Fuji Sticks by Abigail Johnson

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Fuji Sticks (excerpt)

Abigail Johnson

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I never came down from Fuji, not really. This mountain was hell; it was heaven. My body was alive, pain coursing through every part of my body. I could hear the blood rushing in my ears over the wind, my body covered in charred earth. My hands pulsed as I clutched onto the rope: only one option, keep moving. I don’t regret it....

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Fuji Subaru Line 5th Station, 2305m above sea level—Hour 4 

Stepping off the second bus, the hair on my arms was prickling as what I had to do began to set in. The 5th station was seeped in fog, and you could scarcely see 30 feet in front of you. Around us, trail buses arrived from all directions, shuttling massive groups of climbers to the trailheads. We wove through the crowd, my avoiding the hiking poles and swinging overnight packs of the other climbers. I took a glance back at Tatum’s Camelbak Octane 22. One of those small running-vest-meets-pack situations; my lips tightened, and I reached into my otherwise empty pocket for another EVE. 
     On our left, there was a mountain lodge, festive warm lights glimmering behind the frosted glass windows. It was large yet cozy, and I paused to look at it, enjoying the soft heat that came from the door. Inside, tourists and locals alike huddled around the small tables, eating hot bowls of noodles with pearly white rice. Nestled beside the lodge was a small gear rental booth and a station for hikers attempting the climb. 
     We filed into a line of other hopefuls as the guide explained all the gear requirements for the trail in Japanese. My comprehension wasn’t perfect, but I followed along well enough. The guide looked at Tatum curiously, trying to gauge his understanding. 
     “I’ll explain it to him.” I nodded, taking the small leaflet from her hands. As we walked to the lodge, I started to explain what she’d said about thermal clothing (which I didn’t have), when Tatum scoffed, “Yeah, yeah—I understood what she said. I can get what people are saying from the context. It’s not that hard.” I didn’t say anything in reply—instead bending to retie my boots when he gestured at his bag, “I’ve got an extra shirt if you want to wear it. I run hot.”  “Trust me, I know—” I joked, touching his arm and pretending my hand had been burned. 
     He didn’t laugh. 
     During our safety check, an English-speaking guide questioned our plan. “You will not sleep in a hut? You have no reservation?” Tatum fiddled with his backpack, “We’re doing it all at once.” 
     The guide looked us up and down, tracing his broad shoulders and watching as I nodded along.  “It is very late. You better get started. Any longer and I can not let you go up.” I tried to reassure her with a smile. “It’s okay, we’re experienced.” She looked at my body and his once more, then took my palm and pressed a map into it. “You can turn around at the 8th station... and come back down before the summit. After the 8th station, you can not go back.”  

 

*

Yoshida Trail, 2305m above sea level and climbing—Hour 5 

Religious pilgrimages up Fuji began in the 12th century, but Fuji had been worshipped as a place of spiritual significance before the 6th century, around the time when written language was beginning to develop in Japan. Visible from then Edo, present-day Tokyo, Fuji rises above the horizon like another planet, a world inaccessible to us. The trails were originally created by monks and ascetics, traveling up the mountain as a religious act, building shrines along their journey as they mapped the paths to the sky. 
     In the 1600s, the Yoshida trail—the closest entrance to the mountain from Tokyo—became the base for the Kakugyō ascetic cult. Kakugyō teaches that Fuji is the symbol and savior of Japan, the nation’s spirit incarnate and powerful. Hundreds of monks and worshippers ascended the mountain, hoping its spirit would bless them with rewards and sacred knowledge, at the low price of their suffering. Fuji is a place to forget the world, a test of your bravery in hopes that the gods will recognize you. 

The hike began with ascending 2,132 feet in one hour, an almost vertical jog. I didn’t speak, didn’t have the air to. I could feel that rope that tied us together aching around my ankles, weighing my steps. My breath was ice-cold, surging in and out of my lungs—burning the back of my throat as we moved, sparks crackling in my chest. I dug my fist into my abdomen as I climbed, hoping to move around whatever was cramping. [1] My limbs weren’t as long, and I didn’t have the luxury of one of the Fuji Sticks, so I climbed many of the bouldered staircases on my hands and knees. He led the first part of the hike, and I plowed forward, chasing him up the switchbacks.
     During a rest, laying against a boulder, a medical team came across me panting, calling, “Are you okay?” and I replied, ashamed of my weakness, “Yes, I’m great! Today is just very hot, right?” Tatum didn’t say anything from the 20ft away where he stood, itching to continue like a mutt with fleas. 
     “You’re going to have to take less breaks if we’re going to make it up in time.” He said, turning back to watch as I pulled myself over a boulder. “Yeah. Got it.” I spit, refusing to be slower than him, regardless of his 5’11, 195lb build. He shrugged, “You can always go back alone if you can’t do it, and I’ll hike the summit and be back in time for dinner.”
     From there, I resisted stopping unless he was the one to suggest it, or I felt like puking.  I felt everything start to settle into place, and he put me in front, setting our (admittedly slower) pace ahead of him. I knew I wanted it more. I knew I was stronger than him this time. We started passing other hikers, hauling past their Montbell packs and Columbia sleeping bags. It was the same reason we’d been together for three years, both too competitive to throw in the towel first. One of us was going to win this. I liked it after awhile, the simplicity of having a single physical focus; My mind empty as I curled my knuckles around lava rock. Get up, move—that’s it, don’t think—move, you’re sinew and muscle and blood and spit. The other hikers paused to let us by as they smiled and talked to one another, balancing themselves with hiking poles. 
      As we climbed, he stayed right behind me, a trying-to-be-encouraging voice, saying things like  “You’re my little rockstar—" Despite the relentless burning sun, I felt the nape of my neck go cold. It wouldn’t make a difference if I asked him not to do something, and I didn’t have the energy to bring up the “little” argument again. “Mhm, Thanks,” I replied, angling for a foothold on some loose rocks.   
     Below us, the valleys of Yamanashi Prefecture were unfolding, awash with lush greens and blues under the jagged ashen rocks. Plants blew in the wind, rolling over the lava rock as if it were a coral reef, the currents of the wind bending the grasses in their breath. I started to feel like I was floating; it was unmistakable. The awe on my face spread to the rest of my body, my palms falling open at my sides. A new world around me, the cloudless sky as empty as my stomach. 
     I swayed, watching the clouds float over knife-sharp boulders below us.  

