L9: Either/Or
Hi,
Bullet points:
I found out last Sunday that Miss Misery won Best Script, Best Actress (Aley Waterman), and Best Supporting Actress (Jade Blair) at the 2020 British Web Awards. I mentioned in my last letter it’d been accepted to a few festivals. In the last few months it’s been accepted to a few more, and nominated for Best Dramedy at the Baltimore Next Media Web Fest, Best Cast and Best Actress at the Rio Webfest, and become an official selection and the Asia Web Awards. The full season is on YouTube here. IG.
Since I last wrote, Substack has gained some steam and even controversy?? I.e. one (1) high profile journalist joined, there was a rumor Twitter was going to buy it, and some people wrote about it. Just so we’re all on the same page about… Substack.
Two Thursdays ago was my birthday. I’m 38.
I’m always a little nervous before I send these out. If you don’t want to keep receiving them, please do unsubscribe. I don’t want to impose on anyone’s inbox.
So: it occurs to me I should tell you where I’m writing from in addition to where and when I’m writing about, as these things can differ. Right now I’m writing from my friend Tim’s living room in Hampstead, London. (This is the same Tim from L1, all the way back in Oct 2019.) It is Sunday morning, or, early afternoon, which passes for morning for me, because I essentially live on EST. When I got up, Tim was in the white molded plastic chair under the large window that is part of the wall of windows at the back of the living room that looks out onto his garden, which has blackberries and huge leaves and little spiky plants and some yellow. On a stand beside Tim was his new ReMarkable 2, which he likes, has been waiting a long time for a write-on-able tablet to be this good, and on his MacBook Air he was watching a new episode of Rick & Morty, which is unusual for him, as he doesn’t watch much TV. However, his team at work recently finished a 2-year project, and I think he’s feeling like he can take a breather. He works for DeepMind, which was in the news this past week because they solved “the protein-folding problem,” which goes back to the 1950s and is apparently a very big deal in science and which I will let you Google yourself if you’re interested. It’s significant enough that Venkatesh Rao, in his newsletter last night, identified it as something that could help push us into a post-scarcity society. This was not, however, Tim’s project (his was a small step towards “GTP-3 but embodied.”). Anyway—it’s Sunday morning. If I look up, I can see myself in the full-length mirror on the floor beside the shelf that holds the record player and the Angel Olsen LP and several plants. I’m sitting on the couch in my 94% polyester/6% Spandex jogging pants and wool sweater. My face is more blemished than it usually is, and I’m a bit fatter than normal. With my bushy COVID hair, I look a little like an aging hockey player, which I suppose is what I am. COVID grooming aside, this is pretty nice for a couple of guys from Joyceville, ON (Tim), and Glenburnie, ON (me). In the living room it smells like squash, or sweet potatoes, or something, because of whatever Tim has in the oven. This is some kind of weekend thing—food prep, or just time enough to do it. I’ll ask Tim what’s in the oven when I’m done writing, but for now I just want to preserve the snapshot.
So that’s where I’m writing from. Where I’m writing about is Grünnerløkka, a neighborhood in Oslo, and when is the two months from mid-July to mid-September. But I’m thinking about that period, and my current period, through the lens of a short story I was turning over in my mind last year but never got around to writing. That story was called “Crossroads.”
I was imagining “Crossroads” as a story about people in their mid-30s trying to figure out their lives, anxious and frantic and temporary, feeling like they’d never accomplished anything and their lives hadn’t even really started and every year it felt like they were closer to too late, and yet still being young enough to give a shit and have the energy to throw themselves into something, if they could only figure out what or where to throw.
I first started thinking about something like this at the beginning of the year, last year, in January, when I was squatting in a vacant dorm room in Union Theological Seminary, in New York, where I would strip the bedding off the mattress every morning and put it in the closet, and pack up all my things and stuff them in my suitcase, which I would leave upright at an intentionally haphazard angle, to give the impression to anyone who might pop their head in while I was out during the day—I didn’t have a key to the door, so it was always unlocked—that someone was about to move in, and had just left their suitcase there, temporarily. I remember specifically thinking about this story as I scooted through Union’s broad corridors, cavernous and ill-lit, on my way to the printer or the piano, trying my best to do an impression of a graduate student.
