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Content Warning: Vomit, Depression.

Six More Weeks of Winter - Printable PDF

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It’s Sunday, November 16th, 2025. You spend your first hour of consciousness puking into a toilet bowl.

Okay, that’s not exactly true. You spend your first hour lying dizzy in bed, perpetually stuck in the moment just after stepping off the tilt-a-whirl. After an hour of that, you decide the herculean task of locomoting your assortment of limbs to the bathroom is an acceptable price for at least temporarily alleviating the nausea. It works, kind of, but you still take a mixing bowl back to your room, which is an act of tremendous foresight: the rest of the day is a cycle of building up nausea until it’s enough that you can attempt another vomit without dry-heaving.

If it makes you feel any better, nothing comes up — nothing aside from acid, and not even very much of that. If it makes you feel any worse, this is the violent beginning of the longest winter of your life.

You ask off from work for a day, personally suspecting food poisoning (one of your managers brought in a dubious Shrek-themed cake the day before; against your better judgment, you had a slice just before you left.) A day becomes a week. A week becomes a month. A month becomes indefinitely.

The nausea comes and goes, but it mostly goes. That’s not what gets you — it’s the dizziness that gets you. It’s all well and good being able to keep down your pancakes, but that’s not much help when you can’t even stand to mix the batter. You also discover that not eating tends to make it worse, a sinister little variable which means you need to keep easy calories available at all times. Yogurt becomes a precious resource, to be hoarded and used on only the really bad days.

But there are a lot of really bad days.

Sometimes, you feel like you can walk just fine, only to find yourself veering directly into a wall, like driver trying to leave the scene of a collision with a busted axle. Even standing completely still fills your brain with a horrible fizzing, shutting down all your conscious systems and leaving you defenseless; not paralysis per se, more like a computer crash. Sometimes it happens when you’re completely still. It’s like you’re always drunk with none of the upsides and all of the next-morning downsides.

You see the UrgentCare, who tells you it’s an ear infection. You see the ENT, who finds no infection, but tells you to check for brain damage. You get an MRI, which finds no damage, but tells you to check for a neurological problem. Without any better name, you take to calling it “the bees in my head.”

The neurologist, when you finally see her, tells you (she thinks) it’s a chronic vestibular migraine. The good news is that it shouldn’t last forever. The bad news is there isn’t any telling how long it will last. Probably months. She’s a bit surprised it’s gone on this long already.

She prescribes you some magnesium pills and physical therapy. They only kind of work. You only know that because it’s worse when you forget to take them.

So, there you go. You have your answer. What do you do now?

The human body, when healthy, needs to maintain an internal temperature of around 99 degrees Fahrenheit, or around 37 degrees Celsius. Unrelatedly, the second law of thermodynamics states that heat naturally transfers from warmer to cooler areas. These two statements are both true, and that is where the trouble begins.

Most of us here in the Northeastern US have enough cold-weather clothing that we can easily build a layer of insulation around ourselves. This doesn’t eliminate heat transfer, but it does reduce it to a level our bodies can easily compensate, and we end up feeling roughly normal, if a little warm around the cheeks.

But on some days, days where the temperature dips low enough, most people don’t have enough clothing to make up that gap. On days like those, the battle can only be lost; the question is how quickly, and can you get back to somewhere warm before the chill burrows all the way into your bones. For the majority of people, at least in the United States, this is not a problem. The cold is just something to push through, another small frustration to complain about when warming one’s hands by the office coffeemaker. Because we don’t have to stay outside for long, that heat which they do lose is inconsequential and easily replenished.

But that’s not how it really works, is it?

A person can suffer through almost anything, so long as they know when it will end. But the reverse is just as true: a person can suffer through remarkably little if it seems the trials might continue forever. Fifteen minutes’ walk to a central-heated apartment twenty under freezing is a brief, energizing diversion. Fifteen minutes’ wait twenty under freezing for a bus that should have already been here is pure torture.

The thing that usually breaks first is not one’s body temperature. The thing that breaks first is one’s spirit. It breaks when you cannot see the length of the road ahead, nor whether there is somewhere to rest at the end. It is that which drives men (always men) mad during an overland voyage to the south pole, that which gives sirenic weight that little voice whispering how much much easier it would be to lie back and let hypothermia take you under.

It’s a hell of a thing, living only on hope. No wonder the Pennsylvania Dutch invented Groundhog Day.

You have to accept that, at least for the foreseeable future, this is your life now. If you were more on top of yourself, you’d find a way to spend this time productively, or at least in a way that’s fulfilling. But you’re not on top of yourself; you’re barely even parallel with yourself. So instead, you lie flat, staring at the ceiling, waiting for time to wash over your head and erode it smooth.

And the worst part is, it’s winter, so there isn’t even any baseball.

But there are upsides to going through this in the winter. The biggest one is what you aren’t losing: the weather outside sucks anyway, and there isn’t that much going on for you to miss. In fact, if you had been able to choose the date of your condition’s beginning, you would have chosen close to exactly this, so that you can be sure you’re recovered by the time it gets pretty again.

You will be recovered by then. Right?

Anyway, it’s not like you aren’t doing anything. Sometimes, you have it in you to read a book or watch a movie. Every once in a while, you have it in you to write. You don’t finish much that anyone else is going to see, but it feels good regardless. It’s like singing in the shower. You love singing in the shower.

You start getting really into chess. This is embarrassing, because you’ve been on the record many times about how you don’t like chess, including a few days ago. On the other hand, it’s nice to be pleasantly surprised by something for once, and it’s one less thing you have in common with Elon Musk. You used to always feel like the game was judging you, but you’ve managed to let go of the idea that it’s measuring your intelligence and started thinking of it as just another thing you can learn. Besides, Stockfish would never judge you. Stockfish is your best friend.

It’s ironic that now, when your brain is working at the lowest level since you were in elementary school, is the time you’d get into a game famous for being cerebral. But it can also be a game of instinct and pattern recognition, and that part is working just fine. It helps you learn how to trust the parts of your brain you can’t feel, but are just as capable of complex thought. There’s an addictive edge to learning to see the game, like you’re Neo from the Matrix beginning to believe. You love that this is something you could practice for the rest of your life and always have room to get better at.

