Chopping leeks for breakfast this morning it occurred to me that you can’t just keep peeling the less-than-ideal layers off of a leek. That’s all a leek is, really: ringed layers staggered in a series of Vs of nature’s own design. Dirt gets in between them but you can’t really rinse it out. You peel too much and you end up with a whole lot less than you ought out of this misguided desire for clarity, cleanliness, perfection.

This has little to do with anything. But I have noticed recently a tension arising between my values and what is really required in order to carry them out.

To wit: this winter I made the acquaintance of a young man who is homeless and schizophrenic, by which I mean that he showed up on our porch one frigid night looking for help and has been back on it many times since. Those first few visits, it was easy enough to live my values: he needed food, money, a ride, someplace warm to sit for an hour, and these are easy enough to give.

But as his success in getting what he asked of us increased, so did the frequency of his visits, until at the peak of winter he was showing up four or five times a week. This turned into annoyance, and I’m ashamed to say some anger, on my part; many of these knocks on the door came well after eleven p.m. or before seven a.m., when we were warm in bed with no intention of leaving it. Which of course is nauseating to think about saying to someone who’s out in the snow in his socks.

This is what I mean, about shame. It’s easy enough to believe that everyone should give money to the homeless and probably go further than that. It’s harder to be roused from bed at what feels like a terrible hour and engage with someone who is perfectly rational in his desire to keep you on the hook as long as possible because it’s another warm minute and a better chance of getting something to eat on a night that could kill from the cold. I drive him around sometimes from place to place to place as he changes his mind about where he wants to go, and if most of his speech makes no sense to me the logic behind it certainly does.

And it all forces me to think: how much differently would I actually be willing to live in order to help someone to the degree that they need it? How do I balance my responsibilities toward those in the life I’ve created with those I have toward the stranger? As I’ve gotten to know him better I’ve had some success setting boundaries around the frequency and hours of his visits, and how much money I can reasonably give him, but even setting those boundaries can feel like a failure. If his needs are an inconvenience to me, they’re certainly far worse than that to him.

In the light of day as I type these thoughts I don’t like to think about the nighttime version of myself who can feel so hostile to the summons of the world. But that’s still me, after all.

All of this is, I’d guess, part of what has made the fascism of individualized conservatism so appealing to so many people in recent years. If your values demand engagement with the hard, messy work of being with other people, of loving other people, of learning to confront the distance between your beliefs and their practice, well: it’s a struggle you’ll be in your whole life, and you’ll fall short, especially if you’re trying to save others from harm. If your values demand none of those things, you can succeed pretty easily, I’d think, by dint of washing your hands of the rest of the human race and blaming them all for their own problems. Secure the homestead and fantasize about the apocalypse that would allow you to kill them all without consequence. There’s an emptiness in that approach I can’t possibly imagine. But it does seem easier than the other, especially if you can’t conceive of what you’re missing out on.

It is maybe impossible for any of us to live at the level of our intentions. But I am trying to work through the paralytic feeling of shame that comes when I notice the size of the gap between what I’m doing and what I’d like to have done, which doesn’t serve anyone.

Oddly enough I’ve picked up a mantra for this from the opening scene of the 1977 film Slap Shot. In it, hapless Charlestown Chiefs goalie Denis Lemieux attempts to explain some of the finer points of hockey to the audience of Jim Carr’s Sports Talk. This devolves into Lemieux demonstrating various penalties on Carr, and then waxing poetic about the nature of penalties themselves.

You do that, you go to the box, you know. Two minutes by yourself, and you feel shame, you know. And then you get free.

It’s a silly moment in an outrageous movie, but I’m in love with that line. I know I need to learn to sit quietly with the discomfort of my inevitable shortcomings, and then find some other way of living with them, for they cannot be solved. Two minutes by yourself, you feel shame, and then you get free. Two minutes by yourself, you feel shame, and then you get free.

Thanks, as always, for reading. I’ll talk to you next time.

-Chuck

PS - If you liked what you read here, why not subscribe and get this newsletter delivered to your inbox each week? It’s free and always will be, although there is a voluntary paid subscription option if you’d like to support Tabs Open that way.

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PPS - If you’re in the Detroit area, I’ll be reading some poems at Book Suey in Hamtramck on May 1 for their May Day event celebrating the renewal of spring and the international working class. Details here!

I’m back in my hometown of Fayetteville, New York for a few days. Every time I’m here I’m struck by what a beautiful place it was to grow up. Not a perfect one—as a relatively well-to-do suburb, there is plenty of the usual moral rot and indifference to, if not outright championing of, suffering at home and abroad—but it is beautiful.

By beautiful I mostly mean green. I grew up in, under, and around trees, as did those of my peers lucky enough not to be so wealthy as to live in the newest McMansion developments on top of the bare, razed hilltops on the southern end of our district. (I’m sorry that the disgust keeps leaking out of me even as I try to write about something beautiful. There’s still a lot to love. Back to the trees.)

There are many I’ve fallen in love with over the years: the oak a block from our house whose acorns I would fill my pockets with and admire, the Douglas-firs that form the windbreak beside the middle school bus garage. The Norway spruce I planted as a seedling in our backyard in first grade, which some thirty years later has grown to what must be sixty feet tall, and in which untold jays and crows and cardinals and mourning doves now socialize. Just this morning, on my walk to the coffee shop, I noticed by my dad’s house a crown-cropped tree that is now growing upward in four separate compass pointed trunks where they depart from the terminus of the original.

To the extent I have a point it’s that everyone deserves a childhood this green. A childhood where birdsong and insect hum are everpresent, nurtured by the unending creep of the forest. Shaded sidewalks, real parks. A chance to be outside in a living and healthy world. For days I have thought of little but the children of Iran buried in the rubble of the school that my country has destroyed. For years I have thought of little but the children of Palestine buried in the rubble of the nation that my country has destroyed. Horrors beyond comprehension, but not mythic ones: horrors made right here at home by people who cannot see that every child is a universe unto itself. That everyone deserves a childhood as green as my own.

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Note: This piece was originally accepted for publication in a Midwestern literary magazine back in the fall, and then they pulled the rug on me in December after I made some updates they’d asked for. So instead of waiting for another round of reading periods and submission windows to open elsewhere, I’ll share it with you here. Since it doesn’t meet their needs, I hope it meets yours.

The fish had come home some months before. Probably not a year. Then, it had seemed like a long time they were with us, but that was likely a matter of proportion: I myself had only been around a little while.

Whether we had asked for the fish or if our mom had bought them of her own volition I can’t remember. I remember their names: Mo, a redcap, for my older brother; Swimmy and Panther, two black bubble-eyed telescope goldfish, for me. My younger brother was too young then to have a fish even nominally attached to him.

I knew, I think, as a child, that the world of adults was an inscrutable one; that they functioned according to different rules, different priorities. I did not presume to become one; we were simply different types of people. It was only when we got the fish that it occurred to me that the lives of other things might also function according to laws beyond what I knew, and so might be worth pondering.

Over the span of a few weeks Panther began to turn from black to orange before my eyes. What kind of panther was he? Better I had waited and called him Tiger, or something, but I had not, and so I was left to lament that my fish and his name were no longer a match, that either Panther or I had chosen our course poorly. (Swimmy, when she turned, was consequently less of a blow.)

I came home with my dad one evening, probably from soccer practice, to find my mom sitting on the side of the bathtub holding Mo in a plastic measuring cup. He was upside down. She was stirring the water back and forth with her finger and speaking words of encouragement, and after each stroke he would move for a while under his own power before drifting to a halt again.

Right around the time my mom was holding Mo in that plastic measuring cup, my elementary school curriculum was covering some of American history’s heavy hitters with units on Abraham Lincoln and Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. We learned not only about their struggles for freedom but about the grisly, possibly inevitable ends they each met. The stories of their lives could not be told to us without the stories of their deaths. What better way to illustrate the significance of all they had said and done?

There was nothing for me, then, that separated the murders of Lincoln and King, the illustrations from books showing processions of mourners and railcars draped in black bunting, from the image of my mom’s face when she emerged from her bathroom vigil to tell us that Mo had stopped swimming for good. All of it, those balcony gunshots a century apart, the round body wrapped neatly in toilet paper in her outstretched palm, belonged to the same dark side of existence, to a set of facts that, once learned, became for me as toothpaste squeezed from the tube: no going back. I knew, suddenly and clearly, that death was true, and that I did not want it to be. And if it were true, it certainly wasn’t fair, for neither Mo nor King nor Lincoln deserved it.

I learned the lesson again as each of the other fish of our household succumbed to the same fate. And then again with the series of fish we got to replace them, and with a hardy crayfish brought home from a class project, and with a pair of mice that kept escaping their plastic home into our human one, and with a succession of finches my mom adopted when the school where she taught no longer wanted them, and with a pair of tree frogs I inherited from my older brother’s ex-girlfriend, and with a family dog who hung around us for twelve decent years.

Ours was always a household of creatures, and I wanted, then, each time, to put death back beyond my reach. To send death elsewhere, to live a life entirely without the pain of mortality—for myself and for all the people and animals I loved.

But of course the pain came. Of course there is always pain coming. Why should we be exempt? The deer runs through the deep meadow and emerges quivering, paralyzed by ticks. The wolf breaks one leg and runs on three for two agonizing months. The bird and the window, the bird and the windshield. The jaws of the trap are set with every birth and sprung again and again with neither malice nor morality anywhere in the reckoning.

I claim to understand this even as I shy from the implications. It’s easy enough to pluck examples from the animal world like I’m scripting a nature documentary. It’s harder to look honestly upon the time to come when I’ll own a suit I wear to funerals, when its black elbows will turn soapworn with use. It’s hard for me to sit with notions of any end, be it sudden or dwindling: a first drive to the hospital, a final drive to the vet. Most of my life is constructed around the basic truth that the pain is coming, and that I would rather it didn’t. In fact I would rather not think about it at all.

Every morning—too early—I beam the news of the world straight into my face upon waking. The pain is everywhere, it turns out, and at a scope that makes that first lesson feel so distant that it might belong to another life entirely. Death as a single stilled body of scales is one thing, but the words themselves have to get bigger along with the size of the catastrophe. Catastrophe, there’s one. Annihilation, that’s another. In childhood, at that first moment, I was called to reckon with an upside down fish as the end of an entire universe. The distance between that single apocalypse of fish and the wanton suffering I am expected to simply observe and countenance now is staggering. Numbing, mind-boggling, stupefying. More big words. So many universes collapse at once all over the world each day that I find myself wondering how every bit of matter hasn’t disappeared down some black hole by now. Most of the time this feels like the only result that would be commensurate with the breadth of the horrors.

But recently a dog I cared about deeply—not mine—died at a ripe old age. And while his loss hit me hard, what perhaps shocked me most was that for the first time in recent memory, my grief felt the right size. It was recognizable, understandable. Able to be named and reckoned with inside a single human heart. In the absence of that wizened little body, I found not the same old longing for death to disappear, but a gratitude to have found an instance of it that was comprehensible at all. The smallest of mercies; one last gift from a little guy who gave me plenty. For I know now that to love the living is to love the dead. Friends, family, dogs, fish, houseplants. Uncountable masses will pass me by on earth each day before my turn.

Well, but that’s the deal, isn’t it? And there’s no backing out of it. You take the deal because you have no choice. But you can still choose.

Some choices:

Last week I ushered a big spider out of the house and into the yard. Spiders always fight me on this, though they never say whether it’s because they don’t understand what I’m doing or because they understand all too well. It’s warm in the house, and there are plenty of opportune corners, and it’s getting cold outside in our thorny garden.

This week I set two mousetraps. They both went off. My wife gathered the little bundles of mouse from where they lay in the pantry. We took them to the woodpile, said a few words that were prayer and apology all in one. Buried them. Went back inside and held our own dog and cried.

