How to be (slightly) difficult

Last night, I had a terrible argument with my wife, possibly the worst we’ve ever had, and it has left me shaken. I don’t remember how it started, nor even what it was about, you see, because it all happened in a dream.

I have terrible rows with people in dreams. It’s my subconscious, I think. It’s trying to let me know that, deep down, everybody — everybody who is not myself, of course — is a bitterly unreasonable person.

Not All Babies

Yesterday, a woman was arrested here in Queensland for wearing a shirt with the slogan: “From the River to the Sea.” This slogan has been designated hate-speech, punishable by as much as two years in prison, and — here’s why I mention it — I didn’t know anything about any of this until, roughly, today.

Unlike North Americans, Australians don’t have freedoms of speech backed by a constitution, so a person can get into all sorts of trouble here, saying the wrong thing. Which is particularly concerning for people like myself, who somehow feel they are always saying things that are wrong. Although some say that this tendency of mine is one of my finer qualities, so I really don’t know what to do, frankly.

Some Difficulty Transitioning

I’m out on a walk when my phone rings. My wife calling. It’s 8:50am, she’s supposed to be dropping Hattie off at school. I answer the phone and a small voice pipes down the line:

“Dadda, I having difficulty transitioning this morning.”

It is Hattie, who is ten.

“Don’t blame you,” say I, because I am a supportive father. “School’s the worst. Still, it has to be endured. But what is the essential problem, today?”

My Concerns About the Lizard Multiply

Jeremy has vanished. He’s a lizard, by the way, and frankly I’m unsure whether to feel pleased or disappointed.

I was tasked with evicting Jeremy from his home beneath the dishwasher some weeks ago, but I kept, somehow, not getting around to it. I felt neither fear nor ill-will towards Jeremy, nor any other skink in general, though he did seem to be an unnervingly large specimen of his variety. And this troubled me because, as Hobbes put it: life in nature is short and brutish, and so for Jeremy to attain such physical stature on his own, in the wilds, etcetera, indicates an almost unwholesome degree of success in eating smaller creatures. But this, in particular, was something I did not like to think about.

Never Talk to Strangers in Airports

Back in the day, before I embarked upon this mad, optimism-fueled misadventure we call Parenting, I had something called disposable income. And how I miss it!

I had spent my childhood in hand-me-down clothes, and occasionally there was not quite enough food. In consequence, I became a naturally frugal individual. As a teen, I was often destitute, if not actually unhoused, which by the way explains my tendency to treat car ownership as an extravagance, akin to owning a yacht or private jet. So, when I did eventually become gainfully employed, saving my money was, for me, an effortless procedure.

Worryingly, There's a Lizard in my Kitchen

I don’t know how else to say this, but I have been tasked with the capture of a lizard. It’s a skink — these are relatively small, as far as Australian lizards go, although this one is honestly the largest skink I’ve seen in my life. I’ve seen him a dozen times — he’s really wiggly, for some reason, and terrifically fast. He sees me, and goes scampering under the dishwasher whenever I enter the kitchen.

My Awful, Stupid, No Good Tendency to Tell the Truth

The year I got married, my wife was working for a company in Maryland and they were looking for IT people. I was a newly arrived immigrant and, you know, jobless and poor, and thoroughly apprehensive about my chances of making it in America. As a courtesy to my wife, her workplace invited me to interview with them, which was terrifically nice of them, frankly.

I tried so hard that day. I even put on a suit, something I am never enthusiastic about because, and this is actually embarrassing — I look a little too good in them. No matter the suit’s quality, I somehow look startlingly noticeable, in a way I do not seem to enjoy. They also have a perplexing and rather concerning effect on other people. They start to act strangely. In a suit, I seem to transform into what appears to be the most interesting and informed individual within miles. In a decent three-piece suit, I become unexpectedly credible and convincing. Strangers appear out of nowhere and invite me to have meals with them. It’s stressful, frankly. Also — and this was most unsettling — the instant I put on a suit, everyone immediately assumes that I’m in charge of everything.

How to be a Good Friend, and an Even Better Nemesis

It’s tricky. Some days, it feels insensitive to post newsletters — at least, the sort of newsletters I tend to write. I run the risk of seeming too frivolous if I don’t acknowledge the bad things happening in the world. But I don’t have my head in the sand; being cheerful and optimistic is an exercise of freedom. I won’t hand that over to a bunch of garden-variety boot-licking idiots. In short, perhaps to be cheerful in today’s world is, in itself, a sophisticated and revolutionary act of defiance. Just a thought. Though what would I know?

How I Almost Saved Christmas But Didn't, and Why It Didn't Matter

( source: me again!)

Back in August, we had to move. The house we were renting had doubled in (so-called) value and our landlords were eager to capitalize on their investment, damn their eyes.

Scalping houses is a national pass-time in Australia. Older Australians buy up all the houses and force younger people to pay them stupid amounts of rent. I don’t respect it; it’s a nasty business for nasty people, and lead paint is almost certainly a factor. There’s this low-key generational conflict going on in the background of my life, though I try not to pay attention to it, having no wish to become embittered.

A Christmas Easter Egg

Every year this time, I publish a special Yule-time newsletter. This isn’t it. This is the one I write before hand, while I wring my hands and wonder what I have to say this year. But I take it all seriously because I’m a bit of a Yule enthusiast, you see. I like the holiday. I want to reform it, though, because I truly believe the holiday doesn’t have to be so starkly nihilistic, the way consumer-capitalism tries to make everything.

The Customer is Always in Pain

I think it’s called a Shoulder Impingement, or something. I’m not going to look it up, though; it’s too annoying. Also, I’m absolutely not going to a doctor about it. General Practitioners are expensive. And — can we be honest about this? — not very good, as a rule.