But you love the history, too. You love the Victorian players who prioritized playing with style over actually winning the game, which has always been your habit no matter the game. You love that the Mechanical Turk toured 84 years before the public knew its secret; you love that two teenage boys from Baltimore figured it out 30 years earlier, but nobody believed them because they were poor. You especially love the Saavedra position, where a Spanish priest defeated a better player’s rook and king with only a single pawn, winning an endgame most people thought was impossible by under-promoting. You’ve always been a sucker for stuff like that. You love that that’s something human beings are capable of.

Also, you have a crush on Anna Rudolf.

By the way, you’ve become religious, albeit in your own needlessly idiosyncratic way. This isn’t a desperate attempt to get healing from God — you understand the problem of evil too well to expect any of that — but God is at least someone to talk to. You’ve never been an atheist per se, you just didn’t find any of the answers offered by major religions helpful or intuitive, and until now never had a good reason to find your own.

When you say God, you actually mean Gods, because you imagine two. To your mind, every act of creation is an act of love, so it follows that the greatest creation flows from the greatest love. Therefore, two gods, in love with each other. You don’t think of them as people except as a metaphor your tiny ape brain can understand, which is the excuse you need to imagine them both as women.

You don’t understand this mess, but it’s comforting to imagine there’s someone who does, even if they aren’t going to help you in particular. It’s a good reminder of all the things you do not know. It’s a good reminder that you can’t see the good things coming either.

Your roommate adopted cats at the end of last summer. By now, most of the time they’ve known you is as ‘that lady who stays inside the house all day.’ You try not to think about that. Sometimes they lie in your bed with you. You think anyone who believes cats aren’t capable of love has probably just never seen it, or never understood it when they did see it. You pity those people.

You try to remember that the humble, flexible blade of grass is better at surviving a windstorm than the proud, rigid tree. You try to remember you didn’t come up with that analogy.

Snow is one of the most underrated features of reality. That’s saying a lot, because snow is already the object of so much nostalgia, probably more so as less of it falls every year. Nonetheless it is still taken for granted in the way only truly wonderful things can be.

It feels like, if water freezes in the atmosphere, it should just turn into ice. It feels like the compound of rain and cold should create the most miserable conditions imaginable. It feels like the kind of weather a person drags themselves through one footstep at a time because there is nothing for it but to endure the endless torment of mother nature.

Instead, it turns into tiny crystals.

Snowflakes have a lovely array of features. There is, of course, their famous shape, an enchanting mix of six-fold radial and reflectional symmetry. And, as referenced pejoratively by Fox News pundits, each has a unique form due to the specific conditions of its forming; this means even the most slipshod of folded construction paper cut by a first grader is theoretically a valid shape that could be found in nature. That shape also forms a plane, allowing snowflakes to glide through the air, which makes them incredibly pretty as a weather event and catchable on the tongue as a bonus.

When snow accumulates on the ground, it forms a near-perfectly uniform layer of white. It erases all the lines we humans like to paint on the world, wiping it clean to be molded anew. It is shaped into igloos, into men, into balls that arc through the air and shatter harmlessly when they explode across their laughing target’s back. It turns regular park hills into public-access thrill rides, a sliding surface that is reliably frictionless when you’re freaking for speed and reliably frictionful to the dug-in boot when you realize freaking for speed is about to result in a concussion.

Snow makes children of us all. It is something wonderful the world gives us for free. Obviously, this means it is not to be trusted.

You’re autistic, which means you need expectations, routine, and structure almost as much as you need food or sleep. It helps to think of this in terms of a train, and for reasons beyond the obvious: the guiding structures of your life help you remember where to go and when. That is to say, if you lose them, your momentum goes too, and you grind to a halt on the gravel and ties.

You’ve measured out your weeks by having one activity to do before breakfast each weekday, alternating between your more complicated medical needs and at-home body-weight exercises. At your job, there are lots of procedures to follow, each with a clear and purposeful outcome; you even, to the bafflement of your coworkers, enjoy cleaning the bathrooms, despite the way bleach-smell clings to your nose. You need to know what you’re going to have for breakfast, lunch, and dinner before you even get out of bed, and when you realize you’re missing the ingredients for something you were hoping to cook, you need to shut down for 15 minutes before you can reboot and make a backup plan.

You’ve never been diagnosed, entirely for lack of trying: you certainly know the names of enough mid-20th-century passenger aircraft to qualify for at least a preliminary screening (you have a soft spot for the Lockheed Constellation, but like, who doesn’t?).

All this is to say, a malady that comes and goes without warning, ruins any plan that doesn’t involve lying in your own bed, and without any clear timeline on improvement is one the most psychologically destructive things that could possibly happen to you. Not that anyone would be able to deal with this healthily, with the possible exception of a Buddhist monk.

(Maybe you should look into Buddhism. It does seem like desire and suffering have been spending a lot more time together lately. Oh my god, are they dating?)

This whole thing feels a lot like the pandemic to you. Actually, that’s not quite it — this whole thing feels a lot like other people’s pandemic to you. Your pandemic was awesome. You feel pretty guilty about because a lot of people died or lost their jobs, but what can you do? You started estrogen a month in, which meant you learned to love cooking and reading and writing and board games, even if over the internet. You had this perfect chrysalis in which to metamorphose, going in this weird gender-fucked creature and coming out an actual, real-life girl. Sure, a girl with a lot to learn about fashion and taking care of her hair (Jesus Christ, you really needed moisturizing conditioner), but a girl nonetheless. You know you’re not alone in this: many of your siblings discovered themselves during that year. Then again, for others of your siblings it was a prison.