I would think about “Crossroads” throughout the spring and summer of 2019 when I talked with some my friends in their mid-30s. My friend Alex in Toronto was in and out of working on adapting an old play of hers into a screenplay and struggling with her relationship to being an artist. Sally, in Tucson, was dealing with the breakup of a decade-long relationship, and pretty deep into some confusing new feelings about gender and sexuality. Brad, also in Toronto, came to New York for a reading and slept on my couch (it was June and I was then living in an apartment in Crown Heights) and on our walk home together one night said he was totally confused about where to live and what to do and “it seemed like there was no place in the world for him.” And Ashley, who I was hanging out with weekly in New York, had just finished 8 straight years of grad school (4 at Alabama, where we met, and then 4 at Union), and had been sick for a large part of her time in New York, and was being pulled, on one side, towards the (relative!) safety of an academic career path, which would probably relocate her, versus staying in New York and cobbling together some kind of freelancer income and, finally, taking some time to explore the city—a few days after she graduated we had a really memorable cinematic walk through a noisy, colorful, crowded Brooklyn afternoon, squeezing through a procession of Hasidic Jews with their hats and payot and landing in a little Italian pizza/sandwich shop where Ashley, giddy and laughing and a spiritual freethinker who’d just emerged from one of the most rigorous theological trainings in the country, was like “so this is what people do? You just go to a place and get a piece of pizza?”
I was thinking of “Crossroads” around July 31, when I sent my last letter, “L8.” That letter detailed my life in Fornebu. But when I wrote it, I was living in downtown Oslo, in an apartment in a neighborhood called Grünnerløkka. And already, even by being there, I was edging out toward a fork in my life, or maybe several forks. Because Grünnerløkka was only ever supposed to be a temporary solution and so was genetically a dilemma. The house Hanna and I had been in in Fornebu, owned by Hanna’s cousin, was finally being put on the market, and we had to vacate. I had been talking with Tim all summer about staying in London for a while again, having assumed that’s where I’d be after what I thought would be a 6-week stay in Oslo, but since I was still allowed to be in Norway indefinitely due to a temporary COVID visa relaxation, I thought I would. The Grünnerløkka apartment was something Hanna had chosen to move into with her friend, Karolina, and I was being allowed to stay there for a bit.
Two weeks before L8, mid-July, I’d visited this new apartment, to drop my stuff off. It was empty, the previous tenants had cleared out, and I was alone, I’m not sure why—Hanna and I on slightly different schedules. It was a beautiful, spacious, high-ceiling, hardwood-floor apartment. Rent comparable to Toronto or New York prices, but it would be three of us splitting it: me and Hanna and Hanna’s friend Karolina. A week earlier, I had applied for Juno’s web development bootcamp. Two days earlier I learned I was accepted to it. The pre-bootcamp courses would start mid-September. I was having feelings about moving away from Fornebu and also about starting bootcamp, which I felt on some level would inevitably lead to a renunciation of my life as a writer. It was about 4 p.m. I was sitting on the floor of this empty apartment, with my back against the wall, alone, looking out the fifth-floor windows at the tops of Neo-Classical late-1800s Hausmanian apartment buildings that are what most people live in in Western European capitals. The apartment was on Kirkegårdsgata, or Kirkegård’s Gate—gate here meaning, like, street. Kirkegård phonetically starts with a sound like an H, and means church yard, which means cemetery, and is also the Norwegian spelling of the surname of the Danish philosopher who wrote under a multiplicity of pseudonyms and used the Bible to explore the patterns of thought we now call existentialism.
I lived in that two bedroom apartment on Kirkegårdsgata for two months. It was a very nice time of my life. I had been accepted to bootcamp, so my immediate future was mapped. I shared a room with Hanna, who had started working for the municipality 9-5, and somewhere in the education ministry in one of the few divisions that, for better or worse, was carrying on more or less as though COVID wasn’t happening (cases were still very low in Norway at this time), and so she rode the train to work every morning. I got up and ate muesli on the kitchen windowsill, with a view of a gorgeous cobblestone plaza called Rathkes plass—a fountain surrounded by benches and cafés (which for Oslo is just an intersection), and scrolled Twitter for, if I’m honest, about an hour. I then went into the living room and wrote for a few hours, made lunch, and wrote for another few hours. At about 4 p.m. I went for a jog, and when I returned Hanna would be home from work and chatting with Karolina in the living room. I would say hi and get into the shower, and then I would usually join the women in the living room, or sometimes go into the bedroom and catch up on emails. 3 out of 5 weekdays Karolina would also work from home during the day, which was excellent for keeping me on task. Karolina sat at the little desk that also served as our dinner table; I sat on the couch and worked off the coffee table. Our lunches sometimes aligned, and sometimes didn’t.
