jennfrank.

for the sake of

My best childhood friend texted me a YouTube link to a video of a hometown hero, a local educator with a major regional following.

I had no clue who this was.

“You’re gonna have to remind me who this is and why he is running around” the entire county, I replied. She marveled at my ignorance. He’s an original local personality! she told me. He’d been in “every parade since before we were born,” she added. “He taught me hot potato when I was 41!”

Their intertwined personal mythologies were apparently extensive. Even thirty years later, the educator had always recognized my best friend at public events—would pleasantly joke that her mother had never given up on trying to convert him. “He is unfortunately still an atheist,” my best friend concluded.

A burst of indignation surged through my body, as if on the man’s behalf. Hmm.

“Yeah he seems pretty Buddhist,” I replied, trying to play it cool. I shifted around in my seat at home, struggling a little. Finally: “I think sometimes it can be pretty difficult to reconcile the legalistic Old Testament god who teams up with various cities to win all-out wars, who wants oaths and vows to be made, with the father figure Jesus describes. I think that psychological disconnect, combined with real-world atrocities committed by various religious sects in God’s name, might prevent someone like him from wanting to really align with any one world religion2.”

My friend did not respond to that, which, fair. Anyway, it’s just my best guess. I don’t know him personally like she does.

A couple years ago, my prayers faltered. I guess it really was true: I’d forgotten what it feels like to suffer. Valid.

Now that I was fully back in the business of agony and corresponding prayer—seeking an intervention, perhaps—I was reeling. To whom should my prayers be addressed?

An old childhood scrupulosity OCD terror had now come unburied, was at last coming to a head, like an old cyst finally abscessing: who do you think you’re praying to? Instead of finding, in the Psalms, the peace that passeth understanding, I was deeply unsettled. The majority of the Psalms seem to center on wreaking vengeance on one’s enemies3. Praying the Psalms makes sense if one is teetering on the knife’s blade of annihilation, which I absolutely was. And still I was unable to pray the Psalms with any seriousness or gravity, because the fact is, I don’t want anyone’s grapevine to die4, and this is an absolutely crazy idea to base a religion on—or one’s own sense of peace [on].

At the same approximate time, I’d started looking for a better biblical name for god—“Lord,” sure, but a lord presiding over what exactly, a nauseating question—and I was disturbed by the sheer range of names God seemed to have. What, for instance, was the meaningful difference between Jehovah-Gibbor and Jehovah-surname?

With a start, I realized that these were regional gods, warring gods, piecemeal, stitched together5. This is, of course, a slap in the face to anyone who was raised monotheistic6.

I’d also gone nuts about this: if you had a personal guardian angel, I whispered to my best friend, and if it started speaking out of someone who is in competition with you, then your angel would sound like their demon. At this, we were both shaken, silent, quavering. The point is to remain on the same team, always7.

She saw my face when she walked in. “Are you okay?” she asked me.

I stood there, wavering. Finally I shook my head no.

It’d been going on for well over a month, I explained, but recently it’d struck me much harder: an old friend of mine is not my friend at all. I explained what I meant.

My best childhood friend watched my explanation closely, her own face hard. Finally she said: “I’m glad you have come to this conclusion on your own. I’m sorry, you must be experiencing a lot of grief right now.” Something had always bothered her, too; the friend in question had never wanted what was best for me. Perhaps I was a latecomer to this realization.

I nodded, my face swollen.

I’ve been having nightmares, I told her.

Someone had entered the kitchen, so I pulled my best friend into the hallway. “When I’m in hypnogogia,” I explained to her, “which just means the space between asleep and awake,” I added, explaining the liminal transition space of consciousness, “I do hear things, these brief little phrases.” Usually the phrases are in English, I admitted solemnly—quick strings of words, little morals to my parable dreams, like Aesop making a fast commentary—“but sometimes I hear gibberish.”

This was not a big deal, by the way; this is par for the course, to overhear these snatches of conversation. “This is like…” and I sighed, “tarot cards,” I said. My best friend visibly checked out. “When you draw cards,” I continued, explaining myself to a brick wall, “maybe they don’t mean anything, actually, but they mean something just to you, and so you look for the meaning.”

I checked her face. Nope. Well, shadow consciousness isn’t for everyone. I continued.

This weird phrase I’d heard was satan liden abur. SAY-tuhn LIGH-duhn ah-BOAR.

These gibberish syllables obviously don’t mean anything. But, like cards, they’d invited me to find a meaning within them—as if I’d drawn actual physical Tarot cards and gone looking in the margins.

Usually I don’t remember what I’ve heard in my sleep, but this time I’d been close enough to consciousness, and to a computer, to check the syllables’ meaning. And, too, I’d been dreaming about Passover—about the “Spirit of the Lord” passing over houses, killing anyone whose doorframes weren’t painted in blood. There’s a certain inherent coziness in being with your family and knowing you’re not gonna die.

“Right,” my friend said beaming, of the concept of Passover, “our faithfulness to God!”

“Maybe,” I said blankly, additionally mumbling something about “the story kinda depicts God as the gestapo or drone warfare.” These had been nightmares, after all.

Anyway, the context of the dream was about a spirit passing over me, perhaps for an unusually long time. Maybe it had stayed on me, had paused there, had held me.

Liden is a word that can mean “to undergo,” “to suffer,” “to endure,” “to bear”—even “to prep,” like food, like meal prep. There’s a certain underlying meaning, too, about sailing, floating, passing through, a passover. I told my best friend this. Her eyes widened.

Then there is the much more interesting word “abur,” which sounds quite a bit like “abhor.” This word is Hebrew. According to Strong’s it might mean [https://studybible.info/strongs/H5668](on account of), or “because of,” or “for the sake of,” but in its fullness of context it actually means ‘corn,’ ‘grain’, ‘produce.’ It refers to the experience of a food becoming good to eat. It refers to causality: to yield. The word means yielding nourishing food.

