The Real Me.

 

For a long time, I haven't wanted to think too deeply about the part my childhood played in my development. Nothing overtly horrible happened then, mind you. It's just the way those experiences shaped future consciousness. We always had enough of everything in terms of material things. But what was my brain being fed?    

I've remarked often on the pandemic's uncanny way of exposing our inner selves and amplifying what already was there. Personally, it reminds me of the places suffering from drought, where the reservoir levels drop and expose what was flooded so long ago. 

This all started when I set down to think for the first time what it meant that my father was a fervent supporter of George Wallace. Subsequently, as much as I'd love to put all this back into the box and padlock the lid, various occurrences keep triggering memories of my earlier years. Last week a very big example of this occurred when one of my closest friends in high school died. 

I'm still not able to comment intelligently about his passing, apart from acknowledging considerable grief and anguish. This reaction may make more sense if you know that we didn't have a conversation in the 40 years since; it was an estrangement at his behest, and I've no better idea today as to why it happened than I did at the time. Of all the male friends I've ever had, Mike quite might well be the only one I flat idolized. He was my hero, and he could do no wrong in high school. Now, even at the age of 60, I feel the same way in spite of it all that came between us -- whatever it was.  

I'll never know what happened, and it's a tad overwhelming, as well as a miasma compounded on a daily basis by all the rest of the bat-shit-craziness gripping the rest of you populating this failed nation.   

Clearly it's time to dispense with the narrative, 1960-1978. Perhaps I'm missing something important by closing the account, but at the same time there's enough chaos to manage without those ghosts tormenting me. 

ON THE AVENUES: When love and hate collide – or, my father and the governor.

"A man will talk about how he'd like to escape from living folks. But it's the dead folks that do him the damage. It's the dead ones that lay quiet in one place and don’t try to hold him, that he can’t escape from."
-- William Faulkner, from Light in August

1.

This is a story about dead folks, or more accurately a dead era, although it might be said that anything this dead has no damn business being so very much alive, right now, in the year 2020. The retelling itself has proven difficult, and a definitive rendering eludes me.

I’ve read all about humankind’s past pandemics and those famous plagues of old, and assumed these lessons were clear to me, but the part they don’t teach you is the way seismic public health crises peel back the layers of your soul – or, in my case, what passes for one. Atheist with souls? Nah, surely not.

To begin this beguine, let’s go back to the beginning.

2.

These many years later, the way I remember it is that much of my father’s self-worth revolved around good, old-fashioned hard work.

In another place at another time, he might have been an enthusiastic Stakhanovite, a term originating in the Soviet Union to describe “workers who modeled themselves after (epic farm-near-me/">mining hero) Alexey Stakhanov. These workers took pride in their ability to produce more than was required, by working harder and more efficiently, thus strengthening the Communist state.”

We’re Americans, of course, or so we are told by the looters, and it’s all bound up into a different set of precepts. Unraveling these many motivations decades after the fact wouldn’t be easy in the best of times – and as you may have noticed, these aren’t.

It remains that my father was ideally suited to socialism. He just never realized it. A military veteran, working man, salt of the earth, the common folk, Joe Six Pack; my father was eternally suspicious of concentrated wealth and hoity-toity, over-educated elites.

By his own admission drawn to the underdog, he did not cheer for the New York Yankees or US Steel. My father died in 2001, and yet I can imagine him turning the air blue upon learning that Greg Fischer proposed to award Amazon half the city of Louisville (and a state park to boot) in order to lure the company’s headquarters to Louisville.

Conversely, and the hard part for me to accept, is that my father quite likely would have been enamored of Donald Trump’s bait ‘n’ switch brand of cynical populism. That’s because he always was drawn to charlatans, like a moth to the light fixture.

Ross Perot was great, at least until he proved to be an utter flake. Ronald Reagan? A godlike figure, except when those two presidential terms concluded, my father was disillusioned when he realized the rich had gotten far richer; trickle down, but treasure up.

Before them, there was another recipient of my father’s political affections, a passionate straight talker who spoke to the people, not the snobs, and understood what needed to be done to make the nation great again.

