Notes from Polite Society is a work of fiction. The first fifteen chapters have been posted here and are also available under the Articles tab on Twitter. It's about resisting fascism. It's about being a chickenshit. It's about forgetting.
Notes from Polite Society is also about a fictional food product called the Dogdilla, talking to Native American mounds, and scrolling ourselves into oblivion. Thank you for reading.
I hadn’t reached that point yet where I was sick of being sick, tired of being tired. I was still trying to make a go of it. What a sad lost soul I was. I was another baby for your mom to take care of, just as helpless as you.
But I can tell you that I distinctly remember in those weeks and months after when everything was raw and uncertain, I would feed you in your high chair, and you would look at me with those hazel eyes, the same as mine, and I’d say to myself that I’m not going to mess this up. Not this time.
Those were the days of AA meetings on Saturday mornings in the basement of the Lutheran church. You played in the playroom while I poured my heart out in a room of strangers who knew me better than I knew myself.
I couldn’t stand the sound of my own voice anymore. Lord only knows what it was like for her. You give her a hard time for busting your chops, but you’ve got to understand that she’s the one who held this little enterprise together.
When everyone else is gone, she’ll still be there waiting for you. She’ll love you like no one else. You want to learn about commitment and having faith in something beyond all reason, let me tell you about your mom.
I’m glad she got to meet you. I never saw her as happy as she was with you. I know she was worried. I know she couldn’t believe what had happened to me.
She was in hospice, sedated in bed. I didn’t know if she could hear me. But I leaned over and whispered in her ear that I would be a good husband and father. I’ve tried to be those things.
I haven’t had a drink. I’ve shown up like I should have from the start. But like I tell your mom, you shouldn’t get a cookie just for doing what you’re supposed to do.
I remember sitting in the hospital room with her and my dad and the surgeon telling us that surgery wasn’t an option. And the crazy part was that I recognized him from one of my AA meetings.
He was doing the work just like me. There we were, I thought, both of us trying to figure this whole thing out, but here was something that couldn’t be figured out.
Surgery wasn’t an option and there weren’t really any other viable options. I remember talking with my mom and dad shortly after that, and they told me that they decided to stop treatment and that was that.
But how could that be that? How is it possible that we know all the things that we know and can do all of the things we can do, but we can’t figure that out? She died a few weeks later.
But I think we’ve forgotten some of these simple things and gotten into trouble because of our forgetting. We need to be reminded of them. It’s good to remember that our time here is limited.
It’s good to remember that this is a human endeavor that we have going here on Planet Earth, which means accepting that we do not have all of the answers, and also unfortunately having to grapple with people who do think that they have all of the answers.
You’re trained as a kid to demonstrate appropriate deference to adults, but then you come to discover that a lot of adults either don’t know what they’re doing or know exactly what they’re doing, and what they’re doing seems really bad.
Humans are a complicated bunch, a riddle that can’t be solved. We’re like characters in a movie, some good, sure, but others evil, indifferent, tragic.
There is no celestial rules committee handing out detentions in real time for bad acts. I can’t speak to how it works in the afterlife, but that’s not how it works in this one. If you see trash on the sidewalk, pick it up. Don’t wait for someone else to do it.
And when you do what’s right, understand that your reward isn’t a cookie. It’s having the ability and privilege to do more good work. This world needs more good people doing the next right thing. If it had more of those, it wouldn’t be such a tough place for so many.
