No order should locate its dung heaps too far from town.
—Lewis Hyde, Trickster Makes This World
Later, after closing day, as autumn deepened over the corrupted prairie . . . the abandoned structures of the Fair would come to house the jobless and hungry who had always been there, even at the height of the season of miracle just concluded. . . . [The former exhibits were] occupied now by drifters, squatters, mothers with nursing infants, hell-raisers hired for the run of the Fair, now, their market value having vanished, returned to the consolations of drink, dogs and cats who preferred the company of their own species . . . all moving in closer to the fires of Fair debris, once the substance of wonder, as the temperature headed down.
—Thomas Pynchon, Against the Day
Part I
Permanent Carnival
There was a time when no image moved me as much as that of the carnival leaving town.[1] Ever since I first attempted Against the Day, when it was published in 2006, during my freshman year of college, the image of the debris left in the wake of the Chicago World’s Fair has stayed with me and informed my feelings about the borderlands, where enchantment and despair, humor and terror, levity and heaviness, normalcy and freakishness, the town and the wider world, and, in the end, reality and unreality meet.
I have gone, in everything I’ve done since, toward that border, which I’ve often referred to with wary reverence as “the Outskirts,” and tried to trace it as far, and to find it in as many places, as I could. This meeting place has become for me the public and cultural analogue of the private and phantasmal meeting place where the innermost realms of imagination tenuously meet the outer world of conventional signs—that is, the page, upon which the act of writing transforms into that of reading—and where the hidden realms of dream and fantasy meet the hidden realms of the lives of strangers and the workings of history, conjoining on that border into the unsteady yet indispensable concept we call “the self” (or, in a book, “the story”).
I love the image of the carnival receding, like a tide, to show what’s left on the bottom—literally on the carnival grounds and figuratively in the lives of those who flocked to attend—thereby defining home in a deeper, realer way, revealing at once the dissatisfaction of conventional life that makes a visit to the carnival necessary, and also the fear of overwhelming change that likewise engenders, in most people, the desire to retreat before the carnival carries them off.
For years I dragged the image of a circus that consumes the town it docks in from story to story, never fitting wherever I tried to stake it down, until, in 2015, I wrote “Circus Sickness,” which stands as my first complete attempt to trace this dynamic. The story revolves around two small-town best friends who visit the circus only to find that their parents and teachers have given up all restraint and responsibility to become full-time celebrants, buying in so totally that the town becomes just one of many attractions within an all-pervasive circus environment.
Looking back on this story now, it reads like an early articulation of the zeitgeist that has been taking shape over the past decade and has now reached if not its final form, at least a form sufficiently developed to be described as such. In the turn-of-the-millennium world I grew up in, and in which my aspirations were formed, the idea of alternation between the normal and the strange, and thus of fiction, dreams, and fantasy as a reprieve from the banality and stability of external life, was a given. Just as you had to venture out to the edge of town to visit the circus, you had to retreat, to go into yourself, in order to overcome the cloak of normalcy, of bourgeois settledness and enlightened anti-superstition, that you were otherwise obliged to wear. You could talk about whatever you wanted, but there wasn’t much you could actually believe in.
But now, as we move into the second quarter of the twenty-first century—and perhaps at last out of the long “fifth quarter” of the twentieth—the carnival has consumed the town, or revealed that it had been there all along, gathering the strength to break through the membrane that kept it (partially) hidden. Any apparent distinction between the normal and the abnormal, of the carnival beginning or ending at any demarcated point, or of the effort to oppose the carnival being anything other than its own kind of carnival act, was a fantasy—perhaps a grim fantasy, and perhaps a reassuring one, but a fantasy nonetheless. As we look toward the era to come, it’s clear that it will be all carnival all the time, and that our role within it, as celebrants or scolds, victors or victims, will primarily be that of freaks and fools in a chaotic dark sabbath whose meaning may be impossible to pin down, and yet whose creative potential is impossible to discount. Therefore, as we enter this new age and take stock of the energies that have pushed us toward it, I want to take stock personally as well, to look both inward and outward, in order to understand as much as I can about the road behind and what it implies about the road ahead.
I published my first story in 2001, when I was in ninth grade, with the encouragement of my public-school writing teacher, who was also the one to tell the class that 9/11 had just happened, after being called to the principal’s office, where she was instructed to say nothing. I view the moment of her summoning the courage to tell us anyway as my “coming into the world” event, and I view the roughly twenty-five years between then and now as the first phase of my writing life, my initial attempt to bridge the microcosm I grew up in with the macrocosm that I hoped my writing would allow me to take some place within. The beginning of 2025 feels like a hinge moment, a time to gather energies, regroup, and move into what will (with any luck) commence the beginning of the next twenty-five years—a time when all that I learned about myself and the world in the past quarter century will evolve into what I hope will be my creative prime.
Trash Zeitgeist
This is a moment when old assumptions and old rules are breaking or have broken, and when wild new opportunities to squander, redeem, or redefine everything of value have come into being. It’s a moment when society’s mask is not only slipping but rotting away, revealing a grimacing clown face beneath. (It’s no coincidence that Art the Clown, the sadistic yet guileless star of the wildly popular Terrifier film series, a clown with no circus to contain his antics, has become the first truly iconic new character to enter the arena of pop culture in the past decade.) This rot reveals a mask beneath the mask, or else the desiccated, true face of something that has for too long been denied the ability to meet the world on its own terms. After years of consideration of the past and future, both personally and in my attempt to grasp at a larger historical context, this feels like a moment where the present is paramount—where forces that had until recently seemed ancient or distant, memories of a buried past and prophecies of an unrealized future, are suddenly and overwhelmingly right here. While questions about whether this change is good or bad, and what has caused it, may remain unresolved, there can no longer be any doubt that we’ve arrived in a moment worthy of close attention.
My most pressing question is therefore how to muster and maintain the kind of attention that will maximize the value of what I’m able to glean from my own imagination, fed, as it must be, by the world it inhabits. Insofar as we make the world from our imaginations and in turn fill our imaginations with what’s in the world, achieving harmony between these two states or realms, is for me the goal of all art, and the only way to keep the self, stranded on the border between them, from breaking under the pressure of its position.
My fundamental belief is contradictory in that I believe the zeitgeist is nonsense, an impediment to meaning, and yet also that it’s the only way to hear whatever the world is trying to say. I don’t believe in renunciation, because the things that I sense are latent in my imagination are in some way the same as the things latent in the world, undercurrents and subterranean emotions that course through the endless media churn and surface only when enough attention is paid to it.
