Solutions and Other Problems Read online

  So you go to bed.

  Then later, you’re somewhere.

  Something is happening. An activity of some kind. Dancing, perhaps.

  No big deal. You’ve done this before. You loved it.

  So you’re dancing.

  You’re dancing and dancing and dancing.

  You’re really getting down with it.

  You aren’t scared—you’re having a great time. But suddenly you realize…

  All at once, you understand how ridiculous dancing is.

  You wonder how on earth you missed every single one of the signs for 30 years in a row.

  It’s humiliating; it’s deeply humiliating to enjoy something so obviously absurd for 30 whole years without even coming close to realizing how absurd it is.

  You feel stupid.

  You feel betrayed by yourself and the world.

  You wonder, Why do I love this? Who the fuck came up with this? Did they invent it all at once or was it more of a gradual thing where nobody realized how weird it was getting?

  This line of questioning irreversibly damages the concept of dancing. It’s useless now. You can’t explain it, and you may never be able to do it again without feeling too confused to continue.

  Music goes next. Mostly due to its association with dancing.

  And yeah: I have to admit, I love when it goes BWAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA. I’m fucking crazy about it.

  But that is ridiculous. It is ridiculous to love that. I don’t know what my reasons are, but I know they don’t make sense, and I question whether I should be allowed to feel this way about it.

  After music, it was movies.

  It might’ve been okay if I’d never thought soundtracks seemed normal, but, for my entire life up until the moment I realized how insane they are, I was under the impression that soundtracks make perfect sense, just like everything else in the world.

  Unfortunately, the world doesn’t make sense. It just doesn’t. Not fully, at least. Not if you keep poking it. And poking harder doesn’t do anything. In fact, the harder you poke it, the less sense it makes. And once you start to notice this, it rips through you like a Tasmanian tornado octopus, rending your stupid little sense of meaning apart with its flailing power arms.

  It’s a confusing type of sadness. Real, yet undeniably ridiculous. The same kind of sadness you’d feel after finding out that your mom is a sock puppet.

  You want to go back to the way it was before, and it’s terrifying when you can’t.

  You wonder what the endless aftermath will be like, and what percentage of yourself you lost, and how you’ll survive without it. You question whether it was fair for this to happen, and what can be done from here, and you realize how powerless you are.

  Anyway, that was approximately the state I was in when the serious part started.

  We’re gonna get into it a little. Hopefully not more than necessary. However, due to circumstances both under and beyond my control, there’s a lot of ground to cover. And it isn’t fun ground. I did my best to pare it down, but there’s no way to hide a sprawling tragedy sequence in the exact middle of something.

  So we aren’t going to hide it. Instead, what we will do is insert surprising facts at regular intervals until you become acclimated.

  Here’s the first one now:

  It is now time for the serious part.

  Saying that my health deteriorated would be like describing the sun as large; technically accurate, but it doesn’t really give you a sense of scale.

  There were many symptoms. The main one was that I started spontaneously bleeding to death inside my body.

  When you start spontaneously bleeding to death inside your body, nobody knows what’s happening. You just feel weird and go unconscious, and—

  —and somebody takes you to the emergency room. And the emergency room says “We are very sorry, but we do not know what that is. Did you forget to eat for eight days or something? Or, like… maybe did you drink too much paint? Just tell us. You did something weird, right?”

  That happened a few times.

  Then one time, it happened even more than usual, and they were like, “Oh shit… yeah: you’re bleeding to death…”

  And I said, “Why?”

  And they said, “Who knows. You sure don’t have very much blood left, though…”

  Over the following weeks, they put my body inside a bunch of crazy machines to check out what the fuck kind of practical joke it was trying to pull, and what they found was essentially a tumor fruit salad.

  There was a plum-size mass, a peach-size mass, and a large number of grape-size masses. They estimated there had also been an orange-size mass at one point, but it blew up, and that’s why I almost bled to death inside my body.

  Twelve days later, I underwent a seven-hour surgery at a scary cancer hospital where they inflated my unconscious body like a balloon and hung it upside down by the ankles on a wall table, because apparently that’s what needed to happen before the remotely operated claw robot could scrape out the tumors and remove half a dozen of my real body parts.

  And I’m not trying to be dramatic, but that is an absolutely devastating kind of thing to happen when your philosophical structure is teetering on the brink of collapse.

  It wasn’t cancer.

  But, because of the tumors and the fact that my blood tested positive for something related to cancer, they’d told me it was anywhere from maybe cancer to probably cancer, so I prepared for cancer. I spent the weeks leading up to the surgery doing my earnest best to come to terms with mortality, and I don’t know how far I got, but I tried very hard…

  And I guess it felt a bit silly for that to turn out to be unnecessary. On some level, I think I was hoping for cancer. Because that’s what I prepared for.

