This should’ve been easy, but even books-one of the few things I had thought mattered to me-no longer held my attention, because whatever I picked up seemed to me like the playing out of some form or style that had been set long ago and exhausted soon after, like a superficially new way of essentially describing the same thing: life and its various discontents. I asked that they please just give me one minute to try and find something to read. I had taken them to the library to keep them entertained, and now they wanted to go to the play area. My kids, however, made different demands. ![]() Only that amid all this I was trying, of all the things I could’ve been doing, to do what I am always trying to do: redeem my reality by converting it into fiction. Only that the detritus of this chaotic survival-uncapped needles and disassembled pens, plastic spoons and spent condoms, half-drunk Mountain Dew bottles and empty Cup Noodles containers-kept accumulating in my backyard. Only that I lived with my family across a dirt alley from a liquor store and saw, almost every time I looked out our living room windows, someone shooting up or heating up aluminum foil and inhaling or hallucinating or peeing or fighting or starting a fire. Only that middle age was here and it was hard to believe I was still here: exhausted and uninspired in the long shadow of the pandemic, trying to keep my kids occupied on yet another scorching afternoon of yet another climate-change summer, in a midsize city where I knew almost no one. ![]() ![]() Only that I was unemployed and weeks away from turning forty. I was, let’s say, having a bad day when I came across Donald Hoffman in the stacks of the downtown Spokane Public Library last summer.
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