There is thus no choice but to learn to metabolize trash and poison, as David Cronenberg, one of my guiding models, knew long ago, because that’s how the world behind the world bubbles up, making itself known through the surface world’s grossest flotsam. If you reject this trash, you starve; but if you eat it without knowing how to digest it, you sicken—you become unconnected to everything except the feed itself, bloating until you burst. The energy that it takes to avoid both fates is the energy that gives rise to, and is in turn sparked by, a modern-day version of the medieval Feast of Fools, a free-for-all born from the decaying order of a society that can no longer maintain a healthy relationship with its own contradictions and exclusions. The fools at this feast know they’re fools; in this way become wise. But it’s a wisdom that pushes them deeper into the grotesque spectacle, not toward any purified realm beyond it.
Every era offers a unique route to the eternal and thus to a level of meaning beyond the specifics of that era. The route is always and only through those specifics. The past and future and other transcendental reaches of time may well exist, but if they do, we can access them only through the impact that the temporal realm of the present has on the atemporal realm of the imagination, which teems with life-forms that cannot survive in a vacuum.
If medieval alchemy dreamt of turning trash into gold, and psychic alchemy, as Jung understood it, adapted this paradigm to the transformation of mental trash into mental gold, I’m ready now to dispense with gold altogether and simply parse the trash. There is something hidden within the trash we’re constantly confronted with—glimmers of otherworldly fantasy coursing through the stream of worldly “reality” that fills the internet and spills into the interactions people have in whatever we might still tentatively call “the outside world”—that is wildly alive inside the dead skin that contains it. The imagination may be the innermost core of the human being, but it comes to life only by ingesting the impersonal trash of the world and transmuting it into startling and absurd new images with the power to bring both writer and reader back to life (or to birth them fully for the first time), at once deepening the complexity of their self while also attenuating that self, filling it with the impurities that pollute every level of the plane we inhabit, until “self” and “world” refuse to remain distinct.
If you want to encounter the hidden truth of your own imagination, you have to find it by seeking the hidden truth of the world—this is why every myth requires leaving home and going into the woods, to see how the unknown things inside you react to the unknown things out there. The self-discovery that used to take place through physical adventure and now takes place mainly through mental and digital adventure is genuine only if you surprise yourself by your own reaction to whatever you find, and it’s complete only when “out there” and “in here” become spookily synonymous. This is the process I’ve undergone over the past twenty-five years, building and shedding my selfhood in equal measure as an overwhelming desire to become “an artist in the world”—and thereby to feel some pride and security in my existence. It drove me to increasingly discomfiting conclusions about what existence and the world actually are.
Reaching the Present
In college, between 2006 and 2010, my friends and I engaged in endless discussions about our place in history, the nature of zeitgeists and eras and generations, and what it would mean to come together into a generational artistic consciousness the way we imagined had happened in storied “scenes” like the Paris of the 1920s, the Greenwich Village of the 1950s, the San Francisco of the 1960s, or the Berlin of the 1980s. The closest that our time ever came was the exodus to Silicon Valley in the late 2000s and early 2010s; but even back then this looked creepy and commercial, and has of course only proved to be more so since.
So I set out after college without a scene and without much expectation of finding one. I mined my own memories and spectral relation to my hometown for fifteen years instead, across novels like Angel House (2019) and The New House (2022), and the Dodge City trilogy (2017–2025), and explored the feeling of drifting through time and space, never quite making contact with the present, or even with the earth, in the stories that formed my first collection, Drifter (2021). In retrospect, I view this as a transitional phase, a period of working to extract what was most personally salient in the dreams that my town had vested me with as I struggled to find a form that would allow others to connect those dreams to their own, and perhaps thereby to articulate something more general about the ambivalence of yearning to escape your town by obsessively recreating it.
This phase marked an inversion: in my childhood, my town was the outside world, while the wider world lived in my imagination; but then, in early adulthood, as I lived in one city after another, I moved into the outside world only to find in my imagination the essence of my town. I explored my mind as a kind of world and my world as a kind of mind, with my self as a sentry or informant patrolling the border between them, turning from one mystery to the other while trying to evolve a language that could merge those two worlds or reveal that what had seemed to separate them had never been real.
As a Millennial, I grew up in a time when there was no world except whatever one felt the world to be: all expression was self-expression. If one had a clear enough sense of self, or even just of taste, one was impervious to any social, historical, or technological forces that begged to differ. Reality posed no questions large enough to put everyone in the same boat (and thus the boat was this condition).
Needless to say, that era is over. Riding its downward trajectory, I have over the past decades come to understand writing not as self-expression or even self-discovery, but as the traversal of an actual landscape, a place as concretely defined and as drenched in haunting atmosphere as any external landscape, and one through which I, as an individual, move just as incidentally and precariously. I am as much a stranger in my imagination as I am anywhere else on Earth; the town I discovered in my mind turned out to be no more “my own” than the one I happened to grow up in.
I’ve tried to articulate this feeling in my 2024 novel, The Berlin Wall, and my 2025 collection, The Squimbop Condition, which both deal with the present in a more explicit and less personal manner, with narrators who speak as creatures of the carnival rather than as small-town boys venturing out to it. These are “post-self” narratives where all faces are masked and all personal drives merge into a collective or transhuman aura—the id itself, rather than the secret desires of anyone in particular.
This shift is connected to the bittersweet “now is the only era you’re going to live in” feeling that is a crucial component of full adulthood, a putting-aside of the romantic, ahistorical yearnings of youth. It is by no means a putting-aside of imagination or a turn toward realism, but rather a shift in my understanding of what the imagination is and where it resides. When I was younger, it seemed the adults controlled the world, so its problems were their problems, whereas now I feel that I control the world as much as anyone else, and so my uncertainty and vulnerability are universal. I no longer feel that I’m working toward something, but rather, newly, that I’m working in or even as that thing.
The imagination knows things about the world it inhabits; these things can be dredged up and rendered communicable only through the laborious and uncertain processes of reading, writing, and conversation. And they are communicable not as information—I cannot list the contents of my imagination—but rather as stimuli, in a feedback loop wherein what’s in the outside world stimulates my imagination enough to generate stories and images on the page, which don’t mean anything unless they stimulate the reader’s imagination, thereby weaving multiple inner and outer worlds together in hopes of contributing to a culture that rejects the sterility of pure information. A purely information culture—which has so far tried and failed to become absolute, however close it’s gotten—generates a constant, unrelieved feeling that “there’s more to the story.” Still, it never satisfies or even validates this feeling because it views the living stimuli of the imagination as either just another form of information, or as heresy.