A few minutes later, he caught up to me, nudging me to drink water. I paused to have a sip or two when he told me to, not wanting to fill my bladder and then have to stop for a break. [2] As I took the straw, he sighed, kicking some gravel away. “Why are you always mean to me?” He pouted, sticking out his lower lip. I turned to look over at him, my face screwed up in the direct sunlight. 
     “I’m just tired. I mean—you’ve refused to even hold my hand since you got to the airport,” I said casually to his back, sucking on the straw attached to his hiking bag. 
     “It’s PDA! I’m not trying to break the etiquette rules here!” 
     I sighed, “Yeah, because you’re so obviously Japanese. Besides, the “rules” are a little different than you think they are.” 
     “I did research!” 
     I took a final sip, tossing a few of my prescription pain pills into my mouth before handing the straw back to him to drink. 
     “What are those?” He raised an eyebrow, watching me swallow. 
     I shrugged, looking up at the path, an endless zigzag, almost unnerving in its perfect symmetry.
     “Let’s get going.”  

The people who came here first, Buddhist and Shinto alike, did it in an attempt to shed the endless cycle of desire and suffering, birth and death, of being human. Kaji Kito is a concept followed by the ancient climbers, the idea of prayer requiring more than verbal communication with a deity. In order for Fuji to hear you, you must sacrifice yourself to it, and enter its realm.  

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Hinode-kan, 2,700m above sea level—Hour 6 

Once we made it through the first third of the journey, the mountain huts started to appear. They were small, cozy Japanese-style houses with tatami flooring and large cast-iron pots heated in the center of the room. The mountain huts were staffed during the climbing season, and some served food, usually instant ramen. As we got higher, the huts began to sell bottles of portable oxygen with masks attached. I took a sideways glance at the canisters and put 100 yen on the counter for an orange juice. The staff were all fit, carrying radios and wearing thermal clothing. There didn’t seem to be any way to get up or down this mountain other than to walk, so I figured they must be pretty capable. [3]
     As we climbed, it became a habit for me to rush ahead to the next hut, quickly pay for the stamps, and use the branding time as a chance to sit on the ground outside without admitting to taking a break. [4] I sat with my back pressed against the wall, elbows on my spread knees, head lulled down. Steam rose from my arms, visible when Tatum tapped my shoulder with the Fuji stick. “Time to get moving.” 
     Each step I took on the stairs was in a careful pattern of 1, 1, 2. On 1, I took two short breaths, pulling the air in my lungs quickly, watching the brambles in the wind around me. 
     On 2, I exhaled slowly, as long as I could, taking a step forward and digging my heel into the rubble. Focusing on the pattern tunneled my vision; nothing between me and endless gray-blue sky. I imagined ropes tied on hipbones… pulling me forward so hard it hurt to hesitate. 

 

*

On the stairs, approx. 2,900m from sea level and climbing. Hour 8 

I looked over my shoulder, pulling myself over a staircase on my knees. “How long do you think it would take for you to hit the ground if I pushed you?” He laughed up at me. “Yeah, you couldn’t move me if you tried. You’re not strong enough.”
     “I’m strong enough—” I said, my voice cracking through my dry mouth. My mind wandered as I looked over the mountainside, fog rolling over us like waves in the open sea. I stood, turning away from him and looking up. Stairs and paths of loose gravel went up endlessly, the summit still hidden behind another cloud layer. I wondered what I’d feel like, up there, passing through the gates to the sky. 
     My mind wandered again as we continued walking; I imagined what it would be like if he said something nice. I remembered my mom’s grimace when I told her we’d gotten back together. I wondered if he'd do what he did again someday. I thought about the people who had taken the same steps hundreds of years before, their sweat cold on their backs, goal in their minds. No matter how much I thought, I couldn’t find an answer I liked; and yet, here we were. Alone in the roof of the world, and still climbing. 
     I looked back at him, and my face softened, a heavy, endless feeling beginning to set in as I watched him walk, face lit by the stray flicker of sunlight through the clouds. I could sense the end coming like the rope slowly being sawed at... threads fraying and splitting off in every direction. “You know,” I said, leaning up against him as we paused to catch our breath. “I wouldn’t have done this with anyone else.” He nodded, “This is going to be such a badass story to tell, we’re gonna be like the cool aunt and uncle.” I looked out at the clouds and felt a wave of guilt sinking onto my shoulders.
     We couldn’t see the base of the mountain anymore, only the trail, snakelike and curling up the volcano. The path was becoming more barren with every step, the other hikers beginning to fade into the clouds behind us. I looked down at my hands, already gnarled and coated in black rock powder from the volcanic stones. Nothing was bleeding too badly yet, so I dusted my hands off on the handkerchief. My body still felt pretty solid. [5]

 

*

8th Station, approx. 3,100m from sea level. Hour 11  

The last turning point. The 8th station was larger and busier than the other huts, full of people checking into the overnight lodging. The narrow path between the cliff and hut was crowded with people sitting and changing out of their hiking shoes to go outside. [6] Tatum paused, turning on his heel to peer into the lodging as I headed towards the shop counter for the sticks.  “Do you want to turn around?” He asked, pointing a thumb towards the trail signs. I shook my head. “We’re already up here. What’s a little more?” He groaned in reply, “I’m hurting—let’s take a break and eat—” I looked around at the other climbers enjoying warm food. “Yeah, sure.”
     Around us, the other hikers were a mixed bag. A handful of Europeans in sleek jackets and crew socks, outfits coordinating. Across from where I sat in the gravel, a local trail guide explained the lodge’s amenities to a group of young Japanese men. After a minute, I went inside and purchased two hot bowls of instant ramen, with a muffin for each of us. They poured the boiling water inside and provided chopsticks, which we carried back outside to our dirt dinner table. 
     “Do you want to know how long we’ve been—” Tatum asked, noodles in his mouth. 
     “No, don’t tell me or I’ll get tired,” I replied, slurping my udon. Since we’d gotten off the first bus from Tokyo, I hadn’t checked the time or counted the hours—knowing I could get farther without keeping track. I felt my stomach ache and bubble as the broth slid past my dry mouth. I picked at the noodles a little more, breaking off pieces of the muffin as Tatum wolfed down his bowl. “Are you gonna finish that?” He asked once he was done, nudging my styrofoam udon cup. “No,” I replied, handing him the rest, still picking at my muffin. 
     I felt my throat begin to open up after eating, a sharpness returning to me as I began to wake up and realize how cold I’d been. Once he finished my bowl, I gestured toward his backpack. “Can I have the shirt?” He tossed it to me, and I pulled it over my head. Just a long-sleeve shirt, but better than nothing. I looked up at the sky over 8th station, hazy and beginning to clear as we rose above the clouds. During my only treasured rest, about 35 minutes or so, I listened to the warm tones of the language I’d come to love, long after the sun had hit its peak in the sky.  

