Featured image: “Cloud Study,” by Jervis McEntee, Morris K. Jesup Fund, 1982

On Saturdays my dad had a Miller Lite, which sat on the woodpile while he split logs. He ordered split logs to be delivered and then split them further, stacking them on pallets while listening to the Red Sox on a transistor radio. All winter he lugged in wood and stamped the snow off his boots at the door. All winter I hovered two inches in front of the woodstove because the house was so cold. I stood there burning my pants and reading.

I am always cold, so perfectly unfit for winter sports, but skiing was one of several skills I’m unsuited for that my parents required I be proficient in. I only liked the lifts, and wished that instead of getting off at the top I could whip around the bull wheel and loop up and down the mountain all day. On a school-sponsored ski trip to Vermont, we worked around our same-sex hotel rooms by taking to the halls, where I remember sitting on the floor playing a card game whose appeal was the yelling of a swear word. We were trying to annoy the cruising teachers, but didn’t want to get in actual trouble, so we’d yell, “Bolshevik!” instead, which we thought was hysterical.

When the Romanovs were shot in a Siberian basement in 1918 bullets ricocheted off the diamonds they’d sewn into their clothes. The soldiers had to finish them off with bayonets. Not only can you not take it with you, but what doesn’t kill you might lead to something worse. I remember my mother crying and crawling around near the woodpile, palpating the ground in search of the diamond that had fallen from her engagement ring. I don’t know if she was upset about the material or sentimental value, but she never found it.

*

When I was a kid I read the books on my bedroom shelf over and over: A Wrinkle in Time, Rebecca, Jane Eyre, and Sweet Valley High #7, in which Elizabeth sustains a head injury and starts acting wild like her twin sister, Jessica. I liked books about risky teen behaviors, which sometimes taught me how to do the things they were warning against. I learned how to make myself throw up from a library book. I learned about the art and importance of tanning. Through my adolescent summers I fried my fair skin into a reluctant tan and now I have sun damage.

For about two years in my late twenties I watched back-to-back reruns of The Nanny every day after work. Over time, I let a few people in on my dirty secret, perhaps in an effort to take the edge off my perceived gravitas, but I might be misremembering either how I thought people saw me or how I was. When Rusty and I got engaged, I enlisted some work friends to throw me a small cocktail party in order to preempt my other, malicious friend from throwing me a bachelorette party with a penis cake, which I knew she’d do just because I’d hate it. At the cocktail party, I was made to answer quiz questions about The Nanny in a bridal shame game that was much more painful than the penis cake would have been.

I keep my shame close, like diamonds in my clothes. To deflect or be buried with.

*

There is an eddy of writing about D. W. Winnicott by women lately, especially about the idea of the “good enough mother,” of whose use I am uncertain and of its liberatory appearance suspicious. My shallow research on the term’s meaning reveals that it’s a trick—a good enough mother is one so perfectly attuned to her child and its needs that she knows when it’s time to draw back and let it suffer a bit. If a mother either tends too closely to her child after a certain arbitrary point, or before that fails to create a closed loop of flesh and feeling with her baby, then she is not good enough at being good enough.

Sometimes I think that not art but the idea of it might finally be played out, and yet here I am still writing about it.

There is also much recent writing about choosing not to have children, regret at having had children and about hatred of the state of motherhood (those last two things being not at all the same, in my experience). There is writing about failing to have had children and about succeeding at never having wanted them.

According to Winnicott, sustaining your child’s illusion of complete wish fulfillment early on is essential to their developing a healthy relationship to the ups and downs of real life later.

Maggie lands on a purple Candy Land square and asks me what’s the difference between violet and purple. I tell her there isn’t one and I’m pretty sure I’m wrong, but while the difference between illusion and reality is everything, the category of “everything” includes itself.

*

Ovid said, “Everything changes, nothing is lost” of humans and our vicissitudes. Isaac Newton said the same thing, but of the universe. I don’t worry about loss so much as indistinctness, and while I try to ignore my mixed-up middle, I need to know where I begin and end—parents, children, paper, world, the eyes, the heart, or the head?

