The kids finish their school years, David Remnick: Stanley Cup champion, Joshua Boger and the criminal mindset, correspondence, em dashes, the origin of dead Thomas's last words

Friday 6/12/26

Last Friday, my nephew Charlie finished sixth grade and his sister Lilah finished fourth grade. Well, not technically. Camp started for them on Monday, so they sat out the actual last day of school. Lilah's class had been challenged to read 300 pages over the last two weeks of the school year. There was a contest, with the winner receiving a lunch delivered from an eatery of their choosing. Lilah won, having read 1300 pages.

I wonder what percentage of Americans read that many pages in their lifetime. I'm sure now it's less than one percent. This is my problem. It's my problem more intensely than it is anyone else's, and my problem more intensely and impactful than any other problem is anyone else's. Because there goes anything for me. Unless I find a way around that or to reverse it. I can have nothing without readers.

My sister invited my mom over for dinner that night--just coincidentally--which Amelia, whose last day of kindergarten was on Monday (having no camp to go to on that day), interpreted as being a nod to the older kids finishing their school years. Predictably, she expected my mom to be there in recognition of the completion of hers on Monday, and I imagine she was, though I don't know this for certain as I write these words.

I was told, though, about one of Lilah's recent softball games--a playoff contest--that my mother attended. Lilah was pitching late in the game. I believe her team was up by a run. She surrendered the lead, though, and the other team went ahead. Lilah came off the field and started crying.

This surprised me some--I didn't necessarily think that Lilah was that invested in these outcomes. She plays softball and lacrosse. I think she likes being with her friends. Whereas, Charlie is more serious about how he plays and how his teams fare.

My sister took Lilah to the bathroom to get her cleaned-up and regrouped and she was late coming back for her at-bat in that half of the inning. Lilah hustled to the plate, and got a hit that knocked in the winning run.

There's something in that, isn't there? I don't mean a victory of lasting significance from the end of one's fourth grade year. This is how sports are useful and why playing sports matters. That matters differently when you're a kid than when you're an adult. But make no mistake, it can matter a goodly amount in both cases.

Most people in publishing, for instance, never played sports, as if you can't tell. They've never lost. They've always been handed things. Whether that's money, awards, jobs, compliments their work doesn't merit. Pulitzers. New Yorker staff writer gigs. New Yorker editor in chief gigs. What have you.

They were never competing, even in the sports that children play. They never got knocked on their ass. They never took a ball to the face. They never got a beat down at the hands of a team of kids who were much more talented than they were.

That happens and it's good for you. It should happen to you in your life, and it's better when it happens early. Someone comes along and eats your proverbial lunch. There's nothing you can do about it. They're better. They're a lot better. But, you keep trying. Maybe someday it'll be different. But on that day? You are eating your humble pie instead.

David Remnick, as one example, would have that exponentially better team--which is me, in this analogy--banned/banished/locked out...for being exponentially better. Then take home a trophy that people just like him, who operated the same way as he did, and got their trophies in this same manner, rather than through actually prevailing against and beating anyone on a level playing field, handed him.

None of it is real. None of it speaks to talent. Being good at anything. Being better at something than others. I mean, come on. Tommy Orange doesn't write better than your kid who you doesn't want to write his paper for school. But if your kid wrote something about his day, say, and elected to do so honestly, what your kid wrote would have far more value as writing than anything Tommy Orange has ever written or ever will.

And someone else, being honest, and not trying to strike a certain pose in order to be seen a certain way--which the smart person knows is really only as a fool and a fraud--would rather read what that kid wrote about how they feel, their doubts, what they're worried about, what they did on an afternoon that no one else knew about--maybe something they said to the crossing guard who'd had some setback in life the kids were aware of--than Tommy Orange doing his canned shtick for the people who'd ignore good writing if it bit them on the ass because they've never organically, honestly, truly read anything. That is to say, they've never even really read in their lives. They were doing something else whenever they said they were.

Reading is reading. There isn't anything else hovering around it or that you're trying to get coming back to you/credited to you (praise, attention, standing). Taking War and Peace to the coffee shop to be seen reading it or the like isn't reading. Not real reading. Name dropping and status chasing aren't reading. Allyship--please--isn't reading. Real reading is the ends unto itself. And, in that, it can become these other things, and power aspects of your life, your thinking, your feelings, your mind, your imagination, yourself.