He was George Corley Wallace (1919-1998), seeker of the presidency from 1964 through 1976, although most convincingly in 1968 and 1972.

3.

My unanticipated journey through childhood days began innocently enough with a book, the title of which aptly conveys the essence of its content: Shakespeare in a Divided America: What His Plays Tell Us About Our Past and Future (James Shapiro; 2020).

The second prompting came during a chat with a friend, who mentioned a 1968 television appearance by Wallace, soon to become a presidential candidate as an independent: "Firing Line with William F. Buckley Jr.: The Wallace Crusade" (1968).

I watched the episode, and was strangely disquieted. Something began to stir. Concurrently, I started reading another book called Backlash: What Happens When We Talk Honestly about Racism in America (George Yancy; 2018).

At this point, little things began nagging at me. Something was troubling, but I couldn’t put my finger on it. Perhaps it was the culmination of six months spent largely at home, contemplating humanity, pandemics, racism and presidential politics – numerous strange disturbances coming together at the crossroads amid tumultuous news cycles.

Soon it became clear that the specific flash point came with the introduction of Wallace into the narrative; moreover, it flared after watching the Alabamian in peak crusading form on "Firing Line." Watching it made me physically uncomfortable, something uncharacteristic for a history buff with a customarily strong stomach.

It became apparent that I needed a more comprehensive refresher course on Wallace and his epoch, which came courtesy of a PBS "American Experience" documentary film titled "George Wallace: Settin' the Woods on Fire" (2000).

It took far longer to absorb than the three-hour running time because at the start, I couldn’t endure more than five minutes at a sitting. I studied the bathroom mirror. Could someone please explain why I was having such a visceral reaction to this?

4.

George C. Wallace was a four-time Alabama governor whose failed presidential candidacies in 1968 and 1972 functioned as grandiose overtures to the ensuing civil rights flip-flop of America’s two main political parties.

Wallace, who began as a New Deal “liberal” in relative terms, became etched in the minds of Americans as a racist bogeyman; his presidential platforms were swallowed whole by Richard Nixon and co-opted into the emerging “Southern strategy.” Black America subsequently deserted the erstwhile Party of Lincoln for the Democrats, now the presumed defenders of social justice, while Republicans scooped up the South’s (shall we say “reactionary”) electoral votes.

The ambitious Wallace’s political career was like an obsessive-compulsive personality disorder. He told his children only two things mattered in life, money and power – and he didn’t care about money; friends remarked that Wallace’s muse was the thrill of the campaign chase, and he became bored quickly when relegated to the day-to-day grind of governance.

And yet in 1958, when Wallace mounted his first Alabama gubernatorial campaign, he did so as a populist champion of all poor and working class residents, black or white, only to be badly beaten in the Democratic primary (the race that mattered; at the time, a Republican was lucky to get 35% of the vote in the fall).

A humiliated Wallace had an epiphany in 1958, and it brings us full circle, back to the opening exchange from the "Firing Line" of 1968.

Buckley … highlighted Wallace’s 1958 gubernatorial campaign against John Patterson, a race which Wallace lost and which led the young politician to claim that he would never again be outmaneuvered on the issue of segregation. Moderator C. Dickerson Williams had his hands full as Wallace attacked numerous peripheral details of Buckley’s comments, such as whether he really uttered terms like “out-segged” or whether he picked his teeth with a dirty toothpick, as the New York Times supposedly claimed.

“Out-segged.”

Hearing these words on a 52-year-old broadcast that I’m sure I didn’t watch as an 8-year old nonetheless struck me like a baseball bat to the cranium. On the face of it, they’re perfectly accurate words in the context of the discussion, but upon hearing them, I immediately guessed that something important was missing.

Wallace denied Buckley's attribution, openly sneering: “There’s no such expression as ‘segged’ in the vocabulary of southerners. I have never heard of the word ‘seg’ or ‘segged.’”

Duh. Of course he hadn’t.

