THIS TIME I WAS driving a kind of plastic toy car, like the kind our eldest used to have, down a winding seacoast road lined with pines rising up onto knolls and hills. It was a place like Maine, Scotland, or Washington State. That kind of place. The temperature had just begun to dip below freezing, and there were patches of black ice on the road. I went over a patch of ice, spun around many times, and collided with a black Mercedes parked by the beach. However, as my car was made of plastic, there was no damage, and the owner, a lanky, stiff-upper-lipped British Lord Mountbatten type, merely chided me and told me to “be a little more careful next time, young man.” I apologized and turned my car around and began to ascend the same seaside hill, now covered with fat flakes of wet snow. From its base, I watched a car drive opposite me. It went over the same patch of ice, lost control, went up the embankment, crashed into a tree and was thrown into the side of the other hill, where it exploded into a violent blaze. “Oh,” I thought, watching the red curling flames. “That guy is definitely dead.” I drove on up nevertheless to get a good look. A small crowd had gathered to watch the vehicle burn, and a crane was lifting parts of the wreckage into the air. I didn’t understand it, but they had also lifted the corpse of the driver, and as he was suspended overhead, his head came loose and fell into my arms. I briefly recognized a beard — it was a man — and a hat and then dropped the head in shock and began to run back toward the beach, leaving my car behind. Now I saw there were dozens of corpses piled up in the woods. I kept running and reached an intersection, where my father happened to drive by in a blue sedan and said, “Get in.” And so I got in the passenger’s seat, buckled my belt, and away we went up some road into the hills. “Did you see the crash?” he said. “Terrible.”

THE FULL MOON came and went and I didn’t notice a thing. Usually the tug of the moon resolves unanswered questions, but this time there were neither questions nor answers. Feeling blocked is not a terrible thing, but there is an internalized numbness or indifference that sets in like gray weather. You forget things, you forget your name, you forget your feelings. You do what you need to do, and it is not unpleasant to do it, but it is not pleasant either. It’s neither/nor. When your voice is silenced, when those closest to you shut you down, a hollowing out occurs and you come to doubt your own experiences, your own memories, your own truth. Even the word truth seems doubtful, because it is just your truth, not the truth, the accepted truth, the one truth that others would have hoisted on you like heavy cargo. When your love is ignored or blocked or you are told it’s all in your head, or you are just confused about your own feelings, then you have no love anymore. It’s been blocked. The force was summoned, but where did it go? Nowhere. It went nowhere and led to nothing. Wind in your hands, that’s all. What comes next? I don’t know what comes next. I would like to become unblocked, to flow with energy again, to be in the right, with the current. I would like that very much.

THIS MUST BE ONE of my favorite films. The perfect antidote for a Saturday afternoon. I watched The Shawshank Redemption (1994) on the way to China about nine years ago and again on the way back again. I read the Stephen King story as well, which has some different elements from the film (‘Red’ really is Irish). I remember my cousin also loved this movie too and wanted to name his band Dufresne. As I write this, I can hear a neighbor’s saw and hammer in the yard. I should be working, but my body says it’s time to rest, and no fear of a Lutheran god or hot cup of coffee can convince me otherwise. They sound vaguely maritime to me, that hammer and saw, that metallic clang. I miss ports. Wish I was a longshoreman in San Francisco listening to those seals talk in the fog. Any town in Maine or the Swedish archipelago will do. Maybe I’ll head south to Zihuatanejo like Andy did. You know what the Mexicans say about the Pacific. It has no memory.

I KNOW A FEW veterans of the Soviet-Afghan War. These are not old men, most of them were born in the 1960s, though some are older. The reason I know they were in the war is that they have alcohol problems. They have trauma. That’s why they drink. Two of them, while drunk, have looked at me, especially when I don’t shave, and had some flashbacks and started mumbling about mujahideen and trying to converse with me in Russian. These people know I am an American and don’t speak Russian, but some switch goes off and they think they are back in the army. I just learned that one of them is now in jail for beating his wife in a drunken rage. As someone said the other night, “The thing about war is that the dead come home but the living stay on the battlefield.”