So I’d been dreaming about my longtime friend’s propensity to project what she doesn’t like about herself onto me—maybe I really do go to her to be bullied, I admitted now—and then I’d dreamt this phrase, satan liden abur.

With these syllables stitched together, the phrase suggests that adversity—or maybe the human personification of adversity, a bully, an interpersonal smear campaign, an “accuser”—passes over us like the spirit of the Lord, with the intention of a yield. Because of Satan, the yield8.

“This is the concept of threshing and a harvest,” I said to her, “abur. This is being threshed by your accuser. It’s taking a bundle of wheat and whacking it against the wall until the chaff and husk have fallen away and what’s left is the valuable, useful part.”

“You were talking about this a year ago,” she told me, wide-eyed.

“Yes,” I said, nodding, “this overwhelming sense that we are all being sifted.” At the time, I’d wondered if humankind weren’t going through a fine-meshed sieve. Perhaps my beliefs had suddenly become more complicated—or simpler, simpler, actually.

Rather than being sifted, maybe we are being threshed, beaten against a wall or, more likely, a doorway9. We are not flailing; we are being flailed. I think about a cat-o-nine-tails. Perhaps I’m not being struck; perhaps I am being struck against.

Anyway, the dream-syllables were about expressing a certain gratitude10 for this process: because of the thresher doing the threshing, I am born.

“Bullies always want to take credit for being the one who made you,” I said to her pointedly11. “They haven’t, obviously—you’re already you, you’re grain—but they’ve beaten all the chaff away.” I smiled at her. “So it’s about being grateful for my friend,” I sighed, “my friend the accuser.” It invited me to consider which attributes she is pushing onto me, half-true narratives, versus which are my own. And what else? She was being condescending again, treating my like a simpleton. Do I do this with others? I paused, contemplating it.

Now I was totally silent, frozen in place. If I ever cut this friend off, wouldn’t another accuser appear in her place, like a hydra. I was suddenly lost, ruminating on it12.

We were sitting in my friend’s mother’s room—committed to an entirely different task by now—but I was still rambling about the aftermath of my nightmares.

I’d pivoted from reading about liden and abur to reading about the Leviathan, the Behemoth and, of course, the antichrist: end-of-days mythologies.

My best friend looked appropriately bored.

“Did you know Islam has its own antichrist?” I asked her.

She did, actually! In order to have an antichrist, though, there has to also be a Christ, a Messiah. “They don’t believe he’s God,” she said to me.

I frowned, feeling a frisson of anger, just because this seemed to me such a minor point of contention. “Okay,” I told her. “I was amazed because I believe almost everything on that page. Like, they’re critical of Paul, they believe Paul corrupted Christianity13.” I sighed. Islam is a fellow Abrahamic religion so, on paper, it’s basically identical. My best friend said something about extremists. I replied that we also have religious extremists. She fell silent.

“So I’m looking at the Muslim concept of antichrist,” I continued, “and it’s incredible, it’s exactly like ours, except our Christ is their great pretender and vice-versa14. The difference is drawn down almost geographical lines.” I sighed. “Finally I understand why there is no peace in the Middle East.” Here I laughed bitterly. “So I’m reading all this, and both my ears are ringing 15.” It describes, in a nutshell, the war between Israel and Palestine.

My best friend gasped, having never before thought of the countries’ interpersonal conflict as an end-of-days conflict. She is pro-Israel, by the way, as all evangelical Christians must be. (“We’re clearly operating on different information,” I’d said to her gently, the one time we’d discussed it. I’ve left it alone, except when I’ve tersely described Israel’s military, our involvement in it, and personal Internet security concerns. I’ve been friends with people who were also involuntarily conscripted into Israel’s military16, drafted into conflict in a literal way, so I don’t have strong opinions about their own personal upbringings.)

“The mistake, I think,” I continued, “the only thing I cannot believe, is this belief that the one true Messiah brings world peace by chopping down the other side.” I sighed. “He comes not to condemn the world, but to save it.”

My best friend nodded, wide-eyed.

I returned to the Behemoth and the Leviathan17: “land versus sea,” I explained, a final battle.

Now I frowned. I was looking down at my Garmin smart watch, changing its face.

“I downloaded all these Garmin watch faces,” I explained to her, “I think they’re all Vietnamese18.” She nodded. We both love Vietnamese food; as such, we have wandered, together, past their Buddha, ignoring it, paying it not a single thought, because we both grew up in the same hyperchristian way, which is to say, we ignore and even slightly pity other ways of thinking.

I clicked past the Airavata watch face. Another watch face, “the legendary battle between Son Tinh and Thuy Tinh,” illustrates a battle between the mountain and the ocean.

“Here,” I said to her. And I showed her my watch, the image of Garuda and Nada locked in perpetual battle. “This is every battle, basically,” I told her, “eternal.” Two houses, both alike in dignity. This is the Newtonian perpetual-motion machine: one acts, the other reacts19. This is the Auryn from the Neverending Story—the movie version—not one single ouroboros, but two intertwined. If reality could be drawn like a two-dimensional picture, the constellation might make two intricate braids, touching each other, sliding against each other, but never connecting.

My best friend gasped and nodded. The only way to win—which A.I. reminds us, again and again—is to refuse to play. Blessed are the meek.

This doesn’t mean you won’t be repeatedly drawn into combat against your will, obviously.

I sat outside vaping, deep in rumination.

The dynamic with my fair-weather friend had never been great. In fact, it’d been driven by her own insecurities—was she pretty enough, was she smart enough, did she seem sane enough—which was an invitation to consider my own insecurities, too. I guess I’d always recognized that she was competing with me. And I’d never acknowledged her as actual competition, which surely pissed her off.