 

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Former 8th Station, Tomoe-Kan approx. 3,400m from sea level. Hour 13 

The air was getting thinner, and I was getting higher, shifting my weight from one leg to another, jumping from side to side. We had been moving steadily, visibility getting worse, drowning in fog. If I got too far ahead, Tatum vanished into the gray, so I paused every few boulders to wait for him. Unable to stand still, I shook my hands wildly, blood and dirt flying off them in little flecks; My legs started to numb as I kicked at the ground like a tied horse. 
     In 1580, a follower of the Kakugyo fuji-worship cult recounts his experience meeting the godly incarnation of the mountain after fasting and hiking to the summit. As he ascended, his notes became more disorganized, the spelling and meaning of certain words unclear.  As he continues,  his visions become more complex and visceral. He writes,  

[ Day 1 ]  “Funatsu [=Saido or Kawaguchi]. One hundred days' great practice. Received 

Utterance(s) of Water.” 

[ Day 8 ] “Hakone. Did one hundred days' great practice. Met Sengen Dainichi Bosatsu face to face. During one thousand days' great practice in Hitoana, received [?]. During great practice, wrote one thousand scrolls of KOKU-DAI-SOKU-MYO-ō-SOKU-TAI-JIP- PО-KО-KU-SHIN 22 and saved eighty thousand people. Also, during forty-nine days' great practice on Mid-Path, met 

Sengen face to face; utterances and dispensations to save eighty thousand sentient beings.” 

“How much longer?” I asked, before pausing. “Wait—no, don’t tell me.” 
     He said something in response, but I couldn’t hear it—my ears ringing, drowning out his voice. I rolled my head on my neck, pushing down on my aching temples. I rolled my jaw, trying to clear the sinus pressure, when I was able to pick up on his voice again. “...You okay?” 
     “Are you?” I asked, knocking a fist to the side of my jaw, still trying to relieve the pressure, when I noticed something out of the corner of my eye. “Did you see that?” I jerked my head slightly, training my eyes on the boulder where I’d seen motion. 
     “No—” He replied, passing by me on the stairs. I looked back into the fog, trying to pinpoint what I’d seen. When I stopped moving, my leg started to shake wildly, jerking and joints clicking as I tried to balance. There was still a soft fizzling in my ear, but I was able to hear better now. 
     The former 8th station was a pile of wood and brick, nearly sliding off the vertical slope. As we passed by, abandoned flags fluttered in the wind—still tied to bent posts. My throat felt dry as I looked past the rubble, trying to see if there was someone else up here with us.  

* 

The Summit, approx. 3776m from sea level (11,000ft) Hour 15 

Cold was beginning to sink in, my climbing starting to slow for the first time in hours.
     Regardless of my body, my eyes were rapidly searching for movement. There were no humans in my sightline anymore, Tatum coming up quietly several meters behind me. The familiar talk of the other hikers gone miles ago, the crunch of the gravel now drowned out by the wind. I held the sides of my face, pulling the sleeves of Tatum’s shirt over my knuckles. At some point, I’d tied a wooden Fuji talisman to my jacket, and it rose on the wind, jumping and whirling in the air by my shoulder. 
     My head was throbbing with pressure, my hair flying into my face in the wind. I knocked my braids out of the way when I saw it. A massive wooden torii gate, gray with age, standing alone in the wind. My legs faltered, and I pressed my palm against the wood, tracing the yen coins people had pressed into the splintering cracks. At the summit, we noticed another hiker who must’ve made it up a while before. I recognized him from the parking lot that now felt centuries away from here. Tatum bumped my arm, and I nodded, taking my phone out of my pocket and asking if he’d take a photo of the two of us at the summit. 
     We stood next to a large stone obelisk, inscribed with the words “Mount Fuji Summit Asama Taisha Inner Sanctuary.” We each held one of the fuji sticks and smiled, holding onto the stone, our hands not touching. Afterward, the other hiker vanished into the fog, leaving us in the sky.  I tried to bend down and sit in the gravel, my legs wavering underneath me. Tatum sat too for a while, and I leaned against his knee the way I always did. Alone now, he rubbed my shoulder roughly and said something about being proud of me. We were silent in the cold when I closed my heavy eyes, and when I opened them, Tatum was gone. The tattered Fuji flags were changing colors and pulsing like a cuttlefish in my cloudy vision, and I rubbed my eyes. This time, I heard a new voice behind me. 
     You’ve come a long way…again. The voice said, familiar, the one from my recurring dreams. [7] The pressure in my head focused behind my eyes as my ears fizzled and popped, my scalp soaked with icy sweat. Oh, it’s you. I thought, relieved—my breath starting to settle. I could only see him out of the corner of my eye, brushing dark feathers off his arms, his silhouette fluttering in the wind like one of the flags, the same shape I’d seen behind the boulders earlier. The dream seemed to bubble up in my consciousness every few months, but it had been a long time since I’d seen him. Are you able to stand? He asked. Yeah. But it doesn’t feel great. I thought. I felt stronger, older somehow when I was around him. You’re smarter than this. Your life won’t last forever. He said. I know. I just don’t want to be alone. I thought. I couldn’t tell if I was lying down or sitting, but felt comfortable for the first time in hours, unable to feel the pain.  
     You’re not. He said. You don’t count. I thought. He uncrossed his arms, crouching silently beside me, looking straight ahead at the shimmering clouds. Hm, he seems to count me. I laughed, remembering the many fights Tatum and I had over the dreams. I’d written an essay about it:  the story of living and dying in 30 years on rice paddies. I’d had a son with a sort-of man from the mountain. Tatum always brought it up in arguments after that, my ‘disrespectful’ behavior.
     Others might question his ownership if I wrote stories, right? 
     He placed a hand on my shoulder and I put my torn up palm over his, still looking out at the sky. I couldn’t feel my hand, the blood or bits of sunburn, callouses carved away and remade from raw flesh. Do you think I’ll make it down? I thought, looking down over the fog, loose lava rock marking my path home. He went quiet for a moment before speaking again. …You can’t stay here with me this time. There’s only one thing you can do now. He said. I know, I exhaled. He pulled back, taking a phantom step in the gravel behind me, feather-soft. He took a deep breath, watching the sun as it slowly lowered over the horizon like a guillotine. How many more times do I have to save you? He asked. One more, and another, and another, and another—I thought, a smile widening on my face. He knelt, putting a hand on my back, spread palm over my spine—and I felt the ropes sever. I felt myself grit my teeth, wincing as I slid backward onto the boulder behind me. 

