Never Better

It is Sunday morning, and I’m sitting on the sidewalk at the front door of the public library in Morell, using the wifi account I signed up for yesterday. For all intents and purposes it feels like 2005 when I had a favourite wifi-enabled tree in the south of France as my tenuous connection to the Internet.

The sun is beaming down, and I’m a little anxious about getting a sunburn (I’m always a little anxious about getting a sunburn). I’m streaming Never Better as I write this, a new track from Wild Rivers. I was listening to it on the stereo in the car on the drive here, and tears started to inexplicably stream down my face.

I am sitting here because I just had a date with my friend Pedro in Bali, and this is the time of day when his evening overlaps with my morning, and the the library wifi was in service of that. We’ve been trying to connect for a month—and I’ve been wanting to connect with him for much longer than that—so I didn’t want to fuck this up with flaky cellular bandwidth.

Are we both out of our minds?
Walking a line we said we wouldn’t cross
Head first into disaster
Still if you ask me how I’m holding up
I’ll say “Nеver better”

Pedro has been a force in my life since I met him in Copenhagen 18 years ago. We’ve crossed our face-to-face paths in Portugal and Germany and the Netherlands, and our virtual paths in everywhere from Dubai to Jakarta. On paper our connection is fleeting, temporary. From the inside it feels like plugging back into a switchboard that gives me access to parts of myself, and to parts of him, that aren’t available elsewhere.

I realized earlier this week that I could plug in an ePub of my book Using Her Marbles to Readwise Reader, and use its Ghostreader feature to, in essence, interrogate myself.

Q: Does it seem like Peter might have been holding in his feelings, trying to maintain order and calm through putting on a false front?  

A: Yes, it does seem that Peter may have been holding in his feelings at times, as he navigates the emotional turmoil of Catherine’s illness. He acknowledges the difficulty of confronting his emotions and reflects on the temptation to shield himself from pain by pretending not to feel deeply, indicating a struggle between maintaining a calm exterior and processing his profound grief and love for Catherine.

Q: What is the role of “escape” in Peter’s life over the years he writes about?

A: In “Using Her Marbles,” escape serves as a vital coping mechanism for Peter amidst the overwhelming challenges of dealing with Catherine’s illness and eventual death. It allows him moments of reprieve from grief, providing a space to process his emotions and maintain a semblance of normalcy in his life, especially while caring for Oliver.

Add all the asterisks you like about what AI is and isn’t, and what it may or may not be making up, and stipulating that, in the end, I may simply be seeking a slightly more nuanced ELIZA, that’s still a useful mirror to be able to hold up to myself. 

If you like, as a stretch goal, add into the mix that the book itself was me conjuring up a story about my life (really a 6 year collection of short stories), and that what I was writing at any given moment may or may not have been a “hallucination.” Who is interrogating who?

In a related/unrelated development, the casual poet library in Singapore opened recently:

Hello! We are a shared community library in the heartlands of Singapore—Alexandra Village, to be specific, a cosy little neighbourhood where we are surrounded by a bird shop, an antique shop, a spectacle shop, barbers, bakeries, coffee shops, 50-year-old furniture and electrical appliance stores, a laundromat, delicious hawker food, a famous tze char restaurant and so on.

Our shared library is entirely community-funded. Every shelf in our library is rented and curated by a different individual (there are 180 of us in total!). We tend to our own shelves, share our favourite books and take turns to keep the library open.

I am so impelled to visit. Or perhaps to create something similar in my own “cosy little neighbourhood.”

Being on FaceTime with Pedro this morning, I told him, felt like alchemy. Blip, blop, bloop, and, blam, 15,000 km of distance — antipodal distance, almost — is erased. Or at least dulled.

That it seems like alchemy is perhaps a useful metaphor for the larger context of my life right now: we are all alchemists, most of us unaware of the true spells we have access to.

Pedro and I made plans to reconnect later in the week. I’m writing this in my car in the parking lot of the selfsame library, borrowing the selfsame wifi. I will hit publish, then turn the car on and drive the 8 minutes back to home base, perhaps streaming the same tear-inducing track as I drive, and, as I just texted Lisa, prepare for a day of adventure and intrigue.