A week or two ago, I had some sort of creative-euphoric meltdown upon completion of an article about a physicist who loses his way, wakes up on Wall Street, and decides, late in life, to plumb the depths of his mind and soul for answers, explanations. The piece was so good it sent me into a tailspin, and, fully out of control, I ended up cursing like a sailor in the comments — losing my cool entirely — because I didn’t know how else to explain what had just happened: something out-of-body, something spiritual.
That time, the triggering context was the fact that this perfect article somehow just arrived. I didn’t find it, it found me. And, significantly, Readup, this strange thing that we are building, was what brought it to me, the current under the kayak, the wave behind the surfboard.
Well, it happened again, with this piece, just now. Except this time, the story wasn’t on the Readup homepage, it was in the depths of my starred list. I have no clue how or why. I’ll never know where I was or what I was thinking when I starred it. I probably had twenty tabs open. But what I did was give myself a gift, one that I would open in the future, in the woods of Michigan, in my underwear, scratching mosquito bites and listening to the gentle sound of rain on the roof of my RV, my home. Readup makes me a time-traveler, a quarterback of cosmic dust, hurling little maybe-miracles across time and space, usually not knowing what I’m doing or why, but then, sometimes, reaping the benefits of my work, a tighter grip on reality, the human condition, my human condition.
There is one simple reason why this is a 10: it caused me to disappear. I don’t even know for how long (5 minutes or 40?) but what I know is that from the first words of this story the entire world went away and I was the narrator. I was trying to figure it all out: What is it about moms? About drugs? What is it about my kids? (Note, I don’t even have kids, but while reading this essay I certainly did.) What is it about how when we need answers, we need to write? What am I trying to say? And why? Why? Why?
A week or two ago, I had some sort of creative-euphoric meltdown upon completion of an article about a physicist who loses his way, wakes up on Wall Street, and decides, late in life, to plumb the depths of his mind and soul for answers, explanations. The piece was so good it sent me into a tailspin, and, fully out of control, I ended up cursing like a sailor in the comments — losing my cool entirely — because I didn’t know how else to explain what had just happened: something out-of-body, something spiritual.
That time, the triggering context was the fact that this perfect article somehow just arrived. I didn’t find it, it found me. And, significantly, Readup, this strange thing that we are building, was what brought it to me, the current under the kayak, the wave behind the surfboard.
Well, it happened again, with this piece, just now. Except this time, the story wasn’t on the Readup homepage, it was in the depths of my starred list. I have no clue how or why. I’ll never know where I was or what I was thinking when I starred it. I probably had twenty tabs open. But what I did was give myself a gift, one that I would open in the future, in the woods of Michigan, in my underwear, scratching mosquito bites and listening to the gentle sound of rain on the roof of my RV, my home. Readup makes me a time-traveler, a quarterback of cosmic dust, hurling little maybe-miracles across time and space, usually not knowing what I’m doing or why, but then, sometimes, reaping the benefits of my work, a tighter grip on reality, the human condition, my human condition.
There is one simple reason why this is a 10: it caused me to disappear. I don’t even know for how long (5 minutes or 40?) but what I know is that from the first words of this story the entire world went away and I was the narrator. I was trying to figure it all out: What is it about moms? About drugs? What is it about my kids? (Note, I don’t even have kids, but while reading this essay I certainly did.) What is it about how when we need answers, we need to write? What am I trying to say? And why? Why? Why?