Hi, everyone. This is not an essay about swimming. And I no longer live in Alabama. I don’t know what that means for this newsletter. Or for me. But here’s something I wrote which is kinda sorta about all that. I hope you’ll read it.
You may find yourself attending your own funeral.
No, that’s not quite right. You may find yourself watching your own funeral, rather.
Well, that’s not it either. Not exactly.
Let’s back up. Try again: For the past few years and for reasons that are still something of a mystery to you, you have been teaching screenwriting classes at [big southern university]. One day after class last spring, three students approached wearing sheepish grins.
Just FYI, one of them said. You’re in a film we’re making.
Oh, really?
Well, sorta. We took a screenshot of the picture on your LinkedIn profile. We’re gonna use it in a scene. A, uh, funeral scene. You’re the dead guy!
That’s funny. Would it be helpful to have, like, a higher resolution version of the picture?
Oh. Sure.
Expressions suggesting that this was not how they expected this conversation to go.
Will you send me the film when it’s finished?
Of course.
***
The film concerns a funeral crasher and a bereaved man obsessed with exposing the con. Your picture, mounted next to the refreshments at the funeral, plays the deceased. You deadpan in the background of the opening scene.
When the film wrapped the students all signed the back of the 24” x 36” frame and brought it to your office hours to give to you as a gift.
A nice thought, but, well, it was a 24” x 36” framed picture of yourself. A life-sized black and white head. Your head. In a box. It made you a little uneasy, looking at it, having it next to you while you toiled. But what were you going to do, throw it out? So you kept it above your desk and tried to turn it into a joke with your officemates — this guy’s doing office hours today — but you were never quite sure what the joke was, exactly, and at whose expense.
At the end of the semester you were asked (told) to vacate your office. Space issues. You understand. Not the first time this has happened. You can do your office hours on Zoom next semester, can’t you? A head in a box, at your service.
And so you lugged your books and your electric kettle and yes, your 24” x 36” picture home.
Again unsure about what to do with it but still unable to let it go, you tucked it in a corner, hoping no one would notice.
You know you aren’t supposed to talk about this stuff — the indignities and disappointments of a struggling writer. You’re supposed to be the person in the picture, after all. But here you are.
Anyway. Your wife found the framed picture. And found the backstory endearing. So she put it for display up at your birthday party.
You grimaced. Who even was that?
It’ll be funny, your wife assured. It’s just a joke.
***
You may ask yourself, what have I done?
That summer, between projects and needing to make money for rent, you took a consulting gig with [venture-backed technology company]. The work consisted mainly of conducting oral histories to feed a large language model, which would convert that raw material into AI-memoirs. Ghostwriting of a sort. Or digging your own grave.
You spent six hours interviewing someone who had just turned 100. They’d lived a quintessential twentieth century life — born into the Dust Bowl and Depression in West Texas. Present at the Manhattan Project tests in Los Alamos. Helped to plan and zone the post-war subdivisions in that same desert. They’d spent much of the 21st century retired to Florida for John Wayne movie marathons, watching the Duke traipse across sets made to look like a desert where they once lived, had seen annihilated, and built up again.
Later you learned that this person died shortly after the interviews. A eulogy was written by the large language model. It drew on the transcripts of your conversations and was read at the funeral. Afterward, a relative reached out to thank you for helping to preserve their family’s memories. They sent you the message on LinkedIn.
***
You may find yourself behind the wheel of a large automobile. A 26’ moving truck to be exact. Your whole life, boxed up in a box on wheels.
Over the course of the fall, your life in [big southern university town] had fallen apart. You’ll leave it at that. It was time to go.
You left in March. You’d been packing for weeks, living amongst your boxes. Dizzying, but at least it made the impending move more visible to your daughter. Made it easier to talk about, boxed up like that. Strong feeling wants a container, wrote Robert Creeley. But your daughter took the whole thing in stride, seemed like. Even insisted on helping to load the truck.
And there beside the trunks and the bubble wrap and the dusty furniture stood the picture. Maybe you’d leave it on the curb with the ratty old chair and the toaster and the rest of the household items that weren’t making the move. You know…as a joke.
But then your daughter found it, said, hey daddy, it’s you. Then picked it up and put it on the truck, where it made the thousand mile journey.
***
You know, of course, that anytime you write the word “I,” you don a mask. You are choosing to portray yourself to the reader in a certain way, a certain light. A picture you’re presenting. The artifice of art. You know this.
But what then if that picture starts to follow you around?
The joke is on you.
But this felt more like a haunting. You’re the dead guy! Partly because you no longer recognized the person in the picture. The hair, for one thing. But also the ambition. The confidence. To say nothing of the fact that the circumstances which brought about the making of that picture were meant to change, or at least stabilize your life. And didn’t.
You remember yourself perched on a stool looking into the camera, its circular lens that renders in rectangles. It was a rehearsal for a life you did not end up living. No wonder you don’t recognize him. Or maybe it’s he who doesn’t recognize you.
And so you may find yourself writing in the second person.
***
You may find yourself in another part of the world. You’d just begun to unload the truck when the tornado sirens sound. You dashed inside to shelter in the hallway, the empty box that leads to the rest of the house’s empty boxes.
It was the last item on the truck and thus the first to be unloaded: Your picture one of the only things to make it into the house before the tornado came. He smiled upon you from the mantel, as if he was in on the joke.
The weather report put you inside the polygon. The sirens whirred.
Maybe you’ll wind up in Oz yet. And you, and you, and you, and you were there.
But after twenty minutes the sirens ceased. Your wife and your daughter arrived soon after. You unloaded the truck of boxes, filling the boxes inside.
You may find yourself in a beautiful house. With a beautiful wife.
You may find yourself
You may find yourself
You may find yourself
Tis little I could care for pearls who own the ample sea
Love this!