We went to dinner with some friends, here in Kansas City, then went to a rooftop bar where almost everyone was young. I say “almost everyone” because we were not young. We were twice as old as most of the other patrons, and there were a lot of them.
There were a lot of women. Some groups of men were knotted here and there, but I’d say guys were outnumbered five to one. Everywhere I looked I saw women holding drinks, women waiting in line for drinks, and women standing with drinks and talking, mostly to other women.
Where were all the men? I wondered aloud.
They were in their basements, plotting.
I had forgotten: American men have, on the whole, taken themselves in an unfortunate direction. They don’t go to where the women are anymore. They don’t want to talk to them, and see where talk leads them in a mutually agreed-upon pairing that could last a night or a lifetime. They want to pioneer new ways to make themselves look like action figures. They want unquestioned dominance.
If all the young girls were hares on the mountain, how many young men would take guns and remove them from public life, forcing them into abject subservience?
I have published a short story, in the online magazine State of Matter. The story is told from the perspective of a restaurateur in the semi-distant future, a time when space exploration has become mundane. A planet has been discovered that yields new foodstuffs, ingredients that can be introduced to human cuisine. The protagonist, a kind of Anthony Bourdain of the semi-distant future, arranges to be the first to use any of those ingredients, and from there things go horribly wrong.
The story was inspired by something Richard Thompson said at one of his shows, about how boring Italian cuisine must have been before pasta was imported from China and the first tomatoes arrived from the Americas.
I wrote the story some years ago, when I was trying my hand at writing science fiction, and realizing that when I try to do that it doesn’t turn out looking like science fiction. Not really. It just looks like I wrote it.
Check out this giant skeleton that’s in my neighborhood.
Why is it so sassy?
We went to Ireland. We didn’t take the young hotties from the club with us; we hadn’t gone to their bar yet and didn’t know where to find them. We traveled to the Cliffs of Moher, where it was so foggy there was nothing to see, until out of nowhere the wind blew the fog up the cliff faces, and there they were in all their majesty. We went to Dingle and tried to ride ebikes ‘round the peninsula, but the traffic was too dense for us. Trucks and farm equipment were brushing past our daughters at high speeds, missing them and us by inches. There was no bike lane, so we returned the rented bikes and ate Dingle-made ice cream, served to us by a young woman whose brother lives in St. Louis.
We spent a couple of days in Galway, where I spent the better part of a summer twenty-four years ago. It was strange to return to that place, and the strangest thing might be the least strange thing, if you follow me. If you don’t, that’s okay: returning there after so long made me realize I could have gone there at any time. The streets of Galway have long been warped out of shape by my fickle memory. Soon after I left it, the little city became a dreamish place reshaped by time and distance into something almost nothing like what it truly is. And there’s something to be said for places being warped in our memories by time and by regret and a feeling of having lost something when nothing has been lost. But it also didn’t have to be the way it was. I could have boarded a plane and been in Galway half a day later at any time in the last two and a half decades, more or less. I could have walked by the river again, and seen the Spanish Arch again. I could have done it in March of 2013. I could have gone back in June of 2018, or last February. Galway has always been right there. If I’d wanted to see it again all I had to do was go.
I published a work of flash fiction, in the online magazine Flash Frog. It’s about the word “love” and how its meaning changes when applied to different people in the course of one’s life. Like, when you said it to someone you’d been with for six months in your twenties, and you say it to someone you’ve spent almost two decades with in your forties, you’re using the same word, but it’s not the same word.
Or is it? I don’t know.
Also, with the story, I did something I like to do, which is to take a completely ridiculous premise, like, the stupidest thing I can think to write down, and see what happens if I take it seriously. I know how to have a very good time.
On the way back from the Cliffs of Moher, the charter bus we were riding on broke down. It stalled on a remote country road and we had to wait more than an hour for the driver to get in an Uber, go and get another bus, then return to transfer his passengers to that second bus.
We stood outside in the unbelievably pleasant cool air that Ireland is blessed with, and which makes me want to live there. One of my daughters discovered blackberries growing nearby. We ate some of those. We talked for a little while to a woman who had traveled to Ireland from New York City.
When she asked where in the USA we lived, and one of us said Kansas City, she tensed up.
I knew what she was thinking: she might be in the presence of people who voted for Donald Trump.
Sure enough, as we talked she steered the conversation toward politics, and I agreed with her that it would be great if we could have a pro-woman president, rather than the kind we’ve got now, maybe even a pro-woman president who is herself a woman. I meant what I said, but I’m sure it didn’t matter.
I get it. Missouri is a red state. It and other red places are the reason Donald Trump is president.
But New York City is the reason Donald Trump exists in the first place. He was born there. He grew up there. He still owns property there.
People from Kansas City include Janelle Monae and Charlie Parker.
Something I could not help noticing, in Ireland, was that when the train from Dublin to Tralee, or wherever else, leaves the station, not even a full minute after the journey begins all you can see out the window are fields, trees, and farmhouses.
There is a line, apparently, between the city and everything else. The city does not cross that line.
It’s not like in the United States, where cities extend in every possible direction for between twenty and fifty miles, with suburbs devouring the landscape. No way: in Ireland, the city stops, and across a definite boundary there is no more city.
I know stuff is complicated, and I’m probably being reductive, but I took it to be one more stark indication of the extent to which racism has shaped the United States. Why did they build all these American suburbs? So that people could live near cities, and partake of what they wanted from the cities, without having to be neighbors with the kind of people you find in cities. Homeowners wanted racial homogeneity, and so they built communities where they could impose and maintain it as long as they could.
It’s the kind of thing one takes for granted until one is faced with its absence. Ireland has had its problems—I mean, my gosh—and racism is one of them. But it’s not like it is here. I couldn’t see it in the geography quite as plainly.
Do I know enough about this stuff to keep going on about it? No.
I’m not here to write a thesis on racism and the suburbs, I’m here to write “Don’t Balm Me: Nightclub Erudition.”
My collection of short stories has now been a contest finalist five times.
Will it be published? I don’t know.
Does anyone other than me want it to be published? Not really. No.
Will that stop me from continuing to submit it for publication at various places? Maybe. Not yet, though.
Lastly, the website I’m using for this newsletter, Beehiiv, is terrible. I don’t know why I thought it wouldn’t be. I quit using Substack because over there they promote literal Nazis, and I don’t want to be associated with that. I’m not going back.
But it’s unfortunate how much easier to use Substack is than the thing I’m using now. I remember what it was like to log in easily, click one thing, then get to the page where I would write my newsletter. It was simple.
Every time I log into Beehiiv, I have to await a confirmation code, and enter it into a thing. They make it as hard as possible just to log in. Then I have to work to figure out how to open a new post. It’s not obvious, and every time I do it Beehiiv tries to get me to use a template for my newsletter.
I don’t even know what a template is in this context. I really don’t like it at all.