But everyone knows this by now, surely. There are good GPs around — everyone has a friend or knows somebody who has a good GP. Typically, they’re on the other side of town — not that it matters, because they don’t happen to be taking any new patients at the moment. So you grit your teeth and visit the most geographically convenient clinic and hope for the best. And it never is.

A Thanksgiving Lizard

Yesterday, I nearly stepped on this lizard. I made noise that sounded a bit like NYAARRRGH and sprang away so wildly I almost sprained an ankle. Not my ankle, you understand, but my wife’s ankle. She had stumbled over, laughing at me. There is no dignity in being a man, but I digress, because what I wanted to mention was that it’s Thanksgiving.

There he is. He was on the steps below, basking in the sun. I saw him just in time.

How to Use Karl Marx as a Conversational Exit Strategy

In Boston, I had a neighbor with whom I did not get along. He taught ethics at one of the universities. He didn’t wear a mask during a global pandemic, so I somehow also suspect he wasn’t particularly good at ethics. He certainly wasn’t good at taking out his trash bin, but I’ll say no more.

One day, he and I attempted a polite conversation. I mentioned, because he was ostensibly an academic, that I was listening to a lecture series on Karl Marx which had been recommended to me by a friend.

Teaching Robots to Windsurf

Don’t panic! This AI-generated art is thematically relevant, you’ll see.

My friend Zoya used to work at the Kennedy School of Government, and met all sorts of important people and dignitaries, many of whom always sounded, to my ears, somewhat ridiculous. She has many stories, and I can’t tell you any of them. It’s maddening. Anyway, for the past sixteen years she’s been the editor of some academic journals.

English Murders, Danish Parenting, and a Question for You

You know what really annoys me? I mean, apart from any account that starts with the words ‘you know what really annoys me?’, because if there’s one thing I dislike, it’s people trying to bond with me over a shared dislike.

Now I think of it, readers in the British Isles might be wondering what I’m talking about; after all, complaining about some sort of petty, minor grievance is practically the tradition over there. It’s a way of making friends. For further information, consider the weather in England. And oddly, this is a habit some must consciously unlearn if they emigrate to America. I have a friend from the UK who moved to North America; she found one couldn’t really complain about the weather to Americans because the implication of negativity made them feel confused and bewildered.

Why I Can't Have Mojitos for Breakfast

For some odd reason, both my daughters are at school camp this week. And both are in different locales. They’re in different grades, of course, but somehow both these school camps were scheduled to occur in the same week. Hattie is now a few hours drive away, and Boudica is up in Cairns, which is in the tropics and roughly a thousand miles away. She’s snorkeling on the Great Barrier Reef, apparently.

The Custody of Byron

Each day, I like to sit by the window and write. A few years ago, I completed work on a lengthy science fiction novel. I can’t recall if I’ve mentioned it here, but I don’t have plans to publish it for some time; I want to get its sequel mostly written, first. But that book reminds me strongly of an Alexander Dumas novel, and it’s not what anybody might expect me to write.

Growing Up in the Shadow of the Apocalypse

When I was a kid back in the 1980s, doing homework seemed like a pretty pointless exercise because—as we all knew back then—the world was going to end in a nuclear holocaust roughly around 1997. So, why were we wasting time learning mathematics when our future survival probably depended on knowing how to defend ourselves with a katana?

In case you didn’t grow up in the 80s, a katana is a Japanese sword, and one which was widely considered ideal for the impending apocalypse. Anybody with any common sense knew that back in the 80s. I mean, if Connor MacLeod hadn’t carried the fabled steel Ramirez Katana into battle against the Kurgan in Highlander (1986), then matters would not have gone so well for him, let me put it that way. It was forged by legendary swordsmith Masamune himself, and if you don’t know who that is, don’t even talk to me about any of this.

The Docility Tax

So yesterday I was walking by a store that sold fruit and vegetables, and I noticed that tomatoes were priced reasonably for a change. I took out my phone and snapped a photo of them—the sign, with the price and the tomatoes below—to send to my mother, who was just telling me the other day that tomatoes have become a bit expensive. I wanted to know if I should buy her any, I suppose. Anyway, I was then accosted by an employee who told me that I wasn’t allowed to take photos of the produce.

A private space for like-minded lunatics

I’ve been poking about Substack. Turns out, I can have a private chat for subscribers like yourself, so I figured … what could possibly go wrong?

Now, if I have done the technical jigger-pokery correctly, this is should be a conversation space exclusively for paid subscribers—kind of like a group chat or live hangout. Also, I sincerely apologize for using the phrase ‘conversation space’ a moment ago. I try avoid ‘corpo-speak’ when I can, though sometimes I do it with self-conscious irony, just in case it’s become mainstream without me knowing. When I do this, I swear I’m not selling out my identity; frankly, I’m just as bewildered as you.

In Which I (Finally) Contract Covid, and Question Everything

Boudica brought Covid home with her from school the other day. We didn’t know it was Covid at first (that’s how it works, now I think about it) but she had a headache for a day or so, then malingered around the house for the remainder of the week, having what looked like a delightful time. I seem to remember a lot of singing and dancing. When I suggested she go to school, she clutched her head and spoke of aches and pains, so in the spirit of an easier life, I let it go.

Marcus Aurelius, Vitamix Blenders, and the Futility of Stuff

I didn’t disappear; I just moved my family to a nearby apartment, and that whole process dominated my attention for the past two weeks.

Here’s an odd realization: I don’t seem to have any valid photo identification. I’m an Australian citizen but I lack a driver’s license, and this makes interacting with bureaucracy fairly troublesome.