Beyond the Unworkable Equilibrium
During the COVID years, I wrote a series of essays laying out what I called the “Unworkable Equilibrium,” a state of affairs that defined the media and cultural atmosphere of the late 2010s and early 2020s: a feeling of constant apocalyptic crisis was freakily interpenetrated by a numbing sense of sameness—the feeling that everything was changing at overwhelming speed combined with the feeling that nothing was changing, and never could. It was a vertiginous period where it felt that the future was coming with a shocking inevitability and also that the future wasn’t coming at all, that we were stuck in limbo, on deck, up against a portal we couldn’t go through, or else that we had gone through the portal only to discover that nothing was different on the other side.
It was in retrospect the death throes of the long twentieth century, of the culture that saw information and technology as a means of linear progress away from unreason, and therefore as a means of elevating rather than nullifying the human spirit. It was a disorienting and exhausting time, a period that forced people into an unrelieved fight-or-flight state without any of the relief that fighting or fleeing would provide in nature. It was the end of a certain vision of history, the final fragmenting of linear time and the notion of generations and even cause-and-effect that had so preoccupied my friends and me in college. It was the last gasp of the concept of the circus coming to or leaving town, and thus the end of the very concepts of “circus” and “town.” What appeared to be a portal is now better understood as a melding—we didn’t go through anything. Instead, we witnessed the completion of the merger between truth and falsity, surface and depth, superstition and revelation, disenchantment and re-enchantment, online and offline, and perhaps finally between subjective and objective experience.
And something happened to time, something stranger than just its slowing down or speeding up, or getting stuck in a loop or breaking out of one. Somewhere between the early and the mid-2020s, in the aftermath of COVID and the “return to normalcy” that was supposed to succeed it, something happened that has rendered the passage of time harder to track, while the presence of time has become impossible to ignore. Time has taken on a slippery physical dimension. As one of Karl Ove Knausgaard’s narrators posits in the recent novel The Wolves of Eternity (2023), it feels as though eternity has begun. The schema of the Unworkable Equilibrium revealed itself as a carnival game, a trick door that led into a funhouse, a place at once disorienting and filled with potential, a hall of mirrors in which we are “trapped of our own accord” and where, whether we like it or not, unexplored and inexplicable possibilities await.
No longer do the constant “bombshells” and “revelations” in the news spark either hope or outrage—no longer does the present seem always just about to lead to the future. Instead, right now feels like the moment it’s all been coming to, a mini-apocalypse, a time when the murky depths are churned up into the waters we’ve all been swimming in. This feels like a new definition of the “end of history,” not the early ’90s version I absorbed as a child, in which the fall of the Soviet Union supposedly guaranteed the permanent victory of liberalism and rationalism, but also not the “return of history” that the shocks of the mid-2010s were accused of heralding. It feels now like history has ended (or at least “landed”) on a note of pure irresolution, pure conflict without even the prospect of détente. It feels as though the very concept of history has revealed itself as an ominous joke or a volatile new element. The air is filled with endless, echoing laughter, rising like gas from this element, which might be alive in a way we can’t yet measure.
In the stories I’ve written over the past few years, I’ve worked with this increasingly deranged sense of time, staging events whose effects precede and even cause their causes, and playing with inverted generational structures, uncanny recurrences and menacing schemes of simultaneity and mutually exclusive timelines that must nevertheless both take place. All parallel structures converge and all convergences are suspect.
Working on these stories doesn’t feel entirely fictional; or else this work has helped me understand what fiction is, what it means to try to distill a feeling in the air at a certain moment in time so that, with any luck, other people in other times will be able to feel it too, even if they can’t say what it is any better than I can.
Sometimes I dimly sense another aspect of the present in which these clashes cohere and in which all apparent contradictions are resolved not through any solution or the unveiling of any mystery, but through a shift in perspective that reveals how seamlessly they already fit, in a place where these perversions of time are not perversions at all. This place might be one way of defining “heaven” (the setting of the novel I’m working on now). Instead of a perfected afterlife, this version of heaven coexists with the life we’re living now, serving as a means of comprehending its disharmonies from a secret angle (like that revealed by the mysterious crystal known as Iceland Spar in Against the Day) that renders them all already harmonious. Heaven is thus a mental state that is also a place, and vice versa, an actual geography, but one that exists only as a feature of consciousness.
This place, or this way of being—the only way to be satisfied living in our world, if it’s true that there isn’t another one—correlates with the feeling that nothing new enters time and space, and yet these planes are still in constant flux. It feels like all the toys we’re ever going to get have been laid out on the table, or dumped onto the floor, and the only move now is to make up whatever games we can with them. The zeitgeist of 2025 feels like a room where no new oxygen can enter and no old carbon dioxide can exit, so perhaps we’re all suffocating, growing delusional and feverish as stasis and novelty slosh and slap together, causing weirder and weirder reactions as third- and fourth- and fifth-order versions of the same phenomena occur and recur and recur again—maybe all of our lives are flashing by just before the lights go out—and yet the frustration of the Unworkable Equilibrium has abated. Something has indeed arrived.
This may be a temporary eternity, a lull or island or cul-de-sac in the ongoing forward thrust of time. If it is, it’s one well worth exploring. Who knows how long the merger of carnival and town will persist, and what will happen to these concepts if they disambiguate again, or if their congress gives rise to newer concepts—but, from the vantage point of 2025, it feels as though all the ink that had once seemed dry is wet again and, in a way that makes me giddy to contemplate, nearly everything is up for grabs. Even if nothing new has entered the arena, our means of interfacing with what’s here (of shuffling and reshuffling the board until we can see invisible solutions) have never been more manifold.
Seediness
One theme I’ve often returned to—explicitly in the Unworkable Equilibrium essays and aesthetically in my stories—is that of seediness. As a facet of the circus and the carnival, the seedy is to be found on the edge of town, in the land that is neither developed lots nor planted fields, and along the strip between Main Street and the highway, in the noir-scape of drive-thrus and motels and pawn shops and, in my youth, the adult video store, but also in the psychic destitution of the modern world as a site of tremendous wasted potential, of spilled seed awaiting its chance to sprout. I’ve always been interested in waste, in the overlooked contours of a world that prizes knowledge over wisdom and views progress only in the most mechanistic terms, and yet I’ve never wanted to turn against such a world. My religious commitment has always been to accept whatever’s given and then to seek the unexplored potential therein, a potential that grows in strength the longer it’s ignored (until at last it withers and dies).