Some days it’s clear that I am still that child waiting outside the bathroom, head full of black bunting, with no idea what to do about the end.

Thanks, as always, for reading. I’ll talk to you next time.

-Chuck

PS - If you liked what you read here, why not subscribe and get this newsletter delivered to your inbox each week? It’s free and always will be, although there is a voluntary paid subscription option if you’d like to support Tabs Open that way.

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In the 2006 film The Departed, there’s a line Matt Damon’s crooked cop says to his girlfriend, a therapist played by Vera Farmiga, that’s been echoing around my brain lately.

If we’re not gonna make it, it’s gotta be you that gets out, ‘cause I’m not capable. I’m fuckin’ Irish, I’ll deal with something being wrong my whole life.

That last bit, I mean. I’ve always prided myself on my coping skills, on sticking it out, on being able to deal with something being wrong indefinitely—maybe even for my whole life.

There are some obvious drawbacks to this way of living. I say obvious; they’ve only recently become so for me. Not least of which is the realization that if your only coping mechanism is, well, coping, you haven’t given yourself a lot to fall back on when you inevitably find yourself unable to cope.

And this realization has led to some hard questions. Namely: am I really resilient, am I really coping—do I really not care enough to be affected by less-than-ideal situations—or am I trying to avoid the hard work, the responsibility, of caring?

If I’m honest with myself, it’s more often the latter than I’d care to admit. Some of it always has been. It takes work to care about what happens to you, and because it’s work, sometimes (often) I just don’t feel like doing it. There’s also a gendered aspect to this, and at my worst moments I find myself playacting a sitcom husband, internally pissing and moaning about being expected to have an opinion on which drawer the Tupperware should go in. Or what we’re having for dinner—I’ll eat anything! (Except whatever I’m not in the mood for, which is often the sensible, healthy, mildly labor-intensive option that my bewilderingly viceless wife has just suggested.)

This is something I’m working on. Maybe because it’s actually exhausting to live this way, too, in a life with infinite choices: to treat each and every one like an inconvenience and a chore. I would have a lot less to pride myself on enduring, it turns out, if I didn’t treat every little thing as something to be endured.

You may have seen what Kurt Vonnegut had to say about going out and buying envelopes:1

I find that Vonnegut story a nice companion to this tweet I’ve seen floating around lately:

I like this idea: that buying an envelope can be a dance, that going to the grocery store (a task that, when done at the wrong time, or at the Wegman’s in Dewitt, NY, or at the Whole Foods on Mack Avenue in Detroit, makes me feel the way I imagine it would feel to be hunted for sport) can be a dance. That these activities, too, are an opportunity to be embraced. That it is only the baseline of routine that keeps us inhibited from the wonder of day-to-day life.

Something I don’t have to practice feeling this way about is driving my car, and I think the roads would be safer if everyone else did, too. I have been bored on plenty of car trips, but being behind the wheel? Hoo boy. I can’t imagine anything more stimulating, which means I truly can’t understand the people who, even with years of addictive conditioning, manage to reach for their phone to do other stuff while they’re at it. I mean, it’s a staggering thing, being out there. Every day I hit the road and I travel at speeds inaccessible for 99.99% of human history to anyone who wasn’t actively falling off a cliff. I see more square miles of the country in a month than my ancestors did in a lifetime. I may hate what it’s doing to the planet, I may hate the behaviors of other drivers, but I do love driving.

In that same vein I’ve started monitoring trail cams on social media to get a sense, from the animals, of what it’s like to be delighted by, or at least attentive to, the seemingly mundane.

Maybe this is the way out of shirking the labor of being alive, of having needs and desires. Maybe it’s not a trick to learn that there’s real joy in getting to choose how you live every day, even when it’s easier to give in to the slop.

Thanks, as always, for reading. I’ll talk to you next time.

-Chuck

PS - If you liked what you read here, why not subscribe and get this newsletter delivered to your inbox each week? It’s free and always will be, although there is a voluntary paid subscription option if you’d like to support Tabs Open that way.

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A few weeks ago I went backpacking in Michigan for the first time, up in the northwest corner of the mitten. The pinky, I guess.

Despite the cold of the season, there were plenty of people out on trail. It is Michigan, after all, which is full of Michiganders. But by the time night fell, at all of 6:30 pm, I was totally alone.

I don’t mind this, really. Or it’s not that I don’t mind, but that the minding is part of what I go out there for in the first place. It gives me the willies, at least a little bit, each time I sleep out in the woods alone. And that’s alright. There’s a fragment of a line from Jack Gilbert’s “I Imagine the Gods” that I’ve come back to for years and years, wherein the poem’s speaker begs his deities: frighten me into the present.

That’s what I’m looking for out there. The presentness more than the fright, but if one’s the cost of admission to the other, it’s a relatively small price to pay. Curled up there in my tent, looking at my own breath in the light of my headlamp and drifting between wakefulness and sleep from sundown to sunrise, I always remember: this place belongs to them. Them being what hiker and author Carrot Quinn calls stickbreakers. The various little scurrying things that surround you in the woods at night, by virtue of the fact that they live there. They thrive there.

The night lands belong to them, not only spatially but temporally: they’re meant to be out and about in the hours when I am in my sleeping bag wondering about them. I can’t see a thing in the dark. What little power of hearing or smell I have is rendered meaningless by the creek next to which I’ve pitched my tent. All I can hear is creek. All I can smell is cold.

Barry Lopez, in his seminal Arctic Dreams, notes that the Inuit of northwest Greenland name the polar bear not for its color, its ferocity, or its position as the local apex predator. Instead they call the bear pisugtooq, “the great wanderer.” Lopez, after a long season spent watching them traverse and den within the frozen north, boils down the life of these creatures to a few words:

Gathering ground to themselves. Navigating. Wandering with purpose.

Polar bears themselves may be among the world’s greatest terrestrial wanderers,1 but this is what all the night critters are out there doing while I toss and turn on my pricey ultralight sleeping pad. Gathering ground to themselves. Navigating. Wandering with purpose. I represent, at most, a brief interruption in their well-trod paths, an interesting set of smells to check out (and maybe pilfer from). Me, I have animal parts, but have largely been insulated from animal concerns,2 and so the act of gathering ground to myself requires, among other things: intention, planning, failure, fear.

The value in this proximity to and awareness of other types of life in the outdoors is something that I return to whenever I read Hal Borland’s work, which is nearly every day. (Someday I’ll have to stop quoting him in this newsletter, but I don’t see that happening soon.) Borland wrote often about the realities of pastoral life, and so any romance in his writing comes tinged with the authority of experience. In This Hill, This Valley, Borland speaks of growing—and killing—one’s own food as critical acts in knowing the origins of things:

Living close to origins here, we are seldom unaware of cause and effect. It seems to me that any way of life remote from origins has a weak spot in its foundation, just as any way of thinking which deals with effects without knowing causes is at fault.

Well, I have no farmland. I do have a shared yard and a shared garden, which is a start. My wife and I slept with the window open into the first week of November, so that the sounds and the breeze of the night lands might remain available to us as long as we could bear it. And sleeping out, on the ground or in a hammock, as often as I can, brings me even closer to the life I want to live. Though I am no farmer, that’s all I want, in the end: to live closer to cause and effect.

Thanks, as always, for reading. I’ll talk to you next time.

-Chuck

PS - If you liked what you read here, why not subscribe and get this newsletter delivered to your inbox each week? It’s free and always will be, although there is a voluntary paid subscription option if you’d like to support Tabs Open that way.

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Shoreline armoring is the practice of building physical structures, usually from metal, wood, or rock, to stave off coastal erosion. Since 2014, armoring has increased at least fivefold along the eastern coastline of Lake Michigan. Nineteen percent of the coastline is now armored.

There are five hundred and eighty-two trees in Detroit’s Clark Park, give or take. They are comprised of fifty-one species, give or take. I counted them myself the other weekend.

Of these, only two are horse chestnuts. These have gone brown in the leaves faster than just about any other as we barrel into autumn here, and for the last few days these palmate offerings have begun to pile up beneath their trunks.

This morning I watched a city employee on a riding mower circle on trunk over and over again, turning the leaves to so much fine powder.

Some possible short-term effects of armoring: fewer properties damaged by the lake, fewer economic disruptions during high-water years.

Pointless, pointless. As is so much labor, I know. The logical endpoint of a ravenous capitalist state: only the jobs can justify the system, and so the jobs themselves must all be justified, no matter how stupefying or destructive.

Some certain long-term effects of armoring: increased erosion, the loss of public beaches to private structures, the inability of beaches to shift and restore themselves through natural processes, massive future economic disruptions as properties and beaches disappear.

Hunter S. Thompson, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas:

And that, I think, was the handle—that sense of inevitable victory over the forces of Old and Evil. Not in any mean or military sense; we didn’t need that. Our energy would simply prevail. There was no point in fighting—on our side or theirs. We had all the momentum; we were riding the crest of a high and beautiful wave...

So now, less than five years later, you can go up on a steep hill in Las Vegas and look West, and with the right kind of eyes you can almost see the high-water mark—that place where the wave finally broke and rolled back.

Ethan Theuerkopf, Michigan State University researcher:

In a very general sense, we are changing the way the coastal system functions in these areas. There’s this natural dynamic of sand flowing both onshore to offshore, and then back offshore to onshore. When that feeding of the nearshore system gets shut down, you’re changing where the wave energy is distributed across the coast.

Rather than being broadly distributed across the beach, it’s hitting that sea wall and being forced down. And that’s digging a big hole in front of those sea walls, making the recovery process worse and forcing the sand out deeper.

Not all jobs can justify themselves to the system, of course. It just seems like it’s all the wrong ones. Any time I find myself on the New York State Thruway I begin wondering what became, in the process of automating toll collection, of all of those toll workers. Until very recently being on I-90 in that state required you to receive a punch card at one booth upon entering and to pay for it in cash at another booth upon exiting.

Growing up these jobs were spoken of aspirationally: a career, not just a job, with an impressive salary, state benefits, and retirement to make it worth the isolated drudgery of the task. Gone now, gone the way of the red brick Thruway rest stops, all now become Stick Frame Venture Capital Millennial Greige.

I’m getting older all the time.

Theuerkopf:

…it’s one of those things where the more it happens in an area, it sets a precedent. You have very few situations where people are choosing to not armor when they’re surrounded by other people who are armoring. It becomes almost a necessity, because basic physics means armored areas that flank an unarmored area are going to accelerate erosion in that area.

I used to go out pretty often and canvass for the Medicare for All campaign, back when anyone with any power had to pretend to care about improving people’s lives. One of the key pillars we were advocating at the time was A Just Transition. Something like 300,000 people are employed in private healthcare administration in this country. The problem with a society in which everyone must earn a livelihood is that you end up with a lot of people whose lives depend on the ruination of others.

The thing about all the city employees on riding mowers in the park is that I always seem to be in their way. I walk my dog like one of the Family Circus kids to avoid them. Until the snows come, they’re hardly ever not there. Which seems to suggest, maybe, that the purpose of a city park is its maintenance rather than its use.

So many contradictions live within me. I believe, as strongly as I can about anything, in the need for a truly democratic reorganization of society. But man…have you seen the people? Each and every person exists with a beautiful and singular spark within them, and I also believe that with the right push they would eat each other. Hogs trained for the slop. I am not exempt: not long ago, grad school reduced me to my basest instincts, simply from spending all week Thinking Too Hard. I felt I could do nothing more with my spare time than: Get high. Eat ice cream. Watch movie while scrolling Twitter and remember nothing of either. Repeat.

It’s been five months since graduation and each weekend I fight anew the urge to slide back into the anodyne.