Wallace was telling the whole truth; as you may already have guessed, and as the documentary film corrects the normally accurate Buckley, what the failed candidate actually said was this: “I was out-niggered, and I will never be out-niggered again.”

This may seem like a minor point given the slur. However, Wallace had already mastered the sort of coded language and dog whistles that have remained a valued component of the right wing’s wink-wink, nudge-nudge vocabulary to the present day. Buckley afforded Wallace a euphemism, but should he have done so?

Consequently, this had the effect of reminding me that the “N” word was explicitly forbidden in our household during the days of my habitation there.

As an ex-Marine, my father was a walking encyclopedia of creative profanity, but he doubled as family censor. THIS obscenity was okay to use in front of your mother, sparingly, but never THAT one. And the “N” word? Not at all; never. Soap, meet mouth.

Have I mentioned that my father was a strident, outspoken, sign-planting supporter of George C. Wallace in 1968 and 1972?

Ding, ding … ding.

Clearly this accounts for the dissonance in my Swiss cheese of a soul. Now, what’s to be done with it?

5.

I was born in a New Albany, Indiana hospital and spent the first 25 years of my life in or near the presumably anodyne settlement of Georgetown, less than ten miles away from the city, situated a few hundred feet above the Ohio River flood plain.

My guess is townies at the time would have denied Georgetown was a “sundown town,” just a law-abiding Mayberry clone utterly devoid of diversity even before white flight suddenly animated dozens of new subdivisions to sprout like noxious weeds, filling the former pastures of farms, all of it exploding into existence in the wake of Louisville’s 1975 desegregation order.

By then Wallace was in a wheelchair, crippled by the assassination attempt, with his national political career over and my father decamped to adoration of Reagan. After all, the GOP had cribbed all the disabled southern governor’s notes.

But this isn’t to say that my father was racist in any overt sense. He preached equality in matters like sports, although conveniently overlooking the realities of life off the basketball court or baseball diamond.

Dig deeper, and naturally it gets more complicated. My father was, in fact, an ordinary white guy in America. He was a muddled mixture of the admirable and indefensible, usually meaning well, sometimes revealing more than he’d intended, as when he would deny opposing biracial marriage – but shouldn’t they be thinking about the indignities those poor children will have to endure?

These indignities arose from my father’s and his coterie’s misplaced insistence that a biracial child was any of their business in the first place, all of which is to say that yes, my father was racist; he had to be a racist because I am, too, and this, to me, is an inescapable fact, part and parcel of hegemonic structural racism in America, hence the necessity of reading Yancy’s book.

"Racism, in short, is a way of being — exhibited by all white people, progressive and otherwise — that grants more freedom and benefits to whites at the expense of blacks and other people of color."

Am I deferring my own responsibility to listen and learn by somehow blaming my father for my upbringing? I don’t think so. I’m just trying to come to grips with it. Racism is society-wide. It’s endemic, shared and historical. On the surface, my father was better than some, and not as good as others. There’s not a lot to SEE here, such is the annoying and regrettable commonness of the topic.

To reiterate, my father doubtless would have explained his attraction to a populist demagogue like Wallace in non-racial language; obviously, they’re dog whistles precisely because they’re suggestive and implied, not overt.

He’d have said Wallace was a truth-teller who’d make American great again (half-century symmetry, anyone?) and would fight for the underdog. But my father and his buddies, well, they weren’t really underdogs, were they?

How could they be, given the eternal certainty, and those coded-language promises, that Blacks always would remain conveniently beneath them? To be blunt, that white Americans would always have a cushion between themselves and rock bottom: Black America, kept right where it belonged.

I’m angry with my father now, all these years later, not because he was a racist; as I’ve noted, it seems entirely reasonable to me that all whites are racist. Rather, it’s the one point of his that I always previously admired, and find now to be lamentably misplaced, this being his perception of the supposed underdog’s struggle.

Wallace wasn’t an underdog. He wasn’t really shielding the common white folks from mistreatment at the claws of evil central government, or the coming decades-long cancerous neoliberal pillage. Rather, Wallace was reassuring them they’d always stay a step ahead of Blacks, and so what if most of society’s wealth still somehow found its way straight to the 1%?