I distinguish the seedy from the adjacent categories of the shady and the shitty in that the shady is seediness that someone has capitalized on to gain sex, money, or power—a shady nightclub owner, a shady car salesman—whereas the shitty is seediness that has lost all potential and gone sterile, like a shitty part of town that people simply avoid, perceiving there no sense of latent potential. A seedy idea or neighborhood or atmosphere is very close to a shady or a shitty one, but this difference—the presence of animate mystery awaiting its chance to flourish—may be all that makes our world worth living in.
If the world of 2025 has become a carnival, embracing seediness leads to a different understanding of the idea of carnival games: all the prizes are already here, already hidden within the shooting booths and ring-toss challenges, winnable according to byzantine (and possibly unfair) yet nevertheless tangible rules. In this concept of the soul’s progress, there is no other realm, no need to ascend beyond this world, only a need to conceive of what this world really is in increasingly multifarious and capacious ways, and to allow the mind to gestate seeds it may not know what to do with, bearing fruit it may never recognize.
The much-discussed “gamification of reality” may be inevitable and irreversible, but there’s a difference between video games and carnival games. If the misery of social media—the ultimate video game, not least because it doesn’t admit to this definition—comes from seeking some ill-defined form of victory through abstract connection with (or dominance over) others while forsaking that very connection through a lonely pursuit that only reveals its futility too late, then carnival games work in the opposite way: they reveal their futility up front, and for those willing to purchase a token and play them anyway, they lead to real human connection in unpredictable and rewarding ways. Social media offers the false promise of transcending the world while offering only the chance to drift away from it; carnival games offer nothing but worthless trinkets, and yet these trinkets are in and of the world, winnable only through actual interaction—through play that knows it’s play—and are thus worth infinitely more than any digital dominion can be.
The idea that all the carnival’s prizes are already present relates to the feeling of wild superimposition that characterizes the physical and digital world today—the sense that so much is layered on top of so much else, so much history, so much interpretation, so much disagreement and obfuscation all just sitting there, comments atop comments atop comments with no decay and no fruition, waiting for someone to make something of them.
One of the core questions of my work is how can you let the seeds buried in this superimposition take root in you, despite your (justifiable) suspicion of their provenance and intent. This requires seeing yourself as a host or vessel for the age’s attempt to express itself. To let the age do this requires a combination of extreme self-confidence, believing yourself chosen for such a thing, and extreme self-abasement, insofar as allowing the age to say whatever it wants through you requires the abandonment of whatever you might have wanted to say instead. Indeed, I often look over my work and feel that it contains none of what I set out to express.
This is the mentality of the medieval mystics—revisited in accessible and encouraging style in Simon Critchley’s recent Mysticism (2024)—the notion that total abasement and total exaltation are versions of the same state, both highly preferable to the middle state of low-key alienation, which has been the default for so many people in recent decades, online and off.
Now, the key is to overcome the desire to capitalize on these seeds and tip the paradigm into the shady, or to ignore the seeds and let them turn shitty. Embracing the seedy means offering yourself as a seedbed in which alien energies can interpenetrate and cross-pollinate in freakish new ways, and thereby to celebrate the brokenness of consensus reality rather than trying to deny or restore it.
For the first time since the post-truth era began, I feel liberated from mourning or seeking the truth, and free to explore the contours of whatever this era is actually like, to take its face value as its truth. In my understanding of heaven (which is perhaps the same as my understanding of dreams), nothing can be hidden because everything displays its essence on its surface, and there is nothing but surface. Since, in the waking world, the effort to see a new kind of wholeness within fragmentation is such a complex and unpredictable process, and since it’s nearly impossible to resist the urge to look beyond surfaces, accessing heaven requires a new kind of engagement with the narrative froth that subsumes us: not an attempt to put Humpty-Dumpty back together again, but an attempt to see what new meaning might arise from handling his fragments as a complete set of pieces in a new kind of game, even if the rules of that game are not for us to know.
Decadence
Related to seediness is the idea of decadence, and the question of what it means to seek fulfillment in an age when the feeling of decay far outweighs that of growth. In some sense we live in an age of tremendous innovation and development, yet this isn’t the prevailing spirit. Whatever technical breakthroughs may be underway with AI, this feels like an age of human decay, a twilight era of human supremacy.
So what thrills are to be found in watching our own decline? Another way to understand the era beyond that of the Unworkable Equilibrium is to say that we are entering an era when all the efforts to keep decadence at bay, or under wraps, have failed. The coming era will know its own decadence in a much more overt sense; it will be about decadence rather than about trying to slow, isolate, or deny the forces of decay. There is a celebratory and a mournful component to this, but both come from the same place, if not from the same people.
A decadent age rots and reveals its core, yielding up secrets in a potentially revelatory manner, like an old house where the crumbling floorboards reveal what’s hidden in the basement. 2025 feels like a time to explore the old rotting house the way my friends explored the rotting state hospital in our town when we were teenagers. But now the stakes are higher: we’re not teenagers anymore, and the rotting structure isn’t a lone relic of the old world—it is the old world, the entire adult order that, as teenagers, we both rebelled against and secretly yearned to inherit. Now there is nothing to inherit: no center of power, only secret corners, trick doors, dark alleys, and shafts of light shining through holes. All that matters is to cultivate whatever seeds sprout in this light, tending to stalks whose ultimate flowering could be wonderful or horrible beyond belief.
The Ultimate Conspiracy
How did the world get this way? Part of the feeling of having reached eternity, and of the floorboards having rotted away beneath the house, is that the present is overstuffed, all the past and future crammed together, hardened and sticky and starting to smell. Almost nothing vanishes or resolves on the internet (some have argued that much of the bizarreness of recent years is a result of digital storage having become at once nearly infinite and riddled with decay) but rather remains in a state of evolving meaning, linking to more and more stories until it’s part of a web whose shape no one can map. Thus the present feels both illegible and overfull, defined simultaneously by missing clues and extraneous clues, a state that leads to a new form of conspiratorial thinking.