THIS ALL HAPPENED in some remote agricultural community on the other side of the mountains, a place of rolling green fields and yellow corn pastures, with a silty dark river snaking through it, full of farm run-off and gloomy rocks. At the center was a gray mountain that rose up high into the clouds, its base covered with patches of moss and forest. My grandmother was from the South, true, but I didn’t know she had people here in Kentucky, or that she had left a house in my name. This was a long house, a kind of Swiss chalet, same style of angled roof, with at least five levels, each ringed with balconies. Inside, it was fully furnished with rugs and couches, rotary phones and lamps, mustard-colored curtains and bedspreads. Retro chic, circa the LBJ Years. Yes, it was a fine house, and I was surprised that it had been left in my name, but I had never once considered a life for myself in the landlocked South. Still, the local people were so friendly, far friendlier than the Estonians, I thought. One young local woman, a chummy highlands brunette, even showed up in a plaid dress on the porch and asked me if I wanted to share a bottle of whiskey with her. I looked at her and the high gray mountain, with its slate gray sheets of rock at the precipice. This was like some Welsh mining community, I thought, like Aberfan, the site of that 1966 disaster where the colliery spoil tip collapsed and killed 144 people. This was Aberfan, Kentucky. But there was a house here, a wonderful house in my name, and a woman waiting with whiskey. She was still out there on the porch. Maybe I’d stay.

EVEN THE AMERICANS give up. It may take 20 years, or just 10, but after a long slog in a foreign land, the remaining embassy staff are evacuated and the country falls. It’s incredible how quickly it goes, be it at the hands of the North Vietnamese or Taliban. Liberal democracy is a hard sell in deserts, jungles, and other desperate lands. Religious fundamentalists or Communists do well, for a while, but after a while they too need to make a buck. My own life is a mess, I mean a literal mess. Dishes piled high in the sink. Whirlpools of laundry on the floor, mixed together, clean and dirty. Then the need to generate income in this mess somehow. I am expected to be a fulltime caretaker and fulltime father and fulltime worker. It’s an impossibility. It is impossible to do all the things I am supposed to do, under a cascade of words about how whatever I am doing, it’s not enough, and I should really be far wealthier and better organized given the circumstances. Last night I had some dream about war, but in a really upscale, Scandinavian neighborhood, like that patch of Nørrebro in Copenhagen down near the Søpavillonen, or Lake Pavilion, where the Danish businessmen ride their bikes on lunchbreaks. There were hordes of young scared men running between the houses and some of them were being killed by armed assailants. Some kind of genocide taking place among the fine waterfront buildings and pavilions of Denmark, but I couldn’t understand the reasoning for it. Were they being killed for ideological purposes? Or race? Age? Gender? Sexual orientation? There were men in gray sweatshirts murdering others. Maybe it was somehow connected to these arguments between the vaccine men and the un-vaccine men? These endless bloody arguments? At some point, I came face to face with one of the murderers, but he looked scared and didn’t shoot at me. My countenance was too calm. Then I dreamed of rear-ending some blonde Tallinn businesswoman I know. In a white dress. Sublime that. Sex and murder, from Saigon to Kabul to Copenhagen to Tallinn. I awoke, grabbed my briefcase, and was off to work.

ONLY WEIRDNESS, the rest left unsaid. Sometimes things in life are like this. There is no resolution. There is no resolution to the story with the Icelandic girl you left behind behind the Hallgrímskirkja on a December day. There are memories. An old Volkswagen microbus parked on Njálsgata. Frost on the windows. Mist in the harbor. Long walking streets, hot baths, eateries, pubs, staircases, bordellos. Bricks and lanterns, swimming pools, buses and mountains. There are memories, but there is no resolution, because she had turned her back to you and will not say. She will not say what went wrong and why, and any attempt to contact her is met with silence. She is not talking and so you take it all on yourself. It must have been your doing, naturally, if she cannot even bring herself to utter one phrase or word about it. It must be you and not her. So you walk away with a guilt-ridden conscience, but for what, you can no longer say. It’s probably some complex of yours plucked from a self-help book. Maybe you fancy yourself as a victim or martyr? Or you have narcissistic personality disorder? Maybe you are an autist too? An easy diagnosis and remedy. You’re just confused, that’s all. Just confused. But what else is there to do or say about it? Nothing. You fumble for words, but they can’t bring back the connection. There is only weirdness now. It was just a thing, as they say. Just a thing that happened. You should let it go, friends advise. Let what go? There’s nothing there anyway. It was just a thing that happened. Something that happened. Then it was all over. Then it was nothing.