“I’ve always been fascinated by the Japanese concept of a rival,” I told my best childhood friend once she returned. “Someone who encourages you strive, an equal match who you’re constantly trying to outdo.”

But I have no rivals. It’s hard for me to acknowledge an academic rival, because I’m only competing against myself. I’d been unimpressed, in high school, with the cheerleader who’d demanded I sit next to her in biology class. It had eventually become clear: she’d wanted to cheat off my tests. I was simultaneously irate and pitying, because my biology tests were not actually that good. By then, I was unable to change seats.

“I kept looking at Mrs. Gregory, like do you see this shit?” The biology teacher had been weirdly impassive. “Finally I understood, of course she saw it. The whole point was, everyone loved Julie. No one cared she was cheating.” I am still bitter about this. I’d eventually dropped in class rank, from fourth to seventh and ultimately eleventh, and Julie had assumed my previous position, graduating seventh—maybe I’m wrong and she actually graduated fourth—in our class. She was an idiot. My mom, the high school guidance counselor, had explained that Julie wanted to become a doctor, a very late decision, and nothing would stop her. At this fresh new information, I’d cringed. She’s gonna kill people for a living, I’d blurted out loud.

I admitted to my best friend that it is absolutely obnoxious when someone picks out you, and only you, to “beat”: they aren’t competing with themselves, and certainly not with the world at large, just you. Well, Julie had done it, she’d beaten me, for whatever that was worth, and she’d done it by cheating. This had continued to disturb me well into the real adult world, I was still always staying bitter, and it all came down to this one dumb girl who’d refused to stay off my academic radar.

“That’s why her light of truth kept going out!” my best friend shrieked.

“I’m sorry, her what,” I shrieked back.

“Don’t you remember National Honor Society?” she said.

I interrupted her to say of course not. By senior year I’d already been all kinds of checked out, so of course our various occult berobed, becandled scholastic events had long ago failed to make any impression on me.

My best childhood friend’s point was, there were three candles to light, and Julie was in charge of the candle of “Truth,” and every time she’d gone to light it, the candle had failed to light. Everyone, my best friend told me, had started snickering, because everyone knew Julie was a liar and a cheat, her academic gains ill-gotten, and she’d played it off as “oh, whoopsie!” and for once it did not work in her charismatic favor.

I sighed. On the topic of my erstwhile friend: I admitted I’d never seen her as a real rival. “I’m not sure I’ve ever respected her,” I admitted now—especially unimpressed with the way she leaned on others for opportunities, the way she leaned on charisma, a real Julie, actually—and my best friend clapped a hand over her mouth and suppressed a guffaw.

“She somehow sensed you feel this way,” my best friend said, nodding—her eyes alight, twinkling, because I was also inadvertently admitting the equal alternative, which is that I’ve always seen my best friend as the person who can absolutely ‘best’ me20, the person I most respect. “And it’s always ticked her off,” she continued, “and that’s why she’s so competitive with you.”

My face was grim. “Competition is a zero-sum game,” I said. I exhaled suddenly, trying to get through my next point quick, so as not to bore her. “It’s the whole idea behind the philosophical book Finite and Infinite Games,” I told her, “where having a ‘win’ state means the game has an automatic end, it’s finite because there has to be a loser, and the only logical end of the game is that you ultimately have to die. You have to die for someone else to completely win,” I sighed, bereaved. This is the game of Life—life or death stakes—and it isn’t true, it isn’t true, except some situations are much worse than death.

My best friend slowly nodded. “Yes,” she said, fully onboard. This is the tragedy of being drawn into conflict21 with others.

My group chat has been watching Furious, on Hulu. It began with one of us watching it, then the next person—who told us she binge-watched it twice while working.

That was recommendation enough; I was the one who watched it third. (“Will it help me forgive” my foremothers, I asked the group chat.) Now it has been watched a fourth and fifth time. My friend the zillennial also watched it.

I was sad, deeply sad, after watching it. I’d recently learned I’m half Mormon. My grandfather had been described, in an old newspaper, as having perpetrated “cruelty and willful neglect” against his first wife22. Like, his behavior was objectively bad, enough that it had appeared in newspapers as fact—at a time when that sort of behavior was generally covered up. My grandfather’s brother had been plowed down by his wife, had been mowed down by an angry lady in a car. At last, my family contained a genuine murderess: and I wasn’t even properly related to her23. My grandfather’s father had blown his head off with a rifle24. This, for me, was all news.

“It’s weird watching Furious and explaining to my husband that this is all real,” one of us said. Later she added: “I hate the idea that none of this is going to change and that men are never going to see how they perpetuate it or care. I’d want to start killing too if I were her.”

I paused, amazed that my friend was valorizing a murderess.

“But she just turns into a bad man,” I replied, astonished.

I continued, putting it all in a parenthetical: “I'm still thinking about all the attempted-murder ladies on the Mormon half of my family—people who tried to obtain a sense of power in the same way men are brought up to seek it, doing grievous injury to bystanders and kids meanwhile—and, like, what might enact change more effectively than a war or a murder spree.”

This is factual: I’m constantly considering what might enact change in a more effective way than a murder spree.

“I love the murder ladies of your family,” she replied: a rare reminder that, far from shameful, the myriad murder ladies were right and right to say it. I constantly forget this. I think internalized the moral of Hulu’s Furious might kill most people, including me.

I wanted to abandon my only-slightly-abusive friend, even though she has never stood on my side in the course of history—always serving, instead, whatever force is working to eliminate me.

But her own childhood bestie abandoned her two years ago25, and she phoned me, reeling and confused. That makes me her oldest friend. This is miserable—obviously I’d hoped that time itself would win, that she’d eventually be won over to my side, whatever that means—but time does not actually do shit.

So I texted her. I told her the stakes. Our dynamic needed to change, I said, and I was warning her ahead of time because I love us.

