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My Giant Goes With Me

Traveling is a fool’s paradise. Our first journeys discover to us the indifference of places. At home I dream that at Naples, at Rome, I can be intoxicated with beauty and lose my sadness. I pack my trunk, embrace my friends, embark on the sea and at last wake up in Naples, and there beside me is the stern fact, the sad self, unrelenting, identical, that I fled from. I seek the Vatican and the palaces. I affect to be intoxicated with sights and suggestions, but I am not intoxicated. My giant goes with me wherever I go.

Ralph Waldo Emerson, “Self-Reliance”

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In Defense of Late Starts

My sister has been posting furiously on Facebook the past several weeks, having recently encountered decidedly ‘telestial’ facts about the religion we were raised in and its history both old and recent (“telestial” is a term in Mormon scripture for the lowest “degree of glory,” a booby prize in church culture despite doctrinal protestations otherwise, the estate given to the worst kinds of people during the Final Judgment where the Telestial Kingdom is reserved for murderers, liars, whoremongers, ne’er-do-wells, and bad apples). The gritty details of the church’s polygamous and occasionally polyandrous past, its expulsion in the nineties of a few bothersome intellectuals known as The September Six, the recent accusations of sexual abuse at the hands of a church leader back in the eighties, the church’s efforts to protect itself from said accusations, and “blood atonements” that were at the very least verbally encouraged by Brigham Young, second prophet of the church, my sister’s and my great-great-great grandfather, and the person my mom had in mind while I was growing up when she would regularly take me by the shoulders, look through my eyes as her own glistened in certainty, and with gravitas try to engrave a well-meaning but unhelpful message on the back of my skull by declaring, “Stephen Joel, the blood of prophets flows through your veins,” among other things, ‘other things’ here referring to additional troublesome bits of Mormonism but could also refer to the kinds of things my mom would say to me when I was younger, all combined to hot-and-bother my sister who is now blasting out posts about her discoveries and sounding the alarm to anyone who will read them: “HEY! EVERYONE! DID YOU KNOW ABOUT THIS?!”

Well, yeah, I did…

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The Mayor of Silver City

Throughout the Sunday morning drive from Silver City to Truth or Consequences and then later sitting in a private hot springs there, I couldn’t stop smiling at the sublime weirdness of the day before: a poetry open-mic shot through with strange energy in a coffee shop bursting with aging hippies, a surreal night at the bar that unfolded like wandering into a James Joyce novel tailored for Stephen Joel rather than Stephen Dedalus, and that found me, without any conscious effort on my part, having assumed the role of gregarious social connector, the Mayor of the City, greeting newly-familiar faces like old friends, slapping backs, joking with and introducing people to one another, charming and welcoming strangers into my orbit, a night in which a kaleidoscope of characters and dialogue floated in and out of the noisy scene like notes from an irreverent Debussy prelude as played by hobo troubadours straight out of the boxcar: jangly, dream-like, suggesting something real before asking, “Is it, though?”…

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An Update Regarding Poorly Received Jokes

After an hour had passed, I finally broke the silence in a van full of strangers shuttling to Phoenix from Flagstaff, where I’d been living for the month of February.

“Guys. We never talk anymore… I’m worried about us.”

Somehow, the van became even more quiet despite a lone and forced “heh” from the woman sitting to my right. Now, in addition to not talking, they’d also stopped moving and fidgeting.

I’d laughed to myself at the idea of saying it a few minutes before and decided that even though it would probably go over as awkwardly as it actually did, I would regret not trying it out; the possible payoff was worth the risk. It almost certainly came across as socially tone-deaf, evidence of a discomfort I didn’t actually feel very strongly but was still probably the main reason why the joke didn’t take, and I laughed all the more to myself later, shamelessly reveling in its lameness and stoic reception. It reminded me of my first day as a freshman at Brigham Young University in the dorm lobby where I was no longer a big fish of my high school social scene. A group of fellow freshmen who already seemed to know one another were watching a beauty pageant on the television and lobbing snarky comments among themselves about the host’s unusual dress. An outsider looking for a way in, I offered my own jab at the presenter by likening her dress to a lampshade and was met with silent glances and a brief pause before their conversation and friendship resumed without me. That hurt. The comedic failure on the shuttle, on the other hand, delighted me the more I thought about it. A sign of growth!

All this to say, “Dear Reader, we never talk anymore.”

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