Moby-Dick, chapter 123, THE MUSKET:

“He would have shot me once,” he murmured, “yes, there’s the very musket that he pointed at me…I, who have handled so many deadly lances, strange, that I should shake so now. Loaded? I must see. Aye, aye; and powder in the pan;—that’s not good. Best spill it?—wait. I’ll cure myself of this. I’ll hold the musket boldly while I think…he would fain kill all his crew. Does he not say he will not strike his spars to any gale? Has he not dashed his heavenly quadrant? and in these same perilous seas, gropes he not his way by mere dead reckoning of the error-abounding log? and in this very Typhoon, did he not swear that he would have no lightning-rods? But shall this crazed old man be tamely suffered to drag a whole ship’s company down to doom with him?—Yes, it would make him the wilful murderer of thirty men and more, if this ship come to any deadly harm; and come to deadly harm, my soul swears this ship will, if Ahab have his way. If, then, he were this instant—put aside, that crime would not be his. Ha! is he muttering in his sleep? Yes, just there,—in there, he’s sleeping. Sleeping? aye, but still alive, and soon awake again. I can’t withstand thee, then, old man. Not reasoning; not remonstrance; not entreaty wilt thou hearken to; all this thou scornest. Flat obedience to thy own flat commands, this is all thou breathest. Aye, and say’st the men have vow’d thy vow; say’st all of us are Ahabs. Great God forbid!—But is there no other way? no lawful way?—Make him a prisoner to be taken home? What! hope to wrest this old man’s living power from his own living hands? Only a fool would try it…I stand alone here upon an open sea, with two oceans and a whole continent between me and law.—Aye, aye, ‘tis so.—Is heaven a murderer when its lightning strikes a would-be murderer in his bed, tindering sheets and skin together?—And would I be a murderer, then, if”—and slowly, stealthily, and half sideways looking, he placed the loaded musket’s end against the door.

See also: Oilfield workers. See also: Auto workers. See also: Food service employees at Yankee Stadium.

There’s a famous, or at least internet-famous, diagram of a monkey from an addiction study. He’s pushing a button to receive a juice reward when he views a particular stimulus. It really does feel like that sometimes, doesn’t it? See stimulus. Push button. Anticipate reward. We are—I am—pathetic and disregulated. We are—I am—this way because the world we are currently locked into is pathetic and disregulating. The pop culture example I was going to use to demonstrate this when I started writing is already dated.

How many times would the monkey keep pushing the button if no juice were coming out?

I open Instagram and see a video of a wildlife rehabber grafting the wing of a dead monarch butterfly onto the tattered remains of a living one. A living wing, I mean. The adhesive holds. A precious pollinator will get a few more weeks among the milkweed. We could always choose this kind of work, the work of life. We could always do that.

Thanks, as always, for reading. I’ll talk to you next time.

-Chuck

PS - If you liked what you read here, why not subscribe and get this newsletter delivered to your inbox each week? It’s free and always will be, although there is a voluntary paid subscription option if you’d like to support Tabs Open that way.

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I’ve been rereading Moby-Dick this month. I did so in August of 2015 and again in August of 2020 and see no reason not to keep doing so in every fifth August from now until the end of time. There are very good reasons the canon has been reevaluated in recent years, with a scrutinous eye toward its maleness, its whiteness and Eurocentrism, and I’m glad of it. But some classics are classics for good reason.

For my money, Melville’s magnum opus is The Great American Novel. This is graspable even for those who only know Moby-Dick through cultural osmosis: the metaphorically-dense, ill-fated and reckless pursuit of something rare and terrifying, for revenge and for glory, is something we can all recognize from any number of eras of our national history (or national mythology). It is also a deeply funny book, which you may not know if you’ve only ever heard about Ahab and his ivory leg, or about the insane digressions in which Ishmael attempts to classify every whale on Earth or to retrofit Physeter macrocephalus onto every sea monster myth in the history of the world. Ishmael is a gallows humorist first and foremost, and Melville’s own wit shines through on every page.

But even more than the pursuit of the eponymous whale, even more than the humor, even more than the author’s attempts at something like real naturalism (which has at least as many instances of astonishing accuracy as it does laughable inaccuracy), what seems most fundamentally Great and American about the novel is a single scene played out over ten pages in Chapter 81, “The Pequod Meets The Virgin.” I didn’t remember this scene at all from previous reads and was so struck by it last night that I had to close the book. I lay there in bed for some time just processing. (A good case for reading and rereading great books: there’s always more to glean from them.)

In it, the whalers of the two vessels named above compete in the pursuit of a single sperm whale, a “huge, humped old bull” with a damaged fin and “unusual yellowish incrustations overgrowing him” who can’t swim as fast as the pod he’s protecting. The hunt that unfolds is devastating, for Ishmael can’t help but narrate with great sympathy even as he rows hard so that he might be among the crew who “darts” the whale:

His spout was short, slow, and laborious; coming forth with a choking sort of gush, and spending itself in torn shreds, followed by strange subterranean commotions in him, which seemed to have egress at his other buried extremity, causing the waters behind him to upbubble.

“Who’s got some paregoric?” said Stubb, “he has the stomachache, I’m afraid.”

(Humor and tragedy cleave together on every page of this book. Cruelty, too, lurking just beneath it all.)

All three Pequod boats eventually get their harpoons into the struggling whale, and when he resurfaces near death at the ends of their lines, the intimate tragedy becomes an existential one:

As the boats now more closely surrounded him, the whole upper part of his form, with much of it that is ordinarily submerged, was plainly revealed. His eyes, or rather the places where his eyes had been, were beheld. As strange misgrown masses gather in the knotholes of the noblest oaks when prostrate, so from the points which the whale’s eyes had once occupied, now protruded blind bulbs, horribly pitiable to see. But pity there was none. For all his old age, and his one arm, and his blind eyes, he must die the death and be murdered, in order to light the gay bridals and other merrymakings of men, and also to illuminate the solemn churches that preach unconditional inoffensiveness by all to all. Still rolling in his blood, at last he partially disclosed a strangely discolored bunch or protuberance, the size of a bushel, low down on the flank.

“A nice spot,” cried Flask; “just let me prick him there once.”

“Avast!” cried Starbuck, “there's no need of that!”

But humane Starbuck was too late. At the instant of the dart an ulcerous jet shot from this cruel wound, and goaded by it into more than sufferable anguish, the whale now spouting thick blood, with swift fury blindly darted at the craft, bespattering them and their glorying crews all over with showers of gore, capsizing Flask's boat and marring the bows.

Not just a killing, then, but a killing without dignity. And still the injuries deepen, even once the whale has spent his life in that last horrifying gush of blood:

It so chanced that almost upon first cutting into him with the spade, the entire length of a corroded harpoon was found imbedded in his flesh, on the lower part of the bunch before described. But as the stumps of harpoons are frequently found in the dead bodies of captured whales, with the flesh perfectly healed around them, and no prominence of any kind to denote their place; therefore, there must needs have been some other unknown reason in the present case fully to account for the ulceration alluded to. But still more curious was the fact of a lance-head of stone being found in him, not far from the buried iron, the flesh perfectly firm about it. Who had darted that stone lance? And when? It might have been darted by some Nor' West Indian long before America was discovered.

What other marvels might have been rummaged out of this monstrous cabinet there is no telling. But a sudden stop was put to further discoveries, by the ship's being unprecedentedly dragged over sideways to the sea, owing to the body's immensely increasing tendency to sink.

Yes: the men of the Pequod expend themselves all day in hunting and brutally killing a whale older than anything they would recognize as their own nation, older than the European conquest of the Americas, and are then forced to cut the entire carcass loose without extracting a single barrel of oil or an ounce of ambergris. An utter and senseless waste, in other words, carried out by men with just enough knowledge and skill for violence but not nearly enough to make anything lasting of it. What, truly, could be more American than that?

And because I am thinking about American violence—I am rarely not thinking about American violence—I can’t help but think about our attitudes and definitions of that term, and how slippery they become. The United States was a willing party to the worldwide moratorium on whaling imposed by the International Whaling Commission, putting an end to our own barbarous complicity in the slaying of these beautiful and intelligent beings with whom we share the planet. But of course we have no such compunctions about imposing violent regimes on our fellow man, be it the rapid violence of warfare or the slow violence of sanctions and starvation, or the wretched combination of both we have unleashed in Palestine, among other places.

Here, too, a great and tragic irony: Moby-Dick’s main inspiration was the 1820 sinking of the whaleship Essex after it was rammed twice in the open Pacific by an 85-foot bull sperm whale. The Essex crew took to the lifeboats, and, dreading the “cannibals” they might encounter in the Society and Marquesas Islands, attempted to sail a much less direct route to the western coast of South America. Desperate and starving, they began to eat the bodies of their crewmates who had already died of hunger, and in one boat eventually drew lots for a sacrifice so that the others might eat him and so live. I make no moral judgments of the desperate but I can’t help but wonder how much suffering we might be spared if we could recognize that what we fear most in others is something that already lives within ourselves. I think about what we know comes to Americans who suffer great hunger and privation, and about how we hear no such stories from Gaza, and I wonder what that says not about the way we die but about the way that we live. I wonder. I wonder.

Thanks, as always, for reading. I’ll talk to you next time.

-Chuck

PS - If you liked what you read here, why not subscribe and get this newsletter delivered to your inbox each week? It’s free and always will be, although there is a voluntary paid subscription option if you’d like to support Tabs Open that way.

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PPS - An even better way to make use of your spare scratch this week would be to send it to people in Gaza. Two people I’ve been donating to when I can are Nader and Amjad. If it matters, given the scammy nature of the world, I’ve seen reliable verification from people I trust that these two fundraisers are real and urgent.

Last summer, while revolving around the sun in time with Hal Borland’s Book of Days, I dogeared a page about corn. Well, I dogeared a lot of pages. He’s that kind of writer. But only one about corn.

Corn…is a botanical achievement that modern man has never been able to duplicate. Somewhere far back in the mists the Indians of Central America created it from a native grass, by selective breeding and cross-breeding. We find cobs and miniature ears in ancient caves in our own Southwest, and archaeologists have traced the grain far back among the Aztecs and their forerunners. But no one has ever succeeded in breeding anything like even the primitive corn in the ancient caves from the known plants of the world. The best our modern plant men have been able to do is improve the yield or increase the size of the ears or alter the flavor of the kernels.

And I hope they never break that long-standing secret of those “primitive” Indians who first created an ear of corn.

I marked that page last summer because it sent me spiraling thinking about the uses to which we are putting our human ingenuity here in the present, which seem to be almost universally regressive in nature: it’s no secret that funding for the arts and sciences is being not so much slashed as eradicated, with the real money and social investment now going exclusively to the internet slop creation machine, surveillance tech, and ever-more expensive weaponry. (Incidentally, our other main site of innovation seems to be in corn syrup-based treats, which frankly have never tasted better.)

But I’m thinking about that page this summer because I’m thinking about corn itself, because this week corn has contributed to making the Midwest, where I live, feel close to unlivable. This is thanks to “corn sweat,” the phenomenon whereby evapotranspiration from crops drives up the humidity during periods of intense heat. Borland was right to see corn as something of a miracle, but that hasn’t exempted it from being tortured, Orc-like, from something beautiful into a heinous, world-wasting force.

Maybe you know all of this already, maybe this doesn’t help to know. Less than twenty percent of the corn grown in the U.S. is turned into human food. More than eighty percent is processed into ethanol fuel or fed to livestock. We spend three billion dollars a year to subsidize farmers using ninety million acres to grow a single type of plant that we mostly use to inject cheap fuel into cars and cows, an ecocidal triumvirate on which the entire world economy depends. Makes you wonder what the point of the world economy is if there’ll soon be no world to make use of it. You buy the logic of the spiral long enough it’s hard to remember it doesn’t have to be that way. Like those photos you see sometimes of whitetail bucks or moose that get so caught up fighting they lock their antlers together and both die of hunger. Something like that.