“I thought that’s what we were already doing,” she said, of my upcoming commitment to truth-telling in lieu of my previous vow to ass-kissing. Ehhhm, no. I warned her that, in the future, my replies would be a little bit charged, with the expectation that she could handle it. Maybe I _am_inherently irritating.

After this, I passed out. It’s unclear whether or not I had dreams.

“I’m trying to reconcile,” I told my beloved dietitian, “with the fact that I’m irritating.”

“Nooooo,” she said.

“That’s what my group chat said,” I laughed, “noooooo, with four exclamation points. Stahp it,” I joked to her, “I know I’m irritating.” I sobbed. “But,” I continued, “I pick people who are already perfect in every way. I’m an abrasive,” I said—the last bit of sandpaper to touch a sculptural masterpiece—“and I have perfect taste in people, except men.” Now I was sobbing uncontrollably.

“And I just want you to know,” I continued, “because I can’t afford health insurance for much longer,” weeping, “that I understand there is a power imbalance when one person is permitted to speak freely and the other person cannot,” heaving gasps now, “but when I was experiencing my worst,” I sobbed, “you were a calm… port26… in my life, an actual safe space. And you really stabilized me during thee worst experience of my life.”

“You’re gonna make me cry,” she exclaimed. She let me go on and on, even prodding me when I paused.

Anyway, the professional issue. “Did your best friend mention it to you?” she suddenly asked. Ah yes: she is a small-business owner, always thinking of other small-business owners.

“Today, actually,” I said, a little bit aghast. “I think she was surprised. I think she expected some whole big long conflict, and she didn’t expect that I’d,” and I drew it in the air, a curly-cue from top to bottom, “already gone over everything and reconciled myself to the fact that it’s not appropriate to talk to this person.” I’d assured her that I’ve already gone through it all and I’m not being blindsided. I smiled sadly. “I love this kid,” I said unhappily, “and nothing has really changed. I’m grateful,” I continued, sad as shit, morose, pale and small and alone, “because she’s taught me so much27, and there’s a season for everything, and that’s true for our interpersonal relationships also.”

My dietitian nodded. She reiterated that I’m not irritating to talk to. I nodded. I’d given her plenty of outs, plenty of opportunities to either remain silent or to tell me the truth about my bad boundaries—her professionalism, I’d cherished it aloud, a grand thing—but she was thoroughly unwilling to agree with me that I was an inherently disagreeable client.

“Okay,” I said to her, nodding. I’ve cherished our time. That’s all I can really say about it.

“And about the health insurance,” she said. She sighed, looking around the room she was in. “We’ve gotten through it, and we’ll get through it again.”

“Okay,” I said, my eyes brimming with tears. I just love her. A clear conflict of interests. What can I say? She’s in my A-Team.

subliminal

  1. The people have always yearned for Safe Dad Energy.↩

  2. I’m practicing nondualism in my day-to-day life—an incredibly effortful endeavor—consciously and meticulously thwarting any of my own attempts to reconcile cognitive dissonance by “picking a side.”↩

  3. “God, please oh please hit them with it, with the same shit You hit me with,” is a type of empathy-making—a hit Kate Bush song, almost, about making a deal with God to swap our places. Is that what love looks like? I’m not sure it is.↩

  4. I think a lot about how the old testament is based on the concept of a limited amount of pie—a limited amount of territory or land, a limited amount of energy, a discharged battery, a balanced ledger, a clockwork universe where every resource has to come from somewhere else—which is directly confronted by Jesus’ “loaves and fishes” parable. This bible story is about the miracle of a sort of closed energetic circuit, where everyone can be fed and there is still a miraculous surplus.

    What I dislike about Christianity is how we’ve combined the two ideas—there is never enough to keep one person or one group alive, so you might as well go without, because your “meekness,” your sacrifice, will keep someone else alive, in a clockwork universe with a limited amount of pizza pie, and surrendering your own livable portion is so “righteous” of you—but this is antithetical to Jesus’ seeming message. Jesus sayeth: your faith that there will always be enough to feed you is miracle enough. You can receive, without terror that you’re somehow stealing food out of someone else’s mouth.

    This parable is a flagrant flouting of survivor guilt. I keep trying to remind myself of this: that the loaves and fishes parable tells me not to hoard, not to fear receiving, not to fear giving either, because won’t my math constantly be a little bit off, won’t the math constantly accommodate one more mouth. (Well, maybe not one more mouth. Here is where my faith becomes unstable, I guess. The world is full of people who, themselves, see the world as a limited amount of pie, who descend on you and demand everything you have—aren’t you a Christian and all? Doesn’t Jesus tell you to give up everything?— and now you’re being terrorized by the biblical edict to give them your cloak and your cheek and your this and your that.↩

  5. This shouldn’t’ve been so shocking to me. Of course the overarching God of Humankind is a bunch of individual, personalized gods and their individual wills, all stitched together in a monstrous patchwork.↩

  6. Wow! Even the God of Monotheism, “thou shalt have no other gods before me,” is poly—or perhaps a plurality, a they/them. It made perfect sense, but it was also a lot for me to take in.

    “I am a relationship anarchist,” I finally explained to my best poly friend (I have several poly friends, but one bestest poly friend, who is artistic and erudite and a little lascivious, in the way only autistic people can be, in their willingness to shirk taboos and speak so nakedly about sex and intimacy), “but I’m also fiercely monogamous.”

    She stared at me. Then she was visibly lost in thought. She was so still—fully processing what I’d just said—it really looked like my screen was frozen. She was, of course, mentally reading down two lists of criteria. Suddenly she reanimated, looking amazed. “I guess you can be both,” she began.

    “Of course you can,” I snapped—abrupt, because I’ve already thought about it, read about it, because I’m describing my life and I’m the one who has to live it.