“They won’t issue me a driver’s license,” I explained today to a rather nice but befuddled government bureaucrat. It was the Department of Motor Vehicles and Transport, or whatever it’s called now. I went there in person because apparently adults lacking a driver’s license are too perplexing to speak with over a phone.

Of Primate Psychology and Frozen Mullets

So, this week we’re moving houses. I haven’t talked about it here, because I would then have to describe how everything to do with real estate in Australia is, at a base level, evil and despicable, and because most people in the world have their own problems.

The move is on Friday and I still have much to do. And perhaps first on my list would be to confront my almost profoundly heightened levels of denial concerning all of this.

The Problem With Problems

Last night, Hattie brings me her math homework, her eyes glazed with a tinge of madness.

“I can’t do this! It doesn’t make sense!”

The question she is stuck on is the following:

‘How many weeks are there in 420 days?’

Alongside the question are Hattie’s frantic pencil scribblings. I see crossed-out numbers and sudden block letters spelling out the words, ‘HELP ME’.

We’ve all been there, I suppose. But I am also somewhat unimpressed. I mean, the HELP ME is impressively insane-looking, but a nine-year-old should be able to solve this sort of problem in her head. The main issue, I explain to her, is that she hasn’t yet learned to see the fun side of a problem.

Of Crumpets, Cookies, and Outside Dogs

Last week I mentioned I was at my mother’s house. I went there to keep her company, though I was also giving my wife a break from Hattie.

My daughter has been experimenting with lighting fires lately. Perfectly normal, under the circumstances. She takes after me—or rather, my maternal grandfather. Both my daughters and I represent the Irish side of the family; we do a lot of singing, we make up stories and jokes. The rest of our relatives… aren’t like us. Their dispositions are more English. So, more serious, and—historically speaking—more bossy. Also, if you look away for a moment, they will try to take away all your potatoes.

A Quick Thank You

If you’re reading this, it means you’re a paid subscriber to my newsletter. This is a special edition, in other words. You’re part of my inner-circle. In some ways, this is like being in the Illuminati, but without the Eyes-Wide-Shut parties, and without the political intrigue and influence and ugly mega-yachts, or the satellite-based space lasers. Still good, though, and without the tedious necessity of nodding politely whenever Bezos says anything evil and nasty, which I assume happens all the time.

I Would Say Nothing for Cookies

It’s winter in Australia, and I’m beginning to feel it. In Boston, I could comfortably walk around in a tee shirt in five degrees Celsius (or 41F). But it’s 5 degrees outside, now, and I’m shivering because, well, it’s also 5 degrees inside. My mother has left all the windows open.

I just went to put the kettle on and noticed, again, that the back door of the house is also wide open. Then my mother said to me: “It’s a bit nippy, isn’t it?”

The Immigrant, the Anniversary, and the Goose I Did Not Eat

As I’ve mentioned before today, I’ve reached the age by which most people go mad. I’ve discussed that subject at great length already; the short version is simply that we all go off the deep end eventually, and there’s little any of us can do about it.

Many people are already there. They think there are immigrants within the community who are “eating the cats and dogs,” for instance. And the only sensible recourse, to their addled minds, is to hand their democracy over to a small cadre of billionaires and just, you know, hope for the best.

I Made Postcards You'd Only Send to Your Enemies

Some of you would already know this but several years ago I founded an ecards website called Wrongcards. If you don’t know what that is, check it out. It’s really very wholesome.

People used to write to me about Wrongcards, and frequently in complaint; such people lived drab and squalid lives, lacking in good taste and refinement.

But sometimes people wrote to me praisingly; these I recognized as sensible and enlightened. Often, they asked me to publish printed postcards they could send to people in the mail. I never understood this. The website only offers cards one wouldn’t wish to send to anybody, no matter the circumstance. But not everyone is as sensible as me.

When Your Inner Monologue Escapes

Throughout my entire life, I have suffered from an inner monologue. I don’t talk about it much because I suspect it might lead to some sort of diagnosis. Everybody has diagnoses these days, except me. Some days, it makes me feel a little left-out.

But what happened was that, in accordance with the directives of evolutionary psychology, I elected to have children. And this must be the absolute most expensive era to raise children throughout the entire history of western civilization.

Don't Panic, but Douglas Adams Predicted All of This

I read an article somewhere claiming that author Douglas Adams had invented the concept of the ebook all the way back in 1978, and for a few reasons this annoyed me.

The first reason is that it’s wrong. And the second is that the first prototype of an Electronic Encyclopedia was built in 1962. It was designed by Ángela Ruiz Robles, though the project never went into mass production because she was unable to secure funding. Most people haven’t heard of her; I found her by rummaging through the depths of a certain online encyclopedia that also happens to have difficulty securing funding.

Never Go Full Rowling (Spoiler: You Will)

It seems to me that there are only two sorts of people.

The first are those who live with the uneasy certainty that they will, eventually and in grim consequence to their being alive on this earth, become stark raving mad. To such people—and I number myself among this population—the slow decline into madness is as tacit as it is unavoidable. We get by as best we can and watch for the signs.

The Best Ecards Website Nobody Knows About

Seventeen years ago, I created wrongcards.com and it is, I am frequently told, the best ecards website on the internet. All the same, most people don’t know the site exists because it’s a secret locked behind a search engine’s inability to understand nuance. Let me explain.

Wrongcards offers ecards that are wrong for every occasion. This is, not incidentally, what makes the cards so good. But to the algorithms governing so-called Page Rank, these cards aren’t a good match for anything. These ecards are wrong, and by definition the opposite of what humans would send to their friends and loved ones. And therefore, Google will not lead you to Wrongcards. You’ll have to stumble over it by accident — if you’re incredibly lucky.