Maybe the poor would hit the lottery, and move up to the shining city on a hill where the accumulators of capital reside. But they wouldn’t move down THERE, below the (wink wink) invisible and therefore fully visible color line.

If the true underdogs are society’s most vulnerable, did the likes of Wallace really care for them at all? And while my father may have cared, he still supported Wallace and accepted the latter’s shell game. How do we explain this contradiction?

Later, when we both were older, I’d suggest to my father that he should take a closer look at the failure of exploitative robber baron capitalism as the root cause of certain of these maladies. Occasionally, it seemed that I was making headway against those headwinds, although in the end, he may have decided it was easier to humor me by listening, then enlisting with the next populist to appear.

6.

I can’t entirely account for the rise of this crushing angst, and it might well be the case that there’s nothing noteworthy about any of it, at least in the sense of these attitudes being common to a generation now passed.

And yet, as I’ve noted, a quick scroll of your social media feed will reveal the passing of the generational cohort, but not the diseased attitudes. They're very much still with us.

In 2016, dozens of commentators mentioned George Wallace’s racist and white nationalist legacies in the context of Donald Trump’s narcissistic theatrics, and as a well-read and informed individual, I shrugged and looked away. Of course, I recall thinking, but doesn’t everyone know it, and aren’t we past THAT?

Actually, no. Approaching the conclusion of Season Four of Aryan Nation: Trump Remixes the Racist Classics, we remain mired in it.

7.

My father's been dead for a while now. Our relationship was extremely complicated. We were very different people in many ways, and all too much alike in others. Most of the time it's nothing to dwell on, and I think we parted in 2001 with considerable mutual respect. We both gave ground. We both came around.

I'd use the word "love" if I could, but it isn't something he'd have said, so the notion seems superfluous. We were far tighter at the end than the beginning, and for this much I'm genuinely grateful.

Perhaps what I have learned the past few days while struggling to finish this demented jigsaw puzzle, all the while wearing a self-imposed blindfold, is that evidently I tried to bury quite a lot about those Wallace years as they pertained to my father – and to me. I buried it as deep as I could for as long as the memories would stay put, safely subterranean.

Maybe my boxing up of these memories and feelings, to be hidden in a dusty corner of the noggin, was a form of self-protection, with George Wallace merely a peripheral indicator. That’s because at the tender age of eight, I was an eager co-conspirator of my father's Wallace fetish, if for no other reason than the hope, so often forlorn, of this enthusiasm somehow making him happy.

My father was capable of a strange, unpredictable bad temper. He kept it inside the house, to our trepidation, and his contemporaries probably wouldn’t have known. When I was a kid, I'd try to figure out what was eating him, and couldn’t, so it became my habit to conclude that it was directed at me. My father erupted, then just as quickly erased the memory of his distemper.

It would seem that I didn’t.

Once enrolled in university, and intent on becoming the sort of intellectual calculated to irritate my father, it finally occurred to me that his anger likely stemmed from undiagnosed PTSD, a by-product of World War II; seeing as three years during your late teens on a leaky boat lobbing shells at people you couldn't see, until they came your way in kamikaze planes, is the sort of trauma calculated to stay with you.

Then, deciding the war was to blame, it compelled me to try to protect my father from his ghosts. It seemed terrible to me that one would go to war at 17, and be afflicted by the experience for decades afterward. Maybe he’d been shaped by these factors to be receptive to Wallace and his ilk.

52 years later, with the idiocy of racism and white privilege flaring all around us amid a deadly pandemic, tanking economy and global climate crisis, there remains sufficient depth of feeling – some level of feeling – about my father that out of nowhere exposed previously suppressed anger about the bill of goods my father peddled with regard to Wallace, as opposed to what Wallace really was about, and whatever part of all this involved me – or didn’t.

What’s the answer? I don’t know.

8.

