I slammed my ballot down and shoved it into an EMS international airmail envelope and gleefully paid thirty freggin’ bucks or so to get that sucker to my utterly blue state knowing damn well that that vote won’t tip the scales in any meaningful way. And yet. And yet — AND. YET. — I wanna be on that ledger. Goddamn, you bet I want to be on that ledger. What else is there but the ledger in a moment like this? Pull the lever, cast your tiny pebble into it all and hope things add up. De minimis? Hell no. At the very least, you’ll be present on the cosmic scale, a little number at the end of a bigger number — one that wouldn’t have been quite as big without you. That’s not nothing, and when your grandkids asked what you did right now — in this mythic time of madness and infinite resources all seemingly used in the wrong ways, facing the wrong directions, directed at the wrong people — you can at least say you were present, doing the smallest of things you could in whatever way you could. Tick.
Four years ago, at this very hour, I was walking the Tōkaidō. I had a dumb notion: I wasn’t going to read the news (election or otherwise, which is common on my big walks; media blackouts for the entirety of them) or listen to podcasts or whatever (the goal: be “radically present” / no “teleporting” allowed). I also told my friends: Don’t text me who wins. The plan: I’d be somewhere in the middle of rice fields when a farmer would yell up the results upon seeing my unmistakably American mug. Hey idiot! he’d yell, So-and-so won! How about that! Or some beautiful old sudden-crony behind her kissa counter, while pulling a slice of toast from a forty-year-old toaster oven, would whisper, Ya hear? Joe clinched it, kid.
But you know what? In the hinterlands of Japan, you know who told me about the results of the last American election? Nobody. That’s who. No TV ambiently discussed the results. No farmer yelled them to me. No café owner said jack about Joe or Dingdong. No hotel staff muttered a word. No forty-seventh-generation proprieter so much as farted in the direction of America. Whatever had happened across the ocean, it had stayed there, at least from an information perspective. Finally, unable to stand it, I texted a friend — nearly two weeks after November fifth — What the hell happened? (It turns out that both a lot had happened and nothing had happened, that things were uncertain, frozen almost, and that uncertainty would persist for an infinite amount of time, an uncertainty that even today lingers — lingers harder than ever — in all the pervasive stupidity we bear witness to daily; stupidity on a celestial scale of stupid raised to double stupid in a race condition to the stupidest of stupid deaths.)
What does that mean? I don’t know. In some ways, it’s easy to get sucked up into this maelstrom of hellish information and relentless anxiety. In other ways, things connected to politics and geopolitical buffoonery are as objectively terrible as they seem (while simultaneously many other things are more miraculous and inspiring than ever; the great complicating paradox of life in 2024), and this is — for all the fraught hyperbole thrown around these things — a real moment to be taken with as much mustered seriousness as is humanly possible. Even if the farmers don’t really care. (Maybe especially if the farmers don’t care. (And they do care, in the end, they’ve also just got rice to harvest and stuff.))
I’ve lamented the loss of many things these past eight years — so much avoidable loss, things lost for absolutely no discernible gain (the spinning of wheels, the burning of billions of human hours in the name of protecting baseline sanity — it’s enough to break a billion billion hearts a billion billion times), lost by dint of the fever dreams of a zombie hoard unable to imagine the future. Amidst this loss, I’ve maintained my own internal register, my own sense of UUUUGGGGGHHHHH enumerated and revisited. Here are but a few of the things I’ve selfishly lamented: I lament the loss of all the creative work crushed under the boot of anxiety and depression and fear. (And celebrate all the art that was made, that continues to be made, in the face of that same anxiety and depression and fear, as an antipode to everything fomenting that anxiety and depression and fear, art as critical lighthouses, as beacons.) I lament the loss of coordinated, rational scientific advancement (COVID, weirdly, showed us for the briefest of microseconds, what kind of breathtaking scientific work could be possible with a truly, fully, globally-united front; that possibility, times a million, I lament the loss of). I lament the loss of funding going to the right places benefiting the most, of equitable distribution of resources and opportunity. I lament the loss of peace — the great banality of not thinking about bombs dropping on your head — in so many parts of this world. I lament the loss of grounded climate policy acting as a sensible signal for others to emulate. Ughs and ughs and UUUUUGGGGGGHHHHSSS!!!! — when you know what’s possible, when you can see that future (it’s SO CLOSE), and yet daily you witness the world actively sabotaging itself — that freggin’ hurts, should drive anyone with faculty to madness.