All I could see was the gray veil of clouds above; my heart suddenly began revving back up like an engine as the grip returned to my fingers, breath hot and surging. feeling a small trickle of clarity running down my sweat-slicked face, mixed with the salty taste of guilt. Something was wrong with this. Something more than the annoyance. I traced the line from my severed ropes that’d been attached to every bruise, headache, nightmare, sickness, and compulsion, and there was one knot connecting them all, Tatum jangling it like spare keys. I thought about the first time I’d held my younger sister, her newborn body soft and powdery. [9] My hands were small then, too, the weight of a universe was placed on my shoulders that day, one I gladly carried. I needed to get back. Away from home, I’d let myself slip, but I needed to be strong now. He was gone when I opened my eyes.
     Tatum shouted from across the clearing, “Hey—ready to go?” He walked over, zipping up his hiking pants. “I heard you laughing. Something up?” I shook my head, holding the feeling tight in my chest. With the new strength in my legs, I stood slowly, clacking my fists together. 
     “Let’s catch the last train.” 
     “What!? Isn’t the last one at midnight, that’s gonna be tight—”
     “If we’re fast enough, we’ll make it.” I stretched my arms, crossing them over my chest and reaching to touch my toes. 
     “We can get an Uber instead of the train—”
     “I know I can make it; what about you?” I said, teeth clicking and gnashing as I spoke. I started to strip off the extra layers of clothing, balling them up and putting them in Tatum’s pack. 
     “Well.. I’m just concerned about you…” 
     I laughed, the sound ringing in the empty shacks, breath strong as the wind now, my shoulders in line with the burning horizon. A fire rose from my feet, and I raised my arm, pointing towards the path. I breathed in cool air, the smell of home, my home filling my lungs.
     “I’ve got things to do! Can’t wait around up here forever.” [8]

*

NOTES

[1] What hurt the most was the embarrassment of it, what I thought was my weakness puffing hot air up my throat.  

[2] Apparently, all of these things go hand in hand. Dehydration is known to worsen the symptoms of AMS, increasing physiological stress through loss of blood volume, and hindering kidney and respiratory responses required for the high-altitude acclimitization. The EVEs might have been my savior in that department, ibuprofen known to increase fluid retention.  

[3] It takes about 3 to 5 days of rest at a specific elevation to complete an acclimation phase and clear symptoms of Acute Mountain Sickness (AMS). Preventative tolerance would require 200 hours of pre-acclimitization in a simulated hypoxic environment. The workers likely attempted the hike over a day or two, spending some time sleeping and resting in order to adjust to the harsh environment.  

[4] I wish I’d fought more to keep one of the Fuji sticks. By about halfway up the mountain, they looked incredible, and I liked trying to decipher the kanji on each stamp. They sit in a jar at Tatum’s apartment now. 

[5] Since Fuji, my hands seem to be perpetually wounded, bleeding from the nailbeds, absentmindedly picked at or torn open easily, now sensitive to heat and the sun after the burns I’d sustained.  

[6] I knew the Fuji mountain huts included warm showers and sleeping bunks for hikers, as well as meals: costing between ¥9,000 and ¥18,000 per person ($60 to $120 USD), depending on how high up they are on the trail. The Fuji-san hotel is the last place you can stay overnight, and is about 300m directly up from 8th station. I felt tempted, but not enough to come off as desiring rest.  

[7] Gods are said to present themselves in forms we recognize.  

[8] I knew then, I’d be the first one to throw in the towel after all. I knew I’d be proving him right, that it hadn’t been sincere when I said “I love you”, no matter how hard I tried to make it true, no matter how true it used to be. I knew then that he’d never understand how afraid I was of him, and that I’d tried my best. I knew then that he’d blame me and I’d have to keep climbing anyway. 

[9] We chose the most difficult, and fastest trail down Fuji, diverting from our original plan. Running, sliding and crashing down the mountainside, we arrived at the foot of the mountain after dark in a densely wooded forest. Headlamp on, I found a still-open visitors center in an otherwise empty parking lot at the edge of the wood. We’d landed in a completely different prefecture on the other side of Fuji. With no service, the kind workers arranged a taxi with a Chinese father and son who’d also taken a different path and had been waiting for hours. I translated the father’s English to the Japanese taxi driver, while the little boy and Tatum slept leaning on me. Tatum slept in every train and taxi in the four hours it took us to get back to Tokyo, stumbling along half-awake. I urged him on, taking the stairs instead of the escalator to the train platform.  We caught the last Yamanote line train at midnight.  

*

Abigail Johnson is a writer and undergraduate student at the University of Arizona, pursuing degrees in Creative Writing and Japanese Language. Her primary interests are creative nonfiction and travel writing.

Ander Monson, Long Live the Jart, Heavy and Pointed and Gleaming

Long Live the Jart, Heavy and Pointed and Gleaming

(originally appeared in Neck Deep and Other Predicaments)

*

Ander Monson

*

Long live its long lines, thin fins, its lead head.

Long live its obvious danger, the way it arranged moments into living and hardly and summer.

Long live the jart, lawn dart with the aggressive, actionable name, banned in 1988, by the Consumer Product Safety Commission.

Long live the 3:1 ratio of boys to girls with “penetrating lawn dart injuries” that led to the ban. 

Long live the box copy reading, mostly chronologically: “an outdoor game,” “a missile game,” “an exciting outdoor game of skill for the whole family,” “fun for the entire family.”

Long live the amended copy: “an outdoor skill game for adults,” “a skillful sport for adults,” or “a competition rated adult lawn dart game.”

Long live the end of the jart. 

Long live the end of childhood.

Long live the culture of protection.

*

*

Long live the name of the jart, javelin + dart, or jet + dart, or je + the heart, javelina + the art, Jeremiah + the shot through the heart, and you’re to blame.

Long live the jart, modern family version of the plumbata, the lead-weighted military throwing dart used by Roman infantry from 300-700 AD. 

Long live skull fracture and bone penetration.

Long live instruments of war packaged as a family game.

Long live convalescing in Spain.

Long live family, an arena of war.

Long live the jart, the backyard flechette (projectile deployed from planes or balloons during the first world war).

Long live the dreams of those run through by flechettes.

Long live the dreams of the four-chambered heart, about to be struck.

Long live A bell Is a Cup… Until It Is Struck (album by Wire).

Long live the chambers of the nautilus.

Long live the heart, an organ, then not.

*

*

Long live the 4% casualty rate of children struck by jarts in a 1990 study published in Journals of Diseases of Children. 

Long live air bubble and hemorrhage of left temporal region with surrounding edema as shown on CT scan in said study.

