Heat Rises — Nilüfer Yanya

I don't know. People have asked me this hundreds of times. I type very quickly; I haven't clocked my words per minute in years because I don't like numerical assessments of my value. Too many bad things in life relate to a numerical assessment. But I'm fast. And I've been able to type quickly on a standard English keyboard for about as long as I can remember. I've probably typed something on a computer keyboard more than 95% of the days I've lived since 1993.

I have the copy of Goodnight Moon that my mom read to me as a baby. She wrote on the inside cover that it was the first book I could "read" out loud, at 18 months. I think it's more likely I had memorized the sounds of the words; I think she said once that she stopped turning the pages, and I was able to keep reciting it word for word. But I did learn to read it, at a very early age. It's one of the things I'm grateful my mother did, reading to me and Ryan almost every night well into our pre-teens. Eventually I read my own books while she read to Ryan in the twin bed a few feet away from mine, one part of my mind on my book, one on theirs. In middle school we had a competition to see who could read the most self-reported pages over the course of many months; I won, in a tight race with my friend Lucas and a couple of other kids, though the books I was reading were adult-sized fantasy novels and some of the other kids were reading much lower-density kids' books. The pages were counted just the same.

Several conflicts with authority in middle school presaged my eventual deconstruction. Realizing that, not only was the "Pledge of Allegiance" weird — even though I had been raised to be a good nationalist conservative and hadn't broken out of that fully yet — but I could see that people were reciting it without meaning anything by it. Why bother? Each day before school I showed up at my desk and continued reading the novel I'd been reading on the bus, which I had been reading while eating cereal at breakfast, which I had fallen asleep reading the night before. So when it came time to say the pledge, I just decided to stay seated and keep reading. This became a massive deal, including confrontations with the Vice Principal, my parents being called, and me having to write an essay explaining my justification for not wanting to say the Pledge. The VP called my mom that afternoon and apparently said, "We were very surprised by how thoughtful Nicholas's essay is. While he does raise interesting points, we would like to avoid disruption in the classroom. So, as a compromise, while he doesn't have to say the Pledge if he doesn't want to, we do need him to at least stand respectfully."

Thinking this was stupid, but having dealt with over a week of kerfuffle because I'd rather read than mindlessly recite the nationalist creed, I agreed. I never said the Pledge again; instead I just stood up and kept reading my book. That's the short version of that story, which brought me a lot more grief over the following weeks.

Despite all that, I still maintained a general sense that the system was good. It could be addressed. Power could bend. The event that I attribute to really putting the first crucial crack in my perception of school and its value came during an elective computer class. For a couple of periods a day, we would be shuffled around into classes based on our interests, which was a nice thing for a school to do. That's how I learned to play viola, took art, and so on. In the 7th grade one of the options was Computers, which seemed like a no-brainer because I'd already been using a computer at home since I was maybe 5 or 6. I knew I could complete the assignments quickly, and covertly play Oregon Trail on the Apple IIe more days than not.

This seemed especially true when it came to learn Typing. I learned to type intuitively, through repetition, starting with the dos prompt, moving through AOL mad libs and text adventures, into the Nintendo Power and Tamagotchi chatrooms, well into text-based chat in games like Ultimate Online and Quake / Team Fortress. Thing is, I didn't learn to type with the home row. Nobody taught me! I don't even remember figuring it out; it just happened, over time, as an outgrowth of my interest in putting text into the computer. So, presumably my initial pecking turned into placing more fingers on the keys, turned into typing so naturally that I didn't even really have to think about the keyboard itself at all; I think the words and they appear on the screen at about the same time, fingers handling their own business, not necessarily using the same finger to type the same letters each time, just going where they know the words lie waiting to appear.

This didn't turn out to be an asset in the class. I still... don't understand what was wrong with this teacher. I remember her face, her voice, but not her name. She seemed all right a lot of the time. However, when it was time to take an initial test of our typing speeds, I just typed my way through the exercises quickly and accurately, finished, and started poking around the games on the machine. A few minutes later, she came over and whispered that I needed to be doing the typing test. I already finished, I said. She didn't believe me. I showed her the results. She asked me to start again, and watched me type. With something that sounded like vindication, she told me that I may have completed the exercise, but I wasn't doing it right. I was supposed to use the home row; if I didn't use the home row, the test was invalid.

............. Can you believe this shit? My little brain broke. I wanted to do things right, but how could typing what was on the screen be wrong, regardless of how I did it? So, I tried to adhere to home row rules, and found it excruciating; it was like learning to type for the first time, and my words per minute plummeted. The teacher said this was how I needed to do the rest of the exercises. The rest of the day is a blur; I was deeply upset, but held onto it until I got home. I burst into tears, explaining to my mom what had happened, asking what sense this made, and why I could be punished for already knowing how to do something better than anyone else in the class, even if I did it in a weird way?

I don't remember what my mom said. I don't remember what I did for the rest of the typing module. I remember being in the class, and feeling the sweltering panic of being inside the classroom box, subject to judgmental eyes, unable to make real use of the relevant skills I had already developed, drop-kicked from the top of the class to the bottom, an experience that became all too familiar over my next decade in school.