But this isn’t like that. This is going an entire week without breathing more than ten minutes of fresh air, because it’s too cold out to open your windows. This is sleeping ten hours and staying in bed until noon on a good day, wearing the same sleeping shirt and pajama bottoms you woke up in, and dragging yourself through hour after hour after hour, watching the time pile up until looking at the aggregate would drive you existentially insane. You probably spend more of your waking hours in bed during these few months than you did in the entirety of college.

Even when you’re healthy, you get depressed sometimes — it’s one or two days a month, which is sort of like a period if you squint — but an extended stint like this hasn’t happened since you were younger. A lot younger. Living-under-the-wrong-name younger. And because you ground your sense of time in emotional memory, you start losing your grip on your sense of self. Some days you look in the mirror and don’t even recognize your own face. You get a pretty dramatic haircut. It helps, kind of.

If only there were some way to solve this problem — say, through selectively inhibiting the reuptake of serotonin. Unfortunately, such a thing does not exist.

Winter plays tricks on the mind.

It starts so gradually. The sunset is just a little earlier, the shadows just a little longer. The type of movement so slow that the average person doesn’t stand a chance of noticing without assistance. We become frogs in freezing water.

Yet the reverse is true for daily temperature; random enough that any given peak or trough doesn’t seem to be significant on its own. Instead of one great herald, we get a few dozen tiny ones, each of which is easy enough to ignore. It’s just one day of wearing a sweater, then it’s just one day of wearing a jacket.

Before you’ve noticed, it seems normal to leave for and return from work in the dark, to never thinking to step out the door without a parka. The world, it is passively accepted, is supposed to feel like a hostile alien world from which we must seek hermetically-sealed and insulated shelter.

Eventually comes a day when summer — the warm kiss of the sun on skin-bare legs, the green smell of a soft breeze through either kind of canopy, the melodramatic groan of a hammock under shifting weight — it feels like it never happened at all, as though it were something read about in a magazine or seen once in passing on vacation. It feels like one of those impossible dreams, a thing which can exist only in the rose-tinted past, like the smell of great-grandma’s house or quality Levi’s jeans. Something which may once have been real, but not in a way that can ever be accessed again. A Xerox of a Xerox of a Xerox, blurring away into static as entropy leeches it dry.

Spend long enough under the weight of the dark and cold, and you’ll forget it was ever any different. That it ever could be any different again.

That’s nonsense, of course. The Earth’s axial tilt alters its trajectory for vanishingly few measurable forces, but human despair ranks somewhere at the end of the list. Believe it or not, Spring will invariably return.

But not for you. Not yet.

Keep popping out of the ground, if you like. But for now, all you’re going to see is your shadow.

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A brand-new chronic illness has gotten in the way of my writing. I have no idea if or when that will change, but in the meantime, enjoy this short post inspired by old Monty Python and Big Girls Blouse.

“We are here at Cortina Olympic Arena, ready to start the gold medal finals for the Women’s Existential Melancholy gold medal event. It was a tough field at the beginning but we have narrowed it down to just two finalists: Renee Scott representing Canada and Cheong Mi-Hyang representing South Korea. Olympic Melancholy on NBC is brought to you by your local Honda dealer — the only vehicle for driving through misty roads in the highlands and wondering if your best years are already behind you. Honda: The Power of Dreams (That Never Came to Pass).

As a reminder, the winner will be determined by the best of seven rounds, with each round going to whichever athlete can maintain the longest silent and uninterrupted sense of dejection. Competitors are allowed to use whatever mental tactics they like so long as they are actually related to their own life experience — this is a new rule after Taylor Lowery won 2024’s Australian open title by mentally singing Fleetwood Mac’s Dreams for four uninterrupted hours.

Of course, we all expected Scott in the final, but Cheong was seen as unlikely to make it past the quarter-finals, but she’s managed to pass by two French melancholists who were both seen as the favorites. Her approach seems to have worked so far, but we’ll see if it holds up against the reigning gold medal champion.

It is worth noting that acclaimed transgender melancholist Autumn Ortega was not able to compete this year after the International Olympic Committee took the controversial decision to ban her from competition — not on biological grounds, but because the emotion-altering effects of hormone therapy and grief over an irretrievably lost childhood were ruled to give her an unfair advantage.

Well, the sound of rain gently pattering against the kitchen window means the time has started! Scott is off to a strong start contemplating her father’s recent cognitive decline due to ALS and that he will never have a significant relationship with his granddaughter, but Cheong is quickly building momentum by staring out at a snowbank and thinking about every person she ever flirted with on the train and whether any of them might have made her truly happy. Cheong is widely known for her ability to imagine elaborate scenarios to create sorrow, a reputation she gained early when she won the Korean National Junior’s tournament at age 10 by wondering what would happen to her if all her relatives died in a freak tour bus accident.

Was that a laugh from Cheong? The officials are reviewing the replay now ... no, it looks like it was just a bitter chuckle, she was recoiling at the absurdity that as close as she ever tries to get to her loved ones, she will never have the time to truly know them.

And that’s a big sigh from Scott, who is already pivoting to wondering whether she’ll ever have time to finish the manuscript of her romantic poetry anthology. That is a bold change of strategy; we’ll see if it pays off, but that could be effective, especially with the knowledge that she could have finished it in her twenties instead of wasting time on meaningless pursuits still in play. And it seems like — oh no! She’s accidentally discovered forgiveness for her the shortcomings of her overworked, under-supported younger self! That’s going to give the first round to Cheong, that big risk by the Canadian that not paying off this time.

Coverage of Olympic Melancholy be back after a quick break. And later, we’ll see some highlights the men’s final with an exclusive interview of Team USA’s Eric Dougherty, where he’ll break down his hybrid strategy of simultaneously dwelling on the deaths of Fast and Furious actor Paul Walker and the Buffalo Bills’ 1991 loss of Super Bowl XXV on a missed field goal. Stay with us!”

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Terrible Baseball - Printable PDF

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If you want to read Terrible Baseball as a 7-page printable PDF, here it is!

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Something’s dripping from the concrete overhang onto the green plastic between my legs. It’s only drizzling, but Citi Field has seems to have been precision-designed to collect all the moisture in the upper deck and deposit it directly above my seat.