There are no shortcuts to power, to revolution, to winning a world fit for humans and other life. Still I find myself dreaming lately of some great fire leaving alone, for once, the parched and beautiful west and instead sweeping down through the monocultured fields where grow the yellow and green stalks of living coal that strip bare the dirt and make even the sky sweat and boil.

We did the impossible once, turned grass to food through generations of daring and careful stewardship. And in our infinite wisdom we’ve totally botched it, grown the corn as thick and useless and destructive as the grass it once was that now adorns our lawns. I think of the people of Gaza reduced to eating grass once again and how heinous it feels to live in a country where we grow food crops to burn in the engines of cars while we starve a whole nation on the other side of the world and feign surprise that the guns we’re firing contain bullets. The man shot dead carrying flour to his family is my brother in the way that the demons doing these things to us will never be, and I am powerless to help him. The skeletal child denied formula for so long her body eats itself is my child, and I cannot feed her.

I dream about what might come after the fire, the slow and scraggly climb back out of the eroded monoculture. First the weeds pushing forth from the burned and desolate ash, the shrubs and vines, the little trees in long succession. The forests themselves, left long enough.

We wrought miracles from the earth once. I cling to that on the bad days. The pink bells of the fireweed and their silent chime in the hot wind above the burn.

Thanks, as always, for reading. I’ll talk to you next time.

-Chuck

PS - If you liked what you read here, why not subscribe and get this newsletter delivered to your inbox each week? It’s free and always will be, although there is a voluntary paid subscription option if you’d like to support Tabs Open that way.

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When I moved to Detroit I was unprepared for the number of dead dogs I would encounter.

It is a feature of life here downstream, I think, from the Great Recession, a mass clearing out of the city that left in its wake a staggering population of dogs and cats left to fend for themselves on the street, to say nothing of the people. There is a gorgeous park across from my house, across the ocean of a two-lane 25 mph road where most people go 40, and in recent months the lives of cats, dogs, and at least one person have ended at the edge of the grass there. An abscission from the population that through overexposure comes to feel as natural as the seasons.

The other day while driving home from walking two well-loved dogs, clients of my summer job, I passed a highway onramp where lay a collarless street mutt that had been killed by a car. I thought then about what vast distances exist between lives when you travel just a few blocks: I had just left a beautiful home occupied by people who paid me to make sure their dogs were taken care of, walked-watered-fed, plus some Ben & Jerry’s pup cups in the freezer. Shiny black coats, happy dogs built for love. And three minutes later I crossed one of the myriad gray and dismal and sunbaked ramps I see every day—everything in Detroit is a highway, it seems like—and saw the fresh carcass of another dog, all pitbull muscle and scabby thin coat, left to the flies and the elements on a day that cleared 90 degrees.

Of course he might have been other than what he was. The right luck, the right rescue, the right home—there’s no rule that he had to live and die that way save for the rules we’ve made up for ourselves. Or let others make up and impose, I guess.

And even well-loved dogs aren’t immune from our shiny death drive, that imposed set of values that so many have embraced so wholeheartedly. In that neighborhood where I walk the pair I mentioned, probably a third of all the homes have TruGreen1 signs staked out front. As with all other commercially applied pesticide and herbicides, walking dogs through lawns regularly treated with this stuff means subjecting them to a 70% higher risk of malignant lymphoma. Only in America could you dream up a product and give it that name while using it to torch the biosphere and torture the neighborhood animals.

But back to luck for a moment. Scout, for instance. Scout was another of my clients this summer. I say was: “He is dead; it’s best to say it right away, because one can’t help speaking in a different way of the dead than of the living,” wrote Primo Levi. Scout was a hound of some kind or other who was found as a young dog on the side of a country road sporting a gunshot wound to the leg. Another day, another dog’s luck, a little less fight in his brain or in his genes and the story might have ended there. But it didn’t. He died last week at the age of fourteen, having gone on to live in five states. He even met Congresswoman Rashida Tlaib on one of our walks a month or two ago. His Detroit home sported a plush rug and a big comfy couch, on one of which he was always dozing when I showed up. Whatever made a mess of his life in the beginning, he came to be well loved along the way and was allowed to die with dignity when it was his time.

I take great comfort in Scout’s story. Especially at a moment like this. A chorus for our age: He, she, they didn’t have to live and die like that. Every day I look at the news on my phone and this is the base operating thought atop which all others are piled. Gaza or Texas or Congo or Sudan or Iran or along the Rio Grande. He, she, they didn’t have to live and die like that. With the perfectly individuated and atomized and alienated world that has been created and sold to us has come the death not just of undeserving populations but the death of dignity. We have been taught and taught well to see ourselves as holy and just about everyone else as surplus. (One of the great naturalist writers, I forget which, maybe Wallace Stegner, once said of people’s attitude toward nature that we see the world through a “screen of chlorophyll”— plants are so common and so alike, in other words, that our eyes and brains don’t bother to differentiate or even notice them. I can’t help but think maybe we see it through a screen of skin, too, with each of us ourselves starring as the protagonist of reality and everyone else blurring into one great mass that is not worth knowing or noticing.)

Often lately I find myself thinking of something the poet and essayist Anne Boyer wrote back in March of 2020, just as the coronavirus pandemic began in earnest. It’s about that virus, yes, but also about what’s required of all of us in a world that is daily destroyed for so many in ways beyond their control. Emphasis mine:

These are the same types who say the only thing to fear is fear, which of course is not true, because fear educates our care for each other — we fear a sick person might be made sicker, or that a poor person's life might be made even more miserable, and we do whatever we can to protect them because we fear a version of human life in which everyone lives only for themselves. I am not the least bit afraid of this kind of fear, for fear is a vital and necessary part of love. And this fear, which I love, is right now particularly justified, because we have a pernicious virus that travels inside the healthy to sicken and kill the already fragile, and therefore requires that the healthy and strong deepen their moral commitments for the benefit of the sick and weak. We must learn to do good for the good of the stranger now. We now have to live as daily evidence that we believe there is value in the lives of the cancer patient, the elderly person, the disabled one, the ones in unthinkable living conditions, crowded and at risk.

With that relationship between fear and care so apparent I also find myself thinking often of this eponymous poem by the late Molly Brodak.2

I am full of fear, yes. And I don’t know what to do with any of it except to let it condition my love: for others, for dogs, for the plants in my garden. For the future that I refuse to believe isn’t coming. I know too that it’s not enough to let this love simply exist in my mind or be expressed on the page; it must also inform my actions. It’s a lot to remember and a lot to do. I’m working on it.

Thanks, as always, for reading. I’ll talk to you next time.

-Chuck

PS - If you liked what you read here, why not subscribe and get this newsletter delivered to your inbox each week? It’s free and always will be, although there is a voluntary paid subscription option if you’d like to support Tabs Open that way.

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PPS - If you feel like supporting some great Detroit organizations working to rescue/foster/adopt stray dogs and cats (plus TNR services for the cats), here are two places you can do that: Rebel Dogs Detroit and Detroit Alley Cats.

Thanks for your patience in the month since my last dispatch. It’s hard to believe most days that I used to publish this newsletter every week like clockwork. Thousands and thousands of words, exhortations, big ideas. I hardly recognize that person. I’m becoming quieter as I get older, and less certain of all but the biggest things. I’m glad of that, though I’m certainly glad to have been that other version of me, too. Going forward I think you can reasonably expect that I’ll continue on this monthly schedule rather than anything close to weekly. (No hard feelings if you choose to end a paid subscription on these grounds or any other—most days my anxiety makes me regret ever opening the tip jar at all, though I am eternally grateful for what it’s brought.)

Anyway, two of my goals for this summer were to spend a lot less time on my phone and a lot more time in the garden. Well, one for two ain’t bad. Below you’ll find a poem I wrote in a recent frenzy of brain activity after a rare few hours away from screens. I hope you’ll like it.

Firefly Season

A poetry professor told me to avoid
Abstractions like love, big ones, because
What's love? Ask a hundred people
You'll hear a hundred answers, none 
Particularly useful. Better
To stick to the concrete, like weeds.
Irrefutable and bent to the occasion.

But what's a weed? You loved
My salad of lambsquarter, purslane, dandelion.
Good ground cover on garden days I forget
To water, like this one, sultry (still)
Beneath the last sliver of strawberry moon.

Our pup licks salt from the crook of my knee.
I trade her too fast my peace for a piece of watermelon.
I am desperate for something I cannot name —

I think it lives inside you. 

Oh, one other note: I recently discovered that email replies to the newsletter were going to my spam folder, so I’ve only just noticed some extremely kind words that a few of you have shared regarding my last few dispatches. I’ll respond to those shortly—it always means the world to me to hear that my words have meant something to someone else.

Thanks, as always, for reading. I’ll talk to you next time.

-Chuck

PS - If you liked what you read here, why not subscribe and get this newsletter delivered to your inbox each week? It’s free and always will be, although there is a voluntary paid subscription option if you’d like to support Tabs Open that way.

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This piece originally appeared in the 2025 issue of the Wayne Literary Review, a Detroit-based literary magazine.

I.

In the amniotic dark of the deep ocean things are not as quiet as we imagine. Clicks, creaks, long whistles, haunting melodies: these are broadcast at an incomprehensible volume for thousands of miles through their salty medium. This is the whaledark and these sounds are whalesong.

II.

There is a linguistic framework, a habit of frequency, that appears to recur in all human languages. The Zipfian distribution: in general, the most commonly used word in a language appears roughly twice as often as the second most commonly used word, roughly three times as often as the third most commonly used word, and so on. There are many possible explanations for this. One of the most plausible: predictable patterns are required to smooth the path toward complex communication and cultural transmission.

III.

The institution at which I teach writing recently sent out an invitation to a workshop for those seeking AI-driven strategies to enhance their teaching and support student learning. This session, it was promised, would introduce practical AI strategies that can be adapted for various disciplines and teaching contexts. The predictive nature of these tools—their pattern recognition and consequent production—has been floated as a solution to the pesky and imperfect work of traditional learning methods.

IV.

Recent research indicates that whalesong, too, follows a Zipfian distribution.

V.

What the workshop invitation did not say:

This is how to recognize the face of a teenager more lost than you can imagine. Than you can ever remember being. These are the words to put in a midnight reply to a student email with the subject line My Mom’s Cancer. Here are some mantras to repeat in the whaledark winter twilight as you blow past your federally mandated working hours again. There are donuts in the conference room and the toilets in your building are working again.

VI.

A small miracle, that whalesong travels so far and so clearly. It must: we fantasize about the apocalypse but the world’s whales have already lived through theirs. The people of Nantucket used to report a bay so full of cetaceans that you could walk to the mainland on their backs without getting your feet wet. Now, well. Good luck.

VII.

I read a third consecutive paper that includes the sentence Moreover, this use of pathos fosters a sense of empathy, relatability, and understanding to effectively engage the audience. I write, for the third consecutive time, This doesn’t really sound like your voice—please remember that the goal of this class is to make you a better writer, and I can’t help you with that if you aren’t turning in your own original work. I try to sleep and instead wonder on a loop whose is the greater failure, here.

VIII.

In one of the new Planet of the Apes movies, I can’t remember which, a few human survivors have kept hope alive at a military radio outpost, sending their signals into the aether for years in the dwindling hope of reconnection with others like them. Something like that, whalesong. Something that must have a terrible reach to respond to terrible circumstance.