Later that year, my dad very generously "borrowed" a chunky older laptop from work, so that I could have a device to write stories on. I typed furiously on it for months, writing Earthbound fanfiction, Crichton pastiche sci-fi stories for extra science class credit, and starting on a larger fantasy story intended to be a novel. I was driven, full of words, stories pouring out of me. I took it in the car, writing on the way to the grocery store, to restaurants, wherever we went as a family in that old van. I started staying up later, after my parents had gone to bed, listening to CDs on my Walkman and churning out pages at my little green and tan Rooms to Go Kids desk. Eventually, one night blissfully writing, my mom came in and hissed at me to be quiet. "I can hear you typing! You need to go to bed, but at the very least you need to be quiet." I was so ashamed; most of the mistakes in my life were made because I genuinely wanted my parents to be happy with me. So instead of finding another way to sneak it, I just... stopped typing as much. There was additional shaming around how much I was writing; I got stuck on the plot of the novel, honestly never having heard that you could write a book non-linearly, and not quite sure what should happen in this scene even though I knew what was going to happen after that; and, over the next year, I shifted away from trying to write fiction and eventually joined a band, switching to writing lyrics and songs with all of that compulsive creative energy.

Packing my stuff last week, Christina asked me why I wanted to keep an entire shelf of notebooks, from when I was 15 until today. Notebooks full of lyrics, dreams, journals, stories, and ideas of all kinds. I don't like to open them most of the time; but they exist, and they're part of me. Destroying them wouldn't feel liberating; I'm already free of them. But they're one of the few indicators I have of what it looks and feels like to be engaged in something, uninhibited, joyfully motivated simply to turn my time and breath and thought into something material, a feeling that's gotten harder and harder to access and maintain over the years. I respect the effort that kid put into those notebooks. I have to honor myself, in some way.

And there are reams more text that I've carried digitally along the way. But they don't look like anything, don't have weight, are easy to forget ever even existed. They spray out at type speed, pile up, and vanish into the filesystem. But I've kept those, too. They belong to the unsorted pile, and show vast amounts of time spent thinking, and more importantly, thinking it might be important to me that I record them. Dragging the pen across paper takes time; more time than it used to, messier, after shattering my wrist and re-learning to do everything halfway through my twenties. And that time matters, it matters to me, it is a beautiful and terrible graveyard of the little prodigy repeatedly burning up on reentry from unappreciated adventures outside their birth-constrained planetoid.

--

(This post coalesced around various seeds, including: I've read a lot of posts by Tom MacWright in the last few days. He gathers his thoughts nicely. He linked to various note-taking applications, including The Archive, which looks like a nice replacement for the outdated nvAlt I've been using for a decade. Opening The Archive, the first file it shows is a list of acknowledgments, which I read in their entirety. It opens with "This app, like every app, stands on the shoulder of giants. Hundreds of years of human scholarliness culminate in this piece of software. Also, the Internet, electricity, movable type -- thanks for all this, humanity!" And then mentions some specific people. Among others, they thank Toffer D. Brutechild, mentioning their book-in-progress called "Tiny Advice Book." I read some of those posts, identified a kindred depressive spirit, and then read this piece of theirs about burning their old notebooks, then this one about discovering and working with their disgraphia. Finally, The Archive's help document states up front, "We assume that you know how to type." That is an assumption, but one that has gone unmentioned by every other text editor I've ever opened. I love that, and then remembered some things about how I learned to type in the first place.)

I made the mistake of reflecting on masculinity by way of literature today, because I made the mistake of looking at twitter for longer than 1 minute, because we're caught in a re-litigation loop of the last fifty years because almost everything was wrong with the last fifty years. It has never been a good time to read Infinite Jest, even and especially if you were its author, who had words squeezed out of him compulsively, past-due juice bursting from unhappy citrus. If you start reading one of the ten billion books and don't mesh with its voice, the fault is always the book's. But that's my unasked-for masculinity hissing condescension I only half-mean.

I typed "making and unmaking." What did I mean by that? Oh, yeah. I was watching a video of St. Vincent playing guitar and thinking things about gender that I don't have good words for. The things I admire in her, I would hate in a man. The attitude, the emptiness, the prowess. That confidence in a woman is earned and admirable, while confidence in a man is unearned and loathsome — and that this is almost always true. That women have to make themselves(?) while the task of a man in this moment is to unmake himself; to strip away the monstrous layers of sedimentary masculine nastiness.

