Who is the real fool? (Me.)

A friend from college (with whom I am, as is the fashion, only connected on social media) posts a link to a podcast that quotes me. The host, Daisy Eagan, had messaged me weeks ago after finding my frankly exhaustive dissection of the Sam the Sandown Clown case and wanted to use my analysis. I was only too happy, as most of this was already in the world, and she required nothing more of me.

I knew this day was coming. I only checked her podcast page a few times without seeing the episode before putting it out of my mind. I have been interviewed for at least two documentaries and a podcast that even appeared. I was a little testy then, having had to psych myself up, but I understood not to invest myself heavily in another artist's production.

I share the link around and tell Amber that I will never listen to it. This is not an affectation. The thought of doing this is physically painful. I want wider attention. It substantiates what I'm doing. Amber suggests I need exposure therapy, meaning I need to be quoted and discussed more widely.

A friend found it baffling that I would write so much and yet be uncomfortable with being read. That is not it, though. Everyone who will enjoy them should read my books and stories. The difficulty is that I do not want to be *perceived* outside these. I am uneasy with interviews and panels, and cannot tolerate even clips from them shared in my presence. They could be wonderful. I might be willing to believe they are, but it feels like the Ludovico Technique of a security camera, nothing but bad angles that make me look goony. I have a mien for radio - but don't make me listen to it.

Amber asks me what I am so scared of, and I struggle to articulate it, even now. It is not that I suffer Imposter Syndrome. I joke that I am too busy publishing to think about being an imposter. I know I excel as a writer. I'm even comfortable writing deeply personal details and letting strangers read them. By all means, pay me for my work.

With effort, I stammer that I fear being judged to my face. I write about weird topics I love, but I do not want people to presume my beliefs or disbelief. It is a cousin of embarrassment, the childish desire to hide behind my hands, blushing scarlet, taken to pathological extremes.

I do not know what made me this way. Maybe I have always been. I want to do well, but I do not want to be in the glare of the spotlight. I know when I create something of quality. Not in any arrogant way. I'm a strong but honest critic of my work, but I don't need to linger over it once it is out of me. My part of the transaction should be complete, but this is not the nature of my world, or the world as a whole--and I should radically accept the nature of it. How can I reconcile my literary exhibitionism with the agony of being directly noticed?

Once, Daniel began discussing one of my books with Amber. I don't recall the preamble, only that we were at a gas station in Woodstock, and I felt, at once, on the verge of panic, faced with two of my favorite people referencing my greatest passion. I knew it was clownish and inexplicable. I had no justification. I assume that, aside from Amber, no one reads what I write, and it is merely some expensive hobby that occupies me. I know this is not true. The internet makes clear I am freely quoted, if not deeply read.

I do not read my reviews. I do not look for them because I do not believe they are meant for me. (Sorry if you want to praise or insult me there. I will never know.) I do not want to be like this. I do not find it to be a charming, artistic quirk. I need my confidence to extend when cameras are in my presence.

Was there some primordial trauma? I loved acting in high school and college. I can be on stage. People have immediately praised me after talks, telling me that they could listen to me speak forever. I would rather be in another building while they do this. I can fake it in person, but I cringe internally until ten minutes after I am off-stage and nursing a drink.

After a week and a half of keeping the tab open, I listen to 36 minutes of Daisy Eagan's podcast until she reads from my article. I find my words only stranger and more tortured coming out of another person's mouth, as though she had broken into some eldritch language, but I manage to make it through intact. ]]> https://xenex.org/journal/20260420.php 05 May 2026 01:00:00 EST Support Thomm on Patreon

Jordan

Jordan walks past me. We cannot blame him, as I am crouched in a corner, reading. He gives a polite nod, as one might give to any vagrant, and then does a double-take.

"Thomm! You scared me!"

"I am frightening," I say. "I am reading a book about serial killers, after all."

"A specific one?"

"The Black Dahlia," I hold the door open to Charlie-O's, as does he, both polite. We go through our own doors. "It's actually speculation on the author's part that there was another victim. I'm not sure I buy it, but it is convincing prose."