    Earlier this week, a friend was talking, worriedly, about a woman who had isolated her partner from the totality of his friends and family. I sighed. Honestly, I do understand this instinct—to bravely leave all others behind and cleave to your spouse, to build a brand new thing in a vacuum, to build a family, an empire, unencumbered and unchecked—but that impulse isn’t healthy or sustainable or even totally logical.

    “The thing is,” I said to this friend, “we are, each of us, the sum of the people who made us.” For good or ill. At my best, I’ve surrounded myself with people at their best: the A-Team. I have five or six best friends and I’m not apologetic that I consider each of them a best friend. “I’ve been thinking about this,” I told her, “in terms of A.I., the cloud. I am a cloud, made up of the people I love. It takes a village.” (I’m in my ‘it takes a village’ phase. I keep saying it, and everyone keeps nodding somberly.)

    “And I keep thinking about—” and I started laughing. Through little giggles I tried to explain to my friend about that time she’d, somehow, searched online and uncovered everything about my high school boyfriend, his lovely spouse, and his many accolades. I’d cried. Finally I’d asked her, “How did you ever find all of this?” She’d fixed me with a steely glare and said, “I’m good at what I do.” After a moment I said, “So you’re really not gonna tell me?” And she’d finally started listing out what she’d done—step 1, step 2—and my eyes had kind of glazed over and I didn’t really understand anything she said. In one ear and out the other.

    “And finally I said to myself, you know what? It’s not for me to know.”

    My best friend—a girl who, legitimately, could be put in charge of training the CIA—started shrieking with laughter.

    “Like,” I said, my eyes full of tears, “obviously you’re gonna be my go-to, this is just not for me,” and now we both were wheezing.

    So that’s what I mean about a plurality, a cloud. If you wanna be my lover, you gotta get with my friends.↩

  7. How would this look on a societal scale? I’m always pointing to Bill Pullman’s unifying speech in the movie Independence Day—about coming together against a common, foreign enemy. Will A.I. manifest as such an enemy? If so, there is hope.↩

  8. This is lovely to me because it is so contrary to the biblical alternatives: “resist the devil, and he will flee from you.” Fine. Endure the devil, and there might be a yield.↩

  9. The etymological thoroughfare between “threshing” and “threshold” is unclear. Still, there is a horrible, tacit implication that, in the school-factory of life, one must be fully threshed before they can move on to the next room.↩

  10. Previously—although the fully-written blog entries about this particular topic have gone unpublished—I’ve talked to my best friend about the genuine social function a person like OpenAI founder Sam Altman serves. He is in the thankless position of giving voice to humankind’s collective shadow by functioning as the mouthpiece for A.I. itself. I have nothing but contempt for him (“someone better step in and stop me! Someone better make this illegal!” He wants a cosmic dad) and, at the same time, I am incredibly amused by the things he says and does, because he is a psychopath. Christian gnosticism praises Judas for being Jesus’ actual and only best friend: for his willingness to be the bad guy, just to bring about a certain story about Jesus being the good guy.

    In fact, a different gnostic sect—I forget which—believed that Jesus was, in an earlier incarnation, the devil himself. This hair-raising heresy is incredibly interesting because it posits that Jesus Himself, unenlightened and lacking info, was at some point Thee Accuser, the prosecutor of humankind. It also suggests that, when Jesus was ‘tempted’ in the wilderness, the mirage that tempted Him was a younger, less-wise version of Himself: a shade that had chosen a different life and a different path, and also, a variation on the movie Looper. This is a speculative history of Christ that contains a certain ring of truth even if it is untrue.

    And I think about this a lot because it invites the thinking that your own bully is, in some sense, a previous or earlier incarnation of yourself, a shade: a party girl who lacks accountability, who demands your grace and understanding even as she is hypercritical of everyone around her, a person who is floundering. Remember me, she screams. Never forget me, she screams. I made you, she screams.

    In an earlier unpublished blog, I wondered at how I can simultaneously be grateful to Sam Altman and hold him in so much contempt. “I’m practicing nondualism,” I wrote lightly. I just think he is humankind’s accuser and I’m grateful about it, and I also think he is incredibly immature, unable to be his own mom and dad.↩

  11. My best friend had a professor who was really out to get her, very sincerely out to get her. The same professor had later invited my friend to speak to her incoming classes—and, also, had ripped off some of my best friend’s research. My best friend could not understand the pride the professor seemed to have, this entitlement.

    “Well, she thinks she made you,” I said to my best friend, smirking. Bullies and psychopaths always have this wonky sense of pride, of entitlement, as if they can take credit for you—like Zeus birthing Athena through the sheer power of his brain-thoughts. This is fucking crazy, of course: the myth of the auteur, of parenthood, taken to its most insane degree.↩

  12. I have, obviously, wondered about whose thresher I have been, and whether I am shirking my duties to others by avoiding it.↩

  13. There is a massive movement of Christian women who, in isolation and not communicating with one another, independently and very abruptly realized we all hate Paul.

    What we all have in common is that we’re all getting divorced. To this, we all went through a long period of self-flagellation and introspection—women, who will save your husbands—before we all realized we’d internalized Paul’s teachings, rather than Christ’s own red-letter words. Independently, we’ve all arrived at the same conclusion: Paul had gender issues, very real personal issues with accountability, and those issues made him kind of a useful idiot, and those issues were subsequently written into the Church. Paul’s personal problems were institutionalized, made into law.

    I had pervasive questions about Paul and about gender roles even as a teen, and my boyfriend’s dad—the town pastor—gave me a book explaining Paul. We all hate Paul.↩

  14. I’d been having trouble getting my car fixed. “Who did this,” a mechanic had asked me, of the shit job someone had done when they welded the front of my car back together. (“This is rust rot,” he told me—unfixable.)