Whalesong, as I mentioned, seems to adhere to a Zipfian distribution. This is all anyone can say for certain, lacking, as we do, the context to translate these units and subunits of language from the deep. Interesting, certainly, that languages, even across species, seem to default to this pattern. But a pattern of information is not a language any more than a map is a place or a song is a lifetime.

IX.

Whalers used to take teeth and bones from carcasses and etch fine-lined drawings upon them to relate particular scenes and images from their voyages. These pieces are called scrimshaw. One particularly detailed tooth, engraved in the 1850s and held in the Cahoon Museum of American Art, shows a family of sperm whales fighting back against their pursuers. In the foreground a bull smashes a whaleboat in two, its six sailors hanging forever in their marionetted poses. One of the whales, wounded, writhes, great dark head arcing toward tail. Wood and whale and whaler alike flail above and below the water, the depth and color of which are rendered in impressive suggestion by contoured, spider-thin lines. What mouths are shown are all agape. It is easy to imagine a singularity of sound in this suspended moment: no words in either dialect, no translations necessary. Only tumult.

X.

If there is a Rosetta stone for whalesong perhaps it is something etched by spear upon the body of an ancient bull. Perhaps it has been etched by fishing tackle or anchor or hull onto the flank of a cow herding her calves through the open Pacific. We can listen to their songs but they cannot tell us their history or their future save through what blind hieroglyphs our instruments have carved upon them. All that we have been, all that we have done, scrimshawed into flesh, one storytelling people using another like so much paper.

XI.

I open my email to a note from one of last year’s students thanking me for not letting her get away with using ChatGPT to write her papers. She needed tough love at a tough time in her life, she says. I want to hold this message in my hand, run my fingers across its surface, darken forever in ink the spiderwebbing lines beneath my nails. But I’m the whale, not the scrimshander. Ramming my head into the boat in vain protest against the world’s predilection for killing things only to memorialize their lives upon what dead pieces remain. For using, as its sacred totems, the simulacra of what it has already destroyed.

XII.

Will the last story we tell be that none of this was happening?

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I’ve been thinking a lot lately about the relationship between the kinds of things I was reading as a kid and the adult I have so inescapably become. There are some pessimistic reasons for this, which I’ll explain shortly, but the most recent revelations have been the positive sort.

I remember, in particular, one by Paul Fleischman called Weslandia. This book tells the story of an outcast boy, Wesley, who discovers a strange plant growing in his yard and spends a summer nourishing and cultivating it. The plant, which he calls swist, grows with such fecundity that it becomes the basis for Wesley’s own micro-nation: he eats its fruit, builds his own network of infrastructure using its stems and vines, weaves his own clothes, and develops a new language and writing system after processing the swist juice into ink.

It’s a perfect book in many ways, and you can probably see where I’m going here. It’s a triumphant and beautifully illustrated story, one that a lot of kids could see themselves in. And in deftly walking the tightrope between the believable and the fantastical, it’s an expansive book, one that invites kids to go out into the world and find the richness in it, even if they don’t want to engage with the finer points of nation-building.

Anyway I’ve written before, possibly too many times (though I never know how many people reading are new here), about the fact that my wife and I moved to Detroit in the hopes of living more communally with a few of our friends. The linchpin of this project is the work of growing our own food, as much of it as we can. And while we don’t yet own a shared property upon which to grow all this food, we’ve been getting our reps in the interim by developing a shared garden in the backyard of a house owned by two of our friends and lived in by two others.

We’re learning a lot, doing this. That you can plant marigolds between your tomatoes to defend against root-rotting nematodes in the soil. That a border of anise hyssop can help combat the cabbage moths that put holes in all the brassica leaves. That besides watering and weeding and staking, even a small backyard garden requires mapping and planning and rounds of revisions to get everything in a place where it can thrive, and that this is a lot less fun than getting your hands in the dirt. That getting your hands in the dirt is a lot of fun. (Well, that one I knew.) That pulling and eating a fresh raw radish that you grew from seed is a joy worth looking forward to each May.

It’s also inspired us to think back beyond the scientific method to the times when there was little distance between science and magic. Appropriating some old folk wisdom, we planted a few eggs deep in the soil in our tomato beds. Before anyone had a name for calcium or nitrogen, they had rituals like this one, laying eggs or fish beneath their crops to increase their yields. There are so few opportunities to reconnect with who we were so long ago that I jumped at the chance to try this one. I have no data and will likely never collect any; the point, to me, is to do what others used to do and so live with a little more faith in magic than I used to.

Obviously it’s possible that I still might have ended up this way without that single book I read some twenty-five years ago. But I think it’s very likely that the amalgamation of all the books I was reading in those days have profoundly influenced my interests in and about the world. I’ve detailed—again, maybe too many times—my belief that I would not have become a dedicated backpacker without wandering Snufkin from the Moomin series or the adventuring storytellers of Redwall. Both get a shoutout in a lovely recent essay from Katherine Rundell titled “Why Children’s Books?”1 as the author speaks to the difficulties of writing for kids in a way that will nourish and challenge them by understanding who they are and what they need:

I believe in the necessity of offering children versions of wonder. I don’t mean the twee commodified vision of wonder we’re sold – the Instagram post of a mountain lake with an inspirational quote. I mean real wonder: the willed astonishment that the world, in all its dangers and clumsiness, in all its beauties and miracles, demands of us. Active, informed, iron-willed wonder is a skill, not a gift: you have to work at it. And you cannot remain in awe of that which is familiar, so the only way to maintain wonder is to learn: learn, and keep learning.

I have a hard time believing that the creators of iPad games and YouTube slop for kids have similar principles in mind. And even when kids do get to read, the things that are being created for and marketed to them are, like everything else these days, missing that essential spark of wonder. Sondra Eklund, a book reviewer and children’s book procurer for a library, describes the onslaught of (you guessed it) AI-generated content on the children’s book market, which she experienced while trying to acquire some books about animals for her library’s shelves:

Here’s the page that first convinced me we couldn’t put these books on library shelves:

A rabbit has a male and female counterpart. A male rabbit is called a buck. The two types of rabbits have different characteristics. A doe is a baby rabbit, while a buck is a mother. All types of rabbits live underground, except for the cottontail, and their habitats are often called warrens.

Later, I read on. One spread has the same exact text on two facing pages. But the place where it got so bad it’s hilarious was the final spread:

If you’ve ever had the pleasure of feeding a rabbit, you’ve probably wondered how they reproduce. The answer is simple: they live in the wild! Despite being cute and cutesy, rabbits are also very smart.

They can even make their own clothes, and they can even walk around. And they’re not only adorable, but they’re also very useful to us as pets and can help you out with gardening.

It would be comical if the present and future it described and portended weren’t so bleak. How many busy and overworked librarians, parents, and elementary school teachers have the capacity to audit prospective purchases so carefully? How much straight up garbage passing as books is finding its way onto shelves? I’m not naive enough to think that children are held sacred enough in the death cult of capitalist society that no one would try to make money off of them through these blatantly anti-social practices, but it still rankles to see the end product in practice.2

Easy, then, to give in to despair. But if an end to the root of these problems is not possible short of a revolution that remakes our social order, this is one area where resistance feels possible on the home front. Of that practice, Rundell writes:

…the imagination is the primary and first site of resistance. The market abhors all values that are not the values of the market: children’s books, to a great extent because they are written for those who cannot participate in the market, can offer resistance to a vision of the good life which is a built on a hegemony of acquisition. Children’s books insist in having faith in vast truths that lie beyond consumption and display. Their utopianism is that of the Moomins and Pippi Longstocking: it offers an experiential microcosm of a more ideal world.

I don’t have kids of my own, yet. But I do feel a strong sense of responsibility to the kids in my life. My nieces and nephew, my friends’ babies, the kids in my neighborhood and on the middle school flag football team I’ve been helping coach. That responsibility is one that includes the more obvious acts of care—love, affection, learning, safety—and the less obvious, like trying to help them cultivate an active sense of wonder. Or, rather, to help defend their innate sense of wonder against the intrusion of the loud, capitalist world that would gladly destroy it in exchange for targeted ad revenue.

The garden is a good place for this. More secluded nature spaces, too. But maybe it all comes back to books, which can have such compounding, expansive effects on the minds of kids. Even if the joys this practice leads to for them are simple ones, like a radish sandwich, well—that still feels like plenty.

Thanks, as always, for reading. I’ll talk to you next time.

-Chuck

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Toward the end of 2007’s Into the Wild, Chris McCandless, as played by Emile Hirsch, reads to himself aloud from Dr. Zhivago:

For a moment she rediscovered the purpose of her life. She was here on earth to grasp the meaning of its wild enchantment and to call each thing by its right name.

McCandless repeats those last four words to himself, and this sparks his (and the viewers’) discovery that the wild plant seeds the struggling explorer thought he was eating, Hedysarum alpinum, likely belonged to another, Hedysarum mackenzii, which looks nearly identical but can have catastrophic effects on the human body—especially one already starving, as McCandless was.

While author Jon Krakauer, who wrote the book on the young adventurer after his body was discovered by hunters in an abandoned bus in the Alaskan wilderness, has since modified his hypothesis about what killed McCandless (testing found that H. alpinum seeds also contain toxic compounds that could be poisonous in large doses), I think this speaks to a larger truth worth considering as we move through the world: that there is a whole constellation of characteristics underpinning the name we give to anything, characteristics just as important to know as the name itself.

I’ve been thinking about this a lot lately because I’m taking a certification course right now to become a Michigan Master Naturalist.

On the first day of field work, our birding instructor, Rick, paused our walk through the woods and asked us what we heard as a loud call came through the trees. In unison, most of us eagerly yelled “blue jay,” trying to prove in that beautifully human way that despite being enrolled in the course we surely didn’t need it. Gently, Rick encouraged us to forget for a moment that we knew what a blue jay was, what a blue jay sounded like. “Now tell me what you hear,” he challenged us.

What followed was a much longer, much more interesting discussion. We began to consider the tone of the calls, the frequency. Rick encouraged us further: did it sound more like a cry or a song? How many voices seemed to be present? Where in the trees was the sound coming from, and at what height? All of these factors, Rick said, are critical in building toward confident identification: to practice putting away assumptions and instead create a map of positive determinations. The blue jay is pretty singular in its vocalizations, he admitted, but you’d be harder pressed to tell apart a robin and a vireo, a starling and a catbird, without these additional factors.

“In my experience,” Rick said, “when the naming starts, the learning stops.”

This is great advice, frankly. It’s good to know the names of things, eventually, but you have to have other schemas for understanding the world or you’ll be totally at the mercy of the shortcomings of language. The cedar trees native to the Americas—red and white, yellow and Port Orford—are not “true” cedars, a distinction reserved for an unrelated set of trees native to the Himalayas. The nighthawk, one of my favorite birds, is also called a bullbat, and is none of the three animals that these appellations suggest. (It does come out at night, though.) Rhode Island is neither a road nor an island—discuss.

These naming choices are mostly harmless, if potentially confusing. But there are other, more nefarious ways we get hung up on language at the expense of what the rest of our senses, including our simple good sense, should tell us.

Here again I only have words to try to explain something that can’t be explained in words. We’re trapped, I think, in this way. Not that it’s the end of the world. But it should tell us that we’d do well to give just as much credence to feelings as to words, to listen to sensation as intently as we do conversation. And to admit to ourselves that there are feelings beyond words, feelings we still might express through other means.

