They Finally Let Me Be An Astronaut

Everyone else has a rich interior life, it turns out.

I am trying to be more curious about people.

Part of this is no doubt a feature of our current deprivation—I can’t have people around me (my wife, a lovely person, notwithstanding), and so I am inclined to want them around more than usual. This manifests itself for me, like so many others, in increasingly bizarre dreams about the people in my life. In two months of isolation I’ve already worked through quite a few dreams about the people I’m closest to and so I’ve noticed that in recent days my subconscious has had to start swapping in others for variety’s sake. Old roommates, high school crushes, people I only know online, people I haven’t seen or thought about in a decade or more. During the night, in my head, they have joined the circus or are playing a game of ultimate frisbee with mortal consequences or have been folded neatly into my current life in Seattle, about which they likely care or know nothing in reality.

(Somehow I never seem to dream about my colleagues or the people in my union, even though those are the faces I see over Zoom every day. Maybe my brain is protecting itself from taking too much psychic damage on that front. I hate Zoom. I broke a personal record on Saturday, logging 12 and a half hours on a single Zoom call as a delegate to the Washington State Labor Council’s endorsement convention. I do not recommend doing this.)

Then there is the fact that when I do see other people in public, they’re missing half their faces. Most of them, anyway. I ran into an old roommate at the store last week and he recognized me without any trouble despite my mask, his mind no doubt filling in the blanks. But I don’t know what anyone looks like that I don’t already know. A weird thing to be desperate for, to be sure. All the same, I’m desperate.

The last piece of this is that I think mailing out books to people lately has given me cause to think about the rich interior lives of other people in a way that I haven’t before. I have no idea how long someone has been at their current address in Cincinnati or Fort Collins or Sarasota when I mail them a book—did they move in last week? Five years ago, like me? More than thirty years ago, like my mom?—but nevertheless I feel like I know a little something more about them than I did a minute earlier. Some street names just scream plastic siding and laminate “stone” on cookie cutter place in a new development. Others barely register as addresses at all save for the brief interruptions of superscript and punctuation. 14575 9th St #112, things like that. Occasionally I know what their kitchen or bedroom or backyard looks like, courtesy of Instagram, so I can picture them there reading it, which also makes me feel connected to them in a way that’s deeper than I would have anticipated.

So like I said, I am trying to be more curious about people. I am trying to remind myself, constantly, of the rich interior lives of the neighbors without faces I pass on the street. It’s a constant battle against the Protagonist of Reality syndrome I’ve written about before.

And besides, if you want to do anything worth doing you can’t turn away from the world. Good writing—like so many other things—comes from keeping an open mind, and really listening and observing what happens out in the world. Jason Isbell, who last week put out an album that I think solidifies his place in the American songwriting Pantheon, talked about this on an interview last week with Rog Bennett of Men in Blazers:

The honesty of the emotion doesn’t limit the imagination. That was something that John Prine knew…it all had this honesty to it.

It’s something I work on all the time. I try to live the way that John lived…he never dismissed anybody.

…He saw the poignancy and the weight in everybody’s everyday stories…we’re all of value. There’s something to be learned from all of us.

Here’s the song from the new album that I think best encapsulates the beauty and the pain that defines so much of Isbell’s oeuvre.

This bit haunts me:

Heaven's wasted on the dead
That's what your mama said
When the hearse was idling in the parking lot
She said you thought the world of me
And you were glad to see
They finally let me be an astronaut

So basically my plan is to go on trying to love and understand my neighbors and to go on fighting and despising the people and systems that have so alienated us from one another.

Thanks, as always, for reading. If you’d like to keep supporting my work (this newsletter will always be free, but it’s not cheap), feel free to buy yourself or someone else a book using the button below. You don’t even have to use Amazon anymore, which I think is pretty great.

-Chuck