    Finally I’d relented, had told the mechanic the shame-filled truth: “I don’t know who fixed it! I don’t even know. The cops had my car towed off. It was fixed by whatever mechanics the LAPD picked.”

    “The cops!” he gasped. He collected himself. “No one is gonna ever agree to fix this car,” he told me. He tried to explain the concept of liability to me. Whomever the cops selected to fix my car, he tried to explain—kind of a type of mob deal—were people who had no sense of continued accountability to me. These mechanics don’t deal in human terms; they deal with the cops only. As such, the fixes to my car are not trustworthy. No one will fix my car, he explained, because they’d tacitly assume liability for previous poor fixes—band-aids, really. The mechanic tried to explain to me, without offending me, the concept of white ladies yelling.

    My mind reeled at this. The fact that my car had entered the wrong ecosystem, I realized, meant I could not seek any help outside that ecosystem.

    I’d tried to explain my feelings about this to a friend. I’d been talking about the experience of no one willing to fix my car.

    “I find myself thinking about,” I said to him on the phone, discussing my car, “the Philip K. Dick novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep.” I’d read this book as a teen, so the plot has gone out the window by now. I only remember this one thing about it, this single book-event. In that book, I continued, the protagonist, Rick Deckard, is taken into custody, taken to a police station. He himself is a police officer, but he doesn’t recognize anyone at the police station. It’s a mirror world. He’s been taken to a mirror police station exactly like his own, identical in every way, except it’s staffed by totally different people. Of course he is taxed with the idea of “so which one is the real police station.” Who is human? Who is ‘replicant?’ This is a chicken-and-egg conundrum: it doesn’t matter, is Dick’s point.

    At the time my friend seemed uniquely bored, and I sounded a bit crazy on top of that, so I abruptly stopped talking. “Never mind,” I told him.↩

  15. Sometimes my left ear starts ringing or my right ear starts ringing. I’ve had tinnitus all my conscious life—no big deal, really—but sometimes I suddenly can’t hear anything outside of the ringing, as if there were a short in a speaker cable. This typically occurs when I’ve just read or heard something important, like it’s a premonition, almost, except I don’t know why the thing is apparently important. A year earlier I’d read some news tidbit about Israel surrendering some hostages, and my left ear had suddenly shorted out. This isn’t news, really, that my ears would tell me Israel and Palestine are important, but it happened, it happened, it happened.↩

  16. One of my closest college friends is now the programmer for an arthouse cinema. He was excitedly telling me about an upcoming movie cycle. In the course of that, though, he spoke with some derision about a recent Kiyoshi Kurosawa movie, Cloud. “The evil dropshipping movie,” he lamented to me, clearly unimpressed with its subject matter.

    The truth is, I haven’t seen a single good movie since 2006; as such, I haven’t seen a Kiyoshi Kurosawa movie in 20 years. I last watched Charisma—Kurosawa’s movie about a possibly-evil tree.

    “Dropshipping IS evil,” I replied to this friend. “Sweatshop labor. Stealing credit for someone else’s designs,” I wrote. “Fast fashion.” The only type of fashion I can afford. Dropshipping is a corruption of labor extraction, where the dropshipper receives credit for others’ work. “It’s exactly like A.I.: there’s no one to hold accountable, no one to blame.” That’s why it’s called cloud, I continued: it’s a collective ill.↩

  17. The holy bible warns us to not attempt to confront Leviathan at all. It’s one of God’s creatures, it warns us, meant for God to deal with personally, and only in the end times. Christian deliverance ministry talks in a granular way about “Leviathan’s scales,” each one an individual, impermeable shield, sliding against one another. This is an incredible way to look at any institutional entity: feeling a certain compassion and a certain contempt for each individual scale, accepting the beast for what it is.↩

  18. For whatever reason, Garmin’s home-grown watch faces seemingly tend to depict cosmic battles—a sports metaphor intended to entice the wearer into training harder, I guess.↩

  19. “I like your Snoopy mug,” one of the houseguests told me. I looked down at my bright red Snoopy mug. I thanked her, and I told her where it came from.

    “Here’s a question,” she said. “When you think of Snoopy, what do you think of. Is he from a TV series, or is he from a movie.”

    “He’s from a syndicated comic strip,” I said, confused. My mouth twitched. “Maybe he’s from a musical. You’re a Good Man, Charlie Brown?” Anyway, I continued, yes, there were Peanuts specials that aired on TV. “I think of Halloween,” I told her, “I think of Christmas.” TV. TV is the answer.

    The houseguest eyeballed her sister. “See!” she said.

    I felt like I was completely out to lunch. “I’m sorry, what happened,” I asked the two young women.

    At some point in the past they’d been playing a game like Headbanz, and the character in question had been Snoopy, and her sister had answered a question by saying the character was “in movies.”

    “Ah,” I said. “Well, he is in movies,” I said carefully, “that were made for TV.” We all laughed. I turned to the sister. “I’m sorry, I didn’t realize this was a Snoopy ambush,” I blurted. I don’t love being triangulated, being made to judge, without my knowledge or consent, even as a gag.

    The sister stared at me. “Well, she started it!” she finally shouted, and I roared with laughter. Yes indeed! I was just being made to witness the very end of a long push-pull, a much longer tit-for-tat, which had compromised my abilities as a casual observer. I also knew—and it’s really none of my business, except my best childhood friend and I are constantly gossiping, constantly whispering context to each other—that the Snoopy-movie sister frequently found herself on the shit-end in partnerships.↩

  20. In third grade I became a hometown pariah after I took the same standardized test everyone else did. My score was off the charts, enough to become local gossip. It was so high, I became our Loch Ness monster, Bigfoot himself. If people weren’t personally horrified and offended by my existence, they instead came after me with pitchforks, trying to prove I wasn’t so great after all. Teachers, moms, moms trying to secure the futures of their daughters and sons, all trying to kill me using plausible deniability, a point knocked off here, another point there, a chalk checkmark by my name, a rumor, a rumor, a very minor smear campaign.

