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.

A NICE WALK BACK through Viljandi Town on the night of the folk music festival, all the streets lit up by lanterns, and people gliding by on bicycles or scooters at midnight, straight down the middle of the street without caution, talking between each other, groups huddled around cars drinking, or sitting Indian style in the parks under the shadows of trees. Something about it reminded me of my first trip to Europe in ninety-four, and the street festival in Zurich where I saw kids approximately my age drinking in public and having a good time and felt so jealous that they could openly do that, and then sleep off their drinks on the trains out of town into the Swiss hills. Then I got back to my hometown that summer, where a kid I knew kept his beer stash buried in the woods so his parents wouldn’t find out! But I also missed Nantucket tonight, which seems to be the place in the US I miss the most. This has grown in me over time. Sometimes I think Nantucket is my home in America, Orange Street, Union Street, the Whaling Museum, the Unitarian Church, Siasconset. I suppose I also went there as a teenager and bonded with it, and remember hearing the parties at night and wishing I was there. Also thought of Block Island recently and how the Irish girls who worked in the hotels would gather at night and sing folk songs in the yards. Sometimes I miss that time, when my best friend was my cassette of Pink Floyd’s The Wall that had that special new cassette smell. Anyway, it was a nice night and felt at last some balance restored within myself after feeling uneven for some time. Thanks for that.

WHEN I USED TO GO to San Diego I would always stay in the Gaslamp Quarter. Even if the conferences were over the bridge on Coronado Island, or up above the freeway at the Town and Country, the Gaslamp was my home. There were some festive Mexican restaurants with chili rellenos and mariachi bands, and loads of both young urban professionals as well as aggressive, toothless homeless people pushing shopping carts and howling about Obama and Jesus. The names of the other neighborhoods were the usual fare of bland American names that meant vaguely nothing — Golden Heights, Southcrest, Normal Heights — or were named after some historical curiosity that had long since been engulfed by fast food restaurants, parking lots, and cheap motels — Mission Hills, Montecito. Then, somewhere to the south, America ran out of land and turned into Mexico. Just like that. A few tram stops and this gringo paradise of meaningless English names, indoor shopping extravaganzas, and expensive but soulless residential areas, turned into the wild cactus MexTex-Aztec beast. If all of North America could be seen in such a light, as a struggle between pale gringos, hungry for a Burger King on every street corner, and swarthy Mexicans, just hungry, it would make far more sense. That’s all it is still, England versus Spain, with some wily French fur traders mixed in up north. I felt bad for the Europeans I knew in San Diego. I felt bad for them when they had to get in their leased SUVs to drive down to the Gaslamp for that European feel of rolling out of bed and strolling down the street just to get their lips around some sunshine, street scenes, and espresso. I felt bad for them as they sat in traffic many hours a day on a conference call, their shades on to block out any sunlight that made it past the tinted windshield. Only in the Gaslamp could they get any of that old-timey, lived-in feel, of listening to bar brawls at 2 AM and some woman screaming over mariachi horns, or waking up to the clamor of construction at 6 AM and drilling. Only there could they sleep deep in the belly of the hairy California animal. They had given it all away, you know. They had traded away everything for palm trees and this.

DISSONANCE is a word we know from music. But one can also experience cognitive dissonance, or a dissonance in one’s mind, in one’s thoughts. This happens when, for example, somebody insists on pushing a narrative about your own life, feelings, or experiences, that doesn’t match up with your own memories of them. Imagine, for example, that a long time ago, you went on a trip and you didn’t invite your friend along. The trip happened suddenly, and it wasn’t planned. Your own memories of the trip are that it was interesting and enjoyable. It was an experience in your life. You remember that trip the way that you remember it. Until your friend accuses you of having abandoned him by not inviting him along. Your friend says that you went on the trip to spite him. That the trip was against him in a way. You shouldn’t have gone on that trip, this so-called friend says. You betrayed him when you went on that trip. You don’t remember ever having made this kind of pact with your friend regarding spur-of-the-moment trips and until now, haven’t felt anything resembling guilt for that experience. It was one experience from your life, one that you thought of seldom until now. Now, things are different. To make matters worse, mutual acquaintances have been informed of your betrayal, and will bring it up to you in conversation. “Oh, that was the trip when you betrayed your friend,” they will say. You will no longer have control over your own version of your own life, as there is now a separate official version. If you challenge it, you will be ignored or shot down. “That’s not what I heard.” “But that’s not what happened!” “See how toxic and angry you are.” Now you start to relive that experience from your life, with your friend’s old grudge superimposed on your own memories. You see photos of yourself from that trip, and you think, “That’s a photo of me betraying my friend.” You never had this thought before, and this is not even your own thought. Now your friend is in your mind, telling you how your life was, and telling you how you should feel about your life. This is what dissonance is. If you continue down the path of dissonance, you soon will have none of your own memories of your own life or your own experiences, or will at the very least have to fight for them. You’ll have to fight within your own mind to keep your own memories and experiences alive for your sanity. Otherwise you lose track of who you are. You don’t know yourself anymore. You’re unsure. You once thought you were someone. Maybe it was all a big misunderstanding.

SLAVE. What is a slave? A slave is a person who isn’t free. A free person is a person who can decide his or her own destiny. A free person can be a master of his or her own fate. A slave cannot do that, because a slave has a master. A slave’s master owns him and decides what his destiny will be, or what his fate will be. Sometimes slaves try to escape. Some do it spontaneously. Some make plans. Some plan their escapes day in and day out. Then, one day, they make a break for it. Sometimes they are successful. Sometimes. Sometimes they are unsuccessful. They are pressed back into slavery. A slave who has been thoroughly domesticated no longer tries to escape. He no longer wishes to argue with his master. Instead, he comes to terms with his destiny and fate as a slave. It’s not so bad, you know, he tells himself. We are all slaves in some way, he thinks. He sleeps soundly. Better to sleep soundly as a slave than rouse the fury and the barking dogs of a defied master. There is a still a bed here, in the slave house, and there is food. There is company. There are other slaves. Sometimes one or more slaves will try to escape together. This rarely works out. Human treachery trumps altruism. It’s too easy to use someone else to get what you want. Slave rebellions end the same way. They are quashed and put down, and the leaders are made examples of and hanged for all to see. Some still try to overthrow the order, regardless. So fervent is their desire for freedom.