Long live “Male predominance…may be explained by sex difference in exposure to risks and/or behavior,” quoted in said article.

Long live a corollary article, “Pediatric Injuries in the Back of Pickup Trucks,” 1990, published in the Journal of the American Medical Association.

Long live trips in my father’s or nother’s pickup truck as a child, taking jumps down steep hills, catching air into darkness forever.

Long live summer camp with its notions of archery and weird martial training.

Long live the marching band, remnant, reminder of that martial culture.

Long live Bill Millin, bagpiper at the D-Day landings, died on August 17th, 2010.

Long live the bagpipe as a weapon of war, officially proclaimed by an English judge circa 1746, reasoning that his music was his weapon.

*

*

Long live Bill Millin, whom German snipers had in their sights and had not fired.

Long live Red Dawn and the nuclear threat.

Long live the martial and survivalist action of Boy Scouts.

Long live the WEBELOS, the joint between cub and boy, we’ll be loyal scouts, we’ll be forever lost. 

Long live the lawns of the dreams of the past, cleared out of pests.

Long live the idea of lawns, mostly absent from Arizona, like water.

Long live my heart in my mouth as I threw up the jart toward the ring on the ground where it gathered with others in thunder.

Long live their banning, rendering them permanently amazing.

Long live the loss of living with any sense of actual threat. 

Long live our lives, soft, safe, servile, updating motherboards on servers, drinking coffee to feel alive.

Long live the last time you felt anything was possible.

Long live that must have included death from above. Long live that must include love.

Long live the decades of lawsuits. 

Long live the legitimate lawsuit. Long live the spurious.

Long live the lawsuit of Karsten Abata, who sued the City of Houghton, Michigan, for “not properly marking” the obvious speed bump that he wrecked his bike on going 30 miles an hour like a fool down the huge hill, breaking his arm.

Long live the couple hundred bucks he won or received as a settlement.

Long live his trajectory into asininity and Amway and irrelevance.

Long live screw that guy.

Long live my scorn, for it sustains me.

Long live Facebook for not reconnecting him and I with our shared, stupid memories.

Long live so far, long live yet.

Long live the pornography of memory.

Long live the scar on my forehead.

Long live the increasing expanse of my forehead, how like a lawn it creeps.

Long live the lies I told to girls about how I got that scar, my fake Australian accent.

Long live fooling no one.

*

*

Long live the stairways of memory, collapsing below me.

Long live the homemade bomb.

Long live Jeremiah Manchester whose homemade bomb blew up while he made it.

Long live the static that triggered it, that triggered our hearts, that redirected our circulations and ambitions.

Long live our many other bombs before that. 

Long live cannon fuse, saltpeter, Vaseline, improvised nitroglycerine.

Long live the crazy heart of The Anarchist’s Cookbook.

Long live the surgeon who attached his big toe to his hand in place of a thumb. Long live the millimeters by which the fragments missed his vas deferens. 

Long live his succession of longsuffering hot girlfriends. 

Long live my collection of teenage pornography.

Long live the Upper Peninsula, where his name is inscribed.

Long days were ours, those summers of incredible Eastern Standard Time. Long live the air stretching out toward the irreducible evening, and our forgetting.

Long live the arc of the jart, parabolic in air, sometimes in hair and in tears. (More rarely in sweating glasses of tea.)

Long live the sound of it hitting the earth, of it splitting the earth, of spitting on wounds from things stuck in the earth.

Long live the jart’s long flight on my grandmother’s lawn.

Long live the exact width of the sky above my grandmother’s cabin on Pelican Lake, Minnesota, pontoon boats trolling through the summer evenings, my family lining the shore.

Long live my teenage collection of pornography.

Long live demography.

Long live invincibility.

Long live it ending.

Long live the summer of selling stamps door-to-door to neighbors for some reason lost in memory.

Long live the later summer of failed grass roots organizing in Madison, Wisconsin. Grass roots for what? Organizing for what? Gone now, like minnows, like moaning, like each new morning.

Long live my grandfather dying of emphysema just up the road, sucking air.

Long live my grandfather, Heinz salesman, buyer, deployer of jarts on the lawn, in the shed, in the air.

Long live the loss of his hair.

Long live remembering minnows nibbling my legs, though I have not waded in that or any lake with minnows for years. Long live my dulling senses, my hardened skin so that I could not even feel them if theoretically I were to wade in the water, that water, those minnows, my marrow, tomorrow.

Long live the feeling of power in weapons and jarts.

Long live the power of art.

Long live its weight in my hand.

Long live the sound of my brother tracing circles on the lawn.

Long live blindfolds over eyes.

Long live the rocks I threw at my brother while swimming.

Long live what this means to our continuing relationship, never just dust in the past.

Long live the dumb men in our family, who mostly die younger.

Long live our dwindling numbers.

Long live the elegy, geology’s long thought, the brains of those struck by jarts and hospitalized, their names redacted from the record. 

Long live Elkhart, Indiana, home of the last boy who suffered a brain injury due to lawn darts before the ban.

Long live we bumblers, stumbling through summers.

Long live the humming of mummers and their plays, their plays on words.

Long live the absence of birds.

Long live any of us surviving Michigan men. Long live either luck or timidness.

Long live fire, fir trees, the disfigurement of our friends.

Long live Misery Bay and the dredge.

Long live Torch Lake, poisoned from mine tailings.

Long live its phalanx of swarming, cancerous fish. 

Long live my childhood and the disguises it takes even now.

Long live the swears I learned, when to deploy them, and not.

Long live this pornography of teenage collection.

Love live the collection of weapons, the blowguns, the crossbows, bottle rockets, shotguns, air rifles, shuriken, katanas, morning stars, pistols, throwing knives, kidney knives, bowie knives, butterfly knives, carving knives, hatchets, gasoline.

Long live our desperation to be able to affect something, anything.

Long live remembering sensation, a powerful urge growing stronger each year that I age. Long live the inevitability that it will be the only thing remaining in memory as I expect to dream out my last, institutionalized decade on the IV television drip in my Craftmatic, nothing and no one so close as to possibly harm me ever again.

Long live my heart, the machine of my thinking. Long may it not burst.

Long live the earth. Long live the jart stuck in its heart.

*

*

Mar Katz, What We Need Now, More Than Ever, Is Mr. Worldwide

What We Need Now More than Ever: Mr. Worldwide

by Mar Katz

*

The year is 2012, and I am in seventh grade, in the midst of what many New York City Jews would term “bar mitzvah season.” I am on the dance floor, surrounded by tween boys in ill-fitting suits and girls who tower over them in black spaghetti strap dresses and fuzzy socks soaking up the ache of blistered feet, high heels abandoned under a table. I am decked out in party favors that feel precious right now, but will be in a landfill by the end of the week: plastic shutter shades, glow-stick necklaces, maybe even, dare I say it, a neon fedora. In other words, I am on top of the world. 