Magpies, Ministers, and My Daughter's First Political Meltdown

Last weekend, Australia held a federal election. Normally, I don’t pay much attention to these, on account of being part of the under-represented political majority (i.e., I’m not a millionaire). Plus, there’s a fairly dramatic cost-of-living crisis underway in Australia, and the two major political parties aren’t terribly incentivized to do much about it.

Saturday—election day—was lovely. The journey to the local school requires a half-hour walk through a public park. It feels like walking through the countryside to a small, rural school—though we’re in the middle of a major city.

The Sunshine State Without the Crazy

Every now and then, I bring my daughters to stay at their grandmother’s house in Redcliffe. I do this so my wife can get a rest, even though this is the parenting equivalent of throwing oneself on a grenade.

You see, I have married one of the most introverted people you will never meet. Meaning, you’ll never meet her because, like all properly introverted people, she’s very good at hiding.

Autism, RFK Jr, and the Lizard People

For six years, I worked for a lab primarily doing autism research. I was off to the side, maintaining an orthology database. After a few years, the lab started setting up public-facing websites and needed someone to do a good job with that. Having already created several websites ( wrongcards being one), I became the lab’s official creative director.

This was at Harvard Medical School. My contribution felt fairly negligible from my perspective, but I was often reminded that I was helping the lab secure research grants, which was important. To me, it felt like I simply made pretty websites—pleasant work, and not particularly stressful.

The Trickster Approach

I have an odd sort of problem. I know precisely how to be creative — I just don’t like to monetize it. I can spend all day inventing absurd limericks and silly poems, and I can draw cartoons and write short stories; I simply know how. But I have no wish to write advertisements. I don’t want to help corporations sell you products you don’t need. I don’t want to produce ‘content’ for you to ‘consume’, like a shrink-wrapped, discounted baked-goods in a supermarket.

Of Immigrants and Aliens

For whatever reason, every morning at precisely 3am I am reliably wide awake and thinking. I would prefer this not to be the case, but no matter how good the day had been — or how pleasant the weather — some unease comes creeping into my mind at that hour, and there I’ll be, arms folded, wide-awake staring into the void and thinking about how the world came to be in such an absolute, stupid mess.

In Which I Change it Up

For months — or possibly years, I don’t know — my friends have urged me to migrate this blog-slash-newsletter over to Substack. That site has become huge and wildly popular, to the extent that even I had heard of it, and I’m not paying much attention to the interweb these days. But many of my friends were following writers at Substack, so I went and looked one day and found Robert Reich was there (being rather prolific, actually) which convinced me to take it more seriously.

Cyclones and Potato Chips

My father died last year. Natural causes, don’t worry. I’m not a suspect, my alibi was ironclad. My father and I had our differences — I’m smart and funny — but we did share a somewhat dark sense of humor, though some might not notice that about me. He made jokes about his dying all the time, and I made jokes about him dying all that time, as well. So understandably, when he finally died, I had nobody around to mock, so I called up my friend Byron, who lives in Pennsylvania, and made some jokes about his death. But somehow it wasn’t the same.

A Yuletide Message that is Not Ominous At All

Since November … and listen, none of us have any right to feel surprised, do we? If you’ve paid any attention at all, you’re you’re in the grip of a profound malaise. You’re up half the night, fretting. After all, those can’t simply be drones flying over New Jersey, right?

But in case you haven’t heard, there’s a massive UFO flap underway on the East Coast of the United States. Actually, I think it’s called a UAP flap nowadays. This is the third flap in a row. For the past two years, and right before Christmas, flocks of drones have been flying over Langley, VA. They do this with a strange impunity, and the US military seems unable to do anything about it.

Please Exit the Lifeboats, Gentlemen!

But I will say this time around, it seems true. This election’s outcome will affect the lives of countless American women, which is something men should be taking rather seriously.

After all, when a ship is sinking, women and children are the first into the lifeboats. Unless you are Billy Zane’s character in Titanic, whose coldness and villainy rivaled even the iceberg. (Also, how can one man’s face be so punchable?)

Billionaires and Honey Bears

I didn’t want to mention him, obviously—and you didn’t want me to mention him either, because nobody, nobody at all, or at least nobody worth mentioning, feels uplifted at the thought of Elon Musk. We understand the problem well enough. He has a crippling need to be mentioned by people. Worse than that, he wants us to be annoyed with him, like some bratty fourteen-year-old boy making too much noise on public transport. Of course, if we complain about him, we assume we are letting him win. Personally, I doubt the assumption. My feeling is that if a fourteen-year-old boy is being unnecessarily loud and spouting racist nonsense on a bus, we’re allowed to elbow him in the ear accidentally as we exit that bus. Accidentally and only because we didn’t see the nasty little brat, obviously. Human error and all that.

Greetings Fellow Adults

For the past ten years, I have spent most of my time with children. I work from home, so I work precisely between 9am and 3pm. Afterwards, I exist in a frenzied mental state, in which I am imploring Hattie and Boudica to let me think. I am sometimes productive, though it’s difficult to think with all that singing going on in the background. As I’ve explained elsewhere, I’m doing this all the hard way – soberly and without whiskey. I also don’t provide my children with much access to electronic devices. This, I assure you, is parenting on hard mode.

The Invisible Spider Trick

I am forever telling my family to leave spiders alone. They’re our friends, I say. They are on our side — unless, of course, you enjoy the company of flies and mosquitos. They’re benign friends who wouldn’t hurt a … well, we’re not their food, is what I’m getting at here. I agree they might be over-supplied in the leg department, but who are we to judge? I’m sure they’re great multitaskers.

Saying Goodbye To My Father

My father criticized my mother’s cooking only twice. The first occasion was back in 1966. They were newly married, and my mother had placed a plate of hot food in front of him. He looked at the plate and said, “What’s this slop?”