These publishing people would want to be handed the Stanley Cup without ever having played a game. They'd have no shame in that. They're like Donald Trump this way, which, of course, they'd never have the self-awareness to be able to see.

And when you make them aware of what they truly are--which they spend their whole lives trying to avoid--you are the devil. It's like a criminal mindset. The criminal has rage and hate for the person who has the video tape of them doing their criminal acts. They don't blame themselves for doing it and being that way. They blame the person who has the evidence.

Remember Joshua Berger? Okay, not publishing, but publishing adjacent, and defender of Remnick's buddy David Sedaris, who said that the disabled don't deserve to work on account that they might inconvenience or annoy him when he's out shopping.

That's evil, right? Only an evil person has that belief.

And what did Joshua Berger do when presented with this evidence--really no different than video evidence, save that it was textual, right there in front of both of our eyes to be seen--when I stood before him with that evidence? He went off on me. He accused me. I was the bad person.

See? That's the criminal mindset.

Having the mindset--the mental make-up--of a criminal doesn't mean you commit crimes. (Though people do get in touch with me with allegations of criminal behavior regarding various people mentioned in this record, which don't make it to these pages--or haven't yet--because I don't have verification that they're true, even if I don't personally have much doubt.) It's a way of being. A bad way of being. It's how evil people are. Being evil isn't necessarily a crime. It is often worse than being a criminal.

I was proud of Lilah for this bounce-back effort. Not on account of the result per se, but the getting back in there and scrapping.

Her brother Charlie was giving her advice and support from the stands. Not a lot of brothers would do that. Not at that age. He also got behind the plate and warmed Lilah up between innings when she was pitching. They were all going for ice cream one recent day with my mom, walking from the community center in town. I think Amelia had had a dance recital. Charlie took my mother's arm and walked with her. It's not that she can't walk, of course, but just to make sure she didn't have any difficulties. And that's just the type of young man he is. I am proud of him as well. Because being that way isn't a common thing. And it's less common as our world wears on.

The following is a text exchange with my sister from a day or two after my mother told me of these doings, unbeknownst to Kara.

Lilah and Charlie's last day of school-they're skipping the official last day on Monday to go to camp instead. We just found out this morning that she won her class read-a-thon. They were challenged to read 300 pages over the last 2 weeks of school, and she read I think closer to 1,300 pages. She got to pick a special lunch to be delivered to school today via DoorDash and chose Shake Shack-went all in with a burger, fries and a milkshake!

Please congratulate Lilah for me. Of course, reading is its own reward. Tell her I'm proud of her, too, for getting back in there after she gave up some runs and scrapping away. A person has to be able to come back or they can't be much of a person. And that's in little things and big things. I don't check social media because of the state of my life and the precarity of my day-to-day situation. It's always up in the air now if I'll get to tomorrow. So if you want to send me things directly--curate, if you will--to let me know what's going on, I'd appreciate that. Tell Charlie I'm also proud of him. He's a good person. He cares about people other than himself.

I mention not looking at social media. What that really refers to is it's hard for me to see people living in nice houses, in comfort, given how I live. And level at which I do what I do, how hard I work at it. I can't see that right now. Thus, I don't seek out seeing it. I have everything I can handle right now to try and keep living to tomorrow.

One will note an em dash in my text to Kara. We've reached a point in our collective cultural illiteracy where it's been revealed that most people have no idea as what constitute the most basic building blocks of language and grammar. I'm going to talk about this more later in these pages, but an em dash is so basic to basic writing, that you can accurately compare it to one of the simplest things, one of the most "given" things in a carpenter's tool kit.

What would you find there? A hammer. Measuring tape. Sandpaper.

An em dash, as far as the written word goes, is on that level of basic. So when people see one and think they've made this discovery of chicanery, that's like opening the carpenter's tool kit and seeing a hammer and thinking this is pretty damn fishy.

Think of how clueless you'd have to be in order to be that way. That is precisely how illiterate most people are. That the prose/grammatical equivalent of the hammer, the measuring tape, the piece of sandpaper, is this brand new thing to them that isn't ordinary.

Periods, commas, em dashes--they're all basically on the same level of basic. Again, this just speaks to how no one ever reads anything and/or can't remember anything about anything they've ever read. Because they're not even really reading it when they do read it. It's just passing before their eyes.