I remember translating the Aeneid in AP Latin during high school and learning the verb ululate, a trilling, howling wail. As the mother of Euryalus did upon the news of the death of her son, killed alongside his lover Nisus in a daring raid against long odds. As the Trojan women did while their city burned:

Inside the palace there is the noise of chaos,
Screaming, shrieking, ululating sounds
Of the grief and terror of the Trojan women.
The woeful clamor rises to the stars;
From vaulted room to room of the vast palace
The women wander not knowing where they are going,
Some in their distraction clinging to walls,
Kissing the very doors. And on comes Pyrrhus,
In all his father’s power, coming in;
No thing nor person can hold out against
His coming. The great front gate of the palace falls in
Under the battering of the battering ram;
Force makes its way, unstoppable; the Greeks
Pour slaughtering in, so many of them, filling
The palace halls with the conquering entering foe.
The force of it and the fury is greater even
Than a foaming flooding river bursting through
All that would hold against its whirling waters
Insanely overflowing and carrying off
Whole herds and their stables with them across the plains.

Rereading these lines now for the first time in eighteen(!) years I am reminded of nothing so much as what has been unfolding in Palestine for the last nineteen months. The apocalyptic horror of an entire nation being devoured by invading soldiers and unquenchable flames. The people wailing as their children’s bodies, limbs, heads are pulled from the rubble where proud cities once stood.

And yet it is taboo—bordering on illegal—to call this campaign of extermination a genocide. As though it is a magic word that can only be invoked when the American conscience is plausibly clear. You use that word, genocide, vociferously enough and you could find yourself rounded up and imprisoned a thousand miles away from where you were arrested, missing the birth of your child, as Mahmoud Khalil was. You could find yourself snatched off the streets of your college campus by masked agents who refuse to identify themselves, as Rumeysa Ozturk was. You could find your degree withheld for saying so in a commencement speech in which you don’t even name the perpetrators of the genocide (for this, too, is an act of naming that has snuck its way beyond the pale in American discourse), as Logan Rozos at NYU has.

The people who support this want you playing the name game because it’s a convenient distraction from the inescapable truth playing out before your eyes and ears: that this is, by whatever name you choose, a world historic crime, an unspeakable evil being carried out in all of our names so as to eradicate a people from the earth. They want you to get hung up on defending yourself against every conceivable nuance, every bad faith attack, because to move past these games would be to give up the pretense that there is anything here but the greatest crime a human population can carry out against another.

Ultimately I think it’s good and proper to make sure I learn enough about the world to know how to call things by their right names.1 But I am also working hard not to get so hung up on blue jay that I fail to take note of where in the tree it comes from, the tone of its cries, the length of its song, the number of its voices. It occurs to me that I can tell my students this, too, when the incentive structures of their world tell them that the point of turning in an essay is turning in a document that can plausibly be called Essay rather than to learn what it means to express themselves clearly. It helps none of us to lose the process for the product. It helps all of us to start learning to pay a different kind of attention to things.

Thanks, as always, for reading. I’ll talk to you next time.

-Chuck

PS - If you liked what you read here, why not subscribe and get this newsletter delivered to your inbox each week? It’s free and always will be, although there is a voluntary paid subscription option if you’d like to support Tabs Open that way.

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The semester just wrapped up, and with it came the same question I have to ask myself at the end of every semester, when final projects are due and grades are entered: will my students benefit more from learning a hard lesson or from receiving more grace than could reasonably be expected?

It’s not an exact binary, and sometimes the answer is “both,” and sometimes I don’t have a good answer at all. But I do know that, on the whole, our entire society seems constructed to be good at punishing people, and little else. To punish them for being anything other than rich, white, straight, and male, especially. I’m not breaking news here. But if you take stock of how just about anything works in this country it’s hard not to see how many hard, cruel layers there are to just about every system, process, and norm we’ve got. And as products of a system that can do nothing but punish, we in turn love to punish each other. We love to suffer minor indignities and inconveniences so that we might have an opportunity to work it all out on someone else.

My wife and I were talking about this the other night. She moonlights as a high school lacrosse coach and so witnesses a lot of emotional escalation: coaches, players, and referees alike all just sort of screaming at each other all the time. There is a boiling, seething resentment lurking about a millimeter below the skin of every American, and we all seem desperate to just take it out on each other at all times, from the President on down.

This is what I keep coming back to, when I make this decision each semester: that I no longer care to participate in the paradigm of punishment upon which the whole world seems to depend. I’ve had enough of it.

You can yell at your dog for “misbehaving,” but that’s not going to teach the dog anything different. Yet I see people yelling at their dogs all the time—which of course is their failure, not the animal’s. The government can erect byzantine structures of drug testing and means testing and slash funding to try to force the destitute back to work—and all that ever happens is further immiseration, further destitution, the further erosion of human dignity. I could fail a student in May for missing a single deadline that seemed so reasonable to both of us back in January—and, like the bureaucrat, I would never need to bother myself with what became of them afterward. Somebody else’s problem, once I’ve washed my hands of it all.

Refusing to do so seems hopelessly naive, I imagine. It certainly feels that way to me sometimes, and I’m the one making the choice. But I never know if the student is ignoring my emails and skipping my class because they’re a shithead teenager who thinks they have better things to do or because they’re in some profound crisis and in need, more than anything, of a little help. I never know, and that’s the point: I have to make my choices anyway.1 I am trying to destroy the cop inside my head, which means learning to let go of the fear that someone else—in this case, a teenager under my supervision and care—might get one over on me.

Plus—and again, I have to constantly remind myself of this—even if the kid is just being a shithead, they’re a shithead who has already been failed by countless adults and systems by the time they hit my classroom. When I taught community college it was the more obvious culprits: poverty, jail, discrimination, police, hunger. But even my more comfortable university students are learning in real time just how bad a hand they’ve been dealt. Some students miss my emails because they don’t know how to check their email. No one’s thought to check to see if they know how to do that! Students struggle to analyze texts and write about them because they weren’t required to do that to graduate high school. They don’t have to read whole novels anymore! Students use AI to write papers for my class despite the explicit ban I’ve placed on that practice because AI has been given the greenlight by companies, advertisers, and governments! My own institution has rolled out a GPT to “assist” students and instructors with their workload!

So I say fuck it, basically. I wrestle and worry over the idea that my extension of grace might someday cross the line into devaluing the hard work of students who do everything they’re supposed to do without my intervention, but I also take enough pride in my own work to feel comfortable asserting a difference between “freedom from punishment” and “freedom from consequences.” One of the required pedagogical trainings I took last year was geared toward learning to become a warm demander, which is to say an instructor that respects their students by holding them to high standards while still making room to see them as whole people and to make choices about how to deal with them accordingly. It doesn’t come easily to me, especially the demander half, but it feels worth doing.

Case in point: I had a student this semester who had a ton of final drafts overdue. (We have four major essays for the course; there are separate “rough” and “revised” draft deadlines; they need a mark of “complete” in every category of the rubric to get a passing score for each essay.) Most of the feedback I had given them on their early drafts was to the effect that a) they hadn’t followed the prompts and b) the writing was clearly AI-generated and not their own, both of which they would need to fix if they wanted to earn a passing grade. In an effort to keep them (and others) from failing I extended the final deadlines twice, accepting old work that should’ve been done and dusted in January and February as well as a late draft of the final paper. And this student continued to turn in nothing but AI-generated drafts that didn’t really respond to my prompts. That student, having exhausted all available avenues of grace, got to learn a hard lesson.

I don’t have all the answers here, obviously. In fact this new paradigm I’m working through drives me nuts, a lot of the time. I’m not sure how else to square the requirements of academic grading with the framework through which I teach writing, which is one that necessitates drafting and revision and iteration until the ideas within are clear and complete. That takes time, and it certainly won’t look the same for every student.

And, well, at least through this approach I get to opt out of something I hate. This is surely a nation of scammers and fraudsters and hucksters but I think I have it in me to give teenagers the benefit of the doubt. Despite my best efforts I still have a lot of poison to draw out of myself and this feels like one good way to do it.

Thanks, as always, for reading. I’ll talk to you next time.

-Chuck

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Two houses down the neighbors have a colossal dead tree still standing in their backyard. It’s the only house on the block where I don’t know the occupants and so have no idea what plans they might have for taking down such a hazard, but it’s been dead for as long as I’ve lived here, closer now to three years than two.

This tree has my attention most mornings not because of the hazards it poses but because of the life it supports: an innumerable horde of starlings.

You’ve probably seen plenty of starlings yourself—European starlings, to be accurate. From a population of 60 birds introduced in New York in the 1870s they have grown to blanket the North American continent, with population estimates reaching 150 million in recent years. They are hardy and resourceful and outcompete many native species. It’s a shame that they’re basically invasive; they’re beautiful birds. Their glossy coats of night play host to the splashes of white pinpoints that surprisingly have nothing to do with their name, and I think we only underrate their charm because of their commonness.

But what really interests me about starlings is their stunning mimicry.

Starlings, like their relatives the mynahs, will learn and repeat sounds from their environments, and (as you can see in that second video) can be trained to emphasize human words and phrases in their vocalizations. They can start doing this after hearing a sound just once. I’ve never heard the ones in our neighborhood speak, but they regularly pretend to be red-tailed hawks. Whether this is at all conscious on their part I can’t say—birds are thought to engage in predator mimicry both as a means of deterring those same predators and to simply enlarge their vocal repertoire to impress potential mates—but it is always a treat to hear the familiar scree of the hawk folded into the ceaseless jabber of chirps and whistles.

Mimicry, parody, pastiche, imitation: whatever you want to call it, starlings have a talent for borrowing material from their environment and layering it together into something at once both recognizable and new. And this is so fascinating in the starling because it feels like human behavior. Not the use of words, I mean, but the practice itself. We are always, whether we like it or not, remixing and redeploying the stuff that surrounds us into our own material.

I tell my first year writing students this constantly. The trick is not in being wholly original, an uncompromising standalone genius, but to go looking for what moves and interests you and to mimic that stuff until it has transformed into something that is at once old and new, theirs and yours. And it’s not just for beginners! The professor of the graduate creative writing seminar I’m taking this semester has framed the course around the “imitative impulse,” a phrase taken from a wonderful essay by Jessie Kindig about Thoreau’s “Wild Apples,” over the course of which the author herself becomes more and more Thoreau-like.

Kindig writes;

If you are guided by the imitative impulse, everything is important, from the new buds of spring to the first winds of war; everything is your purview and your scope. You, apple, common ordinary person in the common ordinary heroic age, realize you are already divine. Divine as mud. Divine as a daisy chain.

People in every line of work, people of every interest and hobby and talent, first (and often always) take hard the realization that they are not original. But that’s the good news: no one is. And the even better news: it means that no one is alone.

This past November, and again over the weekend, some of my talented musician friends hosted a night of live band karaoke: we requested the songs a few months in advance, they learned them, singers showed up to practice once or twice, and then everyone took their turns on stage (in this case a living room floor) on the big night.

Karaoke fascinates me. Some people are completely transformed up there, from meek or passive or deferential to a wild showman, a rockstar in miniature, a hidden vocal talent just waiting for permission. Others can’t sing a lick but can still spellbind a room just by caring about what they’re doing. And some are expert mimics, the kind where if you close your eyes you can be fooled for a moment that it might really be Queen or Fall Out Boy or Muse or or The B-52s up there performing.

In each case the song becomes something else. It’s not just the lyrics or the instruments, not just the performance or the passion, but a new thing entirely, given meaning by all that it has enfolded: yes, the lyrics and the instruments, yes the performance and the passion, but also the transformation of someone the crowd thought they knew into someone who is more and different than that. Also the crowd itself. Also the moment, the ephemerality. That this particular imitation will never happen again. The knowledge that all of this really is For One Night Only.

It creates, in other words, a night of starlings. Karaoke does. To take the raw stuff of someone else’s song and belt it for the world to hear, and in so doing, to make it your own. Divine as mud. I hope it never stops.

Thanks, as always, for reading. I’ll talk to you next time.