There it is. I want to make Jordan into a proper friend, and I have immediately delved into one of my Topics Amber Feels Should Not Be My Conversational Fallback. Amber is not here, though. This is a Manly Meeting at a bar in Jordan's break between his child's activities. If I can avoid broaching sex or the paranormal for the rest of the night, maybe I can be forgiven for bringing up a bisected woman.

Jordan is an infrequent participant in the queer board game night. I let him know when they are scheduled, and he lets me know he is already booked that night. It's a good relationship, ruined by his giving in to my year-long desire to get him to invite me out for a beer.

We sidle up to the bar. Jordan asks for the beer list, and the bartender rattles off fifteen with occasional florid names. Jordan selects one. She asks which I would like, and I meekly say, "Diet Coke, please."

She is dubious. "Just that?"

"Yes."

"We didn't have to come to a bar," Jordan says in apology.

"No, not at all," I protest. "I want the masculine bar experience. I don't really drink. I never have."

"Is this your first time?" he asks, which may not be unrealistic, given that I ordered a diet soda at a bar.

I assure him it is not. I have been in over ten bars.

He is lightly bearded with an easy smile. His job is to coach in some capacity — people, not sports — and he does improv online. He looks like the sort of man who would have that job.

He broaches the paranormal, and I fill him in on the hot goss instead of detailing the paranormal unified field theory and Keel's ultraterrestrial conjecture. That's more of a second date conversation.

I manage not to bring up sex in our 45 minutes together, though possibly because this child's improv class so abbreviates it. Give me another hour, and I would be asking him about embarrassing sexual foibles in his past. We do detail meeting our respective spouses. We are wife guys, and are unembarrassed about it. He has been with his since high school, and has been hitched for a quarter century, to my mild envy. I will get there.

Our bar chat is never awkward, which is rare for one-on-one social situations where I am required to speak. That we have already hung out together while playing board games likely takes the pressure off. We know we have social compatibility. Once you know how much someone else hates a game involving using mushrooms to grow trees, it is hard to feel like a stranger.

We leave the bar. I walk to the street with him, popping my umbrella. He asks where my car is, and I point to the other end of the parking lot.

We hug because we are huggers. ]]> https://xenex.org/journal/20260328.php 05 May 2026 01:00:00 EST Support Thomm on Patreon

We did not eat this

As we pull into the parking lot, Amber makes a dubious sound in the back of their throat. "Are we sure there's a restaurant here?"

I had looked up the menu and address, but these are so easy to fake. I couldn't imagine the endgame in luring us here, but it wouldn't be much of an expenditure of effort. I might suggest a better bait than Turkish food, but I see the virtue in not making the trap too obvious.

A sandwich board on the sidewalk announces the restaurant between two empty storefronts--one a daycare legally condemned--and beside a dollar store. The day has been a comparatively balmy 52° after subzero weeks and feet of snow.

Earlier, I had practiced my kalimba in the full sun and felt almost warm. So, the idea of waiting outside a restaurant for my parents and younger brother to arrive seemed almost like a treat. It was the first time I wore anything lighter than my wool peacoat outside since, according to the prescription bottle I had apparently relegated to the closet along with my jean jacket, the middle of November. My soul wants to be stripped down to a loincloth (and copious Coppertone), but I would suffer my jacket.

My mother exits her car and tells me not to forget the Christmas present she brought that I left behind the last time I saw them. I tell her not to forget. This repeats until a woman passing laughs at us.

My parents tell the moon-faced Mediterranean man presiding over the nearly empty restaurant that we have a reservation for an early dinner (4:00 p.m. on the dot). I skim online menus before going to a new eatery, so I'm well apprised of the offerings, and do not have to labor under the yoke of making decisions in situ. Sarah's Mediterranean Grill commits the cardinal sin of having a slightly different takeout menu online. Throughout the meal, a robotic voice chimes, "DoorDash order," so in-person dining may not be their bread and butter, and this might better explain their placement in a strip mall between retail husks.

My mother name-drops her neighbors across the street as those who suggested this place. The waiter's face lights up, but there's no way to determine if the name is meaningful or if he just knows to smile. After I put in our appetizer order - my parents like hearing me say "avoganoush" - he brings us complimentary cheese sticks, so maybe the neighbor's name carries weight.

