useful and it was taking up the time and mental space for me to learn the important things about the family I was trying to be a part of.

I walked down to the water, trying to find the rip current out, and do my arm warm ups. I am forty, trying to learn how to surf again. Before there is the pop-up, there is the paddle out. Can I duckdive an eight-foot-foamy? No, it’s a turtle roll. Is the inside that heavy? It’s not.

The water lapped at my feet and I remembered to record the activity with my fitness watch. There is a part of me that believes that if I can record how much time I spend riding my bike, doing yoga, dancing, hiking, walking, surfing, swimming, climbing, backpacking, and weight lifting, that I will know how much leisure time I need. I will have a point for negotiating, with my family and future work partners. I need to move x many hours in a day, week, month, year and I won’t sell or give any time that conflicts with that. Manage your expectations for my output because my brain needs a lot of movement, probably more than I can fit around a 40-hour workweek. But they are never 40-hour workweeks. Not in America.

A quick three-wave set came in, and I tried to catch the white water. The water took the board, but I was too far back, my weight acting like a brake on the board. I got off, tried to walk back to where I thought the line was and then I felt it—the bracing pain of something entering the top of the foot.

I have never been stung by a sting ray before. This is it. I’m forty and these fuckers finally got me. I grew complacent, thinking that all the other surfers in the lineup had scared them. I was also hopeful it wasn’t a sting ray sting. My only experience of being around a “victim” of a sting ray was a teenaged girl getting stung on a Baja trip when I was kid. She cried for hours. This didn’t feel that bad. Maybe it wasn’t actually a sting ray, but some flotsam hitting the top of the foot, cutting it up. I got out of the water, stopped my timer. Nine minutes and 47 seconds surfing today. I saved that activity. I got in the water, so it counts. I didn’t bail.

On my way back to the car, some dude coming out of a $200,000 van asked me how the surf was. I looked at my bleeding foot, and said big, then corrected myself. Steep, fine, short.

I stripped out of the wet suit borrowed from my husband, as mine no longer fit me. Around year two in Korea, I started admitted that I wasn’t coming home because I didn’t want to get fat again. I was elated when I came back and maintained my Korea weight, but that didn’t last once I got an office job and could afford more than a couple slices of pizza a day.

My bleeding foot deserved a photo which I sent to my husband. He told me to go to the lifeguard station to get them to look at it. I refused. It didn’t seem to hurt that bad. Board back on the car, I drove home, listening again to the webbing hit my roof. It was worse on this route. My foot throbbed.

At home, I grabbed a black hose with a spray nozzle on it and hit the top of the my foot with the sunwarmed water. The pain abated; it was sting ray venom. I had forgotten what to do after this point and felt a little chagrined. Shouldn’t I know how to do basic first aid to the common dangers of my sport? But most of my surfing injuries have been from the board: getting hit in the face because I mistimed my roll, getting hit in the shins because I was out in typhoon swell too big for me and a giant wave caught me sideways, trying to turn to catch the wave. The other surfing injuries weren’t injuries per se; they were just the terrifying fear that I was going to drown because I got held down in a powerful set. Sometimes the waves pounded me against the sandy bottom. I’d probably have more stories about infected reef cuts, but even when I surfed badly in the tropics, I only surfed at beach breaks.

Here I was, though, a local San Diegan stung by a local sting ray. I looked up first aid, and got some hot water ready to soak in for an hour or more. I thought of the Get To Do List I wrote before I left. I wasn’t going to Get To Do any of it today. I was going to call this day a wash and see how my foot was.

I thought of all those bastards who can dawn patrol and go to work; one of the sticking points about my last job is that I wanted more guaranteed leisure time. Take it, I was told, so long as you get your work done. Go do those things before your job, figure out how to make it work.

I preferred not to. I preferred to have clearer guidelines. I preferred to fantasize about a past that I never experienced, one where you could be middle-class in Southern California and be able to have the weekends to enjoy it. I didn’t want to be another cog in the infrastructure that sells the landscape and the weather to rich people. I just wanted to have what my dad had, the advice I never consented to but should have taken, “Work to live, don’t live to work.”

So here it is, almost twelve hours since that sting ray got me. My Get To Do List gets re-positioned for tomorrow. Most of it is figuring out how to “Work to live, not live to work.” Surfing gets crossed off the Adventure Auxie column for the week. Tomorrow, I’ll spend some time in the Hausfrau column, because that is another experiment I am doing with my time, supporting others in doing hard things. And hopefully, in the process, I can relearn how to do that other hard thing that I love: writing.