  The publicity tour for my first book was scheduled to start a few weeks after the surgery. It was undoubtedly a weird time in my life to do something like that, but it seemed like I could probably handle it, you know?

  After three weeks of that, I was so confused that I canceled Thanksgiving. A month later, I still hadn’t gotten over it, so I canceled Christmas too. Instead of going home to spend time with my family, I played meaningless games against a computer and didn’t get out of bed.

  On New Year’s Eve, my little sister drove her car in front of a train.

  She died instantly.

  We’d always had a strange relationship, and I wasn’t prepared for it to be over. I don’t think either of us understood how much I loved her. It seemed like there’d be enough time to sort it out.

  But we’ll never get to sort it out.

  And I’ll never get to say sorry.

  And I’ll never know why.

  And that feels… really bad. I could go on and on about how bad it feels. When you can explain things to people who are willing to listen to you explain them, it is extremely difficult to resist fully and brutally explaining them. It feels good to explain them—like maybe you’re getting somewhere. Like maybe, if you can just… really explain them, the experiences will realize you’re catching on and stop bothering you.

  It doesn’t work like that, but I still wanted to explain it, just in case—the emptiness, the awkwardness, the sinking reorientation after waking up from dreams. I even kind of wanted to describe the way it looked in my head when I couldn’t stop imagining the train hitting her. And not just describe it—draw it for you. If I’m being honest, what I truly wanted was to draw the whole playlist and show it to you in person so there’d be no possibility that you’d imagine it wrong.

  I wanted to describe how violently my dad hugged me when I came home, and how much he was crying, and how scared I felt when I realized I would need to lead the family. I wasn’t ready to lead the family, but somebody needs to do that, you know? Somebody needs to maintain the family’s image of impunity at the village meetings. And my parents suddenly seemed too lost and small to protect us, so I assumed it had to be me.

  I wanted to describe how frig
htening that was, and how inexplicably out of place I felt at the funeral.

  I tried to keep it together so nobody would notice, and I wanted to explain how difficult it was, and how forcefully the sadness exited my body when I finally broke down during the closing ceremonies.

  A family acquaintance approached us afterward. He said he had some herbs to help with my emotional volatility. I explained that I was just sad about my sister being dead—she used to be alive, see, and now she isn’t anymore, and it just really came through in the last part of the slideshow for me… And he gently pointed out that I’d been crying significantly louder than anybody else, which I felt sort of proud of, but also ashamed of.

  I wanted to really go into detail about how awkward death can be, and describe the lack of closure and how it always just sits there, and the guilt, and the regrets, and which crossing it was, and all my guesses for what her last thoughts might have been, and how I still have dreams about her, but she acts different now.

  From there, I wanted to go on to express how unfair the world is, and how many mistakes it’s possible to make even when you’re trying as hard as you can, and why I made the ones I did, and what they all were. I wanted to also explain what parts weren’t my fault, and tell you the full details of all my medical conditions, and how scared I feel all the time, and how familiar hospitals have become.

  I wanted to explain why my marriage ended, and what I would do differently if I could, and why my parents’ marriage ended, and how cool it is that they’re still friends. And I wanted to ask all the questions I have that nobody can answer because they either don’t have answers, or they have too many answers, or it isn’t even super clear what the question is.

  I wanted to explain all of it.

  The whole thing.

  Her whole life, and my whole life, and life in general.

  But I don’t know how.

  Sometimes all you can really do is keep moving and hope you end up somewhere that makes sense.

  11. THE PILE DOG PART 1

  I moved to Colorado in 2015, and lived alone for a while. No animals, no people–just me. I still knew some animals, but I wasn’t planning to live with them again for quite some time. Then I met Kevin, and Kevin had a dog. Kevin also had three roommates, and one of the roommates had a dog too. So when I moved in with Kevin, I inherited three roommates and two dogs.

  This is about the pile dog.

  Before you get all attached to the pile dog, you should know that the pile dog is dead. She had a disease that made her liver shrivel up, and it wasn’t fair, and there was nothing anybody could do about it. However, we—all of us—should not allow this to prevent us from making fun of her. Dead dogs used to be just as ridiculous as alive dogs, and the pile dog leveraged our sympathy to get away with some particularly bogus shit. She doesn’t get a pass just because she died tragically young from an incurable disease that wasn’t her fault.

  I didn’t intend for mortality to be such a central theme in this, but sometimes death is what happens, and here we are.

  The pile dog was a silly-looking animal. We had to cut eyeholes in her fur so she could see. It made her look way creepier than would be ideal, but you can’t let your dog be blind just because it looks creepy when you can see its eyes.

