Aaron M. Fortkamp

My son loves Imagine Dragons. Top three songs would be “Monster,” “Demons,” and “Radioactive.” A close fourth, “Believer.” Me, I go through phases of ID appreciation. Sometimes I can jam out with him, sometimes I want to plug my ears with cement. We’ve decided to take him to an Imagine Dragons concert while this infatuation is at its peak, because the concert videos are his favorite. But it is distinctly possible that he will hate that environment and want to get out of there immediately. To (hopefully) ameliorate this urge, we’ve purchased $320 box seats so as to give him a safe space, and also priority parking in case we need to leave in a hurry.

He’s brilliant, my son. You should hear him go for those high notes. He has wonderful pitch recognition. I don’t know about perfect pitch, I don’t really know what that is but I know Chevy Chase supposedly has it, and last I heard Chevy Chase was an asshole I think, so I’m in no big hurry to prove my son can do what he can do. Chevy Chase is one of those celebrities with whom I share a birthday. Also Matt Damon. Also Sigourney Weaver. Do you believe in ghosts?

I do not believe in ghosts.

What do I believe.

Hmm.

I believe the population of the earth is large enough that there is an audience for every entertainment. If there’s someone out there to create it, there is also someone out there who would consume it, given the chance. This is why I’m not wholly opposed to self-publishing, because whatever gets your work in front of the right set of eyes is a win, to me. I’ve just always considered my chances would be better to find those eyes if I had an agent and publishing house to help me out a little in the search.

I believe that given another 40 million years of evolution or so, octopuses could end up developing language, culture, technology, religion, science, math, given the right set of stimuli. Like climate change.

I believe the potential for men to be embarrassed in front of women (or the romantic interest of choice) drives about 90% of all male behavior, in a non-war, non-starvation, non-imminent death environment. The less chance of even the briefest of interactions with an object of potential affection, the less affected the man’s behavior, but even in total isolation you could probably only get this number down to about 40-50%, because you just never know when someone might come around who could make you feel like shit with just a glance. Online, this number approaches near 100%. I would not post this if I truly thought someone whom I could potentially fall for and be happy with and love might read it and think less of me. This is why I’ve taken pains to use “whom” correctly twice already.

I believe that the pandemic would have been only about 25% as serious if people just washed their goddamn hands.

If we consider “psychic” the ability to predict future events or to know of unknowable facts in the present, then no, I do not believe in psychics. But I believe in math. I am always on the lookout for signs that probability, that the proverbial odds may be working in my favor today. If I can guess the time in my head and then check my watch, and I’ve nailed it? Oooh that feels good. I go through the workday repairing servers that sometimes have four distinct but identical components that need replaced, and the order in which they appear in my workflow is not governed by their positioning inside the server. So if I pick the first one to replace, and it’s also the one currently requested by my workflow? Cool, 25% chance of success. But the next one too? And the third, which means the fourth is also correct? I’m really beating the odds at this point. Say I’m doing ten of these server repairs: if I correctly pick the order once, that’s pretty standard luck. Twice makes me feel somewhat psychic. Three times and I’m feeling like this is a rare day for me and maybe more good things might be in store, if I just keep my eye open for the potential. Four times and I’m buying lottery tickets.

I don’t believe in good or evil. I believe in pain, and its opposite. Happiness, pleasure, comfort, call it what you will. Things that universally cause pain often coincide with what we traditionally call evil, and vice versa. But sometimes causing pain is excused as being in service of “the greater good,” which is to say, a necessary evil. And sometimes I can see this argument, such as denying a heroin addict their fix to help them kick the habit, or shooting an active shooter. In general, if your actions have a reasonable expectation of decreasing the sum total of human suffering, I will support you if you decide not to feel bad about the means. But pain is pain, and I’ll also understand if you feel bad anyway. If your actions merely shift the burden of suffering away from your own person or population to another, I will not support that. (How many foreign lives equal one American life? Spoiler, it’s one. I believe in math. Pain equals pain, one equals one.) And if your actions have no reasonable expectation for anything but increased suffering? Sure, we could call that evil, but to me that’s just shorthand for you being an asshole, of one variety or another. Selfish, surely, probably safe to say self-obsessed. Petty. Short-sighted. Insecure. These are all common types of asshole. Genocidal, that’s a pretty important one. Relevant, pretty relevant one, right now. Incidentally the logic that goes into the decision to become a genocidal asshole is dependent upon your ability to label the victims of your genocide as evil. There’s no wiggle room for evil. Evil doesn’t just go away, or get better. There is nothing good about evil, there are no redeemable qualities left in evil, so there can be no fault in stamping out evil, since nothing good can be harmed. Evil has no rights. Evil deserves no mercy. And hey, if all that evil lives in the same place and has the same ethnicity or religion, that just makes the stamping all the easier to carry out, doesn’t it.

