I was at the library, pretending to write. The man at the table across from me was on a Zoom call, and he was loud. Pushing fifty and sunburnt. Fancy haircut in a pink polo and khakis. He brayed into his laptop about quarterlies and metrics and clickthrough rates.

Hearing half of a conversation hijacks the brain: it struggles to fill in the gaps so it can file away the voices as background noise. But it can’t. Or at least mine can’t.

So I became convinced this sunburn with teeth was the avatar of the utter lack of care or even bare-minimum awareness of other human beings that has poisoned public life. This was the antichrist, I thought. Yes, this man was what the end of civilization looked like.

I decided to say something. But first, I needed to make sure the people were with me. A woman two tables away nodded in the man’s direction and rolled her eyes. Good enough. I was ready to stand up. Tell him to knock it off. The muscle fibers in my thighs twitched, about to rise.

Then a child appeared.

I don’t know anything about children, but this one was three feet tall, and I think it was a girl, although it was difficult to say because a bandage was wrapped around her bald head and her skin was grey save for the purple rings under her eyes. She wore a gown with a chunk cut out to accommodate a machine that sent tubes into her nose, and she cradled an armful of books as she toddled up to the antichrist’s table, grinning so wide it made me smile too. “Daddy, look at all the cool books I found!”

I hung my head, and when I looked up again, the antichrist had become a saint. An exhausted father just trying to do his job while looking after his sick kid.

I thanked something I don’t quite believe in for saving me from myself and sparing that child from a scene of me haranguing her dad about civility. I made a promise to do my best to treat everyone as if they're dealing with something heavy. Because they are.

But it’s hard. Hating that man was easy. I enjoyed it. I could have turned up the volume on my music and focused on my work. Instead, I removed my headphones to be more fully annoyed. Why?

Because righteousness feels good. Righteousness is intoxicating, oftentimes addictive, because it provides a sense of purpose, even when its premise is false. And this is far more likely to lead us to societal collapse than some middle manager on a Zoom call at the library.

The television mumbled in the background, and we followed along as the eclipse passed through Mazatlan, Dallas, Little Rock, and Indianapolis. When our turn came, we stood on a ridge by the river and watched the moon chip away at the sun. A lone helicopter crossed the sky. The temperature dropped. The light turned silvery and dim with crisp strange shadows. Dogs barked. Birds stopped chirping.

Darkness fell quickly from the north, bringing a staggering kind of stillness. For ninety seconds, the eclipse was total, and I stood beneath it feeling a giddy sense of slippage, a perceptual freefall that edged toward the frightening. The television had not prepared me for this.

Although I was grateful for the brief fellowship when everyone across a troubled hemisphere was momentarily joined by the sun and moon, broadcasting their experiences in real-time, I tried to imagine what it must have felt like to encounter such a chaotic sky in ancient times, bewildered and alone. As daylight returned, I understood why the first rituals were performed to ensure the sun would rise each morning, and I wondered what the last ritual might be.

The time changed yesterday and nefarious forces are afoot, delivering personal setbacks, professional disappointments, and hard forks in the road. Also, a favorite character on a TV show died (if you're watching Tokyo Vice, then you know) and my speakers refuse to connect to my device. In times like these, I’m grateful for my little altar, where I practice my meditations each morning and night (except Saturdays). “All of humanity’s problems stem from man’s inability to sit quietly in a room alone,” wrote Pascal back in 1654. It remains a struggle. I fidget and sigh and glance greedily at the clock. But they say there’s no such thing as good meditation or bad meditation; there is only meditation. The same might apply to running; I’m not sure if it can be said for writing and design.

Inventory of my altar:

1) a patch of fake IKEAN grass because synthetic nature tickles some pleasure center I can’t quite describe (although I’ve tried). I find it very reassuring.

2) a small brass Buddha that came from god only knows. I found it rattling around a cardboard box seven years ago when moving from New Orleans.

3) a Charity Island “round stone” that delighted my grandfather, who enjoyed telling long geological stories while we stood in the cold by Saginaw Bay.

4) a chess piece my father carved after one went missing in Wisconsin because chess was serious business for us while we waited for a lung.

5) a Garry Winogrand photo that captures the joyful lunatic energy I’d like to bring to the new thing I’m writing.

6) a Glade lemon + bergamot mist diffuser that smells like a fancy hotel lobby. Available for $12 at Target.

7) a handy visual timer purchased after reading Jack Cheng’s newsletter. (I spent ages dithering between Fern Green and Pale Shale before choosing the green because it matches my fake grass.)

I share this because I'm fascinated by the totems and rituals of others. At my Thursday night philosophy book club, there’s a gentle old Catholic who likes to say, “God can’t give us happiness, so he gives us habit.”

The muscle memory of New York is durable. Hopped on the G train and spent the weekend in my old neighborhood, where I expected to get misty-eyed while a montage of memories played in my head. But as I stood before my old building on India Street, I simply thought yep, I lived there fifteen years ago, and it was a nice time, and now it has passed. My neutral reaction disappointed me. Maybe I’ve seen too many movies.