THEORETICALLY, there is nothing wrong with a 41-year-old, mostly employed writer living in a wooden house in a small provincial town on the northeastern flank of European ennui developing a thing for a 31-year-old American singer songwriter who is far more successful and wealthier than he will ever be, whom he also happens to encounter here and there in the media. Theoretically. But there is also that icky feeling that comes when developing feelings of any kind for someone you have never met, and for whom you are almost expected to have some starburst reaction, just like you’re supposed to thirst for a cold Coca Cola on a dry day, or long to feast on a bag of fluorescent orange Doritos, or gobble up whatever else they are selling you. Yet the eyes don’t lie. For whatever reason, they keep rolling over to Miss Swift. It just happened to me the other day. There I was, in the café, drinking my double espresso in the back room, when I chanced across a photograph in a magazine. Two clear blue eyes and that rebellious ski jump of a nose. There was something rather unruly, mischievous, and punk in those eyes. Who was she? I read the photo caption. Oh no. Not again. Her. Why? Years ago while in Nashville, I had acquired some merchandise for my daughters, including crimson t-shirts with her image on them, and an album they could listen to in the car. I remember listening to that album and thinking, “Hey, I actually kind of like this girl.” These thoughts I kept to my miserable, repressed, father-of-little-girls self, a gray, opaque nonentity that existed to step in and bandage knees, procure ice cream, and chauffeur them from destination to destination. I was a little ashamed, truth be told. But why? Why do we feel shame for our own impulses when clearly the mind has a mind of its own? There is a joy though too, the joy of having a reaction to anything. I have enjoyed my thing for Swift. Let it be, you know, let it all be. Even as I have to grimace through the very dreadful “Look What You Made Me Do,” which is basically her saying that line over and over and over and over again, even then, just let it be. Accept one’s inner Taylor-loving self. Revel in it. Write love poetry, songs, prose. Follow her on social media. When I worked in New York in the mid-00s, I had a similar freak experience when I would find myself drawn to images of Nicole Kidman of all people. My eyes would wander the magazines and billboards and movie posters down on Maiden Lane, Gold Street, Pine Street, Park Place, and seize on this pretty person and ponder her identity, only to realize it was Tom Cruise’s ex-wife, the star of Dogville, and an Australian no less. One day I confessed this passing fancy to my coworker, Waylon, who was from New Mexico and carried a knife, and he had no bones about it. “Of course, dude,” he said when I told him. “She’s a total babe! I’d definitely do her.”

I MUST HAVE CREATED a Tinder account a few times already, only to delete it about 20 minutes after swiping through the faces of strangers. Well, mostly strangers. Let’s say the sole joy of using such an application is seeing how your neighbors market themselves to the world. You see their faces, their ages, what they are looking for. There is a bit of a tragedy in seeing these advertisements though. Why is modern life so hard that we have to market ourselves in such a way? Or is this just another sign of progress? If we can pay taxes and vote online, then surely love can’t be far behind? Usually these photos are accompanied by words. What people say they want. What people say they are looking for. I vaguely remember reading these words at 2 AM. Then I remember deleting my account and uninstalling the app again.

I don’t remember the first time I heard about Tinder. Maybe around the time that I became single again. A friend had it. Some warned me that it was a “sex app,” meaning people just used it to fish for hookups. According to the descriptions on the site, most people using it weren’t looking for that though. They thought they were going to find the true loves of their lives, dependable, reliable partners. Sort of like pet dogs, but humans they could actually interact with. And yes, they could have sex. Maybe around that time, I logged in for the first time, and was offered up a motley crew of the eligible. I wasn’t sure on what basis I was supposed to select some of them and discard others. Attractiveness? Shared hobbies? There weren’t many beautiful women, to be honest. Many had altered their profile photos to such an extent that only the eyes and lips were left. They were like cartoon characters. I was being asked to choose an anime character. 