My mother tossed the plate out the window. For the next five decades, my father was contrite and well-behaved. Then, a week ago, he criticized my mother’s curry.

Christmas with Charlie the Unhappy Dog

I think my mother is warming to me. She’s paid scant attention over the years, but lately she’s noticed a few things about me. The other day she commented — in a surprised sort of way — that all my friends were rather good people. She also likes Byron and hopes he’ll visit. Then, of course, there was what happened with Charlie.

Charlie is a dog. My mother has three, and they all look roughly the same to me. Maltese-poodle sorts of things. They’re funny animals, though. She has one called Phoebe who is rather gentle and patient with children, but has taken to growling at my brother. She mostly likes him for a set period of time, but the man can talk nonstop for hours, and eventually the little dog gets fed up and growls at him, as if to say, will you please just shut up?

Wrongcards Works a Bit Better Now, Which is Nice

This is just a sort-of update about Wrongcards, and the website itself.

So you know, there are two parts to Wrongcards — a website which lets you browse through the cards, and another separate application that allows one to send and receive cards. A couple of months ago, I took that web application offline because it was annoying me.

Over the past few days, I replaced it with a new application that I wrote from scratch. It wasn’t ideal timing to work on it, of course, but it needed to get done.

Coffee and Whiskey, Please

I’ve been sober now for six months. I’m not an alcoholic, that’s merely how long I’ve been sober. Generally, I drink two bottles of whiskey a year and consider even that excessive. But this year, my daughter wanted to attend the school camp, and the other decided she wanted to learn the cello. Frankly, I blame their school for overselling the merits of camping and musical instruments. And while I count myself fortunate that Hattie didn’t want to learn the violin, I still think this situation is a dirty trick to play on a man. Reminds me of that Chinese saying, ‘If you quarrel with your neighbors, buy their children drums’. We all know that if the Chinese had invented the cello, the proverb would mention that instrument instead.

Upon the Horns of Indecision

Oops, this is my first newsletter in a while. If you subscribed in recent months — most likely at Wrongcards — then you might have forgotten about me. Don’t panic, this is merely the onset of amnesia, and I respectfully hope it is the good variety of amnesia, in which you slowly realize you’re a government-trained assassin, and not the bad kind that leaves you, say, waking up in an abandoned hotel beside a dead clown, and covered in spiders.

Call Me Nebuchadnezzar

“Oh, the poor Dadda!” Boudica, who is aged nine, will typically say. Boudica seems to enjoy referring to me as some sort of third-person object. “Mama didn’t bring him a coffee this morning. How could anyone be so mean to such a handsome Dadda? Don’t worry, Dadda, you and I will run away. You and Mama shall get a divorce, and perhaps my next Mama will be rich, and buy us a swimming pool!”

Wrongcards and the Mind Virus

“Let’s say you’re romantically involved with a balloon animal. Society doesn’t understand - it never does - and you have to sneak out to this one Italian restaurant where the staff aren’t all that judgmental. Now one night, over a candlelit dinner, she wafts across the table and touches the candle flame. Pop! She’s dead! Do you tip the waiter for one meal or two?”

A Not So Cricketty Christmas

I did eighteen consecutive Christmases in the Northern Hemisphere. The holidays are better up there. There’s nothing like laying in bed, listening to the hollow scrape of the snowplow, or your neighbors fighting over parking spaces. People get emotionally attached to certain carved-out regions of snow, especially after spending a few hours excavating their cars. They put bits of furniture in the street, designating the spot as owned. Woe-betide any who breaches that sacred covenant.

The Infernal Terracotta Pot

In my last newsletter, I described being locked up by Polish border guards, and how that led to an encounter with (what seemed to be, at least) a ghost. But there my narrative stopped.

The story was running on a bit longer than necessary, I felt, and didn’t want to frighten anybody. Now, however, you’ve had time to digest the details and steel your nerves, so I suppose I could continue the story. But not today. Building suspense is, after all, an important technique of story-telling. And I don’t know about you, but lately I’ve been in no mood for the supernatural. If an apparition appeared before me now, I’d hold up a hand and say, in a firm voice, ‘Not interested, not today. Thank you and goodbye.’

Strange Passage, Part Two

My last newsletter Strange Passage, Part One was the first of a series, intended to describe some of the less plausible things to befall me on my various trips and adventures. This series will not, and can never be, comprehensive. I’m busy elsewhere, writing novels. I simply don’t have the time to sit and write twenty thousand pages of nonfiction, even if it’s describing, in precis, the various stupid things that have happened to me aboard a train. Such a book (I imagine it would be titled ‘Off the Rails’, or something silly) would be awful to write. First, because it would all be complete nonsense. And second, it because it would all be true.

Strange Passage, Part One

Floating about on the edges of my life is a topic I don’t normally like to discuss – mostly, because it sounds insane. There are plenty of people in the world trying to live weird lives, after all, and I’m not trying to disparage it. I’m just not one of them. I don’t go fishing for strangeness. In fact, I’ll generally go to absurd lengths to avoid any so-called ‘untoward situations’, though it has always been futile. The stubborn truth of my life is that I can’t seem to be anywhere for long without matters getting a bit weird. What’s more – and this is the crux of the mystery – it’s never my fault.

Don't Mention the War

This is my first newsletter in more than two months. The delay is inexcusable, I know; but I’ve been writing books. I had hoped to finish this one particular novel and then come here and tell you all about how clever and hard working I’ve been, but … well, the process drags on, you see. And while writing this novel, I kept having ideas for its sequel, so I worked on that too. Now the first novel is almost finished and its sequel is two-thirds of the way there. What does this mean? The first two books equate to nine hundred pages altogether. And two books will follow it next year.