This game sucks.

My New York Mets are at home playing last year’s (alleged) worst team in history, the Chicago White Sox. With the biggest payroll in baseball, the Mets were losing by two before they even had a chance to bat. The game was supposed to be tonight, but just in case someone might actually want to attend a Wednesday game against a team that had an estimated 0.0% chance of making the playoffs before the season even began, it was rescheduled to 1 pm. That’s why I was able to get this ticket, with a pretty fantastic view, for $25. I could have had better in another section, but this one has a roof that prevents the water droplets from settling on my glasses.

In theory. A particularly large drop splatters my jeans. I shift over one seat, because it doesn’t matter. There are one hundred eighty seats in this section, ambitiously dubbed “The Excelsior Box.” Only eight are occupied by a living person. Almost no one is here.

Why am I?

Neither of my parents ever watched or took me to sports, with the exception of the World Cup, when they would lock around the TV to shout for Argentina, Brazil or Korea in a good year. Even then, I tended to observe with a polite (or less-than-polite) disinterest. When I was growing up, the two times I had been to a baseball game (once Yankees, once Cyclones) were both a chore, which I dutifully but unenthusiastically attended with a family friend for his birthday.

One could forgive my demeanor as that of children everywhere dragged to events about which they do not care in the slightest; then, one could double-forgive it as the obligatory self-satisfied angst it blossomed into during my teenage years. After all, sports were held in a cultural chokehold by half the people I hated in high school, the half who showed up every day wearing the jersey of some soccer or basketball star like a Visigoth who believes that the pelt of a mother bear will imbue him with her strength. But my joylessness was eventually revealed to be just that: an inability to experience joy. Once I discovered that ability (thanks to estrogen, call your representatives), that side of my personality slipped into the good night — not entirely, but far enough.

Still, when I pulled the vernix of boyhood off my naked, wrinkled body to discover who I would become freed of its burden, a passion for baseball was one of the last things I expected to find.

Two people take their seats in front of me, then apologize in case they’re spoiling my view. They move seats after the first inning, seeking shelter from the rain. There are now three people in my row, including myself.

They’re tourists from Australia, and they have never been to a baseball game before; they came to one today because they’ve seen it in movies. They ask me where I grew up (Brooklyn). They’re impressed that I was born somewhere famous — they visited it yesterday, because they’ve seen it in movies. They thought it was beautiful.

I don’t have the heart to tell them they picked one of the worst days to come to Citi Field, nor that most Americans don’t even like baseball anymore. I just play up my accent as I recite the holy numbers to them when they ask: three strikes an out, three outs an inning, nine innings a game.

They leave in the top of the seventh, hot dog wrappers in hand. They thank me for my company. Skyler from Brooklyn becomes a minor character in their magical trip to New York.

‘What do you even like about baseball?’ is the question a lot of people have for me these days. It’s an excellent question. The game itself lasts for two and a half hours, but the highlights video later uploaded to YouTube, which contains all of the interesting things that happened, is only nine minutes in total (this is considered high). Despite the recent efforts to reduce the length of games, baseball’s reputation as boring is still warranted.

One only needs to look at the players themselves for a cue: people for whom every play on the field is factored into hyper-scrutinized metrics by both fans and managers alike, people whose image and future are in jeopardy if those metrics are deemed insufficient. Those people, for whom millions of dollars are on the line, are slumping over the top of the dugout with their arms limp in the air. One of them is seeing how many of his teammates’ caps he can stack on top of his head. They look like middle schoolers whose parents are an hour late to pick them up from band practice.

King of the deadbeats is second baseman Jeff McNeil, a man who perpetually looks like he would rather be doing anything else with his life, even when he hits a home run that gives his team a 3-run lead. I keep his empty-eyed baseball card in the back of my phone case.

There’s a reason baseball is ‘America’s pastime’ while football gets to be ‘America’s game.’ No other sport has this much standing around, so abundant that some players have been famous for chatting at length with spectators while plays were happening in the infield. No other sport boasts legions of grandfathers who record every detail like they have a worksheet on a field trip. No other sport features its stars jogging in white button-up shirts, like your dad when he realizes the bus isn’t leaving quite as soon as he thought.

I think we can forgive the world of baseball for being so dreary. Remember that the regular season is 162 games long, whereas basketball and hockey are both 82 and football only 17. The eternity of them means tickets are relatively cheap, because each is much less important; it’s supply and demand. Nobody’s calling out sick from work to come see the White Sox.

Almost nobody I know shows up to a baseball game because they want to see what happens. Most of them do it because it’s a place to hang out where you can get greasy food; the sport is mostly an excuse. In that way, it has more in common with going out bowling than a basketball game.

A foul ball flies directly at my head. Most fans would try to catch it, but when a small object is going to hit me in the face at a significant number of miles per hour, my animal instincts win out: I duck. It rockets off the floor behind me, heading towards a family in the back row, the dad reaching out as far as one can with a six-year-old on one’s lap.

The attempt is in vain. The ball jumps back down the stands, passing empty row after empty row. It settles at the feet of a young woman in front of me, who holds it up to polite applause. Other sections join in when she walks up the empty rows and offers it to the kid.

On her way back down, she gives a little bow.

The kid begins chanting, “Let’s go, Mets!” It’s the first time I’ve heard his voice.

Mets fans are known for being long-suffering. We tend to think this is special about us, yet another mundane experience New Yorkers claim can only happen here. Maybe there is something to it, though; after all, we do live in the perpetual shadow of the most successful team in American sports. To be a Mets fan is to choose, almost every year, to break your own heart while big brother pops bottle after bottle of champagne across the East River. Why one would subject themselves to that fate varies from person to person.

For some, it is a blanket bias towards the underdog. This is certainly a noble position, but a little hard to swallow with a payroll over $340 million, which is actually more than the Yankees’ $300 million. If you want a scrappy underdog team with good spirit, the Seattle Mariners are only three time zones away. Contrasted against the Yankees, your old-money country club types, the Mets aren’t really the orphan kid with nothing but a dream — we’re the new-money real estate agent blowing his commission on a Lambo.