-Chuck

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It’s been cold in Detroit lately. (Cold everywhere, really. They got deep snow in New Orleans today.) Single digits, into the negatives overnight.

This gave my wife and I cause the other night to try to trap (and so rescue) the two feral cats who’ve cautiously befriended—or maybe begged from and so tolerated—us over the past few months.

Celeste and Penelope, who might be a mated pair or just boyfriend1 and girlfriend, are survivors. No other way to put it. Celeste is missing one eye and is going blind in the other, and the tip is gone from his left ear. Penelope looks whole and healthy and is preternaturally cautious, which is not the same thing as timid. We met them through our friend Audrey, who used to live next door, and was the person that everyone in the neighborhood called when a stray animal was in trouble. Audrey used to leave food out for Celeste and Penelope, and coming home on warm nights we’d see them under her porch light, snuggled up together but alert, watchful in their quotation mark arrangement.

When Audrey moved out we weren’t sure if we’d see them again. They’re fast learners and maybe can’t afford to wait around for a meal out there in the urban wild. But they started to appear again a month or two ago—Celeste, in his boldness, occasionally coming right up to our front door to chat; Penelope, in her infinite wisdom, keeping to Audrey’s old porch in case of danger.

Maybe they knew what was coming. Maybe they have an animal sense for deep winter the way they do for earthquakes and cancer. Just ahead of this bitter cold snap they turned into a nightly presence on our stoop—both of them, which is how we knew it was serious. Celeste was meowing up a storm, so we put out food and water, plus a little makeshift shelter they could both disappear into if they wanted. And after a few nights of this routine (nights not without their hiccups; in their caution and toughness they are extremely reactive, and a twitch of my leg earned it a four-claw stab from Celeste), with sub-zero temperatures coming, we borrowed some traps from Audrey, baited them, and hoped that what little trust we’d earned would be enough.

It was an anxious evening, waiting them out. No: it was a terrifying evening. What if they don’t take the bait and they freeze out there. What if one takes the bait but that scares off the other and we can only save one—what if we, in our bumbling good intentions, split them up forever through forces they can’t understand. What if the shock of capture kills them and the cold actually wouldn’t have. What if what if what if what if.

We had been given cause to learn again, by surprise, one of life’s most basic truths: that fear is always born at the same time as care. They are symbiotic, enemies, mirrors, shadow selves. No care can exist without the sheer and simple terror of that care ceasing to exist, or (worse) that care, through error, causing its own end. That was the drama that played out in miniature on our front porch as the night deepened into a killing cold.

And yet. Not taking the risk at all, turning from that care, would have been even worse. (“Here’s the truth,” says one of the immortal antagonists of David Mitchell’s The Bone Clocks. “Who is spared love is spared grief.” Yes, and what an awful fate.) We sat there in half-mute distraction until we heard the sound of metal: Penelope, against all odds, had been first to take the bait. We whisked her inside and down into the basement in her little cage beneath a blanket. And then the waiting went on. And on. All those terrors of what our intercession might have caused fighting their way to the surface. We’d look out the window from time to time and there he’d be, Celeste, waiting us out as we waited him out.

Click. My wife rushed outside. He was in. We brought him in. She brought them both to Audrey’s. They are adjusting, maybe. They are warm. They are inside. We don’t know what’s next for them yet and that’s alright.

I don’t know what to with all of this except to say that as things continue to get worse, everywhere, in ways we never thought possible, we will need care and luck in equal measure. We will have to learn to keep extending our care, our love, with all its accompanying holy terror, wherever we can. To each other. To the people being drowned by this fucked-up world. To the little animals out in the cold. “Let everything happen to you,” wrote Rilke. “Beauty and terror. Just keep going.” That might be all we can do. That might be everything there is to do.

Thanks, as always, for reading. I’ll talk to you next time.

-Chuck

PS - If you liked what you read here, why not subscribe and get this newsletter delivered to your inbox each week? It’s free and always will be, although there is a voluntary paid subscription option if you’d like to support Tabs Open that way.

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Next week I’ll be asking my students to read this very short piece as a preamble to the first time they’ll be required to revise something they’ve written for me.

Revisions are an integral part of my curriculum. I try to abolish the framework whereby students write an entire essay the night before it’s due, hand it in with a silent prayer, and then never think about it again save for the moment it comes back with a letter and number at the top. That’s obviously a lousy way to learn how to do anything, especially so fundamentally bizarre a thing as writing for a specific context, a specific audience.1

And yet we insist on this kind of accelerated, pressure-driven framework for writing in the academic context anyway. We pretend to a notion of objectivity, an exact right and wrong, and demand that it be done as quickly as possible. No wonder students skip past it all and see AI tools as worthy shortcuts: when the institutional demand for outputs increases while the institution is stripped (or strips itself) of the tools for providing meaningful inputs,2 we can’t expect students to do anything other than to replicate the incentive structures they see enacted all around them.

This is why I’m so excited to introduce my students to that piece I linked above, which begins with a description of a magic trick from Teller. Once explained, the trick is no less impressive, because of the sheer amount of time that would have to be put in to pull it off. And Teller makes no secret of this. He says:

Sometimes magic is just someone spending more time on something than anyone else might reasonably expect.

This is the rub, and what drives me so batshit crazy about the rapid cultural shift toward AI-everything. Yes, the tools themselves are largely garbage; yes, they’re insanely resource-intensive at a time when we simply Should Not Be Doing That; yes, they depend entirely on the precarious labor of victimized people. But perhaps just as noteworthy is the fact that they fundamentally misunderstand, and so skew, what was so meaningful about all of this stuff to begin with: art, writing, task-completion, communication, you name it.3 We are a society, here in the midst of whatever stage of capitalism you want to call it, obsessed with outputs. And in this obsession4 we have forgotten that what makes any of this worth it is the input.

Here’s Allen Pike, from that piece on Teller’s trick:

It can be difficult, psychologically, to commit yourself to spend an extreme amount of time and attention towards a goal, no matter how worthwhile. Doing impossible things feels, well, impossible.

That’s why, generally, the approach is to start small, then increment. Do something, so you can change it. Get your reps in. Evolve your complex system from a simple one that works.

Eventually, years in, this will culminate in overnight success. You’ll have achieved something that seems magical – impossible, even.

It just takes some time.

I have no interest in AI art or AI writing because at best, all they can do is steal from the immense amounts of time that others have put into honing a particular craft. I have no patience for the treatification of American society, where everyone has come to believe that all food should be deliverable at all times, rapidly and without any meaningful increase in cost. I don’t just mean to moralize here; there is joy in getting better at things! There is joy in using a blizzard to make your own giant pot of stew, the fact that you don’t have to pay a 40% markup to get a wage slave to risk their own safety to bring you something lukewarm to eat aside!

Alright, deep breath.

I wrote recently about the need to embrace the darkness surrounding us in these winter months, a precious gift that is steadily being stripped from the sky by our artificial lighting.

Accordingly, my wife and I have been trying to keep our house lights in line with the rhythms of the day: as evening comes on, all of our lights, save a few strategic festive strings, go out. We light our gas fireplace and then, in every room we might enter, a candle or two. There are aesthetic joys to be found in this simple practice, as Kim Stanley Robinson describes:

Fooling around with stones, running, throwing things at things, those are all on the Paleolithic list, everything we did to evolve into what we are. You do them now and there are parts of the brain that just light up, like a light’s gone on in a room. Even looking at fire, which is a very basic thing. You look at a fire and a part of your brain is just going, “Right on,” and loving it.

But in light of all I’m trying to do as a writing teacher, the desperate pleas I’m making for my students to see their own attention as a resource that they must ferociously guard, it strikes me that candles serve an additional purpose, especially if you choose to do your work by them: they function not only as a unit of light but as a unit of time. Burning the midnight oil wasn’t always just a metaphor; when you live and work by candelight in the dark months, you can actually see the evidence of time passing as the candle diminishes. You can look up at the vanishing wax and quantify the time spent on the work you have done, and in doing so also qualify the work you have done. How much time, and so how much attention was given to the task?

This doesn’t have to be work work, either. Showering by candlelight on recent evenings has turned a task that usually happens on autopilot into a more attentive one. Eating dinner by firelight has brought a quietude and a sense of interest to a meal I usually spend with a fork in one hand and my phone in the other. In that flickering glow my phone screen seems genuinely offensive. I see this as a good thing. Like I’m getting the millennial version of that nasty-tasting spray they tell you to put on your furniture to make your dog stop chewing it.

All I want to do is to live within the rhythms of the real world, the one behind and between all this nasty stuff that has been superimposed on it. Despite really meaning that, it is still a daily struggle to live accordingly, but it is a struggle worth having.

Kim Stanley Robinson again:

I do a lot of weeding in the garden every morning. I have my hands in the dirt, and I’m vigorously and enthusiastically killing plants that I don’t like, or maybe I do like them, but I definitely don’t want them in my garden. So I’m just sitting in the sun on my butt, or I’m standing kneeling over, digging around in the dirt. Well, it’s very satisfying. I don’t think anything I can do on a computer is actually quite as satisfying as that.

There are degrees to all of this, and your mileage may vary. I might never end up back in the pre-industrial rhythm of “The Watch,” the two-sleep default that we likely carried for most of human history. But everything feels so insane lately that I don’t see any other way than to try to break these habits, these poisonous impositions on what could otherwise be a reasonably good life.

Thanks, as always, for reading. I’ll talk to you next time.

-Chuck

PS - If you liked what you read here, why not subscribe and get this newsletter delivered to your inbox each week? It’s free and always will be, although there is a voluntary paid subscription option if you’d like to support Tabs Open that way.

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Whenever I start to see a theme repeating in the things I’m reading, I try to make note of it. A sign, maybe, that I need to do something with whatever idea keeps finding me. Lately the one I keep running into is that we have been robbed of something fundamentally important by the light pollution in the night sky.

Fitting, I think, to dwell on that idea this week. We are past the solstice and so now is the time of sun return, a lengthening of days. Our attention to the sky is rarely keener than at this time of year. Letting my dog out at night, the stars, when I can see them, seem sharper and clearer in the winter cold, and have a glittering coldness to themselves that is attenuated—maybe just in my imagination—in the warmer months.

It’s inarguable that those stars are getting harder and harder to come by. What was simply a fact of life for almost all of human history is a rarity now, and one bizarrely unremarked-upon. Living in a city, as I do, means you’re lucky to get even a smattering of them every few nights, and only those which are brightest. I find that profoundly depressing—not just for romantic or aesthetic reasons, although those certainly contribute. Robert Macfarlane, in The Wild Places, writes (emphasis mine):

Our disenchantment of the night through artificial lighting may appear, if it is noticed at all, as a regrettable but eventually trivial side-effect of contemporary life. That winter hour, though, up on the summit ridge with the stars falling plainly far above, it seemed to me that our estrangement from the dark was a great and serious loss. We are, as a species, finding it increasingly hard to imagine that we are part of something which is larger than our own capacity. We have come to accept a heresy of aloofness, a humanist belief in human difference, and we suppress wherever possible the checks and balances on us—the reminders that the world is greater than us or that we are contained with in it.

It is profoundly alienating to live a human life in which darkness has been banished and replaced with a perpetual half-glow, one that permits no end to the opportunities to produce and consume. Darkness, punctuated only by the moon and the stars, was always a fundamental check and balance on our activities, a baked-in period of rest, stillness, quietude, attention. It came each night without fail. And in removing that darkness and all its attendant demands to slow down, we have made ourselves more than a little insane. Macfarlane continues:

We have in many ways forgotten what the world feels like. And so new maladies of the soul have emerged, unhappinesses which are complicated products of the distance we have set between ourselves and the world. We have come increasingly to forget that our minds are shaped by the bodily experience of being in the world—its spaces, textures, sounds, smells, and habits—as well as by genetic traits we inherit and ideologies we absorb.