When the macro feels hellish, burdensome, unwinnable, I go micro. Where am I typing these words? I’m sitting in a tiny café on the edge of a small city, surrounded by a lifetime of train love. Abject, unstoppable, fully-committed train and model train love. A little man behind the counter — an eighty-something year old guy who has no desire to chat with me, who can barely hear (probably why he doesn’t want to chat), and yet gets up each morning and opens his café (not for the cash at this point, as it doesn’t seem to be making any) — is running his perfect model trains around their magical track, a track that circumscribes the whole shop like locomotive hug, with beautiful handmade scenery and hand-painted backdrops. For nearly half a century, tens of thousands (hundreds of thousands? probably) of people have come here and been filled with delight. Here, an obsession transmuted into love with a side of toast. Given the age of the shop, it’s in pristine condition. The counter polished, the trains without any dust. The egg sandwich actually an omelette sandwich with a bit of jam. (Yum.) The coffee strong. The music classical. I’m the only one here. Sitting in the corner looking at this incredible scene — truly a life’s work, a work of life. This, too, a political act. We forget that. Is it crazy to say that a place like this represents a pinnacle of a life well-used? It does in my eyes. Archetypes move humanity forward and the trains are beside the point: The play is the point, the full-throttled commitment to that play, the showing up day after day for it, the dialing in of a private obsession while simultaneously giving it back to the world as a gift. Play. Something we’ve lost. Certainly in this infinitude of toxic discourse. Certainly in the endlessly penetrating suspicion and paranoia. Something we’ve taken away from common people through shitty policies and a gutting of social services. Something shirked by a ZIRP attack on public infrastructure. Once you see what kind of play is possible — play that extends and expands throughout a life, a remonstration against fear, against smallness, against pettiness, against sinecures — you want to see it everywhere. You want everyone to be this privileged — privileged to make this choice to commit to play, to amplify play and life, and exist as an archetype showing a hundred-thousand others what’s possible as they sip burnt coffee and munch thick toast as a model of the 1964 Shinkansen struts around the shop on its tracks like Lady from Lady and the Tramp.
So when I throw a ballot seven thousand miles “home,” when I chuck it in the belly of a metal bird and burn a bit of oil to get it back in a timely way, to be present on that fetid ledger of nightmares, I’m doing so in a vote for this — for giving as many people the chance to commit their life to amplifying something positive, however goddamned nutty that thing may be. That’s “freedom.” And it requires a truckload of good policy to make happen. Higgs bosons, model trains, arboreal phenomenological analysis, avian domestication — whatever! Does it dent the universe constructively? Is it additive? Does it, uh, “spark joy” and leave people feeling elevated? Does it erase paranoia and suspicion and insidious stupidity? Does it upend gelded stasis? Does it negate pathological tendencies useful 20,000 years ago when we were resource constrained and living in caves and would die from stubbing a toe? Yes? Then go. Go all in. Do it. Anything that shows us the weird, beautiful, fractal depths of that which we’re capable when we commit to play. Play as deontically good. Serious play. I felt this kind of serious play all over CERN — the physicists are almost burdened by it, the joy of it all, it’s such a core part of their minds, their beings — when I worked on a few projects there. University campuses, when they’re at their best, are suffused with serious play, defined by it. And I’ve felt this kind of play a thousand other times over thousands of miles of walking the world, Japan especially.
For me, in my reductive pea brain universe, this is how I vote. It’s my birthday tomorrow. Forty-four. For so many reasons, I really wasn’t supposed to make it this far. And if I’ve learned anything from this bizarre miracle, I’ve learned I’d trade a trillion lifetimes of birthday gifts for everyone to do more of whatever the hell this train guy has been doing his whole life.
When I got up to leave the café, the owner was so engrossed in his models — and so hard of hearing — he didn’t even notice me moving around. I stood just across the counter, close by, watching him studying his engines, his cabooses, pulling them out, checking their undercarriages, placing them back, nodding approvingly. Nodding at what, only he knew. I watched for five, ten minutes. I took photos. I walked back and took photos and walked back some more and kept shooting. There he sat, his back to the room, facing his models. I slid too many bills onto the counter next to the register, and slowly backed up even more. Out the door I walked, shooting backwards, backwards, ba—