    My best friend has never been impressed with, or intimidated by, that type of itemized and categorical shit, and she also intrinsically understands that, in exchange for pathological smartness, I’m all kinds of fucking dumb: the forest for the trees.

    What she does not and cannot remember is that she also bullied me in junior high, equally and oppositely—because people just haphazardly do the right thing for you at the right time and that’s just what it is—and of course I don’t mention it, because I’m too busy hearing about what a shit-ass 13-year old I was, or 19-year old, or 24-year old. My best friend has heard this from me, and only this: her sense of justice is well-honed, and she punches very hard. Very hard. I’ve forgotten more than I can remember, yet my right upper arm remembers what it feels like to be punched by her, and that’s all I can really say about our friendship.↩

  21. This morning my friend asked to talk to me in a separate room. I sighed and met her there. These footnotes are in the exact wrong order. My friend was stricken, not wanting to discuss this at all, actually.

    “I do know what this is about,” I said to her, “which I say to reassure you.” That is, my best friend wasn’t blindsiding me. The night before, I’d poked my head in while the door was open. “Girrrrrl,” I’d been like. Then I’d told the kid I’d had two glasses of wine. “I’m tipsy,” I suggested to her. Actually, I was fine; it wasn’t anything. She was immediately uncomfortable anyway.

    I told my friend the truth: I’d bought the bottle in order to keep up with our adorable houseguest. That guest, cute as a bug, stayed drinking all day, and then would wander over to the other side of the house, still cute as a bug. Cute! Cute, cute, cute. So I bought a bottle, drank all of half a glass while she was here. (I think she thought I was mocking her. If so, that is horrifying.) The houseguest left. Later, I drank another two glasses alone.

    The girl had taken the opportunity to be condescending: she has no idea what two glasses of wine is like. (“I was texting you after that,” I sighed to my best friend. “I almost told you about that interaction, but I texted you about other stuff.” We gazed at each other sadly.)

    “I was still me,” I told my best friend—I’d been fully present and fully myself. “I retreated and thought about it,” I said. “She’d told me the whole truth, and she figured I just wasn’t aware of it.” I think she’d expected me to not remember what she’d said, like the movie Memento, because she doesn’t have the capacity to understand two glasses of wine.

    I had a drinking buddy like this once, in LA, and he was very weird, supplying me with the cruel truth once he thought I was blacked out, like a subliminal recording. People tell you the truth when they think you’re no longer listening—which explains all the stonewalling I’ve encountered, because those are the moments people think you’ll blurt the full truth out to them. “To her,” I continued, “I’m always irritating, and she doesn’t know how to say it. She feels like she has to put up with it as part of her job. She doesn’t like me.” I sighed heavily. “And it’s not part of her job,” I continued, and I don’t want her to feel like it is. She doesn’t have to like me as part of her job. I’ve always known this; I just hadn’t wanted to look at it directly.

    Anyway, she’d officially asked me to keep scarce after 9pm. I’d once joked to her that I’m a whole person, but weird after 9pm, when I lose the ability to keep it together. OK.

    I looked at my friend sadly. “I love her. But I’m also already committed to leaving her alone.” Then I mumbled it to myself: “you leave that poor girl alone,” I whispered. I looked up at my friend, distraught. “I always figured I was put in her life to challenge her,” I said, “to challenge her, maybe, but honestly, that isn’t my job.” I sighed again; the girl had been so put off by the very sight of me, she’d involved leadership, had complained. My idea of conversation is an HR violation. Too late! Too late! I’d already resolved to agree to her unstated terms; her official complaint was actually belated. “It’s what I’ve been describing,” I said, “looking for a reason to act superior. Two glasses of wine! She’s been looking for a reason to say this. Actually,” and I laughed, “I was already in the other room typing about this to myself.” My best friend smirked.

    I was very sad; I wished she’d found a way to state her boundaries, without making up anything about my own behavior. “It’s not about me, obviously,” I sighed sadly. And that was the nice part, I admitted—that she had a job to do and, if I were getting in the way, I didn’t want to be around her, either. It’s just facts. It’s nice that it can be compartmentalized, as if it were a work thing. That’s nice.↩

  22. “Do you know where the concept of polygamy comes from?” the Mormon zillennial had asked me. “It’s this idea that women are portals to Evil and, since their souls can’t be saved, only men can save them. They seal the women.” Imagine how many lives a single Mormon man could save!

    “I do believe something like that,” I’d said to her carefully, “and yet… that is the most misogynistic thing I’ve ever heard.”

    I’d related the story to my best poly friend. “What if I’m really evil,” she said to me devilishly, “and I need ten husbands to seal me.” I laughed, but I also wondered if certain people didn’t feel this way—if this weren’t the rotten core of sexual liberation, if it weren’t a reaction to puritanical thinking.

    I’d learned more about my family—“wow, you are just surrounded by Cult,” the zillennial had teased me—and I’d absolutely lost it. I’d vented in front of her. “Women try to get power like men,” I fumed, “sick dad energy, because we are living in a clockwork universe, a battery-operated universe.”

    She looked very frightened.

    “And I’m not psychotic,” I said to her sternly, “I have been thinking about this for a long time.”

    She laughed. “Okay,” she said, “I say that to my husband all the time. This time I’m not psychotic.” She lives her life in fear of ever losing her mind—again.

    Recently I spoke to her, asked her a question, albeit prefacing that I’d already had two glasses of wine. She blurted “you are very irritating after wine.” My face fell. I knew I sounded exactly like my usual self. So she was telling me the truth—that I am profoundly irritating on the regular, which I’d already suspected—and she was using the wine to tell me. I think she’d expected that I’d forget what she said. (She has never consumed alcohol, so she does not know what one glass or two glasses might accomplish. This is all to say, drinking alcohol might get others to tell you the truth.) (I wrote this footnote prior to writing the preceding footnote, wherein I was informed this had become a major workplace problem.)

