Who's Knocking on the Wall?

Hello there from Poland.

I’m a couple of weeks ahead in putting these newsletters together, so I can only hope that things haven’t spiraled completely out of control by the time this one reaches you. I mean, it’s hard to predict what’s going to happen in the next 48 hours, let alone the next couple of weeks.

I have this fear of automatically sending out an email about the books I’ve read the day after, oh, I don’t know, Canada was invaded, and then I get a dozen emails about how out of touch I am.

“Who cares about your obsession with Banana Yoshimoto?” you’d write. “Oh, great, another random story from the 90s while I’m all out of maple syrup!” you’d write.

Anyway, here’s hoping things are hunky-dory because today I have another story from the 90s and…uh, a bit more about Banana Yoshimoto.

The Viking Funeral

Howard the turtle was no bigger than a quarter when I bought him. I held him in my hands like one would a gumdrop. His sleepy eyes looked up at me. I rubbed his smooth shell and he never flinched. He only watched me with what I believed to be mild curiosity. As someone brought up to love carefully, it never occurred to me that I could love something so small.

He swam in a big tank of water that must’ve felt like the Pacific Ocean. He had a brother, Hunter, who spent most of his time in the tank looking for a way out. Howard, on the other hand, just swam and swam, exploring the mirrored corners and searching for treasure under the blue rocks. While you don’t get the warmth of a cat or the neediness of a dog from a turtle, I did feel a quiet connection to Howard; which is why it nearly killed me when one of my friends took him out of the tank one evening and accidentally dropped him on the hard kitchen floor.

Howard died quietly four days later. If Hunter ever expressed remorse for his brother’s loss, it must’ve been in the way he escaped from the tank the following day, crawled slowly across the kitchen counter, took a few bites from a newspaper, moved a glass a few inches — the noise which gave him away – and looked down at the precipice of drawers, contemplating his next daring move.

This is a testament to how my life was in America - either too self-absorbed, too reckless, or too stupid — I couldn’t find the time to give Howard the Viking funeral he so richly deserved. I didn’t have the heart to simply flush him down the toilet or throw him away. I wanted to make him a small boat, lay his body down next to a pile of his favorite pellets, and set it all on fire. I wanted to watch the boat drift out to the center of a nearby lake until the fire was extinguished and enough of the smoke carried his soul off to Valhalla.

Instead, I put his little body into a coffin made from an audiocassette case, using a napkin for a makeshift bed, and then I placed the crude sarcophagus in the freezer behind a bag of broccoli and a box of Popsicles. I kept meaning to perform the ceremony, you know, next weekend, but naturally, life kept getting in the way.

Howard’s icy presence in the freezer became an alcohol-induced legend among my friends, telling stories about the future when Howard’s cure would be discovered and he could be revived to live out the remainder of his much-deserved life. He was my frozen reptilian Captain America, and though it was easy to laugh at the whole situation, it just broke my heart every time I thought of him sitting there in the freezer and how I let the little guy down.

I have dreams sometimes when I’m back in that little apartment in Tampa. As you get older, your dreams aren’t about specific moments as they are about revisiting dusty movie sets of the places that once mattered. I open the white refrigerator in the kitchen. I remove the makeshift coffin. It is cold and heavy in my hand.

That’s the thing about regrets — they’re always so small and seemingly insignificant in the moment. It’s not until years later that you realize you’ve been looking at the memory through the wrong end of the telescope.

In these dreams, I can see the outline of Howard through the iced plastic — a frosty green amulet waiting for a burial or resurrection that will never come. It’s easy to say he was just a turtle, but I loved him and I failed him, and that means something to me.

I like to consider a different kind of Viking funeral these days. Imagine a boat where you could put all of your mistakes, regrets, doubts, and all the things that create soft spots in the foundation that supports the architecture of your life, and you can set them all on fire. And there you stand on the shore at midnight, watching the inferno drifting away and feasting on all that negativity until it’s eventually consumed by a cold yet forgiving ocean.

You remain at the shore, your bare feet absorbing the rhythm of the water’s ebb and flow. You are free of all the negative feedback loops in your brain.

You are thawed.

You are resurrected.

You are majestic.

Lizard

You might remember how I covered two of Banana Yoshimoto’s books a few weeks back. As I read the books, I couldn’t shake the fact that something was missing — like I remembered parts that weren’t in either of the books. It was bothering me like a chipped tooth, and after going through my library, I discovered I had a third Yoshimoto book. YES!

⁣Lizard is Yoshimoto’s collection of short stories. It has six stories in total and was first published in English in 1995. Of note, it was dedicated to the late Kurt Cobain, which weirdly encapsulates the space the writer is swimming in with these stories.

One of the things I noticed with N.P. and Kitchen, and really picked up on with Lizard is Yoshimoto’s very specific brand of loneliness and isolation. It’s so specific, in fact, that it feels at home with where we are today. Which is odd because Yoshimoto’s stories — at least in these three books — have little to no technology. The detachment the characters experience is a product of cities, modernity, and circumstance. However, the loneliness she depicts feels a lot like the lethargy that comes with social media.

Or maybe Yoshimoto’s clarity at expressing loneliness is just universal — something that’s plagued us from the beginning.

Lizard is a nice sampler of what Yoshimoto’s work is all about if you don’t want to invest in her longer stories. But honestly, her writing is so direct and clear that reading her work is a breeze.

I like when her work gravitates toward darkness, even when it’s in the peripheral, as with N.P. and her short stories like “Lizard” and "A Strange Tale from Down by the River." I like the way she circles tragedy and violence to show how they’ve impacted the characters but reminds us that these acts don’t define them.

This distance works like an escape hatch for the characters. It offers hope to the characters. And, by default, to us.

“Another masterpiece”

When I interned at the Weekly Planet in Tampa back in 1997-98, the majority of my work was sorting the mail, filing paperwork, and collecting the correct movie times from the local cinemas for the next issue (which was mostly screenings of Titanic).

I loved the office and the whole energy of the place, but all I wanted to do was write. One of the editors, Roxanne, said that if I ever had any ideas for a story, she'd be happy to read them.

And I did, over and over again.

Even though she provided me with a lot of brutal and soul-crushingly honest criticism, she always asked for the next piece.

Pictured below is the story that opened the door to writing some columns for the Planet.

Her feedback and belief in my work were the greatest gifts I could've gotten at the time.

I hope everyone — writer or not — has a Roxanne in their life.

Small Victories

I know it’s hard to stay motivated these days, but you owe yourself a small victory every day. If that means just getting out of bed, then take that victory. But we both know you’re capable of more than that. Do something creative. Read a book. Listen to an album you’ve never heard before. Cook something new. Take a walk. Call an old friend.

What is today’s small victory going to be?