biography

In an interview I read a couple of years ago, Hilary Mantel describes reading as a writer as being partly about constantly tracking how the story is told. In other words, she couldn't help but pay close attention to what was being done to her by the author on the other end of her interaction with whatever book she was reading. I have moments like that, but they're mainly flashes of wonder: stepping outside John McPhee's description of taking a walk in Alaska while his compatriots readied their canoes for a river journey and thinking, "How in the hell is he making this incredibly mundane experience so compelling?"

New resolution is to pay closer attention to that, not just from a prose standpoint but from a structure standpoint. Might even start taking notes sometimes. Other resolution is to start reading more great biographies. I am seized by the idea of writing a biography of Jack, as I was this summer by my dream/vision of him as a 46-year-old with a teenaged daughter. That ran aground, as I've said before, on the need to make sure such a projection is true to who he was, that the intervening decades grow organically from the point where in this universe he ended his life. And so the more I thought about that, the more I realized that I needed to grapple with and understand and face his life. What a life he lived, what a life we all lived around him. But it's very difficult to know where to start. The most I have is snatches of this and that, a kind of haphazard list of Things To Talk About.

• How he died, when, where
• His itinerantness
• The joys of our suburban childhood, brotherhood
• The puzzlement we all felt at his early and persistent pessimism
• Laughing at him when he got angry because he was so cute
• Playing "bang" and "sock wars" in the backyard and in the addition just after it was finished and before we had any furniture. 
• Tickling him and Lincoln until they couldn't take it anymore, the "ultimate punishment"
• Drumming
• His drive to practice anything he wanted to be good at: dribbling, popping wheelies, Tony Hawk Pro Skater 4
• His athleticism
• The inadequacy of our mental healthcare system, and the competence and compassion of some of the people working it
• Mom and Dad's (especially Mom's) relentless advocacy for and support to him
• Heroin, cocaine, meth, and the drug crisis
• Lincoln's moving and profound acknowledgement, during the memorial service in May, of Jack's shame at his own inability to meet the expectations of a capitalist, patriarchal society
• Words: poetry, rap, Scrabble
• That brief moment after his coma, before he'd been prescribed new psych meds, when he was detoxed from any and all chemicals and as lucid and clear and happy as I ever saw him, ripping through One Hundred Years of Solitude and The Hobbit
• Jail and juvie
• Scars and physical brokenness, the toll that years of mental illness and drug abuse and losing control of himself took on his body
• His dignity, his despair

And so on.

Right now I'm reading Behemoth: A History of the Factory and the Making of the Modern World, by Joshua Freeman, and Home Fire, by Kamila Shamsie. Also The Island of Doctor Moreau, out loud with SRB. Once those are done, time to start in on some biographies. 

Also, time to start doing a bit of research on oral history techniques. And, well, research.

opioids

At a party last night a friend mentioned that she'd been listening to a German podcast (she is German) about the American opioid crisis, and how fascinated she was by it. So much of the attention in the media, including the German media, apparently, is on the role of OxyContin and its like. My friend mentioned the Sacklers, for example: their company's role in perpetrating the crisis is unforgivable. There are so many stories about people getting injured or having surgery, getting addicted to the painkillers their doctor prescribed, and eventually shifting to heroin because it's cheap and easy to get. It's a compelling story: hardworking ordinary people as victims of a conspiracy of greedy corporations and doctors gone wrong.

Not everyone who ends up addicted to narcotics took that path, of course. 

debt-free

Today, exactly nine years and 11 months after I began paying off my student loans, I got an email from Cornerstone Education Loan Services. Subject line: "Congratulations! Your Loan(s) Has Been Paid In Full!"

When I graduated in May 2018, I got a six-month grace period before I had to start making payments. By November I'd been in my first full-time job for five months, making not very much but living at home. So when the loan service provider -- it was a different one then, no recollection of the name -- emailed me that it was time to start making payments, I entered into their online form an automatic monthly payment amount that would set me free in ten years.

Since then, I have been continuously employed (except briefly, by choice, in the months before moving to Pakistan), with increasing responsibilities and concurrently increasing salaries. I lucked into an extraordinarily cheap apartment in DC in 2009 and lived there for seven years, meaning hundreds of dollars a month that most of my friends were spending on rent was going into my savings account or 401k. I'm a somewhat cautious and non-impulsive spender, although I've taken some big trips and bought some splurge-y things over the past ten years. And every month, without my thinking much about it, a portion of my salary has gone straight to paying down my student loans. Until today.

There's an exercise called the unpacking the privilege backpack, created in the late 1980s by a feminist scholar named Peggy McIntosh as a way to critically examine the power she gained from being white in a racist society. In reflecting on my newly debt-free status, I re-read the essay she wrote about it. We used something akin to that activity in City at Peace, standing in a line and physically stepping forward and back as we decided whether each statement of systematically conferred (i.e. unearned) power, or lack thereof, applied to us.

I am white and benefit from the conferred power of that fact. Same goes for my cisgendered maleness, my heterosexuality, my native fluency in English, my American citizenship. And my economic status. Most people in the US think they're middle class and I was no different, but looking back I think we were in the top income quintile, at least when I graduated from high school. In any case, my income now places me in the upper quintile of salary earners in the US. My net worth is a little behind that, but relative to other people under 35 I'm way out in front. My income and wealth status are amplified in Pakistan by an order of magnitude or more: in the news recently has been the fact that less than one percent of Pakistanis earn a formal salary to pay taxes on.

Whatever hard work I've put in, whatever good planning I've done, is built on a foundation of unearned economic advantage. Systems of power and oppression are inextricably intertwined: In the City at Peace version of unpacking the privilege backpack, I ended up standing way out in front of most of my peers.

McIntosh concludes the essay about the privilege backpack this way: "Though systematic change takes many decades, there are pressing questions for me and I imagine for some others like me if we raise our daily consciousness on the perquisites of being light-skinned. What will we do with such knowledge? As we know from watching me, it is an open question whether we will choose to use unearned advantage to weaken hidden systems of advantage, and whether we will use any of our arbitrarily-awarded power to try to reconstruct power systems on a broader base."

In one way today is a happy day: there are systems of unaccountable financial power and oppression far greater than me or any individual person, and I am free from being beholden to them. That is something to celebrate and be grateful for. But it's also a day for reflecting on McIntosh's challenge. What am I doing with my consciousness of my own power to erode the foundations on which it's built? What am I doing with my arbitrarily-awarded power to try to reconstruct power systems on a broader base? Not nothing, but not enough. Must to do more, and more consistently.