My life in downtown Oslo was little more than this. One time I went, with Hanna, inside an actual store, to buy the same pair of expensive noise-canceling Sony headphones. They were wildly outside my budget but I thought of it as an “investment” for bootcamp. While we were there, we ran into a guy, Knut, who Hanna knew, and who I had met at the king’s milkmaid’s party I described in my last letter. When we ran into him, I thought, it’s funny how quickly you can surmise a guy’s vibe. Knut radiated this cool, skeptical air, and when I found out he was an adult skateboarder and had a modern dancer girlfriend, I was like, yeah, I know.
That’s it, that’s the whole story, for me, of Grünnerløkka. Once, in an electronics aisle of Norway’s Best Buy, I ran into someone I had met previously, once.
Or—you know—it’s not the whole story, but it’s maybe about as much as I think I can get into in this letter. Although I guess I could also mention the time Hanna and I bought dumplings from an enormous app-powered food court and ate them on a grassy slope; I could mention the time I bought produce at a large, packed Middle Eastern groceries store with narrow aisles while wearing a mask and my new headphones, slightly high; I could talk about reading the wonderful obituary of Brad’s aunt in the slightly too-small bed in the Kirkegårdsgata apartment in that weirdly shaped bedroom, written with so much love and devotion by her bereaved husband; I could include the time Hanna and I paused on a walk and leaned against a railing under a very large branch of a leaning tree that leaned over a bar-light-reflecting canal and listened to the guitar music of a somewhat famous Norwegian priest whose songs were apparently often sprinkled with uncomfortably sexual innuendo; and I could say that more than once Hanna and I went back to the grassy slope.
And maybe—one last thing—I could mention that the day before I left Oslo I went to the wedding of one of Hanna’s cousins, and a week before the wedding Hanna and I went over to Knut and Sigrid’s place, and I borrowed a suit from Knut. And, in his apartment, in his home, I thought, maybe you can’t instantly surmise a guy, because Knut was very warm and welcoming and gave me two different suit options to try on. A second later we realized Hanna’s cousin’s wedding was on the same day as some event of Knut’s, so I only had one option, but that was fine—I went into Knut’s bedroom and tried his suit on, and came out a minute later in this loose boxy jacket and these silky pleated pants that were too big for me. All was deemed acceptable, and then, with me still in this funny, baggy suit, we all hung out in the living room for a bit. Like any man should, Knut explained the contents of his living room table, which boasted the vivisected components of about one and a half DSLR cameras, lenses and tiny screws and a very thin mirror, plus some tools in a little leather case. Sigrid, Knut’s dancer girlfriend, sat on some kind of rocking horse chair and radiated friendliness from her boulder-like cheekbones and chatted with Hanna. Like Hanna and me in Fornebu, Sigrid and Knut also had a half-completed jigsaw puzzle on their table, and they talked about cooking with an intensity and depth I am guessing, like me and many people I know, they hadn’t had before this year. I’m guessing, too, that, like everyone, they hadn’t had many people over all year. They seemed happy to have us there, and it seemed like for them, as for me, it was exciting just to be in the same room as a new person. Knut went into another room for a minute to get another camera to show me, and it occurred to me how good it felt to be here, to be in this new world, which had been running parallel to my own life this whole time, a few blocks away, and was so strikingly familiar.
There are other things to say, of course. But what can be said right now is that, all else aside, I couldn’t stay in Kierkegaard’s Gate forever. The choice in front of me was between going to London to live with Tim, or renting a one-bedroom AirBnb in Oslo. Ironically enough in the end my choice would barely matter, because Norway un-relaxed their visa regulations less than a week before my scheduled flight and I would’ve had to leave the country that week anyway, but at the time I thought my fate was up to me. I don’t know enough Kierkegaard to know if that irony is resonant with his work, but it certainly seems like something one of those guys would talk about. Anyway, when I thought that, when I thought my choice was between London and Oslo, I came to London.