I once climbed what’s known as the First Dune of the Sahara, even though there must be first dunes all around the desert’s edge.

I saw Weezer perform a flawless one-to-one rendition of the 1982 Toto hit “Africa” on TV. I looked up the music video, which has Weird Al Yankovic playing Weezer’s lead singer in a flawless recreation of the video for the band’s 1994 hit “The Sweater Song,” only he’s dressed like Buddy Holly from their other hit song. This kind of approprio-ventriloquist art trick is ingrained in my generation’s ethos. As I write this, I’m thinking surely there’s an artist right now making flawless knockoffs of famous original artworks and selling them for either a mint or a song, and then there he is, in tomorrow’s paper.

(“Original” means the first or only instance, which can be opposites.)

A famous trickster artist rigged his painting to self-destruct upon its recent sale. The self-destruction then became the artwork and the subject of copyright, which I’ve possibly violated simply by not naming the artist. Has the idea of art condensed to an ultimate state of self-annihilation? Sometimes I think that not art but the idea of it might finally be played out, and yet here I am still writing about it.

*

I started reading “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction” to see if it holds up—holds up not from 1935 when Walter Benjamin wrote it, but from when I first read it around 1993. He says that before industrial reproduction each thing was only itself, i.e., that the fact of authenticity has been replaced by its concept, like the dodo was traded for the idea of its extinction. This contradicts my sense that concepts are always already in the world for us to find and identify—that before Gutenberg and his printing press, authenticity was just waiting around for something to adhere to it. Surely there are more concepts hiding out there like still-undiscovered species, of which biologists say there are many, even as great swaths of others are dying off.

Benjamin says that a painstakingly hand-copied version of an early manuscript was no less authentic than the original. A painstakingly hand-painted copy of an Old Master is different because it’s one of two more kinds of art tricks—forgery, which is a lie, or a send-up of authenticity, the idea of which, rather than the object itself, is the essence of the artwork and whose point is to reveal the complications of art valuation. Of these two art tricks, I think the lie is now the more authentic one. The other’s been worn to a nub.

In 2001, Rusty and I got on a large jet bound for New Zealand, and when it stopped in Tonga to refuel, we were the only ones who got off the plane. In the town on the main island we’d booked a room at the sole hotel, which was a chipped blue cinder-block structure with a drained pool and spotty electricity. We were all alone except for an older couple whose son had won a weeklong stay at this place by holding his tongue out the longest on a British TV game show. They were miserable. At the time I felt superior, but now I know better. (I am the dodo.)

*

The last song at middle-school dances was always “Stairway to Heaven.” Its collage of many tempos presented challenges that you and your partner had to silently negotiate—let go of one another and rock out or continue slow dancing awkwardly at the original rate? It was said that if you played the track backward it contained a satanic message, which was a real apparent problem at the time. Dan Rather played backmasked music clips on the evening news. Worries over subliminal messaging seemed to relieve parents of the onus to deliver actual messaging, while the real hell was happening in the back of the school bus, where I once saw someone dared to eat an onion like an apple. (He threw up.)

(“Apparent” means both obvious and only in appearance, which can be the same or opposites.)

Ferdinand de Saussure blew me away in college. The difference between “cat” and a cat and the cat gently pried the world apart like layers of delicate pastry, asking, if words aren’t actually attached to the things they refer to, then what is or happens in the space between?

If you search your own name incognito from different VPN addresses too many times in too short a period, you are mistaken for a robot and asked to select images containing particular traffic-related elements from a grid of blurry photos in order to prove yourself human. But while crosswalks are obvious in the foreground, it’s impossible to see them back where the vanishing lines of the street almost meet. And rumble strips, striped-out no-parking zones—how do you know if the computer thinks these are crosswalks or not? Is it tricked or trying to trick me?

Th