For some, it’s a matter of heritage. Their dad was a Dodgers or Giants fan, and the Mets were founded explicitly to cater to old Dodgers and Giants fans. My grandfather was a Giants fan, and my grandmother was a Dodgers fan, but neither cares about baseball, and my one relative who did, my other grandfather, was such a Yankee devotee that he spent his final days clinging to life to see Aaron Judge break the American League single-season home run record. He died a few days after.

What I like about the Mets, though, is exactly what I hate about the Yankees. Yankees caps are worn by all kinds of people, from the Bronx to Brazil, including many who don’t care about baseball or New York in the slightest. What the Yankees cannot have, then, is the tribalistic in-group connections, especially in foreign territory: the one time I went to Fenway Park in a Mets jersey, an older man in a Mets shirt pointed at me and smiled like I had just made his week.

For a similar reason, I tend to forgo a Mets cap at Citi Field, opting for the obsolete logo of the Brooklyn Dodgers. I sometimes get mistaken for a Red Sox fan, including by our Australian friends, but it’s worth it when I get to talk to old Jewish guys who are still bitter about the 1958 relocation to LA.

I stand up to grab some food at a glassed-in food court area with views of the field that provides a little shelter from the rain and cold. I run into a friend from college who is here with her mom, who is also a Mets fan. We talk for an inning and change about how miserably this game is going, and why did we even bother to come out and see it, and they’re probably going to blow the season again, and at least there isn’t a line for the Dippin’ Dots. After I leave, I wander around the park, completing a full circuit of the field by the time I return to my seat.

On the Jumbotron, the largest in MLB, a video of comedian John Oliver tries to get a chant going. He fails, but, being a recording, he is at least spared the embarrassment.

Baseball is a sport traditionally passed from parents to children, usually fathers to usually sons. My kind, who pick it up from nothing, are rare. Meanwhile, the number whose parents love baseball but choose a different sport, or no sport at all, is only growing. That’s bad math.

Much ado has been made about how baseball is dying. On a day like today, that feels desperately true. When they built Citi Field, less time was spent debating how to make a stadium to herald a new era for the Mets than whether it was fair that the whole exterior is designed as a tribute to the Dodgers’ Ebbets Field while the only homage to the Giants’ Polo Grounds was the color of plastic chosen for the seats. It’s all dedicated to a lost past, to the two teams that left our city behind from the one that never truly replaced them. A grand mausoleum to the baseball gods of Brooklyn and Manhattan, who left us their colors so we could piddle away the years in Queens under the shared delusion of legacy.

But when I come back on Friday night to see the Colorado Rockies, this year’s worst team, the stadium is packed once again. So maybe all the nostalgic fatalism is an illusion, too.

The thing I love most about Baseball is that it’s the only major sport in America that doesn’t end when a clock hits zero, but when a certain condition (27 outs per side) is fulfilled. Because of this feature, it’s always technically possible to win. Sure, your team might be down by seven runs with two outs in the bottom of the ninth, but there’s no law in the rulebook or physics that says you can’t score eight runs in a row. The game is always daring you to believe something amazing can happen. It almost never does, but the hope stays alive. In this, of all years, I think that’s something a lot of us can use.

As I write this, the Mets have been eliminated from the playoffs. Maybe they’ll win the World Series next year. Maybe trans people will fight for our rights and win them back. Maybe the unknown 33-year-old assemblyman will be the mayor of New York. Maybe I will write a story that changes the world.

Maybe there’s still something to cling to, way out in the dirt.

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When I started up this blog, I was mostly looking for a home to put all my shorter-form writing. I didn’t intend to make any money on it, not right away at any rate, but I decided to leave the option for a paid subscription available just in case someone wanted it — I will never say no to free money.

Well, one of my relatives actually did it. It turns out that while I will never say no to free money, I do feel bad about someone giving me money and not having something to offer them in return. So, for that one person, and anyone who would like to join them in the future, I am going to be publishing something called Skyler’s Notes. It’s just my behind-the-scenes explanation of what inspired a piece, how it came together, and how I feel about it. Not very fancy, but I figure doing some necromancy to reverse the death of the author is something to show my thanks. They’re a bit less edited, but I figure anyone who’s paying me for access probably wants the straight dope.

The first of these is up now, on my first piece, Sail-Away Party: click here for a free preview! I’ve left the option open to claim one paid post for the plebians, but I’m pretty sure that works prospectively, so you may want to save it for a later Notes — I plan to do one on everything I publish, and I think the Ouroboros one might be a lot juicier.

The price for a subscription is $5 a month or $50 a year, which is the cheapest they’d let me make it. There’s also the $150 tier, which has zero additional benefits and is just if you want to be really nice to me.

Speaking of publishing, I’m not dead! Work continues on my longer-form projects, including my novel and a shorter novel (novella? novelette? whatever) I plan to publish in serialized parts. My paid subscribers (okay, paid subscriber) will get early access to the later chapters. I also have another short essay coming out in the very near future to fill that gap — this one a bit more lighthearted.

Whether you’re paid or free subscribed, thanks for everything! I could probably do it without you, but it’s a lot more fun knowing people are actually reading this stuff.

- Skyler

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Content Warning: Suicidal ideation

Ouroboros PDF Version

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If you'd like to print or read "Ouroboros" as an 11-page PDF, here it is!

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It wasn’t the first time Arsh woke up in the middle of the night, sweat through his sheets, to the sense that someone was standing in the corner, watching him. It was, however, the first time he was right.

The sight of the stranger in the yellow lamplight was like an ice bath, paralysis climbing down his spine like a stepladder. She was leaning on the wall beneath his Blade Runner poster, blinking as her eyes adjusted to the color. She looked about forty, maybe fifty if the extra decade had been kind to her. Her black hair was falling on the shoulders of a blacker denim jacket, in all ways ordinary except that, instead of buttons or a zipper, each of the edges was lined with a metallic strip of a texture Arsh had never seen, like the spine of a robotic fish. There was a square-shaped device with a pulsing blue ring clipped to her belt like a pager. She was so casually still, a predator at ease, disassembling him with her gaze.