The fundamental question in this kind of thinking is whether the surface of the world—“the screen” in the literal and the figurative sense—conceals depths beneath it, or whether the surface itself is far more complex than it appears, or simply far wider and brighter than we can take in. Which is the illusion: the surface, or the suggestion of something beneath it? Are we dealing with a 3D or a 2D problem? Is the intimation of ubiquitous secrecy and mystification a clouded or a clear view of the world as it really is? Is the truth buried under mountains of lies and irrelevant data, a quiet voice smothered by the shrieking of idiots? Or is it hidden in plain sight, so clearly that our instinct to look past it is our greatest liability?
One common understanding of the drive toward conspiracy thinking in a decentralized and deconsecrated country like America, where very few of us have deep roots in a land that constantly sends up portents but never protocols for processing them, is the need for meaning in a culture that doesn’t provide any through public channels. This leaves us with a great private need to put together the “signs and symbols,” to use Nabokov’s term, into an account sturdy enough to support a personal vision of why America is the way it is, or at least feels the way it does. We can either squash the portents before they eat at us, or weave them into a tale as wild as we choose; but we cannot afford to do neither.
But what if it’s actually the opposite? What if the truth isn’t hidden at all, but rather omnipresent in those signs and symbols, just as many medieval mystics understood God to reside not on another plane or in another dimension, but throughout all of creation, as present in a blade of grass or, according to Meister Eckhart, in a “sheep’s eye,” as in any celestial realm? What if today’s culture is touching on something holy in its perception that the clues we receive on a daily basis really do mean something, even if it’s frequently wrong (and of course easily manipulated) in terms of what it claims that meaning is? What if the shrieking of idiots conceals nothing but rather reveals, through the fact of that shrieking, the truth about the moment we live in?
The superabundance of portents without a viable means of processing them has led to a new Reformation, a new phase of smashing idols and discrediting the (secular) priesthood while embracing a tremendous range of new and renewed dogmas in place of the old religions that the last century thought it had vanquished. It has also driven an evolution in my approach to literature, away from the interiority and depth of perspective that I inherited from the twentieth century, and even beyond the information-obsessed sprawl of postmodernism, toward something more reminiscent of medieval tapestries, a panoply of events both infernal and divine, lived and dreamt, rumored and beheld, even real and unreal, all occurring on the same plane, with a complex feeling of mutually interacting cause and effect, or a spooky feeling that the Real Cause, to turn back toward the conspiratorial, is always elsewhere, behind the tapestry or so hidden in its weave—like Waldo among the Gobbling Gluttons—that it can’t be isolated from it. The images from this era that resonate most therefore have more in common with the teeming frenzy of Hieronymus Bosch than they do with the intimate first-person perspectives of Picasso or Monet.
This flattening also relates to the collapse of taste and status hierarchies, the sense, in 2025, that there is no ladder for a writer to climb, no seal of approval to covet or secret room to enter, nor even any map to make a mark upon. I have nothing to aspire to except the production of my own work with the fewest possible limits placed upon it. This is a dark windfall, at once a desolate feeling that there is no prize in the game I’m playing and perhaps therefore, upon sane reflection, no reason to play this game, and yet beyond sanity lies a newfound permission to go wild, to cultivate the seeds in my imagination not for my sake, but for theirs. I feel both heartbroken at the collapse of the literary culture that, as a younger man, I dreamed of taking my place within, and supercharged with a new kind of ambition, that of the unpatrolled wilderness, a frontier feeling that the seals of culture have broken and a totalizing indeterminacy has rendered everything possible, not so much annihilating the truth toward which art aspires but fundamentally changing the ways in which that aspiration takes its course.
It’s not so much that nothing can happen now, but that the realm in which things happen—a shapeless amalgam of the internet and whatever’s still beyond it—renders them instantly fragmented, not only into divergent takes but into divergent valences. The question of which stories, or which images, are “real,” let alone good or bad, feels quaint. Instead, here too a fusion has occurred, a merger of inner and outer space, perception and imagination, angels and devils, so that the line between “making things up” and “finding things out,” when participating in the massive common project of telling the story of this era, is no line at all.
The “world” is both the place where everything happens and also not a place anyone can reach. Everything that happens also doesn’t happen, and vice versa. It feels sometimes like we’re already living in the realm of the dead, or a realm of souls not yet born, held back from the arena while we await an unknown cause to deploy us into it—like a universe that knows the Big Bang is coming but where, unfathomably, it hasn’t arrived yet.
It’s no surprise, then, that all narratives feel incomplete or absurd. The X-Files, a defining artifact from my youth, plausibly asserted that “the truth is out there,” but does anyone believe this anymore? Today, no account of what’s going on can be true, just as nothing can be true without an account explaining why, and why those who say otherwise are wrong. No one can refute any theory without becoming part of it. The way these theories live and breathe isn’t a matter of facts, not even of alternative facts, but something much more ontological: the arena in which anything could be true is so corrupted, so carnivalesque, that the only response is to view this phenomenon on its own terms and to enjoy the freedom it engenders, the way that the entirety of what seems to be going on is always and totally in play.
This is the overarching conspiracy that fascinates me so much. It always feels as though the potential of the world is being wasted, or as though it’s trying to tell us something we can’t hear, like alien transmissions from Earth itself are trying in vain to make contact with us, just as it also feels like we’re constantly absorbing lies and sinister messages designed to keep us from inhabiting the silence within which we could think the thoughts that would free us from the maze we’ve been herded into. In other words, if the goal is to live a full and real and authentic life, is the path toward doing so hidden in the churn or hidden by the churn?
This overarching conspiracy is perhaps no more than the process by which the present appears to be all there is, even while it conceals the past and future and infinite imaginary realms in between and off to every side. Perhaps the pervasive feeling that the truth is hidden is no more than the uneasy way in which the imagination (and so much of conspiracy culture uses the same mental faculty) is simultaneously in the world and not in the world, hinting at the presence of other worlds whose location it cannot discover.
In just the same way, the powers that be in this world appear at once completely inept and diabolically powerful, and no evidence in either direction discounts the evidence in the other. This may be a trick that the world—in order to seem like a world at all, to reach the bare minimum of coherence required for human habitation—can’t help but play on us, and thus a trick that we, as vectors of the world, can’t help but play on ourselves and each other. The surface of reality—“the screen”—may conceal nothing except the consequences of passing through it. Thinking of the screen as a physical entity, like a screen door, it seems as though passage through it is both unrestricted and highly perverse. You can cross over as many times as you like, attempting to correlate events on the internet with those in the world in a way that makes sense of both, but each time you cross over, you bring something of the other side with you, until it grows absurd to claim that either side exists and you start to wonder if you’ve ever gone anywhere at all.
