Monthly Archives: April 2026

You’re Smart. No, You’re Not.

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When I was a kid, a group of teachers decided that I should skip Grade Three. Mr. Fleming took me down the hall to his Grade Four class. I didn’t understand what was going on, just that I was suddenly in another grade. There was a writing exercise, maybe a math test too. I don’t remember much about what happened, except that I didn’t spell something right – the word “sheep” keeps coming to mind – or maybe my e’s looked like a’s. I don’t remember. But before the day was over, Mr. Fleming escorted me back. I was in Grade Three after all.

I now do some work as an external grader, which means that I assess student work from schools outside my district. My grading has been considered consistently accurate over the years, so much so that they had recently doubled my work load, including re-assessing those who they thought failed to meet their standards. Recently I was promoted to team leader, an assignment that lasted less than a week when they informed me that my grading was now unacceptable. We’re sorry to inform you that you will not be able to continue your grading. We are sure you will appreciate that our first concern must always be for the integrity of these assessments.

There was no recourse, no means of questioning or challenging the decision. It was my Grade Three/Grade Four experience all over again. I had been exceptional or whatever for a day and then I wasn’t. Institutional gaslighting at its finest.

Anger > Fear

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I’m spooked listening to my breath, thinking that it might be somebody else ready to tear me apart. I turn my phone around, and there’s nothing there. I’m stupid enough to think that this might be real. A child, still a child.

I’m driving the winding road at the bottom of the city, thinking it’s the next left and never getting there, searching for whatever and it always being ahead. I’m lost. Maybe worse.

I’m on the phone. No one’s answering. I limp across the street. The door won’t open. There’s a siren and then another. I vanish into the dark and walk and walk. The anger comes first and then the fear. I work myself up and get back to the anger. I want that sense of control as the bear chews off my face.

Is This The Most Important Question In Your Life?

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Are Trite Questions the New Headlines? Is This the End of Civilization? Is Musk An Immortal? Is Trump the Savior? Oh, well, maybe yes to those ones.

But more to the point: Is This Really The New Super Food? Who is The Most Dangerous Person Alive? Why is Everyone Afraid of This Tiny Thing? Why Does Everyone Ignore This Advice? Can This Dog Really Speak Ten Languages?

Why Are All of These Questions Never Answered? I’m waiting.

Is Cormac McCarthy’s “The Passenger” The Worst Novel Ever?

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I am a great admirer of Cormac McCarthy’s work. No Country for Old Men, All the Pretty and The Road are intensely terse and darkly compelling. Blood Meridian is absolutely mind-blowing and one of the few books I’ve (tried to) read multiple times. To be honest, McCarthy is a great inspiration for my own writing.

And so I was pleasantly surprised to learn of McCarthy’s The Passenger, a book published in 2022, a year before his death. “A brilliant book,” reads the review from The Los Angeles Times. “An elegiac meditation on guilt,” writes Esquire. “The first novel that I’ve read in years that I want to read three more times to savor,” proclaims The New York Times.

The jacket design offers promise.

Sadly, none of its true, as the book is awful. Weighed down by relentlessly repetitious, cliched dialogue, completely undeveloped vapid characters and heavy-handed explications on random topics such as the Viet Nam War, quantum mechanics and the Kennedys, it’s a 437-page spew that could have been a novella at best.

I’ve encountered no greater mystery in life than myself. In a just society I’d be warehoused somewhere. But of course what really threatens the scofflaw is not the just society but the decaying one. It is here that he finds himself becoming slowly indistinguishable from the citizenry. He finds himself co-opted. Difficult these days to be a rake or a bounder. A deviant? A pervert? Surely you’re joking. (159) I could go on. Or to be more accurate, Mr. McCarthy could go on and he does.

State of mind just halfway through the book.

The book felt debilitating for me in the end, making me wonder if I knew good words and that, leaving me to wonder how McCarthy could write this sophomoric gobbledygook, how the maladroit dross wasn’t purged and how the press could offer such sickly sweet sycophantic praise.

Certainly, we all have our bad days, but this book made me recall the line from McCarthy’s own The Road: Just remember that the things you put into your head are there forever. And so not just the cannibalism but now this book too.