The only sounds were the low groan of the expanding radiator and his mother’s voice in his head. If someone breaks into the house, just let them take what they want. Your life is the most important thing.

“What do you want?” he croaked. It felt like shouting.

“Huh.” The woman tilted her head, as though rotating one of his components in her mind. When she spoke, there was a kind of buzz at the bottom of her voice. “You sound different from how I remember.”

“What,” he tried again, injecting a hint of threat this time, “do you want?”

“Relax.” She made a fence of her hand between them. “I’m not going to hurt you. The opposite, actually.”

He reached for his phone on the nightstand, trying to move as slowly as possible. “Is that why you broke into my room to watch me sleep?”

She laughed, and he knew he’d heard that laugh before: it rolled and peaked like the waves of the bay, stabbing and tossing the ferry back home. “I didn’t mean to watch you sleep. You just looked so peaceful. It was probably a nightmare, though, wasn’t it?”

His hand grasped at the empty wood where his phone should be. He tried to keep his eyes from it. If he could just find it without her noticing, he could … well, he could do something. Had he put it on the other side of the lamp?

“Looking for this?” she sighed, waving his phone at him by the corner, like a poker player about to reveal a flush. Shit.

“Give it back to me,” he said. The threat was not a hint anymore, though he didn’t quite know what he was threatening. He was disgusted at the sound, at the posturing as the kind of man who was capable of violence, at the way the two ideas were so inseparable.

“You’re going to have to hear me out first.” She slipped one hand down to the doorknob and, almost absently, twisted the privacy lock upright with a click. “My name is Laila. I’m, uhh ...” she paused, doing some opaque calculus in her head, “I’m from the future.”

“Sure,” said Arsh.

“It’s true.” Laila smirked, and the confidence of it forced him to kick down the sense that it might be. She looked at the floor, then back up to meet his eyes. “And you’re a younger version of me.”

A slideshow of images clicked over in rapid succession, all the mosquito-like thoughts he normally swatted away burrowing into his skin, running amok in his blood. A dull hurt without a name threatened to spill out of his stomach like bile. He began twitching his toes, because at least that she wouldn’t be able to see. “Get out of my fucking room,” he said.

Laila exhaled through her nose, as if to say, you’re really going to make me do this? “Your name is Arshad Yazeed Kader. You were born on January 18th, 2004. Your passcode is 5522. Your parents are Fadia and Rasul. They have a really old Boston Terrier you named K-Mart when you were six. You spend so long in the bathroom people think you have a digestive problem, which you let them believe because it’s easier than explaining that sometimes you lie on the floor unable to get up. When you jerk off, you imagine red-haired women dressing you up in skirts and fucking you with a strap-on.”

“I don’t—”

“When you were 15 you stayed with your friend Isaiah and his parents for the weekend while yours went to a funeral. You woke up early and saw a family of rabbits on the grass outside the kitchen window. That night, when you lit the fire pit to make s’mores, you heard a squeaking sound. Isaiah’s dad said it was just the wood, and you’d never heard wood make a sound like that before, but you didn’t say anything. You only figured out what was happening when you spotted the adult rabbit inside the pit. You and Isaiah saved that one, but her three children burned to death. Isaiah’s dad laughed at how hard you fought to save that rabbit. You haven’t eaten Hershey’s since then, because the taste makes you nauseous.”

Arsh tried to say something, anything, but each sentence found its target precisely in his memory, and he came up empty.

“And once, when you were taking out the trash, a piece of broken glass ripped the garbage bag and sliced open your arm. It’s the only real scar you have.” Laila extended her arm and, pulling back her sleeve, revealed an identical question mark-shaped line on the inside of her elbow. “You thought the nurse at the urgent care, the one with the curly hair and the husky voice, was so beautiful you tried to cut your hand with a kitchen knife just to see her again. But it didn’t go deep enough the first time, and the second time you chickened out.” She rested back on the poster again, the thick paper creasing under her head. “You thought you just wanted to fuck her. I didn’t figure it out for a long time, but you thought that because it was the best filter you had for what you really felt: you wanted to be her. Or look like her, anyway.” She glanced up and down her own form. “You sort of pull it off, too.”

The onslaught of perfect truths, so many things he hadn’t told a living soul, crashed over his head like a waterfall. A collection of disconnected moments pulled into parallax around an impossible point. When he wrestled back control of his larynx, the only question he could ask was the only one she had already answered. “How do you know all this?”

“I told you,” she said, “you’re me.”

And, suddenly, with the floor tilting sideways like a cabin on a ship, he saw it. In the rounded cuff of her eyebrows. In the way her ears were flat against the sides of her head. In the two tiny brown birthmarks on her neck, imperceptible to anyone else, yet now obviously the same he glanced over every morning when he applied his sunscreen. In the differences too: the subtle flares of her face and nose, the curves in her hips and chest, the texture of her hair. All foreign, all primordially familiar.

She was watching him stare. “Don’t tell me you’re that surprised.”

He wasn’t, really. She made blinding, hypnotic sense, like staring directly into the sun; he could already see the purple afterimage of her lingering in his vision for days. It was like he had been trying to jam a triangular peg into a round hole his entire life, and for the first time, tried the one to the left and found the wood sliding right home. All the fuzzy threads of the possible future knitted together into a single, graceful knot. It was the way he imagined all those other kids felt in second grade when adults asked them ‘and what do you want to be when you grow up?’ A football player! An astronaut! A princess!

A woman. The word was so deliciously forbidden to him, just the shape of it made his stomach loop around like it was being sucked through a crazy straw.

Laila slipped her hand into the back pocket of her jeans. It surfaced cradling something resembling his smartwatch charger, two circular nodes bound together by a rubber-coated wire. She walked over and lowered herself into his desk chair, holding it up to the lamp for him to see.