Dining out seems to be my parents' favorite activity in retirement. The only other contender is home repair, and much of that is done by hirelings, so it lacks immediate gratification.

Bryan talks of getting his PhD. I asked if he doesn't already have an MD, but it is a DNP.

"I want to get an alphabet next to my name," he admits, and then proffers his phone containing his work email. Following his name are possibly 26 letters already, though not in order. I try to figure out how to reorder them to spell insults.

Amber produces their own phone, showing that one can get a free accreditation in rat tickling. "I know someone who got a job just because the interviewer thought that was funny."

I share some work stories, the most entertaining of which involves a pitch battle at our morning meeting about not bribing the kids with lollipops. Anytime candy is the worst thing going on among dysregulated teenage felons is a blessing.

We all managed to finish our dinners, something that is nearly unheard of given the portions and number of appetizers my family orders. The Turkish may be a more parsimonious people when it comes to dining, and the restaurant might be a front for something, so it would not behoove them to stuff us like grape leaves.

I do not forget the gift in parting. ]]> https://xenex.org/journal/20260228.php 05 May 2026 01:00:00 EST Support Thomm on Patreon

Kalimba

The kalimba is an implicitly silly instrument. It is as if one has eviscerated a music box and fiddled with its guts. They are toys more than anything else. The tablature for the 17 tines, half of which are so high, is of limited or no use — it is a series of numbers without breaks, looking like 4 1* 3 2* (5-5*).

If one doesn't already know the song, the tabs won't help. Even when one does know the song, it's no guarantee.

I have never loved an instrument more, in part because I have never made the formal introduction to one. In elementary school, we were asked to pick an instrument to learn. Earlier that year, I had been pulled aside and told I would be taken out of class once a week to do a program for gifted children. When the day came, I lined up with the other two students. The teacher told me to sit down and said I was lying about being in this program. I do not know that I had context for mortification then. Still, that experience carved graffiti into the chapel of my self-concept.

They picked me up for the program the following week, offering no apology.

When presented with instrument options, I saw that most required learning notes. Percussion only needed to know speed, so it was the easiest. Who would notice if my triangle were out of tune? It was a public school, and they needed drummers, so no one was going to yank the sticks from a third grader's hand and point him to the string section.

We all learned the plastic recorder, and were equally miserable in our squawking. The other class got mouth harps for a play, and I burned with the indignity that my class only got scarves.

I've always loved piano music. Watching someone play well hacks my brain. Listening to it in the right mood can leave me weeping in the corner, so moved am I by the transcendence. The grace of it felt beyond my comprehension.

I told myself I was not musical because I did not instantly and intuitively excel. I could not suffer being seen as second-rate. I could not give evidence to the teacher who left me behind to moulder in the mainstream classroom while my peers completed Venn diagrams, rebi, and logic puzzles---the gifted program was a little more than that, all done in a closet cramped with other teacher supplies.

I did not try, even though I ached to pick up a guitar and be the sort of guy who could. I had rock-star fantasies, despite being unable to sing, which I do not hold against myself, as this is an anatomical issue; I lack the correctly shaped throat. I can't even whistle, damn it.

In my limited defense, whenever I noodled on some instrument left in my presence, nothing much came from it. Pluck a string, press a key, and sounds came out. My brain did not resolve these into chords.

Kristina gave Amber and me a hand drum and a kalimba for Christmas. They lingered in their boxes on the kitchen table for a few days until Amber asked about them. Last year at this time, I might have conceded to relegate them to the giveaway box. Now, I had an office, and I could clutter it.

I tried the hand drum a few nights. It is a green metal instrument shaped like a gel-coated aspirin. I said I would learn it and claimed it, though my success was fairly unremarkable.

The kalimba lay in the kitchen for a few more nights, the 17 tines looking more mathematically challenging than the drums' six tongues. Amber started asking whether something would be done with it; the linguistic construction was too passive. I snatch it up before it could be it could go unloved and forgotten by some strange child. I plucked it a little; the tablets are the same sort of "Hit this number" as the drum.