Or that's how I find myself thinking about it; that I've spent most of my conscious life trying not to be a ""man"" because almost everything about the concept is repulsive. I've unmade myself for so many reasons, almost all of which have to do with inadvertent manifestation of the toxic. I've been the obnoxious, too-talkative lit dude; but I've grown through it and tried to replace haughtiness with enthusiasm to keep listening. Whenever I try talking about this, though, and raise any complaint about my position as "the dude" in any situation, there's understandable raising of queer hackles that I might be going MRA. No! There is no defense of the obelisk; it must be torn down. It's too much to talk through. All I want to say is that I feel, acutely, that I have been made to carry the insistent clawmarks of manhood, that I've put so much effort into rooting out the enculturation that makes all my favorite people less trustful of me, that it is excruciating to have enjoyed in any measure some of the books on a "red flags list" at some point in my accidental life, and to choose not to defend those experiences, that there is a vast desert of my life that was none of it what I wanted and that I read Infinite Jest not (entirely) because of my gender but because I was jobless and briefly had a roommate with a different set of books than I had access to, and it kept me occupied for a month when I was 22 and needed desperately to believe I wasn't going to be poor forever (spoiler alert: I was), and it was a powerful experience precisely because of the ways it ripped and tore at the fabric of convulsive masculinity, the pressures of performance and speechlessness and disconnection and the illegible torrent of words that want to come out except you're supposed to sit there, politely, and let the old men decide your fate based on whether you fit. And even now I don't want to talk about it, because it's not important to me, and the likeliest thing is that, regardless of my personal experience, invoking certain objects casts me in a light I reject but can't evade.

This renders jagged chasms of my life unspeakable, and I am having a hard time right now with (among everything else) how much of my life feels like a story I either hate or have trouble speaking!

believe me, I am deeply aware of and ashamed of the contrast between posting about racist violence by state actors and then posting about needing a new cell phone plan!!!! we, as I have said, live in hell and the context collapse is just one of its manifestations

Do any of y’all use Visible for your phone? I need to change my phone service and it sounnnnds okay, despite being owned by verizon. Anybody have any good/bad experiences with it, or have a party plan I could join? reply to the tweet this generates or email me!

HEY, COPS, STOP KILLING BLACK PEOPLE, YOU COWARDLY FUCKS

There are no words for how terrifying, exhausting, and enraging it is to live in the USA,
and I’m among the least at risk of just being shot repeatedly because the neighbors called the cops. Jacob Blake was shot by the cops yesterday in front of his kids. I watched the video and feel sick beyond words. I hate this place, our corrupt systems, our constant abuses of power, and our ingrained disregard for human life.

I was shocked and moved to tears to wake up today to several donations to my Ko-fi, some of which were for larger-than-requested amounts!!! Thank you, sincerely, for even being willing to think about supporting me, let alone actually doing it.

If you missed my post yesterday about subscribing to keeping me alive, you can read it there! And whether you read that or not, I just want to say: I have had a hard time making enough money to live over the last couple of years, and am asking for help through donations or subscriptions through Ko-fi. You're not obligated to do anything, but if you have enjoyed any of the jokes, podcasts, art, writing, music, games, or anything else I've put online in the last few years... any amount is appreciated.

In the meantime, I'm continuing to work on a game that I'm very excited to tell you more about in the next couple of months, planning further game prototypes, and preparing to do some more web work to keep the bills paid. I'm also thinking about what little things might be fun to do for subscriber-only content (idk, we'll see), so if you have ideas about that, go comment on this Ko-fi post!

If you can, and I know it's a fucking ridiculous time, I need to ask for help! I've been having a hard time making ends meet for a couple of years now, but have continued to scrape together enough to keep going. Right now it's not looking so great! I just had to move out of the house where I've lived for the last few years because my housemate was going back to work in person with kids and that's a covid risk! I'm staying with my partner Christina temporarily in her little studio apartment, but I need to get a new place, and can't afford the rent on anything even remotely close to here. I haven't had a working car since last spring, when mine broke down and I couldn't repair it.

Since starting antidepressants last fall, I have majorly rehabilitated my capacity for work. I spend so little on things that aren't rent and food. I've spent most of the year since February working on a small game project that should be announced in the next month or two; but we're in the tail end of a longer-than-expected dev cycle (which, duh), and the money is running out. I have some web work lined up that I'll be able to do hopefully in the next month. But basically every month or two for the last two years I've scrabbled to get enough money together to pay everything I'm responsible for. It's exhausting, as I'm sure you know!

I'm turning 34 in a few weeks. After working low-wage jobs for a decade, then getting paid better but working contract to contract for most of the last... 5 years? I'm looking for something with longer-term stability; I'd love to find a way to keep working on game projects, especially on any of the half dozen designs I have sketched out that would give a fresh and meaningful injection of creativity into the world of games! In the meantime, I'll keep making web sites. I'd like to have time to do more public-facing creative stuff like podcasting and writing. But right now I'm focused on making a living and not dying! I haven't bought new glasses in 9 years! I don't have health insurance! I'm gonna need a new computer soon! Shit is bleak if I take even one tiny step back and peek out from between my trembling fingers, but I'm still going!!!!!!!

If you wanna help me keep the lights on and fund time for me to bring things in the world for you to enjoy, or if you just have a steady income and want to help out your friend who does not, how about you click on that Ko-fi button and subscribe to Keeping Me Alive!!! Or, send me a little one-time chump o'change! I dunno. I appreciate all of you who pay literally any attention to me despite everything, so thanks either way.

I love Achewood.