For over a month I have been writing everything that appears below, in the rest of this newsletter.
It was to be my first newsletter in I don’t know how many weeks. A certain number of weeks.
It took me a long time to write it all, not because it’s good, or so very thoughtful, but because it’s been hard for me to write lately. I started a full-time job when the year started, and that’s not a bad thing, but I don’t know. I can’t explain why I feel paralyzed.
Except, I guess, there’s not much to explain. I haven’t had much extra time on my hands. I have lost my appetite for nearly everything. I look upon my works, like the material I wrote for this newsletter, and I don’t despair, but I know it won’t be enough. Nothing will ever be enough.
I decided, late last week, that I wouldn’t send this newsletter out. I would cut my losses and move on. Maybe I’d never send another newsletter for my whole life, and maybe everyone would be better off.
But then, on Saturday, I stopped in at Meshuggah Bagels in Liberty, Missouri.
I have been to this place before. They make good bagels.
When we got there, me and my daughter and wife, there were two older women in line ahead of us. They were in the midst of ordering. Only they weren’t yet ordering anything, they were asking questions of the young woman behind the counter.
They had apparently not eaten a bagel before. Or, if they had, they had not been to a Meshuggah Bagels.
These two women were more confused and lost than I have ever been in my life. And that is saying something.
They seemed to be dealing with some kind of problem, and as I stood behind them and observed I gathered they were having trouble understanding how bagels worked. One of them said, “So, now, if I order an everything bagel, does the plain dip come with that?” The other one was like, “Can you tell me about the different flavors of dip again?”
They kept calling them “dips,” the different schmears they have at Meshuggah Bagels. “Which of the dips do you recommend?” “But if I order a bagel, I have to get the two-ounce tub of dip separately?”
Why were the women calling it that? Why were they so reluctant to say “schmear” that they resorted to calling it “dip?” Where did they get the idea that you “dip” a bagel into the schmear, when the only person who would eat one like that would have to be completely out of their mind?
It made me so upset, to witness this scene, I knew I would have to tell as many people about it as I could.
Something I have trouble admitting, because it’s embarrassing, is that certain words make me want to throw up when I hear them. One of the words that does that to me is “dip.” Call something that and I will not want to eat it, because the word makes me feel sick.
“Dip” sounds like something you drool out of your mouth when you’ve collapsed on the floor and may never get back up again. Put an E on the end, change the D to a B, and the P to an L, and you get “bile.”
I still don’t know how I feel about the rest of this newsletter. I know I don’t feel great about it.
But I had to tell everyone about the women whose lives were flipped upside down when they were faced with the difficulty of figuring out how cream cheese works. And I couldn’t make this newsletter about that that thing only. There has to be more to this email than that.
So here is the rest of what I wrote, before. More and more, I wish I had never written anything in my whole life. I am embarrassed that I ever tried. I should have spent that precious time forming a cocoon.
I have been following the Jeffrey Epstein email saga—sort of.
I can’t pay too much attention to that stuff. If I spent more than a little of my time with such a gargantuan nightmare, my brain would probably melt, and my eyes would also melt, as might my heart and entire face.
Wealthy men have been getting away with murder, for a long time, figuratively for sure, and maybe literally as well. And not only are they moving about in the world every day and night as if they have done nothing wrong. They are teaching at the finest schools, and taking private jets to pristine beaches and picturesque knolls and valleys.
The things they are doing at those knolls, valleys, and beaches are far from pristine and picturesque.
And yeah, I know, of course that’s how it is, because that’s how it has always been. The richest guys of all do the worst things of all, and no one can ever seem to stop them. Forget it, Rob, it’s Chinatown. It used to be barons and dukes who got away with it, and it probably still is, but now it’s those sorts plus a bunch more fellas who got rich, one way or another.
One of those fellas is named Bill. He is good with computers. He built a whole, giant company on how good he is with computers.
Jeffrey Epstein had way too many guys he was emailing and doing far worse things with than emailing. I was thinking: you know, I’ve been alive for forty-four years. Almost forty-five. My life is almost a third of the way over. And in all of those years, I have mostly kept my head down, and I’m shy, but I meet people, and I bet I have met someone who is in those Epstein emails and Epstein files. I bet I just have.
Then I remembered, last week, when I was bedridden with Influenza B—which has ruined 2026 for me completely, by the way—that I came face to face with Steven Pinker, once, when I was in grad school.
It was 2003 or 2004. I had read some chapters of one of his books for a linguistics class in college. He was coming to campus, to give a talk and sell his new book, The Blank Slate—I think that’s what it was called. I bought a copy that I never read.
At the time, I thought the reason I didn’t read it was that I was lazy. Now I know it was because I recognized instinctually that it was a book I had to let go unread for my mind’s safety.
I went to his talk and heard him talk. I bought a copy of his book, and went over and had him sign it.
There he was, sitting. Steven Pinker, who taught and still teaches at Harvard, and who spent time with Jeffrey Epstein. They were friends, but there was more to it than that. They didn’t just love one another the way friends love each other. They enjoyed a deep and mutual respect. They honored one another’s minds. Talking for them could be like a warm embrace—but it could also be a kind of fencing match, as they challenged each other and were challenged in return. Also, one of them was constantly violating minors, on and off of his private special island.
I handed Professor Steven Pinker my book. He signed his name inside the book.
He handed it back, and looked into my eyes.
Was he friends with Jeffrey Epstein yet, when he looked in my eyes? I don’t know.
He had so much hair. It did curl and billow so.