My brain purred, "Yes."

I startled, unaware my brain had a node that could say yes to an instrument.

I outgrew twinkle twinkling my happy birthday to Mary's Little Lamb as quickly as I could pluck them. The internet was not shy about creating tabs for real songs — though the instrument is too niche and its range too specific for a robust selection outside of Jesus-love.

Within an hour, as long as I could see the numbers etched in the tines (and once I fully accepted it was a thumb piano and I could not cheat with other fingers), I could play simple songs I knew well.

I went straight to the complicated ones, found them difficult, but practiced nightly.

Early on, I discovered that the score for Amélie suited the instrument. I have long considered Yann Tiersen's compositions there among the music that reaches directly into my soul. It was almost hubris to think I could make that music, yet I found my favorite, "Comptine d'un autre été."

I have yet to master---or even approach---the faster parts that seem to necessitate more thumbs than nature has blessed me with. However, when I plucked a few keys and the chords I love came out, I actually cried. I could produce beauty using only my hands (writes the writer). The music, for the curious, is

(3*3) 7 (22*) 7
(4*2) 7 (4*2) 6
(5*7) (3*5) (5*7) (2*5)
(74*) (2*4) (4*6) (2*4)

It doesn't look hard—or incomprehensible if you cannot read it—or tricky if you can (needs more thumbs). It is gorgeous to me. I cannot believe I can do it.

Playing my kalimba makes me melancholy at times--though it makes Death Cab for Cutie's "Follow You Into the Dark" sound remarkably cheerful. It reminds me that I told myself a limiting story for decades, and I know I could have learned the kalimba at any time. I just feared, in my soul, failing at something. How much have I done this? I thought I couldn't dance until I started doing it several times a week with a video game, in part because swing dancers are snobs. It recalls how I held myself back from getting therapy and meds. What else lingers on the edges that I have been too scared to face?

And why was a tinkly thumb piano the item on which this revelation will eternally be fixed? ]]> https://xenex.org/journal/20260121.php 30 Mar 2026 01:00:00 EST Support Thomm on Patreon

Not this year

I do not abound in regrets from 2025. I survived buying and moving a house, making it a true home for us. We lost the continuity of Megabrain, but we are trying to keep the community. I thought I made a new friend, but it flamed out because she couldn't respect boundaries, which was bruising but too predictable. Otherwise, we left the year with as many friends as we entered.

I don't care to prognosticate the specifics of 2026. I will write. I will publish. Amber and I will go on a few trips and have parties, but I know of nothing potentially startling — and I am not too sorry for this. The chances are that a surprise at this juncture would not be a pleasant one.

New Year's Eve, we found out too late that The Governor, a hip bar in Poughkeepsie, had opened at 4, with a ball drop at 8PM, ostensibly so reasonable people could be tucked in and dreaming when the year ticked over. Amber and I cannot deny the appeal of this, but we promised ourselves elsewhere.

We ring in the New Year at Amber's mother's house, where Rebecca and her friends have gathered. This summer, Rebecca is marrying her partner, Kai. It felt imperative that we see one another again before they return to Texas.

I invited James, who lives within walking distance of Amber's mother, in better weather.

I have known Kai almost as long as I have known Rebecca, having met them all at the Eveready Diner once I was ready to be shown off as Amber's boyfriend--Amber had invited me before. I was too anxious about what might have been a social gauntlet. I have always regarded Kai well, and their involvement with Rebecca was strong enough that they followed my sister-in-law to Texas. Still, I was never quite sure of the temperature of their relationship. When I heard they were engaged, I said, "So I guess they were dating!" Amber is unsure. It was a practical discussion that resulted in the outcome, not some romantic gesture.