In Recollection of Past Mischief

Every now and then I read a scientific paper. It’s never especially easy. My name is actually on a few such papers, from when I worked in research. My contributions were negligible, but I enjoyed the work. I was just in the background, coding software and making silly observations about geese in meetings.

For a few years, I maintained an orthology database for our lab. I remember a lot of complex, undocumented spaghetti code which, to the best of my knowledge, computed orthologous genes via a rather clever algorithm. I’d be happy to explain to you how it all worked, but that would likely require at least one full metric cup of whiskey just to get me back in the flow. And whiskey would obviously provoke further digression until my explanation resembles a Fibonacci sequence drawn in crayon. What’s a Fibonacci sequence? That too will require a cup of whiskey.

Cake, Compliments, and Christmas

I baked a sponge cake, and then my mother complimented it. Actually, she somewhat praised it. You know, six times. Which is somewhat more than the number of times I was complimented in the nineties.

I learned an important lesson the other day: don’t tell a friend that you’re baking a cake later in the day, without first knowing their precise date of birth.

And The FBI Has Lost My Fingerprints

Nobody who knows me in real life will be at all surprised to hear that the FBI has lost my fingerprints. It’s all business as usual for me. This one doesn’t even make it into my Top Ten Bureaucratic Mishaps for 2021.

I am barely shaken by any of it. That the paper copy of my fingerprints was somehow misplaced – possibly stuffed into a manila folder marked ‘Bank Robberies, Unsolved’ – is not the sort of thing that would give me much of a jolt these days.

In the Garden of the Danger Noodles

In 2003 I emigrated from Australia to the United States with only about five hundred dollars in my pocket. Long story short – I moved to Boston, got a job, a dog, bought a house, had two daughters, and wrote a couple of novels. In short, I was busy.

In order to save up a deposit for a house, I worked a fairly stressful job. And I didn’t want to stay doing that, so every evening and weekend I studied to be a programmer. You know, in the mad hope that it would be better and less stressful. Within three years, I was working as a software engineer. But that was just the beginning of the learning curve.

Adventures are Greatly Overrated

It was all a bit of an adventure, unfortunately. I say ‘unfortunately’ because real-life adventures tend to be less enjoyable than the tourism industry would have us believe. Marketing departments seem to have co-opted the word ‘adventure’ in much the same way that ultra-capitalist gigacorporations have co-opted words like ‘revolution’ and ‘revolutionary’. Which is how the term ‘adventure’ became synonymous with a weekend in wine country, staying at a five-star bed-and-breakfast, and enjoying a bit of artisanal cheese, or perhaps even taking a hot-air balloon ride with an irritatingly attractive companion who looks like they breed horses recreationally.

Back to the Countway

After living in the United States for fifteen years or so, I’ve decided to move back to Australia for a while. When my friends ask me about it, I explain that my niece in South East Queensland – who is roughly the same age as my eldest daughter – likes to recreationally catch pigeons with her bare hands.

Apparently we have to hide ladders from her, or she’ll be up on the roof. You know. Catching pigeons.

The Vengeful Eye

If you’re a newly subscribed, hello and welcome. And if you haven’t already, I recommend going back to go read my last newsletter, because it had a lot of interesting things to say about people being eaten by bears.

Now, normally I live in Cambridge, Massachusetts, with my two daughters, ages 5 and 7. After a year of lock-down it was getting a bit claustrophobic, so I decided to take the girls to a farmhouse in Maine. We stayed there about six weeks or so; it was fun and peaceful and good.

Oh For The Fear of a Bear!

I think that’s because they’re — you know — actual monsters, with sharp claws and bite teeth and all that, which belies the common claim that monsters aren’t real. Nonsense, of course. Demonstrably false. Monsters are real, they are called bears, and why is everyone pretending this isn’t the case?

Anyway, over the past two weeks I moved my family up to a remote corner of Maine, the most northeastern state within the United States. We’re in a farmhouse about twenty minute’s drive from a town called Bangor. Imagine rolling hills and trees, and a foot of snow on the ground, and little girls sledding down hills. That’s my life these days.

Punching Upwards

In my official writers bio, I mention I’m working class. That’s a bold thing to do. Some might even say it’s peculiar. Shouldn’t I be embarrassed or something? It’s called ‘humble origins’ not ‘tell-the-world origins’.

And anyway, who is working class these days? Everyone is middle class now – and nobody say otherwise, because … well, nobody wants a class revolt on their hands.

But I do not feel the least embarrassed by my origins, though it might surprise you how often people seem to think I should.

The Sound of Christmas

For nine months, I have remained sensibly sequestered with my two small children, aged 4 and 7, while plague stalks the land.

It is probably worth mentioning that I cannot remember the last time I felt psychologically prepared for a conversation with either of my children. Most days, I only seem to have my wits about me after 9.30pm. And by then, of course, they’re snoozing quietly in their beds like perfect cherubs.

Faith, and Other Worrisome Ideas

And this made a lot of people very angry indeed. In some states, groups of voters assembled to chant, ‘Stop the count! Stop the count!’ Elsewhere, in other states, ‘Count the votes! Count the votes!’

Both groups were supporters of the same political party. American elections are strange.

Here’s a phrase you might hear around election time in the United States: ‘They won the popular vote, but lost the election’. This is a normal sentence, apparently. The conversation will flow around it. Nobody is going to stop and say, ‘Wait — what?’

Me Versus Me

I am locked up in a house with two small children who are obviously genetic composites of myself, so every day I feel like I’m being specifically mocked by Nature.

They’re not clones of me, of course, though I regret to say that they act like they’re my clones from time to time.