Part II
Three Questions
One definition of what it means to be alive is the ability to influence things, whereas solely being influenced by things is a definition of being unalive or inanimate. If so, then the question of who and what is alive is one of the core questions of this era, connected to the totalizing conspiratorial feeling that unseen hands are turning wheels within wheels, infusing the world, and our own thoughts about it, with tantalizing clues that lead only to more clues, rabbit-holes eating away at the ground until no ground remains and we can only float.
The “agency panic” that so many of us feel, lost in this matrix, the abiding question of how to have any impact on—or even, really, any experience of—a world that threatens to turn completely intangible is one of the questions that literature is best suited to explore, since the acts of reading and writing demand a complex balance between the will to focus one’s mind and the will to surrender focus to the workings of another mind, whether that mind is a hidden part of the self (as occurs while writing) or a hidden part of another self (as occurs while reading).
Therefore, the question of who and what really drives events, and how the expression of will relates to the surrender of will, both as a subject in a receding world and as a definitive component of the literary process, is a core question of the books I’ve written so far. My books always ask who’s alive and how can they be certain, just as I feel most alive while losing myself in the netherworld of unconscious creation—as if by drifting away from the world my body inhabits, I could sneak back up on it from the far side, and there, for a moment, touch on solid ground, even if only as a ghost.
I’ve come to see imagination as a form of inner biography, an act of discovering what has “already occurred internally” and giving those occurrences external form. Just as they say new matter can’t enter the universe, I’m increasingly certain that new ideas and images can’t enter the mind. I have therefore tried to understand my own goals as a writer as much from considering the work I’ve produced as from dreaming of that which I still hope to. The more I see my imagination as an alien country, the more convergent my attempts to understand the world I live in and the world that lives in me become. When I look at what I’ve done over the past decades, these three questions constantly resurface:
- What does it feel like to live through an age of decadence?
- How, if at all, can humans influence their environment, or engage with it in order to cease being “on deck” and to become “fully born”?
- How does one look through the zeitgeist one is trapped within, toward the underlying eternal reality beneath? Is accessing this sublevel (or seeing through the illusion of levels altogether, collapsing the 3D into the 2D) what it means to become “fully born,” or does holding on to this hope actually prevent that step from occurring?
All three questions, now that I look back on them, emerged from the age of the Unworkable Equilibrium, when consensus reality was still struggling to cohere, or at least when its incoherence was still a shock. They are symptoms of a threshold phase, in which the question of how an individual can embark on a transformational adventure in a world that was itself transforming, and that was waging war on the concept of the individual as anything but a unit of data, felt primary.
Perhaps now this adventure has succeeded: consensus reality has broken down so definitively that it’s ridiculous to claim it can be repaired. The world has begun to speak in a new, polyphonic voice. Now that the circus and the town are one and the same, and the concept of disentangling them has taken on the same tragicomic valence as everything that takes place in this hybrid space, the question of how to influence and be influenced by the world has evolved into a new form—one that I hope my next phase of work will address, in ways I can’t yet foresee. The question of whether the individual seeking transformation should harmonize with or resist the energies of the world they inhabit has receded, while the question of what these energies actually are, and where they come from, has become paramount. If this is a form of surrender, then my question is: what have I surrendered to, and what does it want from me now?
For the moment, it’s enough to say that becoming a clown or a freak at the freak show is no longer a choice; neither is it an expression of anything unique about any given person. It is, rather, the natural state of all people—the costume we all come dressed in now, reflecting the changed world back to itself.
Holy Blasphemy
On a mushroom trip when I was seventeen, on a ski slope in Vermont, my friends and I broke into an abandoned cabin, where we found a half-empty bottle of Jack Daniels and an old rotary phone. The hardest we ever laughed—still the hardest I’ve ever laughed—was when we realized that God had been up here, drunk on Jack and making prank phone calls, before abandoning his post, never to return. We collapsed on the cabin floor with the sublime humor of it, the trickery, the shame, and the exaltation at knowing, in the way only teenagers tripping out of their minds can know, that this was the final truth of God’s relation to the world, and also the only proof we’d ever receive that God was real. The deep woods beyond the cabin were surely the space God had retreated into, but we knew we would only get lost if we tried to find him there.
The moment was juvenile and it passed quickly, but the power of that laughter has remained. It clarified something; it felt simply and clearly true in a way that few other moments ever have. It crystallized a form of worship through blasphemy that has defined my relation to myself, to my work, and to the cosmos ever since, solidifying my love of carnivals and clowns as well as my feeling about the nature of the world and how, through joyful degradation, the holy is never out of reach. Our delirious laughter fused the disparate levels of reality—we were at once middle-class teenagers on drugs and also weary pilgrims ascending the Holy Mountain, and it was at once tawdry and sublime that God had left us this message, which at the same time had nothing to do with God and wasn’t a message—in a way that neither sober reflection nor brute force can.
That mountaintop vision was part of what led me to create a major called “Esoteric Studies: Mysticism and Modernism in Western Thought” when I got to college, devoting myself to the dual study of the Middle Ages’ greatest mystics, like Meister Eckhart, Heinrich Suso, and Julian of Norwich, and also to the thinkers around the turn of the last century—the era that Against the Day chronicles so ecstatically—who, to my mind, had resurrected that strain of medieval thought, coming to see, as those in the progress-mad nineteenth century never could, how much of modern human experience, when considered honestly, has retained (or even struggled to recover) its medieval characteristics.
The great thinkers of the early 1900s, like Freud, Kafka, Faulkner, Lovecraft, William James, and Bruno Schulz, brought the Middle Ages back into modernity, or showed how the two had never been separate, while in those same years Einstein redefined time and space in ways that would forever change how stories are told, undoing the groundwork that the Enlightenment tried to lay. No longer could science promise relief from uncertainty. Today, a century later, that same spirit of cosmic strangeness has returned in hypercharged form, hopefully not preceding cataclysms as destructive as the world wars, though it’s hard not to speculate.
As the world enters another neo-medieval state, shedding the rationalism of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, one of the great ironies is how the internet emerged as the primary achievement of that rational order and has now become the primary instrument of its downfall. Going forward, as we come to share the world increasingly with bots and other AI entities, the medieval mindset of inhabiting a world full of demons and possessed bodies and golems and other beings of ambiguous humanity and sentience will also return. Furthermore, as we rapidly evolve into a postliterate society, those few of us still devoted to fusing human consciousness with the written word will have no choice but to view ourselves as members of an occult order. All human literary pursuits, if they haven’t already, will come to seem religious through their refusal to go extinct.
