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)

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Ander Monson

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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

What We Need Now More than Ever: Mr. Worldwide

by Mar Katz

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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. 

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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. 

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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.”

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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. 

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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. 

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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.

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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

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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

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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. 

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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”). 

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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. 

My Objects: A Tiny Cabinet Installation by Caroleine James

My Objects: A Tiny Cabinet Installation 

by Caroleine James

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Whenever I move to a new city (Salt Lake City to Tucson, in this case), I take a collection of semi-useless objects with me, for comfort and familiarity. These are a few of my objects. Some of the descriptions of them are true. Some are lies. Some are a mixture of both.

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1. Hammer

Days after my move to Tucson, I used this hammer to construct a Target bookshelf. After constructing this Target bookshelf, I was very proud of myself. The first evidence my Tucson roommates had of my existence was a loud hammering sound that was me constructing my Target bookshelf with this hammer. I don’t have good enough scissors to remove its tag, so if you have some scissors you believe could do the job, let me know.

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2. War of the Worlds Book Remnant

The Illustrated Classics edition of War of the Worlds was one of my favorite books growing up. The book disintegrated years ago, it was a cheap paperback, but I held onto this cover as a keepsake. Plus, it looks cool on my wall, which is where it resides when it isn’t in the cabinet.

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3. Dinosaur with Painted Toenails

I stole this gentleman from my mother’s garden (with permission). He used to guard her dahlias. Now, he guards my windowsill. 

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4. Cat Claw Clip

I used to be a full-on dog person. Then, after I got this cat claw clip as a gift from my sister two Christmasses ago, I started becoming obsessed with cats, particularly black cats, like the one in the clip. What the clip wants is to be in my hair while I hold a black cat in my arms. Once that happens, the clip will be set free.

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5. Page of Imaginary Cutout Letters

I made this page of imaginary cutout letters for a printmaking workshop in college. This page has a personality and that personality is: trickster. Once, while legally using psychedelics, I thought it might be fun to stare at my page of imaginary cutout letters and watch them dance, but the cutout letters REFUSED to move. Instead, when I flipped the page over, the ink splotches on the back marched across the paper like army men. The page of imaginary cutout letters would not do the thing I wanted it to do, but it would do a different, also cool, thing.

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6. I <3 Honor Code Pin

I stole this from my mother (without permission). 

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7. “It’s A Beaver” Shotglass

This is a perfectly effective shotglass, but these days, I mostly use it to hold my earrings. 

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8. Blackberry Sage Candle

A friend of mine named Sage gifted me this awesome Blackberry Sage candle, which I am afraid to use, since I don’t want to deplete it, or burn down my apartment. Sage and I met in a small town in Alaska. She was a radio reporter and I worked for the print newspaper. Recently, she got a sick new job in Colorado and continues to be a person I am proud to know.

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9. Evangelical Comic Book

I found this mini Christian comic book pinned to a public bulletin board in Wrangell, Alaska. I grabbed it because I loved the illustrations, and because I, too, have been tortured by horrifying anticipation of the moment when Jesus and I will get together to watch a supercut video of all my worst behavior on a big screen. Is any amount of shame enough to expunge the guilt of sin? I think not. But looking the worst thing you’ve ever done in the face is, I believe, a useful skin-thickening exercise.

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10. King Cake Baby

I got lucky once and picked the King Cake slice with the baby in it. In all likelihood, I have already spent the luck I gained from this baby, so if you need luck, ask for him, and I will be happy to pass him on to you. 

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11. Small Silver Dinosaur

His name is Norman.

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12. Rayme’s Bar Token, Good For One Drink

One time, I danced on the table at Rayme’s Bar in a tube top to the tune of “Pour Some Sugar On Me,” and the patrons rained these tokens down on me, I’m not kidding. I have a whole bin of them back home.

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13. Jordan/U.S. Flag Pin

Jordan and the United States of America are two of the world’s many countries. This pin represents that fact.

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14. Stone Turtle

His name is Oliver.