Sitting in the living room and eating too many dishes reliant on the theme of cheese, I marvel at the interconnections. Rebecca's friend Amy's sister, Colleen, was almost married to my younger brother, Bryan, who supplanted me among the Cold Spring Crew, including with Kendall, who introduced me to James. The Cold Spring Crew also adopted Coley, whom I dated twice and enjoy now, and whom Amy suggests may have tried to sleep with her. This is what comes of living in the same area for decades: positively everyone who is anyone has done something with someone. Amber later tries to figure out which matchmaking feat they would have to undertake to make us related to all of Rebecca's friends. I pronounce it unlikely and decidedly unwise. ]]> https://xenex.org/journal/20260101.php 30 Mar 2026 01:00:00 EST Support Thomm on Patreon

I do not have a picture reading "abuse"

She messages me out of the blue, informing me that one of my social media friends is a sex offender, abuser, and "very bad man."

I search and find no one by that name on my friend list of 463 people, most acquired over decades, and maybe a tenth of whom mean anything to me. Otherwise, they are the social detritus of having lived and lost.

Eventually, she says that he goes by another name, and I find him.

He is a man who is not relevant to me, a friend of a dead friend. She says I don't have to do anything. She simply felt the need to let people know what sort of people they had befriended.

I click on the friend. She gives brief context to the relationship — 25 years expired — but I don't need this. Once she has left the conversation, asking that I not tell him she is doing this, I slowly remember their coupling in a few loud fights when he was not paying attention to her, and having her nudes shoved at me in the era before smartphones. My now deceased friend did not think much of this woman, who gave as good as she got in these squabbles, shrieking, weeping, and breaking things---occasionally against his skull. I cannot speak to this. I avoided any domestic violence and did not spend much time with the guy. Oh, he was a scumbag to you in 1999? Yeah, that scans.

I do not know what set this woman off, and I don't feel it is my business, except that she brought this to me, maybe a decade after we had an interaction. However, I cannot entirely fault her for reconciling her past as best she could.

I still hold a grudge from that era, something that would have been so much less of an issue except that no one listened to me. When a woman in her mid-20s set her sights on me at sixteen, I warned people, who shrugged it off. When she held me down and bit me in public, I alerted security, who told me not to let her do that. When she slipped naked Polaroids of herself under the windows of my parents' house, I was unambiguous, and people thought it was edgy of her. She took revenge porn of my also underage friends and threatened to blackmail them with it if they didn't comply with her whims, and people looked the other way. She was written up in a local paper op-ed for producing CSAM, which wasn't fair in itself, since it was more racy kitsch involving teens, but worrisome when taken together. She enlisted people — including my younger brother — to report back on what I was doing when I cut her out of my life. I could go on.

I told people, and they excused her. Not even that she wouldn't do these things---I don't believe anyone would contest that these were all in her character---but that they opted to like her too much to care about her predation of kids. She had a dominating personality, and they wanted to succumb to her fantasies. Years after she was out of my life, I saw her, and I told the people I was with that she was an abuser, and I did not want her around me. I did not want a confrontation; I wanted them not to invite her around me. They outright said she didn't abuse anyone, even though they knew me and not her. It is much easier to forgive people who never sinned against you, because holding them to account (or at least believing the victim) requires uncomfortable work.

This week, this site received a jolt of attention from China, all focused on an entry from 2006 where my father gently tried to confront me with the fact that my girlfriend was abusing me. I was too brainwashed and stuck in the relationship to fight my way out--but not so much that I didn't publicly write the conversation. Rereading that filled me with fury that I had been mistreated, that this woman wasted years of my life I should have spent growing rather than compromising. I do not hand her all the blame, but I do hand her enough of it. Almost from the beginning, she manipulated me because that is what she knew, and years of therapy had not trained it out of her yet. (And I had no therapy and medication that might have allowed me to hear and not simply transcribe my loved ones' advice.)

I cannot fathom reaching out decades later to let mutuals know I was misused. Either they know, they prefer her, or they don't care. It would not be relevant to them, and I do not see a point to it. Neither of us is those people any longer. A part of me will never forgive what she did. The woman I see on the internet is a distant relation — and I think she is otherwise a good and cool person who has grown into a stranger. My indignance on behalf of a man barely out of grad school kowtowing to a woman who took his money and time. It is not forgiveness or forgetting but understanding. Also, I know a few people who are that age, and I think they are idiots to rival who I was. It would be a struggle not to see my pain through that lens. ]]> https://www.xenex.org/journal/20251230.php 30 Mar 2026 01:00:00 EST