It is well documented that during Wallace’s twilight years, in a dogged pursuit as vigorous as any of his campaigns for public office, he made an apparently sincere effort to atone for his mistakes. If his purported religious awakening was genuine, then the word “sins” might be more fitting.

According to Wallace’s friends, he finally understood that what he had done in order to possess political power caused great suffering to others, with his own accumulating illnesses and pain abetting this revelation. Wallace asked for forgiveness, and remarkably, Alabama’s Black voters supported his final runs for the governor’s office in the early 1980s.

A Black attorney who had figured in Wallace’s early period as judge during the 1950s responded to these entreaties by saying yes, he could forgive Wallace, but no, he could not FORGET what he'd done.

In another striking convergence, the late John Lewis – beaten by Wallace’s state troopers on Bloody Sunday in Selma at the Edmund Pettus Bridge, named for a 19th-century Confederate general, politician and Klansman – also forgave the governor.

Forgiveness from Wallace’s victims in the play’s final act alone attests to the seemingly distant role of William Shakespeare in all this, although I think the Bard of Avon is twice applicable.

I’m not the first to see familiarly dramatic Shakespearean aspects of tragedy as pertaining to Wallace’s story: a lust for power, deals with the devil, the ironic cruelty of an assassination attempt leaving him crippled and in agony (but not killing him), and of course these later efforts to achieve forgiveness and redemption as intended to snatch his tattered soul back from Satan.

Also, like Oedipus in ancient Greece, Wallace’s ambition and arrogance carried both the seeds of success, and his own destruction.

My personal nod to Shakespeare comes with an early 1970s recollection that somehow has stayed fresh in my memory, perhaps as the perfect summary of how tense the relationship with my father was at the time.

I’d taken to checking out LPs of Shakespearean plays from the library, and trying to follow along, reading them while listening. My father came into my room one day, projected his finest facially contorted dismay, and ordered me to get ready for baseball practice by turning off “that shit.”

It’s very strange what you remember, and what you don’t.

At times, it can be downright debilitating.

The ghosts wobble, but they don’t fall down.

---

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ON THE AVENUES: Guys.

I'm using songs to title my posts. They may or may not bear relevance to the subject matter therein. It amuses me; for how long, I don't know.   

It took only two pandemic-delayed months, and now the Confidentials finally have their bicycles back from the shop.

My battle-hardened Trek model dates to 1999, and Diana’s to 2005. Neither of us has been in the saddle for a long while, and our two-wheeled conveyances frankly have been shamelessly neglected, left to molder in back of the garage since Obama’s first term along with a pile of dry-rotted, heat-warped and mostly useless accessories.

But functionality has returned, and with it quite a few of my ghosts have come back to call. I’ll have more to say about them in a moment.

It has been eight years since I put appreciable mileage on the bicycle, with the final peak in odometer terms coming in 2010, my 50th birthday year, when I recorded approximately 3,650 miles without ever exceeding 30 in a single day.

Not at all coincidentally, 2010 was the year when Bank Street Brewhouse (founded in 2009) devolved into a perpetual stalemate of small business trench warfare. In retrospect, pinned in place of my own lamentable accord at BSB, and realizing that European travel was out of the question, I devoted a portion of most days to riding my bike to forget, in search of stress relief before returning to the intensive care unit called "work."

I was still riding in late November, 2010, trying to reach 6,000 kilometers. One morning late in the month while walking I slipped on some black ice in the parking lot opposite BSB and suffered a big quadriceps tear in my left leg, which was purple for months afterward. 5,875 km would have to do. It took until June of 2011 before I even considered riding again.

By then the biking spark had been greatly extinguished, most likely from sheer burnout after almost 15 years of riding so much, along with the lingering leg injury and never-ending frustrations at BSB. There was a short-lived comeback attempt in 2012, and then I became a walker instead – and this phase lasted eight years.

What’s more, the period of 2010-2012 was when Kevin Richards and I weren’t seeing very much of each other. Kevin, who sadly died of a brain tumor in 2016, was my original bicycling muse. He had personal and professional issues of his own at the time, and I was preoccupied with the tumultuous business expansion -- and my responsibility for it.