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15. Sewing Kit

One time, before a high-stakes job interview, one of the buttons popped off my button-up shirt, due to my chest being so voluptuous. Thankfully, I had this sewing kit with me, and was able to repair my shirt before the interview. The interview went great and I got the job. Then, I got fired. After getting fired, I applied for this nonfiction MFA, where I plan to write a book-length memoir-slash-expose about the events that led to my firing. It’s a great story. I hope it gets turned into a movie. I hope that movie is a musical. Tate McRae would play the role of ME, in a stunning film debut.

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16. Retractable Claw Herb Chopper

I believe this herb chopper could be an extremely effective close combat weapon, similar to brass knuckles, except sharper. I have not had the opportunity to test it, either as a weapon, or as an herb chopper, yet.

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17. Shakespeare Bust Paperweight

David Sedaris gifted me this Shakespeare bust paperweight. After attending one of his readings in Connecticut, I stood in line for a long time to talk to him. The line moved slowly because David’s whole thing was having an in-depth conversation with each person, and giving them a memento from his “bag of crap.” When he got to me, he told me that his landlord had given him this paperweight with the injunction to NEVER GIVE IT AWAY. So, looking me solemnly in the eye, he gave me the paperweight, and said, NEVER GIVE THIS AWAY. Obviously, I have to give it away someday, but I haven’t figured out who to give it to. If you’re a big David Sedaris fan, maybe I’ll give it to you. 

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18. Bunny Head

One time, in middle school, after getting heavily bullied for wearing Vibram Five Finger shoes, I went for a walk around the block, alone and crying. In an instance of divine providence, I stumbled across this Bunny Head on the sidewalk. I put it on, returned to school, and used its frightening, mascaraed face to startle my bullies into submission. Soon, everyone started wearing Vibram Five Finger shoes just like me, because they were (and are) such a cool variety of shoe. And I still keep this Bunny Head with me, just in case. 

Hyland Fittro, Peanut Patch Passing

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Peanut Patch Passing

by Hyland Fittro

Once as a boy, I saw a man race. A week before, he’d shattered his ankle in a wreck of another car. It was a common enough thing to get hurt racing, you can’t drive a vehicle at high speeds and crash without at least being bumped and bruised, and occasionally breaking a lower limb to the point they have to put you in a cast the size of Texas. Anyway, that man won the race I was watching. His name was Brad Keslowski.

Everyone has a couple of moments that shape their life, and I think watching that happen was one for me. As a 10-year-old, seeing someone overcome what sounds like the most painful injury possible to win a 500-mile race around some weird track in Pennsylvania is formative. It’s inspiring, it’s impressive, and it kind of had me questioning whether or not complaining about the squash I had for dinner was a smaller problem than I thought. Suddenly my bigger problem was that I couldn’t buy a model car of Brad Keslowski’s because his sponsor was Miller Lite, and I was 10 years old.

For the years to come, I’d watch a lot of races, mostly with my grandfather. I saw a lot of men overcome injuries, insurmountable deficits, and all manner of other challenges to win races. My grandfather would tell me stories of watching other racers overcome all sorts of challenges in his younger days as well: crappy cars in the 70s, ill-fitting engines in the 40s, and the occasional time where a driver would get arrested for moonshining right before a race and have to cancel. I loved listening to those stories with my grandad; they brought a life to this sport we were watching that I wouldn’t have known about without him.

Most of all though, he loved telling me stories of one southern legend: the Lady in Black. She’s located in South Carolina, deep in the heart of southern territory, surrounded by miles of peanut patches, and shrunk oddly at one end thanks to a duck pond. It’s one of the oldest tracks in north America, an awkward egg-shaped oval with high banks and a fearsome reputation. The tight corners and inconsistent banking make the track incredibly difficult to race, earning it the moniker: “Too Tough to Tame.” My grandfather frequently would visit to watch the races, and he’d tell me stories about the old wooden bleachers, the smell of peanuts, and the constant sight of drivers brushing the white and red wall, leaving burnt black stripes along the edges, giving the track its other nickname: Lady in Black.