I'll conclude this entry by revealing something because it ties in to the subject of school and also various other matters actuating this entry. One remembers the recent-ish prose off--the first pitting the work of a writer from history against my work, rather than just your standard Junot Diaz/Joshua Cohen/George Saunders types--involving the famous conclusion, oft-touted as the best prose in history, from James Joyce's "The Dead," which was obliterated in terms of quality by the excerpt from my own "Dead Thomas." Anyone in publishing looking at that entry would know and knows that there is no comparison between the writing of the man presently writing this entry and anyone. Anyone now, anyone before. Anyone TK, as they would render it.

Therein is the problem. And therein is what has always been the problem. It's what the deal was with a Carolyn Kuebler all along. And a Wendy Lesser. A Michael Ray. I'm merely saying it out loud now. David Remnick, seeing that side-by-side comparison, would admit, if his life depended on it, that Fleming is the far superior writer to Joyce. You can't look at that and be like, "Nope, it's Jimmy J," or "It's close," or "Art is subjective!" because that's all bollocks. If you actually read what has been written.

That's why I wasn't allowed to be in the room with these people. You want to win the Stanley Cup without being any good? What if you have the option to make it so that the your opponent doesn't get to even make to the rink to skate in the game? That's what we're talking here. Can't let me lace 'em up. Not if you want to be seen as the best. The smartest. Whatever the case may be. I'll say it again: go ahead and look at that comparison of a random passages from "Dead Thomas" and the conclusion of James Joyce's "The Dead." Read that entry. Read it with hate in your hate, if you wish. With the highest hope of seeing that the Joyce is better. If you're someone against me. Read it with as much bias as you can muster.

Won't make any difference. Anyone would know in their heart that it's not close between those two writers. In publishing, this being true won't get you backed, awarded, allowed a seat at the table. It'll get you shunned. It'll make you, above all, he who must not be allowed entry. The money that could be made doesn't matter. The plaudits by association--as in, "This is our guy!"--don't matter. What matters is the upkeep of ego. These people would devour their own faces if that's what it took to maintain their fragile/house-of-cards egos. Fragile because they're not based in anything real, anything meritorious, anything legitimate.

Anyway, it was nearly two years ago, when I was at Haymarket procuring fruits and vegetables to help with my heart health, so that I could continue on in what is a life of nothing but suffering because of what I am and how people feel about themselves in relation to what that is. Which is ironic--that I take these steps, and am so dogged in my commitment with these measures, to live longer, when I have no reason to live, and my life is nothing but an absolute of pain. What am I doing? I don't know.

The kids were about to start school. The older kids. As I got my fruits and vegetables, I came up with this line to tell my sister to tell them. A jokey line. Kind of like a self-aware pun. Something funny because it knew it wasn't funny on its face, but funny in a certain context of knowing what the remark really was.

The kids' names are immortalized in "Best Present Ever," the only work of fiction I've made available for full in these pages. That is, one can read the entire story, which is also better than anything before, at present, or TK, by anyone else, with no way of someone being able to remark--not that they could with the excerpts either--"Well, maybe that was just the best part he put up there." It's all the best part.

But then I didn't tell my sister my message for the kids on that late summer-bleeding-into-fall day. Because almost immediately it had become something else. And that was the last words spoken by dead Thomas in "Dead Thomas," the greatest last words in all of art. In context. But it has to be in context. That doesn't mean it's relative. It means in context. There is no relativity. Things are things.

Those last words of Thomas's are said earlier in the story by Bonita's friend Rachel during a crucial moment in science class pertaining to the making of energy. Rachel makes a certain kind of joke. She normally makes these kinds of "bad" jokes because she's awkward, self-conscious, trying to fit in, nervous. But here, she has a different purpose, and what she does for someone else, and the way she does it, the self-awareness with which she does it, surprises even Bonita, her best friend. And later, during the moment of his passing--or, if you prefer, his second passing--we see what Rachel's words--and her gesture--meant for Thomas as well.

When I have something like this, I can't share it with anyone until after. I can't talk about it in these pages. It has to be just mine. Or else it changes. And during the creating, it must be only mine. It's like knowing this great secret of the universe and it's not okay to share it because that will hinder that information in doing what it needs to do first. But once it has done it, then I'm free to discuss.