Later that night, the lights went out and a bottomless drone filled the shell of a former glass factory in the industrial zone between Brooklyn and Queens. Then Godspeed You! Black Emperor took the stage. One of my all-time favorite bands, and I had no idea what they looked like. I expected elaborate beards, aggressive tattoos, and maybe cloaks. But they looked normal and sane, like your kid’s cool history teacher. Then came the Biblical guitars, joined by 16mm film loops of flowers and vacant buildings and wildfires and crowds mowed down by firehoses and choking on tear gas. Unlike any other band, their music captures modern dread with hope burning along the edges.

A few hours earlier at the Museum of Modern Art, I visited one of my favorite Francis Bacon paintings, another traveler into glorious nightmares. A few days before that, I came across the phrase mysterium tremendum et fascinans, which belongs to Rudolf Otto’s concept of the numinous, “a non-rational, non-sensory experience or feeling whose primary and immediate object is outside the self . . . whereby the human being finds himself utterly abashed.” The mysterium tremendum repels and reduces us to a sense of “humility, submission, and creatureliness,” while the mysterium fascinansattracts us and generates spiritual joy (and thus feels less interesting, at least for the stories I want to tell). But taken together, mysterium tremendum et fascinans effectively describes the appeal of artists like Godspeed You! Black Emperor and Francis Bacon.

As I left New York City, the driver played Bon Jovi’s “Living on a Prayer” several times and never said a word. I milled around the airport, again trying to make peace with my sweaty palms and wobbly legs. I consoled myself by an elaborate fountain, where I ate a burrito and started the first pages of Tony and Susan, the poorly named novel that inspired Tom Ford's Nocturnal Animals, one of the most frightening and beautiful films I've seen. This line resonated: “It was the habit of his mind to know the worst case, the ultimate. His life was a scenario of disasters that never took place.” Somewhere over Pennsylvania, my fear of heights evened out, and I listened to Godspeed while I admired the lights of civilizations below, glimmering in a sea of absolute black.

My fear of flying kicked in the moment I entered the queue for security. Tingling limbs. Kaleidoscopic vision. The gloopy sensation of walking through a nightmare. The plan was to fly to NYC to see Godspeed You! Black Emperor and catch up with some old friends. I had not flown by myself in a decade, and by the time I approached the jetway, I was sweat-soaked and sick. My brain was a fire alarm telling me not to get on the plane. Reimburse so-and-so for the ticket. Enjoy a quiet weekend at home. Not a big deal. I turned back, shouldering past confused passengers. Then I boomeranged around a trash can and hurried onto the jetway.

My brain is ridden with omens and ghosts and catastrophic visions, which I'm beginning to understand is the squealing of a misfiring organism determined to protect itself, throwing up every possible reason to flee. An inauspicious flight number. The sound of the door closing. The metal roar of the engines. Turbulence. Just the thought of these things is enough to send my nerves into Stone Age terror: shallow breath, constricted vision, a mad urge to climb the walls. But there's no reasoning with a glitch. A broken machine cannot repair itself. Thought cannot fix thought. This was my magnificent revelation at 35,000 feet, which I now realize is the point of everything from Zen to stoicism to the power of now. But I need to learn my lessons the hard way.

I felt like a hero as the plane descended over Queens. If you squint through the window, you can see the Unisphere from the 1964 World's Fair, which was dedicated to "man's achievements on a shrinking globe in an expanding universe." In 2009, grass was growing in the area representing Antarctica. A year later, the piece for Sri Lanka blew away in a tornado. Maybe there's a metaphor here. (Either way, the Wikipedia page for it is delightful.)

C. and I left the desert sooner than expected because an ideal apartment opened up down the hall from her parents. At first, I did not want to leave Vegas. Not so soon. Then I thought about how I would move heaven and earth to live down the hall from my parents if they were still here. A different timeline, perhaps. I like my in-laws. They taught me to play mahjong. And it's a rare gift to live down the hall from them. When I lived with my father while we waited for a lung, I quickly discovered it wasn't the weekend dinners or games of chess that mattered—it was the day-to-day business of schlepping groceries and being nearby when he tipped over.

Truth be told, I like our spot in Ohio, even though this fact gnaws at my soul in the hour of the wolf. It's more diverse and strange than I expected, the food is fantastic, we live by a river, and there's a magnificent new library eight minutes away. We only lived in Vegas for a year, but by then, I knew my fantasy of the desert did not square with my reality. I imagined spending my days roaming the white spaces on the map, perhaps growing a long beard and summoning visions like the ancients. Instead, I spent a lot of time at Target. Despite hanging maps of the Mojave on the wall, I could not capture the hungry eye that comes with road-tripping, and there's an interesting phenomenon at work here: the psychology of the resident versus the interloper. 

Living in Ohio reminds me of Tarkovsky's Stalker, which I haven't seen in years, but I remember it as a fable about the need for a mythic place. Three men search for a room that can fulfill your deepest desire. When they reach it, they are too frightened to enter. Because what meaning would life hold if you were utterly satisfied? They fear terrible men might abuse the room, yet they cannot bring themselves to destroy it. The promise of fulfillment it offers is necessary in the world. The room's presence is enough.

Maybe I need the desert to remain a fantasy. Perhaps an annual pilgrimage will do.