This was driven home to me—this forgetting what the world feels like—this past summer on a trip to Cape Cod with my wife’s family. Our vacation coincided with the peak of the Perseid meteor shower. We rallied the group to grab some lawn chairs and sit out for it; that close to the ocean, the sky was dark enough to really see the display, and we were rewarded accordingly. And in the midst of all the gasping and pointing, I heard my sister-in-law’s boyfriend say “I don’t think I’ve ever seen a shooting star before.”

That shocked me, though it probably shouldn’t have: according to Dark Sky International, 80% of the world’s population and 99% of Americans live under a substantial enough “skyglow” that they can’t experience a natural night. The vast majority of children born worldwide since 1988 will go their whole lives without seeing the Milky Way. Never having seen a shooting star before is not a personal failure of attention but a massive structural problem several centuries in the making. What a profound loss—that the only truly bright celestial objects most people will ever see at night are manmade planes and satellites. As L.M. Sacasas writes in one of his best issues of The Convivial Society:

Perhaps this is a bit too dramatic a metaphor, but if we think that the loss of the star-filled night sky is a real and serious loss with significant if also difficult to quantify human consequences, then the final imposition of an artificial network of satellites where before the old celestial inheritance had been seems rather like being tossed cheap trinkets to compensate for the theft some precious treasure.

Yes, we have been robbed of something here. And the compounding tragedy is that with each passing year, fewer and fewer people will even know that it was ever otherwise, that the sky was ever so dark as to force us—to permit us—to live in a more restful, attentive way. Sacasas continues:

We are doomed, it seems, to abide the loss of all that we cannot quantify. Absent shared ethical frameworks or normative accounts of human flourishing, modern societies tend to resort to quantification as an ostensibly neutral and value free lingua franca suitable for the public sphere. Meanwhile, it becomes increasingly difficult to recognize and defend human goods that cannot be objectively measured. And should some effort be made to quantify them, they are likely to be reduced, impoverished, and exploited.

Still, despite our societal commitment to the perpetual glow, there are places one can go to regain a sense of what’s really above us in the night. Hal Borland, a naturalist and country-life correspondent for The New York Times, found plenty of stars overhead in the Connecticut hills of the 1970s, and within them a sort of aesthetic warmth, even in the wintertime. In the December 26 entry to his Book of Days, Borland writes:

…though I admire the mathematics, I almost resent being told that some of those stars I am seeing have been dead and without a glimmer of luminescence for a thousand or two thousand years. The light I see, I am told, and no doubt with ample reason, is simply light that was cast this way by those stars before they died.

Even so, to walk abroad now is to walk in the midst of infinity. There are no limits to either time or distance, except as man himself may make them. I have only to touch the wind to know these things, for the wind itself is full of starlight, even as the frozen earth underfoot, starlight and endless time and exalted wonder.

There is wonder up there, even if we have veiled it, or had it veiled for us. And even still the winter wind is full of starlight—I think I can feel it when I step outside at night, here at the close of December.

One year ago today, I wrote a missive that I titled “More Light.”

I stand by it. But I can’t help but think that an equally important mantra for this year, and all that will follow it, is its inverse: More Darkness. By this I do not mean the abandonment of light, but simply the acceptance of our own place within the world and its encompassing universe, an acceptance that can only fully occur through a striving toward attention in the quiet darkness.

Thanks, as always, for reading. I’ll talk to you next year.

-Chuck

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I’ve written before about how my New Year’s resolutions, when I bother to make them, tend to be formatted as lists of More1: rather than list all the specific things I’m going to do or achieve, I try to attend to things in my life that already feel good, and commit to doing more of them.

While it’s long been obvious in the abstract, this year brought home to me—with meteoric intensity—the concrete conclusion that my time is a finite resource, and that in order to do more of the things I find fulfilling, I must necessarily do less of other things. And, being a person here at the end of 2024, it’s also long been obvious that the needless thing I do the most of is “using my phone.” To do more of anything else, I need to do less of that.

This doesn’t come easily to me. I don’t just mean that various apps have been successful in getting me addicted to their particular pleasures and interfaces, though they have. I also mean that I am by nature both very desirous of connection and a relentless people-pleaser. Accordingly, what eats even more of my time and attention than simply scrolling Twitter or Instagram is the fact of communication. I’m in countless group chats on those apps and others, full of people I like and want to stay connected to,2 and more of my online time is consumed reading chats than scrolling feeds. I, like everyone else, am simply perpetually available. And this perpetual availability, at the risk of sounding dramatic, has begun to ruin my life.

Put simply, I am finding it harder and harder to pay attention. To anything, which is to say, to everything in my life. Even as I commit to reading for pleasure every night, I find it harder and harder to keep my attention on the page. The ceaseless, frantic searching for something new and stimulating on my phone, and the need to respond to everything that comes my way, have destroyed my deep cognition, my ability to focus. (Just since I started typing this paragraph I’ve gotten distracted by two non-essential messages popping up on my screen; I linked my text messages to my laptop years ago and am just now starting to realize how annoying I find that.) That realization terrifies me in the most profound way. For all of my musings about death, for all of my lofty (and sincere!) beliefs that death is the necessary opportunity to give the gift of the stuff of our lives back to the earth, I am not in any way prepared to die. And if some tragedy befell me tomorrow and I had a few moments to think about things before the end, one of the most vehement thoughts would surely be: What the fuck was I doing with all that time???

This drives my anxiety through the roof and makes me miserable to be around. (It at least makes me find myself miserable to be around, which is reason enough to want to do something different.) If I can’t focus on things I purport to care about, if I can’t let them fill me in the way they ought to, I am not participating in my own life. And I am not letting the fact of my own finitude, and theirs, to fill me with the kind of urgency toward love that should be central fact of our relationships to each other, to our animals, and even to our things.

Here is the only solution I have found, short of abandoning society for the woods once and for all: my phone is now permanently on “Do Not Disturb.”

I’ve customized whose messages and calls will actually come through as notifications, a very short list limited to my immediate family and the friends who I need to check in with about dog care and our shared home-buying project. Regardless of how much I like or love everyone else, I have decided that I have to like and love myself enough to limit communication with them to such times as I feel capable of participating authentically. In fact this is how I can show them that I do care for them: by not letting the fact of their getting in touch become intensely triggering to me, thereby creating some deeply negative associations that really have nothing to do with their target.

This goes for every app: I am learning to work through the anxiety I have long had toward letting Instagram messages pile up. I used to stress big-time about this, that by not responding, not watching the funny reels I was sent, not giving the appropriate emoji reactions quickly enough, I was signaling to people that I didn’t care about them enough to reciprocate their act of friendship. Because it really is nice to be thought of! And these apps, for better or worse, are the tools of sustaining friendship in this day and age. I can’t tell you how warm I feel knowing that someone saw something somewhere and my name, my face, or my spirit came to their mind.

But it became increasingly clear to me over the course of this year that this kind of communication, on Instagram in particular, was becoming untenable. It’s been years since I let myself get push notifications from social media apps, but I now have to work to give myself permission to not even click over to the red (it’s red on purpose) message icon to see what lies beneath.3

My full-time Do Not Disturb experiment has been going on for less than three weeks, and so many of my old anxieties are already beginning to feel silly. There has not been a single emergency during that time in which I needed to be reached by someone who doesn’t have other ways to reach me. I have gone upwards of three days at a time without reading text messages from people not on that short list I mentioned, and not one of them has cut me out of their lives or expressed concern at my behavior. When Instagram reels pile up in my inbox I simply don’t watch them and don’t react if I don’t feel like it, and no one has demanded to know why. It turns out that pretty much none of this is a big deal at all.

The urgency baked in to our modern frameworks of communication papers over the fact that very little of the communicating we do is in any way urgent. Communication itself: yes, this is urgent, this is the foundation of community, of society. But we were always meant, I think, to be able to communicate on our own terms, rather than living in each other’s heads and ears and pockets and eyeballs twenty-four hours a day.

Thanks, as always, for reading. (I don’t take lightly that you are spending your own fleeting, precious life reading this newsletter and focusing your own attention on my thoughts.) I’ll talk to you next time.

-Chuck

PS - If you liked what you read here, why not subscribe and get this newsletter delivered to your inbox each week? It’s free and always will be, although there is a voluntary paid subscription option if you’d like to support Tabs Open that way.

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Well, somehow another semester is almost over. After this I have just one more of being, formally, both a student and a teacher left. My skin, waistline, wallet, and marriage have all suffered considerably in a year and a half of grad school, and while it has been nice to get structured time to learn so many things and be in community with so many fine people, I will not miss the struggle when it’s over.

If there’s one thing I’ve noticed in all my time teaching it’s that in settings like the one I’m in now, as the prescribed time a class has together draws to a close, some semblance of affection seems to appear where it didn’t used to be.

It’s like how my old basketball coach used to get really convivial toward the end of the season. The rest of the time we didn’t have this kind of relationship, and I didn’t often feel like a valued member of the team—on a good night, I was the twelfth man in on a fifteen man squad, and the good nights were few and far between, though I did average something like one steal per game for my whole career despite also averaging something like ninety seconds of playing time per game, which you can interpret as a function of just how badly I deserved more chances out there or just that it was Syracuse in the aughts and so we were running the 2-3 zone like every other team in the city and that formation is a scrappy undersized player’s paradise—

Anyway. I don’t mean to say that these sudden outpourings of esprit de corps weren’t genuine. Quite the opposite, and that’s what keeps drawing my attention. The way that the movement of time toward an end seems to draw people together, no matter what the rest of it was like. Hence there being a French term for it at all.

This same thing happens with my students. We all silently cross some threshold together in the last few weeks of the term, and things get easier somehow, and things seem to be forgiven, mostly. Even if each of us believes ourselves to have been on the receiving end, not the giving end, of most of the preceding weeks’ difficulties. There is simply something about endings that makes us feel companionable, even affectionate, toward the people who were with us for the beginnings and the middles. No matter how those beginnings and middles felt.

Time is always going to run out, whether we want it to or not, and so this companionability is perhaps a natural and necessary defense mechanism against the void. It’s maybe why W.S. Merwin wrote “Would I love it this way if it could last,” why Jason Isbell sang “Maybe time running out is a gift,” why Jim Harrison asked “Would I still love the creek if I lasted forever?”, why D.H. Lawrence said “I yield myself and am/borrowed/By the fine, fine wind that takes its course through/the chaos of the world.”

I don’t know exactly what to do with all of these observations other than to recognize that we are entering the season where time is of a stranger shape than at any other point in the year. The light continues to diminish, as it will for another few weeks, leaving the days frighteningly short and the nights exhaustingly long. There is a frantic rush to get things done—schoolwork, last emails, elaborate meals, travel between homes each with their own complicated emotional tenor. It feels important, then, to hunker down. To let time do what it must do, to be taken by the rhythm of the season rather than fighting it uphill until the dawning of the new year. We were always meant to feel a little awed and small as things swirl around us on their way to an ending. May it draw us closer instead of breaking us apart.

Thanks, as always, for reading. I’ll talk to you next time.

-Chuck

PS - If you liked what you read here, why not subscribe and get this newsletter delivered to your inbox each week? It’s free and always will be, although there is a voluntary paid subscription option if you’d like to support Tabs Open that way.

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PPS - If you’re in the mood for some holiday-specific reading, please enjoy this piece I wrote a few years ago about The Last Waltz, Thanksgiving, and our human need for traditions.

PPPS - If you need a good gift for the outdoorsy reader in your life AND want to support the author of this publication, A Good Place for Maniacs: Dispatches from the Pacific Crest Trail is available online wherever books are sold.