Lightness
Over the past decade of teaching writing, I’ve often assigned “Lightness” by Italo Calvino (1985), himself a great scholar of the medieval mindset and of the ways the intuitive processes of creative production can mirror and often anticipate the deductive processes of scientific research, so as to jointly map the shadowlands of reality.
In my classes on “Lightness” we discuss Calvino’s study of Perseus and the Medusa, and how Perseus turned the Medusa’s own reflection against her, thereby harnessing the power of light to avoid being turned to stone. I ask my students, “How can we avoid being turned to stone by staring too directly at the contemporary world?” We discuss the Medusa gaze of the internet, the ways in which the endless scroll can so easily arrest all motion, inner as well as outer, nullifying the imagination and turning us into orbs of pure attention with nothing behind it. We think aloud about how to recapture the Hermes-inspired spirit of lightness, the upward-tending energy of unshackled creativity, and the mental nimbleness required to resist ideology, as well as the ability to see the hard material world as airy and incomplete, all solid surfaces composed of mostly empty space. We consider Calvino’s appreciation of moonlight, which reflects the sun in a way we can stare at without going blind, and bathes the world we inhabited all day in a glow that estranges it and fills it with new possibility, just as a childhood visit to the fair can reveal unknown sides of our parents and teachers and neighbors and, socially as well as geographically, can call into question the very nature of the place we call home.
Turning to stone, or being blinded by the sun, is the tragedy of surrender to the screen, of staring into the vortex until you become a mirror of it. Whatever seeds lie buried in your imagination burn up in this harsh light. Repurposing this light as a nutritive source that allows those seeds to sprout requires a searching, sometimes exalted, and sometimes debased process of being stimulated by the screen and stimulating it in return, of entering into congress with it, acting sometimes like a detective, sometimes like a celebrant, sometimes like a huckster, sometimes like a terrorist, and sometimes like a clown, playing the games it sets out for you and making what you can out of the materials it provides you with. It requires an understanding of the relation between self and world that allows for a balance of proactive and reactive play.
This is my ideal of the creative spirit: someone whose hands are dirty but whose soul is alive, covered in runoff and rubble but never buried beneath it. The creative spirit is someone whose only responsibility is to the game, never to any one outcome, and thus is someone who, in opposition to the heavy, Protestant-inflected ethos of American work culture, happily embraces their own potential for irresponsibility and sees in art a pathway toward profound joy rather than toward normative morality, or even toward victory. As Jean Baudrillard wrote in 1996 in reference to the chess program Deep Blue, winning will increasingly become the province of machines, but only human beings can truly play—even if this comes to mean something like “enjoy losing.”
In “The Street of Crocodiles” (1933), my favorite author, Bruno Schulz, writes, “Even if the classical methods of creation should prove inaccessible for evermore, there still remain some illegal methods, an infinity of heretical and criminal methods.” Today, as the world decays and fragments, the creative potential of heretical and criminal methods is the only potential left.
Part III
Trickster on the Borderlands
Lightness and blasphemy combine in the archetype of the trickster. Floating and flitting along the borders of things, dancing at the edges and often defining those edges by transgressing them, the trickster is always alert, at once innocent and crafty, nimble and clumsy, driving culture onward by undermining its legitimacy. As we seek to surf the strangeness of this new carnival era, and to resist turning to stone by either championing or refusing it, we would do well to absorb as much of the trickster spirit as we can bear.
One of the books that left the largest impression on me in 2024 is Trickster Makes this World: Mischief, Myth, and Art, a 1998 study of the trickster in mythology—Raven, Coyote, Hermes, Vishnu, Loki, et al.—by Lewis Hyde, author of The Gift: Creativity and the Artist in the Modern World (1983). The point that stuck with me most is Hyde’s exploration of what he calls “dirt-work,” the trickster’s irrepressible play with the gross and, indeed, seedy runoff of any cultural order that has, like the town dump, the fairgrounds, and the unpatrolled outskirts of town, been relegated to the edge of whatever space that culture lays claim to. The trickster respects no prohibition on going there, and plays by no rules except those he makes up, agitating forgotten and ignored materials until he reawakens “the possibility of playing with the joints of creation,” and thereby overcoming creation’s decadence from within, rather than imposing any program of restoration from without (that way lies fascism).
Cultures with strong internal orders, like the Roman Empire or the Roman Catholic Church in the Middle Ages, can legislate specific engagement with this otherwise shameful zone, using annual Saturnalia or Carnival festivities as “a sort of psychic and social drainage system in which structure’s garbage gets expressed only to be carted away when the banners come down.” According to a medieval Parisian churchman, one such carnival, the Feast of Fools, featured “masqueraders with grotesque faces, disguised as women, lions and mummers, performed their dances, sang indecent songs in the choir, ate their greasy food from a corner of the altar near the priest celebrating mass, got out their games of dice, burned a stinking incense made of old shoe leather, and ran and hopped about all over the church.” Furthermore, “excrement was sometimes burned instead of incense, and . . . the clergy themselves would sometimes ride in dung-filled carts through the town, eating sausages and tossing turds at the crowds.”
But the problem with this ritualistic pressure-valve, and also its site of possibility, is when it’s no longer enough to purge the energies that have built up within a given order, straining its edges like gas in a bottle of rotting milk. Then the mockery reveals the fundamental decay within the order it was called upon to protect. “Dirt rituals may stabilize things for years on end,” Hyde writes, “but when the order is in fundamental crisis these rituals can become the focal points for change. Every so often Fat Tuesday does leak over into Lean Wednesday, and into the rest of the year as well.” In certain moments, and 2025 is clearly one of them, the “Ritual Container” breaks and its contents slosh back into town, clogging the streets like the Great Molasses Flood that buried Boston in 1919.
Homemade Religion
Even before their decadence becomes terminal, less coherently organized cultures, like America’s, have no official means of containing these unsavory energies, and are thus stuck in limbo between denying their existence and reveling in them everywhere and always. Our culture doesn’t “have much agreed-upon collective dirt-work. . . . What are the modern forms by which order deals with its own exclusions? Where is the dirt-work of democratic mass society? Where has trickster’s spirit settled?” The promise of America is that it liberates people from old, restrictive orders elsewhere in the world, but this comes at the price of leaving them stranded and flailing to remake order on their own.