The year is 2025, and I am waiting in the longest line I have ever seen for the chance at free entry to a concert at the Feria Nacional de San Marcos. Some people camped out in tents overnight to secure their spots in line, but my friends and I were not so committed. We only arrived five hours early. One of my friends works on the book of Sudoku puzzles she brought to keep herself entertained. My other friend takes dumb videos of us on her camcorder. We are enveloped in a crowd of people dressed in a uniform consisting of dress shirts, ties, aviator sunglasses, face-painted goatees, and bald caps. 

*

The only connection between these two experiences that occurred half my lifetime apart is none other than Mr. Worldwide. Armando Christian Pérez, aka Pitbull, aka Mr. 305, aka Mr. Worldwide, was born in Miami, Florida to Cuban parents who had fled the Castro regime. Pérez was a precocious child. By the age of five, he was already reciting the poems of Jose Martí he had memorized by heart. But by twenty-three, he was well on his way to becoming the king of recession pop with the release of his debut album, M.I.A.M.I (Money Is A Major Issue), featuring top singles “Culo” and “That’s Nasty.” 

Recession pop is the dance music genre that dominated the top charts in the years surrounding the Great Recession, roughly from 2008-2014. The genre is defined by its catchy melodies, uptempo electronic beats, flashing-light synths, autotune, and lyric content. Recession pop lyrics reflect the nihilism of the day, promoting hedonism as the only appropriate response to financial precarity. 

*

There is perhaps no song that better exemplifies recession pop than Pitbull’s 2014 hit, “Time of Our Lives” feat. Ne-Yo, off the record Globalization. In the pre-chorus, Pitbull explains that his rent is over one week late, and though he’s worked his “ass off,” he still doesn’t have the money to pay it. That doesn’t stop him from having a good night though–he has just enough money to pay the cover fee at the club. Pitbull’s priority is having a good time “before my time is up.” 

This “YOLO” ethos was the predominant attitude in popular music during the most formative years of my childhood. The core message to live in the now was drilled into my generation. Oh, to be a Zillenial. We are the generation that reposted infinity signs on Tumblr, but were too young to make the mistake of getting them tattooed on our wrists. We are the generation who talked to strangers on Omegle and bullied each other on Ask.fm because parents didn’t yet understand the dangers of the internet. We are the generation raised on Degrassi: The Next Generation and America’s Next Top Model. We are the generation of hookup culture, of the loneliness epidemic. We are a generation who won’t wait up for a “Mr. Right,” only what Pitbull would categorize as a “Mr. Right Now.”

*

At Pitbull’s free concert at the Feria Nacional de San Marcos last year, I counted about ten heads in front of us when the bouncers cut off entry to the concert. I had had no problem getting into Los Ángeles Azules several days prior, but this was Mr. Worldwide. We had gotten so close to seeing him live, and we weren’t about to let this stop us. We had spent the last five hours killing time standing in line for a chance to live in the now. We were exhausted. As we bought gorditas from a nearby food stand, we noticed a man with a stack of lime green and royal blue plastic chairs. He was renting them out for the night at 50 pesos a pop; you just had to leave your ID with him. We quickly complied and lined our chairs up as close to the barriers as we could get, just as we saw other people doing. We couldn’t really see the stage, but had a good view of the screens, and were able to rest our legs. When Mr. Worldwide sprinted out onto the stage, letting out his signature, “DALEEEE,” people cried out with pure joy.

If I stood and craned my neck, I could see the now 45 year-old Mr. Worldwide on stage, gyrating his hips in his tux. Back up dancers in bedazzled bikinis groped him as he sang. At one point he removed his jacket to reveal a skin tight leather zip up...bodysuit??? He looked out over the sea of bald fans, grinning. In a viral TikTok from February of 2025, a fan captured Pitbull on stage addressing his impersonators directly: “I wanna say a special thank you to everybody that came out with bald caps here tonight. I appreciate y'all. It is amazing to see, it's amazing to feel, I hope when y'all put on those bald caps, you feel just like I do. Having a good motherfucking time every day of my LIFE!” At a time when hair transplants have become popular among balding celebrities, Pitbull’s embrace of his aesthetic leads the way for a level of authenticity we don’t often see in pop stardom. He didn’t seem offended that his appearance had become a meme. He was still living for tonight. 

*

At the tail end of Brat Summer, whispers of the second coming of recession pop began to circulate the internet. The majority of the articles about the phenomenon published in mainstream news outlets, such as Time, Vogue, and NPR, listed the top artists belonging to the movement as Kesha, Lady Gaga, The Black Eyed Peas, and Rihanna. And while some of them at least mentioned Pitbull, none of them entertained his outsize role in the establishment of the genre, one that I would argue deems him worthy of the title “King Of Recession Pop,” not that he needs any more aliases. Pitbull has been peddling recession aesthetics since his inception, before the recession even began. Part of Pitbull’s brand has always been to connect on the common goal of having fun despite being broke, of living in the now during the end times. In a world of Mr. Steal Yo Girls, Pitbull united us with the project of Mr. Worldwide. 

Many of the zeitgeisty articles about the genre that flooded the internet in 2024 and 2025 cited Sabrina Carpenter, Charli XCX, and Chappell Roan as today’s artists ushering us into a new recession pop era, now that Usher himself has moved on. And I’m so sorry to have to be the one to say it, divas, and I say it with the hopes of not being disowned by the queer community, but while Chappell Roan’s ballads are great for karaoke, they just aren’t danceable. Only a few of them hit a BPM high enough to dance to, and even those lack the synthy, highly climactic beat drops core to the genre. And while Sabrina Carpenter does address the disposability of her partners, no one in their right mind would ever categorize her music as recession pop. 

Of the three, Charli XCX certainly comes the closest. I love Brat as much as the next person, and “365” and “Club Classics” certainly approach the attitudes present during the height of recession pop. But Charli’s description of a luxurious vacation to Italy in “Everything is romantic,” and her rivalry with fellow celebrities in “Girl, so confusing” and “Sympathy is a knife,” albeit set to electronic beats, are not relatable and hardly in the spirit of the genre. In “Rewind,” and “Apple,” she dwells on the past, rather than living in the now.  Besides, as Charli XCX herself said in an interview with British Vogue in April of 2026, she’s moving away from creating dance music because “the dance floor is dead.” As much as they might claim to be able to “get the job done,” the new guard just isn’t giving the people the recession pop we need. 