I have short stories and essays coming out, soon, in several magazines: South Carolina Review, Cimarron Review, Gulf Coast, Sprung Formal, TRNSFR. That last one was supposed to come out like two or three years ago, but it got delayed. Now I have it at my house:
I am mentioning them now because unless one of them is posted online I shan’t send a newsletter about them.
I have a full-time job, now, and I don’t have much time for writing newsletters, or else I would send a new message every time one of those stories came out.
Everyone would be so glad to get those messages about my short stories.
People have been talking about Heavens to Betsy. That’s the chapbook I published late last year, in 2025, when I hadn’t yet caught the flu. Good things were still possible.
2026 seemed to hold such promise. That promise was lost. It is not coming back.
One of the people who has talked about my chapbook is Karen Carlson. She didn’t actually talk about it, though. She wrote about it. It was really good of her to do it, as my book needs all the help it can get. So do I.
Oh no. Oh god.
I just googled myself, for the first time in a long, long time, and learned that I currently make an appearance in the Grokipedia. I didn’t even know that was a real website. I think I heard about it, before, but I never went to it until now, when I found out there’s an entry for me.
It’s like finding out your name appears in Satan’s ledger. And it has been underlined.
Wait. Actually, my entry is pretty great, because most of it is about my storied career as a rugby player in New Zealand. I’m not kidding. I will not link to it, because it’s best not to tempt the forces of darkness to encroach further into my life than they have already. I mean, I once made eye contact with Steven Pinker.
Anyway, the other brave warrior who has discussed Heavens to Betsy is Nico Rodriguez, who is one half of the podcast The Culture We Deserve. The other half is Jessa Crispin. Nico had some really nice things to say about the book, toward the end of the episode I link to there. It means a lot to me that he said what he said, especially since I heard what he had to say when I was inside the car with my wife. I am constantly trying to impress my wife.
If you want to be impressed with some of Nico’s writing, he published an essay on TCWD about civil war, and the possibility that the United States is heading for another one. That’s partly what it’s about, at least, and it’s good.
Thanks to my new job, I now have to go to a building. And because I work at a building I think, every day, of the Herman Melville short story “Bartleby, the Scrivener.” If you don’t know, it’s about an office worker who, when asked by his boss to do some everyday office thing that is not in his job description, refuses to do it. He says, “I would prefer not to.” The boss is baffled and furious.
Soon everyone in the office starts using the word “prefer” a lot, and Bartleby becomes more frustrating, until the boss fires him. But then Bartleby continues showing up to work, even though when he’s there he no longer does any work. He persists in being there.
At a loss for what to do, since Bartleby refuses to leave the premises, the boss relocates his office. Bartleby continues showing up to the place where the office was. Things only get worse from there.
It’s a weird story. To say it’s about any one specific thing is misleading, because it’s about a lot of things. It’s also not really about anything. It’s a story. Its job is to tell a story, not be about anything necessarily.
But I have been thinking about Bartleby, and of how the story is at least to some extent about what happens when you agree to do a job. You do the job; you carry out the tasks that are in your job description. But you are also expected to do other things that aren’t in the job description—corollary things that may have nothing to do with the job as it was described to you. They’re not part of the official transaction you have made, with your employer, but still if you don’t do them there will be consequences.
Take my job. I am an editor of documents, and I spend much of my time editing documents.
But that’s not all I do. I am also a liaison for a task force. I attend meetings with the task force.
I do things that involve Microsoft PowerPoint.
When I’m at my job, I make conversation with my coworkers. It’s not one of my official duties, but I do it.
When I enter the office, and when I leave it, I switch the light at my desk on and off. When I’m the last one out of the building, I set the alarm for the night.
I get emails all day long. When they come in, I read them. I delete them, or I put them in one of the email folders I have made, to keep my inbox organized.
There are no separate men’s and women’s restrooms, and in the one I use most often someone is always leaving the toilet seat up. I make a point of restoring it to the down position whenever I’m in there. It is yet another thing that I do that isn’t an official part of the job.
On day one at the new job, I was given a small plant, to go with my desk—which was very nice of the person who gave it to me. I am genuinely thankful, but because it’s there, it is up to me to water it when it starts to droop.
I am not complaining about doing those things. Getting emails is a part of every job. I like my coworkers, and I like talking to them. It would be strange of me to not participate in our conversations. Also, plants are cool.
I don’t even have to do some of the things that come with the job. I could leave the toilet seat as it is. I could let the plant die. It wouldn’t really matter.
Crispin Glover as Bartleby, and David Paymer as his boss. Yes, they made a movie out of it.
But “Bartleby, the Scrivener” makes me aware, in a way that I wouldn’t be, if I hadn’t read that story, of the significance of all of those tasks that come with my job but aren’t necessarily part of my job. They are the things I am not being paid to do, but which I am expected to do all the same.
Sometimes I think the story is about someone who tries to stop himself from becoming his work—who tries, by refusing to do small things that aren’t his job, to keep it from overtaking him, from consuming too much of him, or bleeding into more of his life than he would prefer to let it into. But he fails at that, and ultimately suffers a kind of ego death.
I don’t know. I don’t still have the flu, but I may still be in the midst of post-flu exhaustion.
Why don’t I want to drink coffee anymore? It doesn’t taste right. If I stop drinking it, I’ll get a headache, and it will last a long time, but I don’t want it anymore.
It’s the weirdest thing in the world, to get sick. It’s also a weird thing in the world to start a new job. I spend a lot of my time, now, in a building I didn’t realize was there two months ago. I have gotten to know a whole bunch of people that last year I didn’t know at all.