“This is an RBRS Device. All we have to do is attach one side to you and one side to me.” She pointed to the back of her head to demonstrate. “This will allow me to ...” she paused, perusing the selection of phrases, “take over from here.”

“Take over...” he rolled the words around in his mouth, tasting them from different angles.

“Take over,” she repeated, “It’s obvious you want to be me. I know how to make that happen. You can live the life you’ve always wanted.”

“And is that part of it?” Arsh said, reaching towards the square on her belt. Laila flinched away, like he had just aimed a loaded rifle at her stomach.

“Listen,” she said, rotating the desk chair to angle the square away from him. “I know how this goes. It takes you years to figure it out, years after that to do anything. Years of loneliness and dissociation. Years of stumbling around without real feelings. You have a way out of that.” She holds up the two pads of the device. “It only takes a minute.”

It wasn’t like he hadn’t dreamed of an opportunity like this. He was never stupid enough to believe that taking his life was actually the easy way out. It was a dirty little trick, really: from his absentee roommate, who would find his body only once it started to smell, to his parents and grandparents, who would find a bottomless pit of grief. Everyone who wouldn’t be able to imagine why a bright young man with his whole future ahead of him had failed to see that his life was worth living. Everyone who would wonder whether they could have saved him if they had only reached out a little more often, to take his decision as a myopic excuse to flagellate themselves. The existential joke that his twenty-one years orbiting the sun would amount to a collection of grayscaled headshots posted to his acquaintances’ social media, the interchangeable backdrop to a platitude and the phone number for the national suicide hotline.

What Laila offered was so much simpler, in comparison. He’d just let go, sink into the black waters of his consciousness, and not only would nobody ever know, but those who didn’t reject the woman she’d make him into would rejoice that the person they loved was finally happy. It was perfect; all he had to do was nothing.

But, faced with that choice, Arsh was still an ape. An ape with consciousness, that knew he had consciousness, and, when the choice was in front of him, would fight with tooth and claw to retain it. So when Laila leaned in, with one hand gently on his forehead, the other reaching for the back of his skull, he slapped her arm away.

“No,” he said, “I can’t.” Then, because that didn’t feel like enough: “I’m sorry.”

“I’m sorry too.” Without breaking eye contact, she reached into the inside pocket of her jacket. “Hold still.”

He watched Laila aim something at him, finger hovering over what must have been a trigger, and the adrenaline that had been crouching in his bloodstream awoke almost a second too late. He grabbed her wrist and wrenched it, a misty beam of white light arcing over his shoulder and dissipating into a fevered glow against the wall. Laila swore, and he shoved her backwards before she could get her guard up. He made for the door, unlocking it and slamming it closed behind him, stumbling backwards into the kitchen. Running through possibilities at the speed of panic, he grabbed two legs of a kitchen stool and lofted it onto his shoulder, hiding behind the refrigerator.

The door creaked open.

“What are you so scared of, Arsh?” Laila called into the dark, “I know you. I know you’re—”

Arsh pounced, shouting a warrior’s cry to pump his nerves. He swung the stool at Laila’s torso, but it hit the counter instead. Two hours of hunching over IKEA instructions with an allen wrench exploded in his hands, the blond splinters scattering across the floor. Laila aimed at him again, but he charged her at full speed before she could set it off, the light sparking off the ceiling. He pinned her backwards against the stove, the weapon pointed at the wall next to the sink. She tried to shove and wriggle free, but she was older, more fragile than he was. Her shoulder bumped the glass cover of a saucepan on the drying rack, which fell backwards and flipped the garbage disposal switch. It began gargling, loud and hungry.

Laila snarled. “Why are you fighting me? I’m trying to help you.”

“Because I’m alive!” he shouted, incredulous, “I’m a person!”

She laughed, and he recognized it now: it was his mother’s laugh. “You’re not a person,” she spat, her words laced with arsenic, “You’re a shell! You’re just wasting day after pointless day, pissing your life, my life, into the gutter because you’re too scared to do what you really want!” She kneed him in the crotch and slipped free of his hold. He grabbed at her through the pain, trying to find purchase on her waist, but she escaped to the far counter, raising the stun gun again. “You won’t even notice it’s happening.” She moved to pull the trigger. And then, she hesitated.

Arsh was holding the square from her belt an inch above the disposal. It continued its growl, salivating for matter to shred with its spinning razor teeth. The device pulsed an indifferent blue between his fingers. It was smooth and cold, like ceramic. “This is important, isn’t it?”

"Okay.” She continued lowering her aim with one hand, coaxing him down with the other. “Just please … don’t drop it. We can—”

He smiled and, in a fit of toddlerish spite, let it fall into the drain, disappearing beneath the shiny black rubber. He could hear it bouncing from blade to blade, the mechanical confusion of one machine trying to digest another.

Laila screamed and tackled Arsh to the ground. There was a white flash from behind her head as his skull collided with the floor. Then, the world went black.

Arsh awoke to every fire alarm in the apartment shrieking at him in discordant symphony. Black smoke filled the top half of the room, lit from below by fire eating the countertop. He coughed and spat as he got to his knees, saliva mixing with blood on the tile. The sink was gone, shattered from the inside, shards of it strewn across the floor. His eyes, and a hundred other places on his body, were stinging and raw.

He found Laila next to his arm, unconscious. He laid a finger on her throat, searching for a pulse; it was there, regular and true as his own, but blood was leaking out of a cut on her neck, with siblings down her back and side. Arsh pulled her over his shoulder, almost buckling under the extra weight, and began crawling towards the front door. He tried to unlock it, but the brass already too hot to touch. He bit through the pain and twisted it as hard as he could, then the handle, then dragging their bodies into the cold, forcing the door shut behind him.