*

And it’s not their fault–we cannot look to artists to shift an entire culture. My generation has gained a reputation for playing it safe, for being boring. We’re drinking less than the generations that preceded us. We’ve been called out for not wanting to leave tabs open at bars (guilty as charged). And most importantly, since 2004, the U.S. partying frequency rate has decreased by 35%, largely due to us. We’re more cautious, more religious, and therefore less likely to feel, as Pitbull did upon hitting the clubs, that “We didn’t go to church but I got blessed.” It would be too much to ask of these artists to revive the mentality of a bygone era. 

As I watched Mr. Worldwide sing the opening line of “Hotel Room Service” from my plastic chair, I felt the crowd’s collective effervescence flow through me, chills running down my spine as they always do when I see a live musical performance. When the concert was nearly halfway over, I realized that I was familiar with far more of his discography than I had previously thought. I must have absorbed him through cultural osmosis. Never before his free concert had I considered it, but as I felt the joy of nostalgia wash over me, I asked myself if I was a fan of Mr. Worldwide. If I, too, would some day don a bald cap and aviator lenses, humming with the gender euphoria brought on by wearing a suit and drawing on a mustache with Sharpie.

Pitbull continued to make music after 2014, but nothing seemed to hit like his recession pop did. At his free concert, he chose to almost exclusively perform his biggest hits of the 2010s. And the crowd ate it up. It was fitting that, given his roots of only having “enough to get up in this club,” Pitbull gave us the gift of a free concert.

*

If you thought that the age of Pitbull had long since come and gone, you would be sorely mistaken. The false alarm of the return of recession pop has only left me craving the genre more. And in 2026, when Rihanna has effectively gone into retirement, Nicki Minaj is Nicki Minaj (RIP), and the contestants for Best New Artist were primarily indie songwriters of the likes of Olivia Dean, Alex Warren, and sombr, (and just in case you were thinking it, no, you can absolutely NOT be serious if you wish to convince me that ADDISON RAE is going to singlehandedly save recession pop.) we cannot trust anyone to give us the recession pop we require. As the shitstorm that is humanity in 2026 continues to rain down, as we continue to light this planet on fire, in these times of crisis, what we really need now, more than ever, is Mr. Worldwide.

Hayeon Lee / If You Are Reading This, This is Your Sign to Crash Out

 

Quentin Parker: Indecision / Percentages

 

Indecision / Percentages

Quentin Parker

*

My first diagnosis was an “unspecified” ADHD. I have a habit of almost, but not completely, meeting the benchmark when it comes to mental health evaluations. It took months for the label to shift from “unspecified” to “inattentive,” and a year for my therapist to suspect a possible overlap with autism. This was either due to or despite my autism screening results coming up inconclusive; she said it was unlikely that a non-autistic person met any of the thresholds, at least in her years of experience. I was instructed not to spiral about this, that my life wouldn’t fundamentally change with an eventual autism diagnosis, and that Google was the last place I needed to search for answers. Luckily, I was proactive and went to Reddit to corroborate her theory before the session ended. 

The signs seem to have always been there. I can now pinpoint the moments in my adolescence where I boiled neurodivergence down to being a kid: the excessive talking to my classmates in the second grade when we were expected to learn, my hyper-specific (bordering obsessive) interests that lasted years until I abandoned them completely, how I procrastinated on nearly every major assignment until a day or two before the deadline because the time constraint was more actionable, the overwhelming need to spend money so that I could have things for the sake of having them—only to forget they existed once the newness faded. Without knowing, I taught myself to hide in plain sight. My impulses became jokes and I laughed off my lack of motivation to do tasks or make decisions that didn’t result in immediate gratification. The phrase, “I’m just a boy,” was a crutch for my mind’s shortcomings. When I couldn’t hide, I masked the traits completely. I suppressed the urge to plan my responses and cut in the second someone finished a sentence, maintaining my composure when they’d go on another tangent and I lost my opportunity to participate. Once I sat in a graduate-level literature course unable to do anything other than daydream or fidget or pretend to read, I realized I’d actually been hiding from myself.

The ADHD diagnosis wasn’t revelatory or cathartic, it was inconvenient. Day-to-day tasks overtime became noticeably herculean compared to when I juggled almost twenty hours in the writing center, multiple 400-level courses, a teaching assistantship, an honors thesis, two capstone projects, nine graduate school applications, running a literary magazine, a 6-day-a-week workout schedule, intermittent fasting, and persistent essay submissions in my last year of college. Answering the long-standing question of how my mind worked meant that I suddenly couldn’t “lock-in” my way through academia. If I wasn’t on campus, I was lying in bed. I hated lying in bed. But I also loved it. But I also couldn’t not do it. I went years without meaningfully reading a book that wasn’t assigned and I couldn’t write unless there was a due date attached to the essay. Cooking dragged on longer than ordering food and waiting for it to arrive at my doorstep, the hard work already done for me.

My therapist introduced me to the concept of “habit stacking.” It was a logical solution to my problem: attach the things I want to do to something I already do routinely. If I run out of clothes to wear for the week, I can load the dishwasher after loading the laundry. If I need to buy gas, I may as well go to the grocery store while I’m still in the car. The hope is that one task snowballs into another, then the snowballs become dominoes, until every task has been knocked down sequentially.

Reading and writing are roadblocks. My brain hates to choose. In an ideal state of mind I can pick up a book that interests me (enough) and voluntarily begin to read, but I struggle to get past the action of staring at letters on a page; nothing flashy, nothing shocking, nothing extra to flood my brain with dopamine. Pages and text and pages and text until it ends. If I want to find something more in a book, I have to work for it. Essays are no different; there’s no finish line on a blank page. Concepts and outlines aren’t results, only “maybes.” I can spend hours revising, striving for perfection, because nothing needs to be made—just shaped. I can easily exhaust myself at the thought of focusing on one book, and many books, and one essay, and many essays. The repetition of reading and writing is incredibly unappealing, yet they’ve remained passions of mine since the sixth grade.

I started rolling dice because I needed something to do with my hands and my brain. Something repeated but not repetitive. For the last six years my “special interest” has been Dungeons & Dragons, which translated into an obsession with collecting dice (if and when my budget allows). Before I started playing, I developed a dice ritual. Everyday I rolled them in sets: d4’s, then d6’s, then d8’s, etc. I did this until I rolled the maximum number on each die. My ritual became an absentminded form of stimulation, something I’d turn to when I was bored at home, an alternative to scrolling social media or playing games on my phone while sitting in front of my laptop. This practice can take just a few minutes to complete if I roll really well, and some days I can do it for up to an hour, rolling slowly and methodically or messily and frustratedly until I get my desired results. In my creative nonfiction workshop course, we were given the task to develop a side practice; I decided to gamify incentive.