When I’m with them, I feel myself transformed into a fanatical proponent of the virtues of green vegetables, caution, and quiet living. Alone, on the other hand, I am practically throwing potatoes out the window at neighbors (they don’t wear masks, thus they must learn to fear me). I have lately acquired a BB gun, for the purpose of enjoying a bit of harmless rooftop sniping while my daughters take naps.

Misbehaving at Parties

I prefer small groups of people I know well. Crowds worry me – especially when they’re taking themselves too seriously. Whenever I find myself in that scenario, I usually get nervous and start saying true and horrible things about dolphins.

In most respects, I’m a comedian who elects to write books instead of standing on a stage in front of drunk people. Same temperament, though, which means I have this involuntary tendency to make fun of things. You know – institutions, the status quo, hypocrisy. Frankly, I’d rather not be this way. I occasionally think about studying marine biology. I’d enjoy that on some level, I think, though the truth is that I would never be that good at it. I’d achieve nothing as a marine biologist, other than thoroughly alienating a bunch of dolphins, I suppose.

The problem with Yetis

I didn’t know, so I looked it up on my phone. Turns out that today, in fact, is Father’s Day – in the United States, at least.

Odd coincidence, actually.

I didn’t know, because there’s no television in the house. Due to a global pandemic, Boudica and I are somewhat disconnected from the zeitgeist (which isn’t a terrible thing in the current era). The absence of television is turning both my daughters into remarkably imaginative people, and I recommend this as a useful parental strategy for anyone who doesn’t mind being unsettled by, say, their children’s imaginations.

Smiling in aTime of Contagion

I’m getting a bit wary of opening newsletters at the moment.

Large companies have been reaching out ‘in these troubled times,’ to remind us that ‘we’re all in this together’ and – in solidarity with the grieving – are offering a 2% discount on certain items, while stocks last.

Not only is this crass, it makes me feel sheepish for even having a newsletter.

Then there are the other folks who, while faced with a global pandemic, see little option than to make the entire issue about themselves. It’s normalized, of course. We’re not supposed to notice.

Ginger Scones for the Apocalypse

I was just sitting here thinking about how irritating it is to look up a recipe on the internet and then have to read through someone’s life story to get to the actual recipe. I would never do that. No wait — yes I would. I would just do it properly.

Let me demonstrate.

This recipe was given to me by my Nana. Have I mentioned my Nana before? Our relationship is complicated. She died a while back, and I haven’t stayed in touch as much as I should have, owing to the fact I find seances sort of creepy.

A Hypothetical Book About Aliens

Sooner or later our species will be visited by an alien civilization. One sunny day, a shiny spacecraft will just, I don’t know, drift out of the overcast above The Hague, in The Netherlands, and settle gently onto a patch of dewy grass – just near Noordeinde Palace, most likely.

A ramp extends from the craft, and down they slurch, tendrils wafting affably, bringing peace and relatively benign intentions to our blue planet. And the Earth, as the saying goes, stands still.

How I Cheer Myself Up During the Holidays

I like living here in Cambridge, Massachusetts, for at least six months out of every year. Then it gets cold and dark and dismal, and you have to be very deliberate about cheering yourself up. Here’s an example of how I do that.

I’m a pretty fortunate person. I’m not wealthy by any means, though I am surrounded by people who are, at least by my definition. It’s pretty strange for me. One neighbor is an MIT professor, the other a lawyer. Next door down, a doctor – and so on and so on, with me in their midst, feeling a bit sheepish. I write books, I tell them when they ask. “You know, when I’m not vexed.”

Everything Is Not Awesome

There I was, age 24 and standing at the departure gate like the fool I was … They should post warning signs at airports.

“Notice to all travelers. The world is filled with beautiful women. Do not get carried away.”

Mind you, I’d have ignored the signs because I am what they call An Optimist. Which is all well and good, most of the time. Except that sometimes A leads to B, and B leads to – well, being woken up one day by a six-year-old daughter.

The Cold, Moist Salmon of Hypocrisy

I normally prefer to ignore Halloween and just wait for it to all go away. But I now have two small bairns – ages six and three – and they don’t like it when I ignore anything. Like hypocrisy, for example.

And just so you can understand what I’m contending with, my three-year-old has taken to standing in the meat section of the supermarket and declaring loudly things like, ‘That’s a dead body! That’s a dead body, too! Meat is just dead bodies, cut up! Poor an-mals. Why did they have to die? You shouldn’t kill an-mals! I don’t eat dead bodies.’

Cats and Monkeys, Living Together

A week ago, I was walking through Terminal 2 of Madrid Airport talking on my phone to a mate I went to school with whose name is – well, I’ll call him Cooldeep.

Cooldeep is Indian-Australian, and he’s sort-of like the brother I never had. He’s currently living in Phnom Penh, Cambodia and, against my advice, he has gotten himself a cat.

Now to be clear, I had carefully advised him against this, because I have noticed that fewer than 5% of cats actually like their owners; the rest are just waiting for their people to die so they can eat them. I don’t know why cat owners don’t notice, frankly, but there it is.

The Story So Far, Part II

There I was — slouching on my couch, staring at a message that informed me that I was going to be a father. This was not a moment of great personal shock.

I’m a grown-up, after all; I already knew the inherent risks that come with reading provocative magazines in IVF clinics. (By the way, fellers: if you’re ever in that situation, don’t ask for magazines featuring nurses. It’s considered a faux pas.)

The Story So Far, Part I

It’s time to come out of the woodwork. But first, let me update you on the story so far.

Almost ten years ago I created an ecard site called Wrongcards. In those days I was living in a small town in Massachusetts called Belmont, and commuting each day to Harvard, where I was working as a biological software engineer.

When I founded Wrongcards, I had just spent six months reading textbooks about biology and statistics. Interesting subjects, but to me back then they were like two anchors dragging me down into hell.