For whatever reason, our paths diverged.

Unfortunately I didn’t ever think to consider the impact of Kevin’s temporary absence until later, when it became permanent. In 2011 and 2012, Kevin wasn’t riding his bicycle much, either, but if we had been in closer proximity, we’d have shamed each other into getting out there.

We didn’t go for a ride together for the last six years of his life, closer to seven. I have few regrets, but this is one of them. A very, very big one.

---

It’s a story I’ve told before, but humor me.

I helped get Kevin into better beer. He was instrumental in getting me into the seat of a two-wheeler.

In 1996 it had been twenty years since high school, when my teenage bicycling career came to a close once I had a dependable car to drive. Horrible, exceedingly American, and true.

But in 1996 I bought a cheap bike with big knobby tires and started tooling around New Albany. Gradually a collection of pub-going cyclists found each other, and I upgraded to the current Trek, swapping the mountain bike tires for hybrids because Kevin properly commanded it.

One late summer's day in 1999, Kevin and I rode to the top of the Knobs via Corydon Pike's switchbacks. We stopped for a sag at Polly’s Freeze, the venerable ice cream haven. Light bulbs belatedly became illuminated and an earnest discussion began. Might we dare biking in Europe, where it was standard operating procedure -- and heaven forbid – maybe quaff a few fine ales in the process?

So the planning began. We booked hotels at three beer-oriented urban venues in Belgium, along with rental bikes for day trips radiating from each stop. Faxes (!) and e-mails were sent, and the itinerary came into shape. As the calendar turned to June, 2000, there were five of us ready to make the journey, and it proved to be a classic.

A beercycling group was born, and as many as 15 of us in all took part in a total of seven European trips in nine years, with the last occurring in 2008. Kevin was along for four of the seven, and without his tutoring, I'd have lacked the confidence to "lead" the other ones, although in fact all of these trips were genuine group efforts.

Kevin and I conceived, orchestrated and performed those beercycling trips together, and while the cast revolved, each time out we functioned as a band of brothers (and on a couple of occasions, sisters). I’m not exaggerating when I say that Kevin’s bicycling advocacy changed my life. My European travel instincts were joyfully reborn in 2000.

During previous journeys to the continent, I'd dodged bicyclists while walking between train stations, never stopping to consider how much fun it might be to ride myself -- actually, never stopping to consider that I could do it. Kevin patiently taught me about the art of the possible on two wheels, with or without panniers. It wouldn’t have been possible without him.

By 2003, I was able to take my bike apart, pack it in a hard shell case, reassemble it, ride it all the way from Frankfurt to Vienna (meeting friends along the way), and get bike and me home without incident after almost a month on the road. As a humanities major with almost no technical aptitude, I've never been more proud of myself, and eternally grateful to Kevin for showing me how.

Our partnership was mutually reinforcing. We’d pause by a river, and I’d prattle on about a doomed revolutionary revolt in a neighboring town. Then Kevin would explain the hydraulics of the locks and dam we were observing. I’d score a brewery visit, and he’d calmly repair a spoke. Kevin had his life, and I had mine. Not all our interests intersected. When they did, life was great fun.

---

About those ghosts.

We brought our refurbished bicycles home yesterday, and as I rooted through the dusty gear untouched since before Kevin's death, it quickly became an emotional ordeal just filling the garbage can. His fingerprints are everywhere, stepping out of every shadow.

I’d only recently remarked to a friend that returning to the Public House can sometimes be challenging for me because of the ghosts; she asked if the ghosts haunt me, and I said no, not that. They accompany me. At times their presence is heavy enough to give me pause. It’s not so much individuals as the accumulated weight of the past. Most of the time my ghosts keep a socially respectful distance.

Then there’s yesterday.

Back in late 2015, maybe early 2016, during the period of my business divorce, I’d still be at the pub here and there and see Kevin, always in the usual “gee” spot, and eventually we started chatting about riding again. He’d been doing it. I needed to restart. We’d get the band back together, maybe even do Europe again.