Some did not follow this pattern. Some women posted photos where they looked away from the camera, creating a sense of reluctance or mystery. Others trained the camera lens on their legs. Or their cleavage. Was this what it had been reduced to? Selecting a new pet human based on breast size or appearance? Maybe some other attribute. Kids, no kids. Distance. Musical taste. 

I probably swiped through hundreds of women. They fell before me like foot soldiers during the Great War. It was a slaughterhouse. The app reshuffled the deck again and again. No, no, no, yes? The ones I actually chose bothered me more than the ones I rejected. Most had a kind of psychotic gleam in their eyes. Why was I drawn to mentally disturbed women? I deleted the app.

Later, a female friend showed me her side of Tinder, the images of men standing beside their new cars, or working out in the gym with their shirts off. I had simply harnessed my Facebook profile photo for my short-lived profile. Alas, it lasted no longer than the Otto Tief government.

(It was taken of me through a window one summer, reading Sakala, and looking very literary).

What horrendous nonsense, really. What a stab in the heart of anything good and honest left in this world. Take your online dating applications and shove them. I have heard there are other apps too out there. I don’t know, if you want to find a new life partner the same way you pick out a pair of discounted snow boots on Amazon, then be my guest. But this tack in life isn’t for me. 

Whatever happened to the old days? Whatever happened to the Nineties, when you just called a girl on the phone and she was forced to speak to you, or at least you would hear her tell her mother in the background to relay the message that she was busy or not at home? Or what of just riding the bus home together and going to a bedroom while the parents were at work? Whatever happened to inglorious college dorm hookups, so blurry almost nobody could remember them? What happened to paper letters? What happened to sharing mix tapes? What happened to seeing a film?

What happened to dreaming and not writing? To sensing and yearning and feeling and not typing or swiping? What happened to not knowing what you were looking for? What happened to waking up in a feverish state soaked in sweat dreaming of her and only her? What happened?

What happened to pretty bar room girls shooting you thrilling glances? What happened to a world without the instant gratification of the digital connection? Will she write or won’t she? Will I be ‘left on read’? Will she like my comment? Why did she like all my Instagram posts at 3 AM?

There was once a quote attributed to a high-ranking Nazi official that went something like, “Whenever I hear the word culture, I reach for my revolver.” In this case, we could stretch it to, “Whenever I hear the word Tinder, I reach for my gun.” If I had one. Maybe a journal instead.

SOMETIME IN EARLY ’94, I walked into a music store in New York and saw Morrissey’s new album, Vauxhall and I. I was 14 years old, which is a tender, non-knowing age in man years. Generationally, I occupied an interesting in-between space between the older kids, who were well versed in The Smiths and the odyssey of Morrissey, and the younger kids, who would probably only learn about them in college many years later. I can’t say Morrissey appealed to me on any level, looking like Chris Isaak crossed with Helena Bonham Carter, but that name stuck with me. Who was this Vauxhall and what did he have to do with this brooding Englishman? Much later, while in London perhaps, I did indeed learn that Vauxhall was the name of a street. But that is all irrelevant, because this story is actually about vaccinations and “vaxholes,” not Vauxhall, though I enjoy the similarity. I’m wondering why I became vaccine hesitant, and it probably goes back to looking at these rather pitiful effectiveness rates of the early vaccines, Jannsen and AstraZeneca, which promised to deliver around 66 percent protection. Which wasn’t very promising, honestly, if these were the tools that would supposedly catapult us back into normalcy, or perhaps some two-tier system for the vaccinated and unvaccinated, where those with the doses could cut ahead in line in airports while sneering at those idiots in the unvaccinated slow line. The Pfizer and Moderna vaccines looked better, for sure, but recent studies have shown efficacy hovering around 39 percent versus the Delta variant, the one that matters currently, which is pretty much where Jannsen and AZ are. This, plus widely reported breakthrough outbreaks, some of them in highly protected populations, mean we aren’t going back to normal on the back of first-generation vaccines. It’s just not happening. There will be some adjustments in policy, but they haven’t been fully articulated yet. Recent anger toward people who asked questions about vaccines, or decided on a “wait-and-see” approach, which is understandable when you are dealing with experimental new healthcare products, has one foot in legitimacy and another in frustration with the status quo. Yet there is anger, a lot of it, and there will be more. People will turn on each other, blame each other, and hurt each other. Mostly because hopes have been dashed.