I am back

No seriously, I’ve just been busy. You know, being interesting. Where was I?

First they took The Gilmore Girls off air, then its spiritual successor, Bunheads. I couldn’t help it; I went into a bit of a decline. I pushed all my furniture into the backyard and set it on fire. Then I grew a beard, smoked a few thousand cigars, and refused to talk to anyone for six months.

Quarrels with Dogs in the Dead of Night, Part III

So there I was in the wilds of New Hampshire cutting up some vegetables for dinner - yams and some baby cabbages if you must know - and the fire was snickering peacefully, and all the trees across the wide valley were stirring about conversationally, getting in a last bit of gossip while daylight remained. I looked up, and shadows were stretching right across the meadow, and the air was suddenly cold.

Quarrels with Dogs in the Dead of Night, Part II

Yes, she’s tried to kill me ninety-three times, and I’m not including that one time in Montreal because her heart just wasn’t in it.

Don’t get me wrong - Chloé is not in the least bit bitey, and no doubt she considers violence too artless, pedestrian and vulgar for her tastes. No, creatures like Chloé don’t kill you with a lazy bite to the jugular - they prefer to draw it all out in a protracted campaign that results in you dying of a brain aneurysm.

Quarrels with Dogs in the Dead of Night, Part I

It was around this time last year, when the leaves began to turn, as they say up here in the Northern Hemisphere, that I did something fairly foolish.

I’m living just across the Charles River from Boston and in October the air gets a bit nippy and you suddenly notice that you’re out of time; summer is over and within a month you’ll be sequestered indoors, standing near electric heaters and, if you’re anything like me, wearing fourteen layers of clothing and making all sorts of quiet promises to yourself about getting back to the tropics for good, and to hell with this cold insanity…

The Rat Lieutenant is Dead

Wait a moment, let me fetch some tea.

*Right. If you’ve been following my adventures, you might recall that a few months ago I had the temerity to resign from my Creative Director position at Harvard Medical School, after which I fled the country, almost immediately going to Spain for fear that I might fall prey to a moment of good judgment and thus go slinking back.

Over in Spain I holed up in the house of my Spanish hermano Paco and there I spent the days working on The Harvard Skull Fiasco.

So Farewell To All That

It’s difficult to explain.

I once had a job at Harvard fixing computers. That’s not the part that is difficult to explain - well, yes, alright, it’s difficult to explain how, with all things considered, I got to be there of all places, but that’s another matter - the difficulty lies with telling you what I’m doing now.

First, I should mention that fixing computers at Harvard was easy. The workload was heavy, but it was always the same sort of thing day-in day-out. I had a nice office, though; I was responsible for a lot of fun infrastructure and my colleagues were cool, intelligent people who were nice to me because I was the guy who would fix their computers when things went awry. (Be nice to your IT guy, or he’ll put you down last on his list every damn time, trust me.)

Creative Unease

I spend about forty minutes in there each day doing body-weight exercises, and twenty minutes in Childs Pose, sobbing in pain and wondering why I do it to myself. I used to call the room The Temple of Pain until my lady told me she felt it carried the wrong implication, and asked me politely to knock it off. I complied because I’m all about noblesse oblige. On the outside of the door I have a sign that says: “Kris’ room. The Dojo of Deprivation. Keep out.” And two skulls and crossbones for good measure.

Where, What and How

“Where has Byron wandered off to?” I ask Tristan. “Are we doing the meeting or not?”

For the past year, Tristan and Byron have been helping me run Wrongcards. For years now this has been an endeavor I have run solely by myself, but they started helping me out last autumn when I promised them lots of work for no reward other than the satisfaction of making me rich. Today we are supposed to have a meeting on the fourth floor of the building in which we work. We’re part of a bioinformatics lab, but I won’t get into that now because Byron is still missing.

In Defense of Libraries

Damn it, I’m in a library again. I took the train from London to Oxford; I walked around a bit and saw some things. Obviously I looked at the university buildings - all very nice etcetera - but, please don’t think I’m being nit-picky here, some of them were a little bit old. I thought about getting a Reader’s card so I could investigate Oxford’s academic libraries from the inside, but I couldn’t be bothered dancing with university bureaucrats. This is a vacation after all, not a standard work day.

Devilish Curiosity

I remember it clearly, as if it all happened yesterday. Tony and I were playing chess and I was winning, which is no surprise to me because in all my memories I win at chess. I shouldn’t say so, of course, because you’ll start wondering if I’m a reliable narrator and this is a distressingly true story. I always tell the truth here. That’s what makes it all so difficult for me.

The Petrol Station Incident

Roughly nine years ago I found myself marooned in Melbourne for several months with no job and no money. I lived alone in a small closet in Toorak on the dole. When I wasn’t writing job applications or nervously attending interviews I studied a programming language called Java. I read a lot of books but generally felt uneasy about the nothingness that seemed to be happening to me exclusively.

Blueberry Scone and Tall Americano

I am not a man who likes to perpetuate myths about himself but I can’t exactly help it if fate herself has decreed that I must be an International Man of Mystery. So I like to share my occasional indignities with the world so you’ll see that in many ways I am just like you, though I might have slightly better hair.

When I awoke this morning, unsuspectingly and with my dog standing over me, I felt apprehensive and bewildered. This is because only moments earlier Darren Aronofsky, director of Black Swans and The Fountain, had been eager to sign me up as a lead role in his next motion picture and I had been pretending to demur. Negotiations had been difficult and tense, of course, because the role was an enticing one, and also because the discussion had taken place on an ice floe while contending with sentient bears armed with vintage Thompson machine guns. So naturally I was bewildered to find myself in the thin reality of daily life once more, with a dog standing over me menacingly. Under those circumstance, who wouldn’t be?