Sore-footedly yours,

Auxie Ekster

This is why I told you to get off your phone.

February 22, 2023

Your Honor,

My name is Auxie Ekster and I’m writing to express the impact that the death of Matt Keenan had on me and my community.

I knew Matt from a Meetup group called Urban Bike and Social Club. He was funny, easygoing, patient and trustworthy. He was a pleasure to spend time with and a responsible cyclist on the road. Unfortunately, the pandemic had scuttled many social rides, but he was someone who I hoped to reconnect with once it felt safe to socialize again. I was greatly sadden to learn that he had passed away—then angry that his death occurred while doing something that we both loved.

While the impact to his family will be greatest—they will be the ones with the empty seat at the dinner table, the missing voice at the holiday gatherings, the aching lack of a person who should be here but isn't—to a fellow cyclist like me, his loss communicates how careless we have become as a society about the potential repercussions of our actions.

As a cyclist, when I get on my bike, I always have to steel myself: will I die today? The roads in San Diego are poorly maintained and the drivers distracted and forgetful of the damage vehicles can do in accidents, even to their passengers (seat belt laws aren't meddlesome government intervention but a response to a crisis of mortality).

Every time I put my foot on the pedal and push off on that ride I accept that today might be the day that I die. Despite only wanting to take my time to get somewhere, to be focused in my commute, to enjoy and learn about my community, to live a little lighter on this earth, it only takes one person driving in any of the tens to hundreds of cars that might pass me on a trip to end my life.

Matt knew this as every cyclist does. We know the risks. Every bike ride, though, is a demonstration of trust in other people and society. Cyclists know that should things go wrong on the roads, that they will lose. We are hopeful that drivers—members of our shared community—will do the right thing: pay attention.

On September 21, 2021, Matt Keenan's trust in others proved to be unfounded. A driver did not do the right thing: pay attention. Another cyclist was killed.

As a cyclist who wants to be able to ride, I am tired of this trope. I am tired that drivers (and I am one, too) can end someone's life through carelessness and have their freedom. It's not a crazy idea to trust people—indeed, it's the power of our species—but trust is fortified by consequences for wrong-doing; that is, justice.

In the eyes of the law, a cyclist is the same as a motorist, but in the actuarial tables of mortality, the equivalence does not hold up. Cars kill more people than guns, each year. Unlike gun deaths, very few of those automobile deaths are intentional. Driver inattention is a leading cause of traffic accidents and mortality.

If I, as a cyclist, think about my death before every ride, what should a motorist think about? How should they approach the drive and the two-ton machine that can kill so easily? How do we as a society ask them to be good, trustworthy members, attentive to the potential destruction they wield with an internal combustion engine?

Your Honor, there should be serious consequences for ending someone's life, especially due to negligence. Matt will not ever be able to hold his son, kiss his wife, or laugh over a beer with a friend. All of this because of one person's inattention or lapse of judgment about how to operate heavy machinery. No other cyclist's family should go through this. I ask you to help fortify cyclists' trust in our society by using your discretion to add additional penalties. I trust that you will understand the importance of justice in supporting a civil and caring society.

Sincerely,

Auxie Ekster

On March 20, 2023, the driver who killed Matt Keenan pleaded guilty to misdemeanor vehicular manslaughter with gross negligence. The judge presiding over the case sentenced her to four days in jail, one year probation, 150 hours of community service, and suspended her license for three years. The reasoning was that “she did not deserve a punishment that would wreck her life.”

Sometimes I’ve pitched this to my husband as an “epistolary scifi satire”, but we aren’t there yet. That’s the goal. Maybe it’ll be in book form but I think we’ve got about 60,000 words before we can get there.

Other times I describe this as “autofiction”; if you ended up here because the Author, a real person who you’ve met in real life and might be connected to via social media or a group chat that you only look at every 6 months, said they are writing again, and then you see some weird name but not the weird name of the person you know (and haven’t been saying right, I GAUR-an-TEE it), it’s because stories need some distance from reality. And also, some times it’s fun to change things for dramatic effect.

It is also an attempt to understand the system that we live in and how it shapes us and our relationships with others and the world. It is, too, an examination of those systems and relationships in light of the stressor that was the Covid-19 Pandemic, in the hope that there will be lessons learned and changes.

And, yes, its a manifesto for degrowth and for most people to work a lot less.

To understand more about the slogoir and AE, the Author, hit the button.

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