I loved listening to those stories. Every individual track has a story of its own, a mythos it builds from the moment ground is broken on it. Daytona is home to the greatest stories in American racing history. Indianapolis is the pinnacle of racing in the world. Talladega is the haunted ring of speed in the south. And Darlington is where men went to test themselves and their cars in ways that felt unreal. Some won, most lost, and some found incredible ways to fail. Just read up about the man who somehow launched himself over the fence and into the parking lot. Everyone thought he was dead, until they realized the jug of spilled tomato juice in his destroyed car was not in fact blood. Great story to hear while watching drivers whip around the track. 

How this track connected to Brad Keslowski, and me by extent, was a bit interesting. Because funnily enough Brad won there a couple times. A daredevil like him was bound to happen eventually. He won, got his name carved in the trophy for the rest of time, and drank a Miller Lite while sitting on his 2 car. But that wasn’t the win that I remember when I think of Darlington. 

It was what happened in 2024. 

By then I was a little bit less of the enthused, bright-eyed child watching a daredevil, and more of a slightly depressed post college dude watching a childhood fixture of his slowly become less relevant. Brad was aging, I was… also aging, and when Darlington rolled around in Spring of that year I turned it on hoping for a distraction from the monotony of life. As for Brad, he was facing a new challenge: he’d just become a team owner in Nascar, owning, operating, and driving his own car. For the uninitiated, this is INCREDIBLY hard to do. Not only was Brad having to deal with all the stress of racing his car, but he had to manage day-to-day repairs, staffing for his team, and finding sponsors to pay the bills. It’s like running an NFL team… while also playing quarterback. Tough stuff, and he was doing it in the twilight of his career. 

I knew all of this as I turned on the tv, but I didn’t really think about it as the race unfolded. I vaguely noticed the flashy new Castrol sponsor on his hood, and the metallic number 6 that was now on the sides and top of his car, but that was it.

Until the daredevil came back. 

Late in the race, Brad had managed to drive close to the lead but wasn’t especially close. Two other drivers were battling for it, and Brad was comfortably nestled in 3rd place, on track for a solid, drama free day, without any Darlington stripes on his car either. It had been a couple years since he won a race, and like most older racers it was sort of just accepted that he might not again. Most got the impression he was… well, rather like me: going through the motions, getting by alright, and ready to move on. 

Then the two guys ahead of him hit each other. 

It wasn’t hard contact, but they’d gotten side by side and were racing each other close and hard. Neither was giving an inch, and both really wanted to win the race. A win at Darlington is historic, no matter how you slice it. But making contact while racing for the lead is risky. Especially when you have a veteran daredevil behind you, one who is stressed, overworked, and hadn’t won a race in a couple years. 

What came next was proof that no matter how badly the grind takes you down, no matter how tough to tame a place is, a man with no fear cannot be stopped.

Brad gunned it, drove right up on his battling competitors, and swung below them, nearly to the inside wall of the track. Dust flew, both drivers above him stared down the track, and Brad somehow passed both in a single, glorious move. It was a move that I have never seen at Darlington, and one I don’t imagine most drivers would like making. But Brad Keslowski wasn’t most drivers. He was a savvy veteran with guts, intelligence, and the sheer will to win.

And win he did. He left both his competitors in the dust behind him, becoming the first owner/driver to win at Darlington in decades. It was an achievement unlike any other, and it genuinely had me falling off the couch in shock as I saw it. Not just because of the move to win, but the sheer amazement at what he’d managed to do. Somehow despite all that madness in his life, Brad Keslwski tamed the Lady in Black.

And as I watched him burnout on the front stretch of the track, smoking his tires and pumping his fist in celebration to a roaring crowd, I must admit I felt a cheer myself. Because to my shock, for the second time in my life Brad Keslwski had showed me that I might have the wrong idea about some things. Maybe life, despite its grinds, its challenges, and its unwavering desire to beat you down, doesn’t always win. All it took to convince me of that was crazy pass on a track in the middle of a peanut patch. And this time, I was old enough to buy the model of his car :)