I used to believe I could learn anything, given enough time. Acquire any skill or comprehend any concept. Then I tried driving a stick shift and decided no, some things are out of my reach. Thus began a list of things I would never achieve, like playing guitar. Fundamentally I understood the physics of the guitar, how the sound was being produced, but training your fingers to make those complex shapes on demand seemed quite impossible, beyond the scope of me. Then I bought a car that was a stick shift because I liked the car and they didn’t have it in automatic, so I learned how to do that after all, which a few years later turned into me buying a guitar. I learned enough to understand how it could be played and mastered, but I didn’t have the patience or the encouragement or the dexterity to achieve any sort of real competency. Still, I took the mystery out of it, which led me to believe once again that given enough time and motivation and stretching I could learn anything. Then I took Physics 2 in college. Electrical circuits. I had a teacher who couldn’t speak comprehensible English, and I couldn’t figure it out for myself. I had to drop that class to avoid a failure. A legit F. Never in my life had I hit a wall so hard. Also that was 9/11, the very day, the day I decided, as I was driving to campus knowing I had just failed the previous test, to turn around and just go home. On the way home, Howard Stern on the radio informed me about the first plane hitting the tower. Universes were in seeming alignment, screaming at me that my previous reality had been turned on its ear. It was a shock, and it shook me right out of engineering school, eventually.

Well, it seemed, that was that for my reclaimed belief in myself. I had to admit, once again, here was one of those things. Maybe I cannot learn that. But maybe… specifically that? Maybe everything else is still on the table? So after a couple years at Ohio State I worked up the nerve to officially declare myself a Creative Writing major, because writing a novel was another one of those things. So I did that once, wrote a novel, and almost twice, but because no one bought the first and my marriage’s detonation claimed the second, the motivation to actually finish a novel is now severely lacking.

Now I believe in my limits. Or rather, I’m trying to accept that it’s okay to have limits. I’ve met plenty of people over the years who were much smarter than me, but really it wasn’t until I hit about 30 that I kind of accepted the fact that even though I can now successfully operate a manual transmission, it may be outside my own personal brain’s capacity to grasp quantum physics.

I believe sports is both an essential part of civilized society and also the leading contributor to the tribalism conditioning that, when added to the internet, with its facelessness and its instant access to information, be it genuine or malignant, is fueling the current disaster of a political climate we are now facing. Also, and possibly because of Back to the Future II, I believe legalized sports gambling is a sure sign of a society in decline. But the playing of sports itself is a pretty damn important outlet for the competitive instinct, because of the agreed-upon set of rules and definitions of success. I feel fairly confident that without the Olympics the Cold War would have eventually gone nuclear.

I used to believe that everyone was a genius at something. By which I meant they had a natural, innate capacity to be great in at least one aspect of human activity, not including basic survival functions, the animal portion of us, like breathing or eating food didn’t count, but anything above and beyond was fair game. And I have met experts at all kinds of things, random things, geniuses at games, at shopping, at wrapping presents, people with uncanny abilities, like guessing birth dates, or being able to get along with anyone. I don’t really believe it’s a possibility for everyone anymore, in part because I’ve met too many people, but also I can’t even say for sure there’s anything I personally am a genius at. I had this argument once with a girlfriend in my early 20s, who quite pointedly refused to acknowledge my genius in anything, at which point I tried to define the genius traits I saw in each one of my friends. And in her. Really I was fishing for affection, for appreciation, but unfortunately that was a dry well because the things I valued and was proud of about myself did not frequently overlap with her own points of pride. Now I’m more in the opposite camp. I believe everyone is a complete idiot at something. Not like, again, quantum physics, but like something completely within their wheelhouse, something totally they could be a genius at but, usually out of arrogance, they have decided it is not worth the effort to invest their time in understanding better. And usually because they have no level of understanding, they tend to think they understand it perfectly, better than most folks, better than the certified experts, even.

Come to think of it, some folks are real geniuses at idiocy. Honest-to-god moron polymaths.