  To an uninformed observer, her gentle nature and clownish demeanor would have given the impression that this was just some bumbling fool. But, as far as dogs go, the pile dog was basically a criminal mastermind.

  Real fools don’t have plans.

  This dog had plans.

  Not good plans.

  But there was often something she was trying to do that was more involved than not having a plan.

  If we were dogs, she might’ve been able to pull it off.

  But we aren’t dogs.

  Sneaky animals don’t realize how easy it is to tell. They think they’re getting away with it the whole time. And because of that, you get to see a lot more of their plan than you should. You get to see pretty much the whole plan. An animal won’t accept that it’s been caught until you show it irrefutable proof. You have to actually convince the animal. You could be staring at the animal’s entire plan unfolding in full view of you, the animal, god, and the FBI, and the animal will still be like, heh heh… they do not suspect I am the one who is doing this…

  One time I dropped some chips on the ground, and the pile dog lunged for them. I saw her do this. The instant we made eye contact, she froze.

  She knew that what she was doing was wrong.

  And she saw me see her doing it.

  She hovered above the chips, completely motionless, staring directly at me for quite a while. I assume this was to prevent me from noticing her while she came up with a plan for how to spin this.

  Here’s the angle she went with:

  That’s a plan. A plan for deception. Anyone could look at that and tell exactly what it is. It is absolutely, undeniably a plan. It’s just really far away from working.

  That’s just one example of the mischief she was capable of. The pile dog had all kinds of tricks and schemes up her sleeves, and she wasn’t afraid to shoot for the moon.

  To get an idea of what I’m talking about when I say “wasn’t afraid to shoot for the moon,” let’s say you love walking back and forth on the only strip of linoleum in an otherwise carpeted apartment. But, every time you do that, everybody somehow figures out what you’re doing and stops you. And this has happened at least four hundred times. Every single one of the four hundred times you’ve done this, somebody or everybody immediately sensed it was happening and told you to stop.

  Also, you are not invisible or capable of levitating.

  If those were the odds you were up against, you probably wouldn’t think there’d be a way to get away with it. And there isn’t. But there are things you can try. Like, for example, after you get caught, wait for them to stop paying attention and veerrr-rrrryyyyyy slooooooooowlyyyyy sneak away to start doing it again.

  If I had to pinpoint the main problem with that strategy, it’d probably be that no matter how sneaky you are about going into the kitchen, it’s pretty difficult to hide the fact that there’s a 50-pound animal with sixteen toenails walking laps on a plastic surface merely four feet behind us. That’s the exact reason we wanted her to stop in the first place. If she could walk around without anyone noticing, that would’ve been amazing. But there were at least two very obvious ways to trace it back to her… I mean, how did she think it was going to work?

  But do not be tempted to assume the pile dog’s repertoire was limited—it wasn’t. I know this because I once saw her cycle through every single thing she knew how to do in a row. It took over half an hour. And I know it was all of them because carrots were involved, and her level of desperation was well past the cutoff where you’d be like, “Yeah, I tried 599 of the 600 things I know how to do and none of them worked, but I think I’m gonna keep this last one for later…”

  It was a catastrophic lapse in restraint. She wanted those carrots too bad. All we had to do was withhold them, and her entire arsenal came tumbling out in a symphony of futility.

  The further it went, the more the sequences started to resemble magic spells. We saw the whole lineup of persuasion techniques, deception maneuvers, and mind-control chaos, and after that… well, where else is there to really go besides sorcery?

  The schemes I’m describing are highly convoluted, yes, but do not worry: we always knew we were being tricked.

  It probably made us seem like mind readers.

  I don’t believe in heaven, but there are a lot of nice things about the idea. Personally, I’d be most excited about finally knowing all the stats and behind-the-scenes info. You’d get to find out what you were right about and wrong about and all your personal records.

  I have no doubt the pile dog would feel proud of herself if she found out she probably got the closest any dog ever has to legitimately tricking somebody. Yeah, it wasn’t very close at all, and the sheer for
ce of the effort looked absurd, but I’m sure there was like half a second at some point where we almost got kind of close to a little bit falling for it.

  And that’s pretty fucking good for a pile animal with a shriveled liver and no eyes.

  12. THE PILE DOG PART 2

  When I implied the pile dog never tricked anybody, I only meant it in the strictest sense: she never successfully deceived anyone as the result of a purposeful action.

  But she did confuse a lot of people.

  One symptom of end-stage liver disease is a distended stomach. Fluid builds up in the abdomen, and it keeps going like that, and pretty soon your dog looks nineteen months pregnant.

  You can manage it for a while, but the procedure eventually stops working, and your dog just has to stay like that.