This is why we need what Hyde calls “homemade religion” and “homemade ritual,” which, when successful, can overcome both the conservative desire to reimpose old religious rituals and the liberal desire to claim that no such rituals are necessary. A truly free soul, and thus the apotheosis of the promise America makes, is one that has attained the freedom to operate within its own structure—not a soul stuck in a structure imposed from without, nor a soul in free-fall with no structure at all.
As I seek this freedom for myself, no term appeals to me more than homemade religion. This is why I’ve always gravitated toward mystics and outsider artists, anyone who avoids religious dogma and hierarchies of power without giving up on the possibility of the divine and the miraculous. It’s also why I remain committed to writing, the most homemade of all art forms, created not on sets or in studios but at cluttered desks and kitchen tables, no matter how much its horizon of external opportunity narrows. Whereas once I’d imagined myself climbing upward, dreaming of fame and fortune at the heights of a stable culture, now I see myself descending into the basement to tinker with that culture’s broken pieces in hopes of teasing out whatever meaning they still contain.
Mikhail Bakhtin, discussing the carnivalesque and the Feast of Fools in Rabelais and His World (1965), showed that the carnival left the town square after the Reformation diminished the public power of the Catholic Church, replacing it with the private power of Protestant study, reflection, and, most importantly, art. Since then—and never more so than now, if we really are in a new Reformation—it has fallen to artists to keep the power of the carnival alive. Homemade rituals in an era that has given up on official ones partake of culture in the deepest sense, stirring the seeds that keep it alive and opposing its tendency to clot and harden into a fixed set of rules rather than a fluid set of practices.
This brings us back to seediness and decadence one last time. In a modern society that sees no use for the Feast of Fools, or that repurposes it for purely commercial ends, revelatory potential is everywhere. It’s almost too present, like overripe fruit in the jungle, so the challenge is to dispense with obsolete notions of what ritual means without dispensing with the possibility of ritual itself. The mental world of the mid-2020s is neither secular nor religious, but postsecular in a way the world has never quite seen before. For the first time in my life, it feels like the innermost storeroom of culture is open and unguarded, and thus the possibility of genuinely remaking it—of not just reenacting or rediscovering lost ideas, but of actually reworking the fundamental materials of reality—is at hand. In the 1920s, another famously decadent age, Faulkner said he wanted to write as if the ink in the Old Testament still wasn’t dry, as if the “begats” in Genesis weren’t complete yet, so his characters could take their place directly within the Greatest Story Ever Told, not as latter-day adjuncts to it.
Hubristic or not, the spirit of never letting go of the fundamental things, of never settling into an age where everything’s settled, is the spirit that, despite everything, continues to make America exciting. Many of my stories deal with reenactments and recreations, models and renditions and movie sets, as if the real story were elsewhere, but they always seek out the secret places where the feeling that everything’s been done already, that the past is the only site of real events, breaks down and genuine possibility reemerges, perhaps by accident, fusing the reenactment and that which it’s reenacting into a single event. As I explore the present moment, I can’t be alone in sensing that, for the first time in memory, it might be possible for something to actually happen, overwhelming the barrier between the realm of events and the realm of recollection and interpretation.
Undead Energies
Having entered eternity means that the past is always present, though never as we remember it. Ideas from bygone ages return in undead form, masked and in costume, turned strange by the long journey they’ve undergone to join us at the carnival. Hyde writes that the trickster is sterile: he cannot make new life; like the artist, and like the Demiurge in Schulz’s work, whose job is to ceaselessly rework the corrupted materials of a world that was created in error, the trickster can only tamper with what’s already at hand, drawing connections and teasing out potentials that would otherwise have gone to waste.
Now is a time when all dogmas and pieties have discredited themselves, and the way is open to those willing to improvise and flirt with humiliation and self-destruction, playing with the runoff from the collapse of coherent culture. If the revolutionary understanding of art is that it should provoke real-world actions, violent ones if need be, and the bourgeois understanding of art is that it should make us more able to bear living in a permanently imperfect or “good-enough” world, then the mystical approach is the hope that art can change reality from within, that the world is secondary to the Word, and so it’s in the realm of the Word—down in the moldering basement—where the structure of reality is up for grabs.
I don’t know if this is true, but, as in Pascal’s wager, it feels right to proceed as if it were, as if it actually mattered which imaginary worlds make the journey across the borderlands and into physical space, or which webs of meaning get woven among the insane surplus of images, ideas, and possibilities we have to work with. This is, sadly, a time that requires literature to make meaning from this surplus, and also a time that by and large can’t read. Therefore, the heretical nature of the Demiurge tinkering with the corrupted matter of a botched world will merge with the heretical nature of literature itself, turning the entire process into a kind of shadow-play or dirt-work, deep in the outskirts, beyond the notice of the townspeople.
It’s time to establish a new paradigm out there in the smokey twilight. The next alchemy—the next portal, and the subject to which I want to turn my attention—is to remake reality in a new form, one that makes no attempt to disentangle the levels that have melted together, and no attempt to debunk or to embrace any theory, but merely to accept the raw materials—the toys—we’ve been given, committed to playing in the way only humans can. The spirit of art going forward cannot surrender to the toxicity of this age, nor can it refuse to nurture the life this toxicity contains. After several decades spent with my self as a sentry on the border between inner and outer worlds, I’ve arrived now at a state of homeostasis, one in which inner and outer, fantasy and reality, have merged so completely that the self no longer has a job to do. What work will become possible in its absence?
All systems of thought are self-exculpatory in that they position whoever adopts them as “in the know” and therefore not as a dupe or an unwitting part of the problem—they are designed to protect and bolster the self. Now, therefore, is the time to throw these systems off and live without them, naked and vulnerable, not on the side of good or evil, the past or the future. Free of these categories, in a new era whose shape has not yet hardened, it’s time to embrace being a dupe, a vector of unknown energies, a mouthpiece for alien ideas: one more fool at the Feast, eating all that’s been laid out on the communal table, no matter how sick it makes us. God has abandoned the cabin, but the bottle of Jack and the rotary phone he left behind are funny enough to redeem the ruined world from within. 
[1] In this essay, I will alternate among the terms fair, carnival, and circus, not because I believe them to be interchangeable, but because I want to conjure a realm that contains the associations of all three.
David Leo Rice is the author of the novels Angel House, The New House, The Berlin Wall, and the Dodge City trilogy, as well as the story collections Drifter and The Squimbop Condition. He lives in New York City.
Illustration: Jan Robert Düenweller