It wasn’t to be, and there'll come a time when I accept it.

At some point after America’s COVID-19 pariah status finally dissipates, we’ll be in Europe somewhere (hopefully Belgium), rent bikes and say goodbye to Kevin again, preferably with a toast of Rochefort 10 Belgian Trappist ale, but I’ll be damned if I try to drink two of them and keep riding, as Kevin would have.

He was just showing off, and I loved him for it.

---

It isn’t the 60th birthday I’d have chosen, but it’s the one I’ll get on Monday, and that’s all right with me.

2020 has been the stuff of proliferating nightmares, and it’s easy to sense the pain, stupidity and avarice of the dipshits multiplying all around us.

D.I. Fred Thursday of British television’s Endeavor has advice, as he explained to D.C. Endeavor Morse early in the show’s run.

Morse: How do you do it? Leave it at the front door?

Thursday: 'Cause I have to. Case like this will tear a heart right out of a man. Find something worth defending.

Morse: I thought I had! Found something.

Thursday: Music? I suppose music is as good as anything. Go home. Put your best record on. Loud as it'll play.

And with every note, you remember: That's something the darkness couldn't take from you.

---

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July 5: ON THE AVENUES took a week off. Here's what I've been writing while on holiday.

BOOKS: Merely using the word "Thanatoid" tells you which novel I'm reading.

Reading may lead to an adjustment in brain chemistry. At least I hope it does. The current selection reposing atop the nightstand is Thomas Pynchon's 1990 novel Vineland, more about which in a moment.

A brief digression: I actually do believe in ghosts, just not the supernatural spirit sort. Rather, I believe in the ghosts inhabiting my own head space. At the present time, while scanning and annotating 30-year-old slides, these ghosts are proliferating. 

Up until the spring of 2017 little of this would have occurred to me. But my mother died in 2017, and during the weeks that followed her passing a book I was struggling mightily to comprehend at the time suddenly began speaking to me: Alan Moore's gargantuan novel Jerusalem.

Each of Jerusalem’s chapters offers a vignette centering on one of the Boroughs’ many diverse inhabitants, including humans, angels, demons, and time-traveling ghosts; the characters’ lives intersect in space and time (and other higher dimensions), forming an intricate web of narrative interconnections.

Later that summer, fulfilling a promise I'd made to a friend, I somewhat unwillingly undertook to read Lincoln in the Bardo, a novel by George Saunders. I found it oddly compelling. Saunders provides insight:

Without giving anything away, let me say this: I made a bunch of ghosts. They were sort of cynical; they were stuck in this realm, called the bardo (from the Tibetan notion of a sort of transitional purgatory between rebirths), stuck because they'd been unhappy or unsatisfied in life. The greatest part of their penance is that they feel utterly inessential – incapable of influencing the living.

Now it's Pynchon and the characteristic oddity of the Thanatoids, who appear in Vineland. "Thanat" is the Greek word for death, and "-oid" suggests an imperfect resemblance: deathlike.

Thanatoids are ambiguous beings, creatures of entropy. They “watch a lot of Tube,” living in ghostly communities like Shade Creek, where DL and Takeshi (the “Karmic Adjuster” almost accidentally killed by DL thinking she was killing Brock Vond with the ninjic “Vibrating Palm” — is anything harder to summarize than a Pynchon plot?) meet Ortho Bob Dulang, their first Thanatoid. They “limit themselves… to emotions helpful in setting right whatever was keeping them from advancing further into the condition of death… the most common by far was resentment…”

Thanatoids seem more zombie-like than ghostly, and in typical Pynchon fashion it's all kept quite confusing.

Moore's ghosts are ghosts; they cannot interact or be heard by humans ... except in certain cases, when they can influence the living. Saunders takes it from there by means of his bardo (with reciprocity in the case of Lincoln, who enhances the self-esteem of the dead). Thanatoids apparently cannot completely die until their resentments are abated.

Literature is neither real life, nor real death. The ghosts I've created remain inside my own head. They seem slightly more unreal than before, although only a wee bit.