The February night wasted no time stripping Arsh of whatever heat the fire had lent him. The sidewalk scratched through his sleeping shorts, biting with icy teeth into his calves. He lifted Laila’s torso onto his thighs to shield her from it, examining the shape of the body that could one day be his. When he traced his finger over her jaw, he found that it was fizzing, like soda poured into a glass. In the distance was the angry red whine of a fire engine, glancing off the buildings’ walls, then manifesting into physical form as it turned the corner and squealed to a hissing stop. The firefighters’ boots touched down to earth; they grabbed their equipment from the side of the truck, attached hose to hydrant, located the flames. Arsh’s upstairs neighbors tripped out of their front door, coughing the clear air into their lungs.

Arsh’s eyes fell back to his lap, but Laila was gone. The memory of her smeared in his mind, blurring into a morass of disconnected impressions. He couldn’t make sense of them anymore, and when he gave up trying, his mind went as blank as the piles of snow lining the street. All he could hear now was the purr of the idling diesel engine.

One of the men clapped a giant, gloved hand onto Arsh’s shoulder, trying to shake him back into the present. “What’s your name, son?”

He gave his response to the concrete, the words seeping out of him like the thin smoke from his windows: “I don’t know.”

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The ways the days and hours pass, you'll never understand / Falling like rain through your hands

- Fountains of Wayne, "Troubled Times"

Dear adults in my life,

I am now graduated and in the possession of a bachelor's degree. For the first time since I entered Kindergarten, I am not waking up with a schedule for my next class. The long work is at long last complete.

Every culture on Earth has its own version of the rite of passage, the ceremony wherein a child is said to become an adult. The age, however, is always different: a Bat Mitzvah at 13, a Quinceñera at 15, a first (legal) taste of beer at 21. It is tempting to take my graduation, my exit out from the shadow of the 16-year word “Education,” as another example.

The obvious critique of such rituals is that the age of adulthood is effectively arbitrary. This is to some extent true, but for a necessary reason: the moment a person loses the innocence we associate with childhood is idiosyncratic and unpredictable. For some, it is when they are first affected, directly or indirectly, by an act or threat of violence. For some, it is when they become acutely aware of the expectations being placed upon their shoulders, and what sacrifices are required to meet them. For many, it is when they become responsible for their own well-being; for the luckiest among us, this is after they have a college diploma.

For me, it was the year I realized I was transgender. That same year, our nation invited the little man into the big house to let him tear us apart from the inside. That morning, the 9th of November, 2016, I first truly grasped the number of people in this country who are motivated by fear and hatred of those they perceive as an other; a desire to make those people go away, even by unconscionable means, so they can continue to live in a bubble of simple unquestioning reality. That morning, I attempted to bury the nauseous bubble in my chest by deciding I could not reveal the newly discovered lie of my being until I knew I was safe, until my country returned to normal.

But the moment of metamorphosis was not when I realized there were fellow Americans committed to my persecution. The moment was when I realized that they were not going away. That I would live the rest of my life with this sword dangling over my skull, waiting for the thread to snap. That I would have to pay in courage for the chance at a full inner life most receive free. That my struggle was nothing compared to the unconscionable numbers of my people living in true poverty, insecurity, or danger. So I made my choice, because the choice was already made. As I wrapped myself in the blanket of my new community, immersed by the total acceptance I could never have beyond its walls, all the while immersed in the fear and pain my siblings are forced to bear, the world of the typical 14-year-old slipped further and further from my hands.

I yearn, as we all do, for a simple path through tranquil seas. Instead, at the beginning of the rest of my life, I stand staring into the screaming hurricane of possible futures, trying to navigate my little vessel into a safer harbor. The route there is neither clear nor straight. It will twist and turn and loop back on itself. The quiet at the end of the voyage may only be a temporary shelter, if it is not a trick of the water and light. Yet I have no choice but to go.

The moon will wax and wane, the stars will circle overhead, the Earth will orbit the Sun will orbit the Galaxy. I will lose my favorite earrings and my favorite people. The most important days will arrive and depart without staying for dinner. The world will rearrange itself, then rearrange again, too fast for me to keep up. Concerned parents will lobby to ban the modern objects of their ancient panic. Bad things will happen to good people, good things will happen to bad people. Occasionally there will be some justice. It won't be often enough.

Viewed in its best light, the rite of passage I have undertaken is not itself a transition from childhood from adulthood. Rather, it is a celebration of that moment, at whatever time and in whatever form it occurred for each member of my graduating class. A joyous substitute for whatever wounds, bloody and banal, thousand cuts and single stroke, were the true catalyst of our maturity. A yearly sail-away party for each of two million tiny ships, where we can pretend, for an afternoon, that most do not already bear the scars of the waves.

For all my sobriety, this is the version of graduation I got. I stood shoulder to shoulder with many of the people I love most in this world, and we smiled, and we sobbed, and we tossed our little square caps into the air. We saluted the skies to the people we were, the people we are, the people we will become. The pomp and circumstance there not to aggrandize, but because no ceremony less than the maximum can shoulder the burden of our parting lives.

Someone once told me college is like adult Disneyland — and like Disneyland, eventually, we have to go home. Disneyland is special because if we return, when we return, we have become too old, too weathered, too jaded to see beyond the plastic. College, like the day it ended, was so perfect it was easy to forget how imperfect it really was. For every friend who stood beside me was another's ghost, lost to coldest misfortune, hottest conflict, or lukewarm entropy of drifting acquaintance. It’s all plastic now. But there is still magic, out in the unknown, where the maps are etched with dragons.

It is time to inherit the world, as we once inherited this world of concrete halls and brick walkways and midnight trips for burrito bowls. The world we must now leave to our successors, the class of 2029, so they can find all the loves and heartbreaks and triumphs and failures ahead of them. So they can write their name in its stones, as its stones have written their names in our hearts.

The sun sets as it rises. The tide ebbs as it flows. Now, I cast off, and let the wind carry me to the lands beyond. I bid farewell to the two children on the shoreline: the boy whose face I wore for so long and the girl whom I so rarely got to be. Then I will turn, with clear eyes, and search for the next horizon.

Ready or not, here I come.

- Skyler

To read my behind-the-scenes thoughts on this piece, check out its companion Skyler’s Notes post.