I believe in Isaac Newton. I believe in tendencies, in inertia. I saw a clip of Jeremy Renner today, possibly appearing in public for the first time since he got mangled by a runaway Snowcat, caught up in the treads while trying to save his nephew. He has a lot of metal in his body now. His eye fell out, he said, and it did the thing where he could see out of it still but it was dangling and uncontrollable. He looks perfectly normal now, you’d never know by looking he had an eye fall out and had 14 broken ribs (how many ribs even are there?) and his leg pulverized and spent days in the ICU. Avenger indeed. Anyway, Jimmy Fallon asked a typical Fallon-level question, something to do with how do you recover from such a thing, and Renner was like you just have to put one foot in front of the other and then the other foot in front of that one, again and again and again. By which people usually mean, and I think he meant in this case, you cannot focus on the final stage, on feeling completely better again, you just have to focus on the small things you can control right now. But also a smaller subpoint is that you have to keep moving, because that momentum will self-perpetuate and make it easier to keep going.

It’s hard for me to get writing again because I don’t do it every single day, and I know I need to, because that’s the one foot in front of the other, one word after another, the momentum I need. I don’t blame my schedule, or the weeks I have Alex, who requires so much energy so much of the time, and when he doesn’t I scramble to try and keep the house from falling into complete ruin. I did blame school, but I’m not taking classes anymore. I know if I want to make those classes worth anything I need to build up my portfolio more, so there’s that, sapping some of my creative energy. Also I don’t have a writing project I’m working on currently, I fear going back to my last novel may not be what I need right now, which means maybe I never will finish it, which makes me sad. But I don’t have another project. Besides this. These sporadic journalings. You can see how it’s hard to get going, to get interested, with this being my primary draw. This isn’t an assignment. This isn’t going to get me a job. Hardly anyone will even read it.

I heard recently that Bill Maher had invited Steve-O onto his podcast, and Steve-O agreed to appear but asked that Maher not smoke weed during it because Mr. O is 16 years sober. Maher refused and tried to flip the script on his canceled guest, saying he was not about quit doing his own drugs just because his own invited guest demanded it, but I’m not here to discuss how egocentric Bill Maher is—often to the point of idiocy, obviously, that’s not up for debate, no one was asking you to quit permanently you toxic butthole, merely to refrain for the course of an hour it you could manage it, you would’ve forgotten all about it before the night was even over. But the 16 years of sobriety. That’s interesting to me. That’s a long damn time to do anything, let alone to not do a thing you were somewhat famous for doing, it being related to the thing you are really famous for doing, which is putting yourself in dangerous and ridiculous and often intentionally painful situations. Most people say they would have to be shitfaced to go karaoke, well what level of intoxication would you require to pierce your scrotum and lift weights with the piercing in front of a camera meant for distribution to millions of viewers. He was able to give up the drinking and the drugs 16 years ago, though, and for a man who knows a thing or two about committing to the bit, he’s found himself engaged in one that requires total commitment, forever, or else guess what, the stunt has failed, you lose. Now, you might think, 16 years? Shouldn’t you be able to be around someone else getting high by now? Surely you have, surely you’ve developed coping mechanisms to deal with such a situation, given the crowd you have traditionally surrounded yourself with. Well, for staters, please don’t encourage Bill Maher, he doesn’t need your help, and secondly, yes, perhaps some people master the art of sobriety in such a way that other people’s behavior has no affect on them, but Steve-O? The guy who got a giant tattoo of his own goofy smiling face on his back holding two thumbs up, because he just wanted to make anyone who saw it laugh, to impress people he hadn’t even met yet? Peer pressure has to be off the charts difficult for him to deal with. Being a crowd pleaser has gotten him everything. It’s practically his entire persona. But even if it wasn’t. Even if he was a hopeless misanthrope who didn’t give a whit one way or the other what you thought of him. No matter your motivation for getting clean, you’ve got to maintain the momentum. (I’m not saying one slip-up and the whole enterprise should go down the toilet, I’m saying avoiding a second slip-up will be a whole lot harder than avoiding the first. It’s a stoplight on the freeway, when your poor little three-stroke would’ve held 60 just fine going up the hill but for the bad luck of hitting the red, and now you’re getting passed by semis because you’re red-lining it at 45, and wouldn’t it just be so much easier to pull over, stop the car again, and get high.)

Momentum is everything, is what I’m saying. Exercise, writing, music, sobriety, what have you. The thing you did yesterday is the most likely thing you’re going to do today.

I believe in endings. This is why I don’t read a whole lot of short stories, why I kind of gave up on publishing my own stories, or reading lit journals. Modern short stories are more like long prose poems, just going to an impression, or a moment. If there’s any plot it’s often only one movement, which almost inevitably turns into the climax, and then the final image that may or may not provide any sense of resolution. Short stories aren’t the ideal form for finding a satisfactory ending. Flash even worse. Poetry, forget about it, resolution is the opposite of the goal. And blog entries? Perhaps the worst resolution offenders of the lot. Let me explain.