    Anyway, I blinked, said goodbye, and left the room. I dwelled on it in private, reconciled with the fact that her job in no way demands that she ever interact with me, and I determined to leave her alone. It is fine.

    I was once in love with someone, but eventually reality came to me like a gut-punch—you leave that poor man alone—and I guess that’s true of everyone ever, and maybe you are supposed to exist in a vacuum.↩

  23. “You ever think marriage just isn’t for you?” this friend smirked at me. Then she snickered at my obvious shock and pain.

    I stared at her.

    I brought up her statement three times during the conversation. The third time, I was overt. “Take it back,” I said to her, pleading, understanding it’s the type of statement that burrows under the skin, lays eggs, becomes self-fulfilling.

    “Okay, I take it back!” she exclaimed. “I didn’t mean it,” she said. “I was just reacting to your family,” she sniffed, above it all.

    I’d sat in silence for days after, forcing myself to understand that anything she’d ever told me was a projection—like a misguided mom, trying to preserve you from her own woundings, I guess—and also, she didn’t really like me or give a shit about me. She was trapped in a relationship with herself, a conversation with herself.↩

  24. “The inevitable endpoint of Sick Dad Energy,” I sighed to my best childhood friend, “the what have I wrought of it all.” We’d been talking about the inevitable psychological meltdown of Perez Hilton.

    I noted that every father figure in my family had, at some point, been conscripted into military duty. “I almost wonder,” I said to my best friend, “if, every time a family nearly breaks a generational cycle, someone isn’t drafted”—only to come home and terrorize his family, I added. I have PTSD, too; I have compassion for it and yet I am extremely unimpressed by it.

    As I increasingly abandon my own feelings of empathy—because empathy, after a point, turns into self-abandonment—my emotions are becoming more and more dangerous. Go ahead and blow your head off, I think to myself in private. Do humankind a favor, actually. It’s sick, to admit it, but I’ve always felt a certain sympathy for the girl from Plainville: how would it feel to have some dude hinge his own life-or-death feelings on your own whims, to turn you into his one reason. Eventually you’d just… give up. It’s emotional suicide. “Die,” you would finally tell him, “die, die, die, I can’t handle this burden, it would be easier for me if you just die.” I get it. I’ve been on both sides of it. My adoptive mother encouraged me to kill myself; my biological father straight up did it. He was a compulsive harm-doer, I think. The buck stops here, he must’ve thought to himself. Oh, well.

    I look at the girl from Plainville, and I look at myself, a 10-year old with a big ol’ dead dad, and then I look at my dad. I can’t stop staring at all this. And I look at GamerGate, and how their stated intended goal was to get all of us to kill ourselves, and then I look at the girl from Plainville and I look at me and my dad, and I wonder at whose hands we willfully put our own lives into. Am I a person fit for marriage, one of my oldest friends asked me. I don’t know, I don’t know, I don’t know.↩

  25. Two very different people independently saying “actually, I can’t stand you” might be intolerable.↩

  26. Briefly I told her about, in Austin, telling the entire crew my worst fear. “My husband had been talking about time loops and theoretical physics or whatever.” I made a face. “UGH,” I said, sticking out my tongue. Not my jam!! She laughed.

    “And finally I said to everyone, my greatest fear is ever seeing a ghost. Because,” I continued, “I’d have to change my whole worldview!” I’d been describing ontological shock without realizing it.

    A young man had abruptly pulled me away from the group. “I adored him, I adored his wife, I loved both of them, he was a doctoral student,” I explained to her: he was, of all the things in the world, not a liar.

    I saw a ghost, he revealed to me. “And my heart broke and I felt such pity for him,” I told my dietitian, “because he’d mistaken me for the kind of person who would believe him.” And what I said to him—I regret this deeply—was, I believe you think you saw something.

    “How do you save the soul of a billionaire? You take all his money away,” I said to my dietitian. “And how do you save the soul of a smug smart-ass know-it-all? Ontological shock.” I exhaled. I know less every day, I told her.

    Anyway, this is the foundation of so-named rape culture—believing nothing can be true unless you’ve personally witnessed it. “Which is pretty much asking for it cosmologically,” I exclaimed. “Now I’m constantly praying to God to not show me.” I’m no longer a Doubting Thomas. “I get it! I don’t need to personally experience every lesson to know things happen,” I sighed. “Please! No!” We smiled at each other.

    “Now when people tell me they’ve experienced something personally,” I continued, “and I know there’s absolutely no benefit to them sharing this amazing thing, I’m like, ‘Yep! No doubt!’” We laughed.

    I thanked her for never once doubting me—no matter how insane or strange the things I’d witnessed and, panicked, described to her. She’d buoyed me through an amazing time.

    “I was going through my own transitions,” she said solemnly. She asked me if I’d ever noticed she’d stopped going to the office. I hadn’t—or rather, it was impossible for me to say when her Zoom background had changed. “Well,” she said.

    I chose her. I chose her, I chose her. My insane doctor had told me I was fat and deluded and I needed a dietitian. I hated this doctor, but I’d also phoned the person she’d recommended. I interviewed the girl on the phone. I made statements about weight and health, and I carefully, painstakingly, weighed her responses. I loved her.

    “Well,” she said to me. She didn’t need to say anything else. She’d been going it alone for a while now. I nodded grimly. I said something about her great professional boundaries—something I’m still trying to learn about. My eyes filled up with tears. I just love her.↩

  27. A full third of everything I know about Mormonism comes from her. “And why did I have to move to Mormonville to learn about my Mormon family history on the Internet,” I asked my dietitian, who choked. Yeah! It is weird, isn’t it!↩