Dice rolling has been a method of circumventing my (possible) AuDHD. The rule set is necessary for success: the d4 represents the 4 essays I planned to revise for the semester, the d8 represents that 8 books on my shelf that I planned for months to finally read, the d6 and d10 represent that various times I allotted to read and revise so that rather than leaving task completion to the horrors of the indefinite, I knew there was a point in time where I’d be required to stop. However, structure is never enough. The dice incorporate a tasteful randomness where I never have to decide what book to read or what essay to revise, otherwise I can easily talk myself out of it. The dice, in removing the burden of choice, require me to switch between projects when they deem it so. They tell me exactly what to do and how long to do it, with options and variety. A near perfect reverse psychology. 

I act in sequence now, after years of behavioral contradictions and searching for ways to trick my brain while needing my brain to be aware of the tricks. The dice don’t create the doing, but they leave me with something I can do without much room for argument. I can leave my thinking to percentages.

Clare Boyle, Articles of Faith, Featuring Drake

*

Dear G, 

It has been seven months since we began talking about God nonstop. Technically, God’s name entered the chat when I was trying to tell you about the light in Arizona. 

But really, we had been walking towards one another on our Godjourneys for a long time. 

You know this: Over the past five years, my life has changed and changed in ways that can sometimes be disorienting. I’ve lived in four cities, in at least ten apartments. I’ve had about that number of jobs. Who’s at the center of my life has changed a lot over this time, sometimes because of friend break ups but also, often, because of banal things: busyness, distance. 

In September, having just moved to another new place, I began needing to trust that there was something inside, or behind, or coursing beneath the surface of life that would remain if everything else fell away. I was not concerned with whether our spirits persist after we die. I was scared of the possibility of a future in which I would feel like there was nothing/no one I loved enough for me to get out of bed, as had happened in the past. This was the fleshy pink center of my Godwanting. 

Your own Godjourney was accelerating around then, too, because of wanting to figure out how to be a good uncle to your sister’s baby without getting fucked up by proximity to her very dogmatic religious community. 

“God” became a recurring feature of 

the Google Doc through which we’ve remained tethered since you moved from Philly to Brooklyn and I moved from Philly to Minneapolis, then Tucson.

To feed our convos, I started mentioning my Godjourney offhand in every conversation to see whose ears perked up, and asking all of those people how they define “faith.” I chose “faith” instead of “God” for a few reasons. It seemed less likely to ruffle feathers as an entry point if an interlocutor had a very rigid definition of God. Also, in what I felt to be its forward-lookingness, “faith” still dealt directly with what I was worried about. This perception of “faith” as future-oriented was soon unseated. 

*

September, 2025 

Lesson: Faith is waking up one day to realize every beautiful thing in your life. - M

Object: Dried rose 

M said this to me when we were sitting beside each other on the curb near the gas station, drinking chocolate milk. The gas station is where I first met M, one hundred degree September afternoon. She was sitting in the shade by the door, asking if anyone could spare change. When I asked if she wanted a snack or drink, she chose chocolate milk. I had to ask the cashier to unlock a literal chain coiled around the refrigerator door in order to buy one for her and one for me. When I handed M her bottle, we bonded over the drink’s delightful efficiency as a drink. (In addition to being sweet, it packs a hefty punch in terms of both carbs and protein.) 

M started talking about God pretty much right away. She explained she was an angel rather than a human, something she had to remind herself when she was being harassed for living on the street. When I asked what faith meant to her, her answer reoriented a lot of things for me–specifically, it reframed faith as a practice of gratitude. That felt, and feels, much more accessible than Trusting the Future™.  

M’s friend, sitting with us, gave me this rose, then in tender bloom. 

*

October, 2025

Lesson: God is inside all of us, and the world is a series of doors. - Sadi

Object: Rock from Sabino Canyon

My old classmate Sadi is actually the person who introduced me to the phrase “God journey” (which I then smashed together here), when she visited Tucson in October for a translation conference. As we sat eating lunch in the grass, she explained that her own God journey–which has involved traveling to shrines across Pakistan to archive Sufi and Bhakti oral poetry–has led her to the understanding that “God is inside all of us, and the world is a series of doors.” The phrase “God is inside all of us” reminded me of something I am still learning, something I have to remember again and again: that devotion to community does not foreclose, and in fact depends upon, nurturing one’s inner life. 

I collected this rock on a hike at Sabino Canyon in October as part of a closing ritual with my Minneapolis therapist, who I continued seeing for my first few months of living in Tucson. To culminate a therapeutic relationship, that therapist asks people to go to a place that’s sacred to them, leave one rock, and take another. They instruct people to write a burden they want to leave behind on the rock that stays in the place, and write one reminder they want to carry forward on the rock they take. 

On the rock I took with me, I wrote two things. On one side, “Prayer is more than an order of words”–my favorite T.S. Eliot quote, which reminds me that effort can look like many things, including, counterintuitively, releasing conscious attention to something troubling me.

On the other side of the rock, I wrote something that sustains the possibility of my inner life. No one else knows what it says. 

November, 2025

Lesson: “No need to ruminate about that, it is God’s plan!”- Us

Object: The “God’s Plan” playlist 

The phrase “God’s Plan” feels tinged with menace after Pete Hegseth’s words about a “Holy War” in Iran, but between us, it began as a way to obstruct rumination. There was some bullshit happening in each of our lives in November, and saying, “No need to ruminate about that, it is God’s plan!” as a joke-not-joke was a way to defuse and redirect thinking we knew wasn’t going to lead us anywhere. 

On the phone, we said it to one another in singsong voices. Walking alone through our lives, we muttered it through gritted teeth and grinned. Then one of us (you, I think) typed it into Spotify. 

The “God’s Plan” playlist began with songs about faith, then swelled to include any notable song that referenced God, then swelled again to anything we listened to obsessively during and after you visited me in Tucson for my birthday (such as “Ten Drunk Cigarettes,” whose lyrics we were, in your words, “Put on this earth to learn”). 

*

Godjourney: 

Trying to figure out the nature of God, the nature of faith, and how articulating those things can orient us to ourselves, one another, and the world. Godjourneys may be undertaken both alone and in partnership. 

Godwanting:

A combination of loneliness and longing that becomes beautiful in the moments it pushes you outwards, in moments it “re-tethers” you to reality, to others. 

To quote a poet we abhor but nonetheless bop to,

I believe in you, and it makes me believe more in the world.