Three things I read this week

Theft of Fire and John Updike's short essay on beer cans

My dog and I made it back to America! She survived the 26-hour plane ride without a hiccup. Dogs are resilient like that, I suppose. I’m so happy that she’s fine and I’m glad to see her already enjoying the perks of being in non-Asia. The primary benefits being lots of love from family, and running around my Dad’s large property; chasing deer and trying to figure out what the hell a fox is. So many new sights and smells!

In other news, I didn’t read anything this week. Literally nothing. I’m moving into an apartment and had to furnish the entire place. The results have been satisfactory, but all that purchasing of secondhand furniture left me no time to indulge in the mental stimulation. So… This week’s edition will be shorter. Primarily it’s a review of Theft of Fire that I’ve been working on for almost a month. I loved this book and wanted to share a portion of its magic with you.

Also, this may not meaningfully affect your life, but my new writing space is the luxury of billionaires compared to what I had in Bali. I’m not saying a fancy new setup will make me into the next Saul Bellow, but I’m not not saying that either.

Out with the old

In with the new

1 - A beer can

John Updike’s essay, Beer can.

This seems to be an era of gratuitous inventions and negative improvements. Consider the beer can. It was beautiful—as beautiful as the clothespin, as inevitable as the wine bottle, as dignified and reassuring as the fire hydrant. A tranquil cylinder of delightfully resonant metal, it could be opened in an instant, requiring only the application of a handy gadget freely dispensed by every grocer. Who can forget the small, symmetrical thrill of those two triangular punctures, the dainty pfff, the little crest of suds that foamed eagerly in the exultation of release?

Now we are given, instead, a top beetling with an ugly, shmoo-shaped tab, which, after fiercely resisting the tugging, bleeding fingers of the thirsty man, threatens his lips with a dangerous and hideous hole. However, we have discovered a way to thwart Progress, usually so unthwartable. Turn the beer can upside down and open the bottom. The bottom is still the way the top used to be.

True, this operation gives the beer an unsettling jolt, and the sight of a consistently inverted beer can might make people edgy, not to say queasy. But the latter difficulty could be eliminated if manufacturers would design cans that looked the same whichever end was up, like playing cards. What we need is progress with an escape hatch.

2 - Theft of Fire

A few years back I took a trip to the Philippines with my sister. Swayed by the recommendation of another hostel guest we ended up in NAME REDACTED, an idyllic town built around a beautiful U-shaped bay. Ballads have been composed about places with this much splendor, but it would seem that they’re published abroad because the dearth of reading material in our tropical paradise was maddening.

The only thing I could lay my hands on was a book about a woman rowing a boat down the Nile and complaining about the patriarchy, and lots of romance novels. Piles and piles of romance novels, abandoned at our guest house like newborns at the orphanarium. On principle, I stared at the ceiling rather than risk my manhood in that fray of undulating emotions and unsheathed cocks.

A beautiful but bookless town

Not a fan of love stories, clearly. And yet… Maybe I’m not a cold-hearted monster after all because Theft of Fire, although nominally sci-fi in genre, is in the final reckoning a romance novel and I cherished this book like a brand new car. Theft integrates space, physics, AI, a gorgeous woman, nuclear missiles, genetic engineering, rapacious corporations, asteroid mining, zero gravity, nepotism and alien technology so cleverly that the romance slides in under the radar. I didn’t realize what was happening until I had a flash of insight and though, holy fuck, these two characters better hook up or else I’m going to be seriously pissed. So blatantly did I identify with the protagonist that I wanted to swap places with him. Take his life, have his opportunity to love a gorgeous human of the opposite sex.

Last week I wrote that, in aggregate, I don’t think my best years are behind me. However, I do worry that my best love might already be in the past. Her name was Joanna, a strikingly beautiful, ungodly stubborn, chain-smoking, beer fiending, crass speaking, Asian food hating, Rick and Morty loving, independent thinking Dutch girl and she was the love of my life. We moved in together (started sharing beds at hostels) ten days after meeting and the six months we spent in each other’s company was debauchery, sin, cheap beer, motorcycle adventures and so many Long Island iced teas because they have twice as much booze for the same price. Traveling can be intense, and we cycled through several years of emotion in just a few months. However, there came a point of overload when it all became too much for me.

Joanna at happy hour. Beer, the foundation of any healthy relationship

The day I broke up with Joanna was maybe the worst three hours of my life, but I was falling apart and had to get out. Our relationship was anchored on alcoholism, and after six months I just could do it anymore. I felt like if I drank one more Chang I was going to lose my mind. After returning to America I didn’t touch the devil’s elixir for the next six months.

Could our relationship have worked? I still love her, I’ll never not love her. But we brought out the worst in each other. In a relationship there should be one person less debauched than the other, but with Joanna it was like we were racing each other to the bottom. And then she was Dutch, too. That made it hard, to be in love with someone from a foreign country. Logistically speaking.

I’ve dated other women since her but none of them have made me feel like she did. That chick was freaking nuts! I loved her dearly. If we’d gotten married I think we would have destroyed each other, but logic is of little import to what the heart responds to.

So.

The book.

Theft of Fire made me think about Joanna and if I’ll ever have a chance to love someone that much again. I hope it happens, but it’s not something you can just will into existence either. It either will come to pass, or it won’t.

---

Many of you are probably already familiar with John Carter and his premium quality Substack: Postcards from Barsoom. Why is his Substack called that? You could find out with a Google search, but a far more elegant solution would be to read Theft of Fire. That will answer your question, and take you for a journey along the way.

John’s review of Theft (that’s where I learned of this literary treasure) helped me to understand a dynamic that I hadn’t identified on my own. Marcus, our space miner protagonist, isn’t naive about women in the way that men have been naive about women since the dawn of time. Marcus is, well, I’ll let John explain it.

Marcus is the alienated, beaten down modern man: worried he isn’t half the man his father was, struggling with guilt for the things he’s done, struggling to avoid taking responsibility for the choices he’s made, angry at a relentlessly hostile world and deeply suspicious of the cold and unsympathetic powers who rule it. He’s the downwardly mobile, terminally online gymcel with a statue pfp.

Today’s young men, raised on porn and Instagram, may be some of the most femaically out of touch guys in human history. The youthlings don’t go on dates, talk to women at bars, or get laid. In Japan a quarter of all people under forty are virgins, and the proportion of perma-fappers in the West isn’t much better.

This is double plus bad. A day is made richer when you wake up in the morning your shoulder pressed against the soft skin of the girl you love. Her body is warm, her hair haphazard on the pillow. You’re lost in reverie for full minutes until you glance down and realize that she’s looking at you. She smiles, a subtle lift at both ends of the lips, and says hey. No porn from the filthiest dungeon’s of the internet’s blackest corners will ever replicate this intimacy. The moment as you’re falling asleep and the last thing you realize is that your breathing is in sync. These mammalian joys cannot be commodified.

Solutions? Nuke the data centers. Export Zuckerschmuck to a Siberian work camp. Dig up Steve Jobs and charge his corpse with war crimes for unleashing the iPhone on an unsuspecting world. Seriously though, I don’t know how you get young people to start dating again. Maybe no top-down policy can solve it? Maybe a groundswell awakening, a ritualistic casting of the cellphone into the fire in towns all across the world, is the only hope. One person at a time, finally saying ENOUGH to the “social” networks and getting their ass down to the bar to see what’s going on in the real world.

In any event, Theft of Fire was excellent. The emotional toboggan ride I didn’t know I needed but am so glad I took.

If you enjoy reading these posts I’d love it if you took a second to share this writing with someone who you think would enjoy it.