A Portrait at 45

Today I turn 45, and though not one for milestones, this year more than most begs reflection. It is most obviously marked by my dad's difficulties with dementia and physical injury - and transparently, my fears for him echo upon myself, too - infirmity awaits me just as surely. Yet I also sense that I have come now to a certain 'rightness' - a harmony with my life's circumstances, a belief that I am basically whole, that any remaining imbalances exist generally around the periphery. This does not necessarily reassure - wholeness leaves mystery nowhere to hide - it is both an admission and acceptance that this is all I am.

I went back to work last winter, a change refreshing in its normality and in the basic good faith of my coworkers, whose trust I take as my own to earn (I believe have largely done so). I had spent last fall working at SpeedPro, following Merry's departure from Boys Town, and now I spend occasional nights continuing to build and refine tools for their production processes. I continue to do this because they rely on me, and because it satisfies me to build entire 'things' - to thoughtfully align software to real-world human action is, I believe without irony, a modern artisanal medium.

I have also moved slowly towards woodworking - first with my dad and now whenever the practical need arises (these are rarely complex or elaborate in any way). I find myself in the familiar dilemma of enjoying an idea (in this case the Christoper Alexander-ish notion of designing spaces in harmony with people) more than the process itself. Thus I care more about curating a space than that the woodworking itself is executed with procedural or technical precision. So perhaps I should call what I am doing design and not woodworking.

Some ideas that are especially alive within me at this age:

1. Jung's theory of psychic complexes and the necessity of "making the unconscious conscious." This is a lens through which I view events every day, as I try to learn to treat myself and people around me better.
2. To this end, the most critical "meta-lessons" to teach my kids are their own power of agency, and the freedom to pursue meaning in the world. More selfishly, I want my kids to love me as much as I can rightfully deserve.
3. AI will necessitate "zero trust" systems in virtually all parts of society, as every window of implicit trust is an arbitrage opportunity for bad actors, and AI plunges the cost curve of these attacks downward. And though the Red Queen Race will surely continue between security tech and its exploitation, blockchains (if not necessarily particular cryptocurrencies) will benefit proportionate to the degree trust in nation-scale social and financial organizations and infrastructure erodes.
4. Looking further out, Enlightenment-era human values must be made integral to any autonomous forms of our increasingly-powerful technologies if the world is not to devolve into a state of all-domain war from which few of us - and perhaps none - would be likely to survive.

Some art that has particularly shaped me the last couple years:

1. Bruno Schulz's collected stories, so often circling the father, a sort of quester/trickster demi-god, alternately inspired and pathetic, familiar and unfamiliar, coming and going, finally a symbol of the maximal possibility space of both art and life.
2. Peter Handke's Repetition, in which the narrator's quest for his unmet brother becomes a Campbell-ian Hero's Quest - a departure from modest means and a return home to reintegrate into a patrilineage forever altered in his eyes. The mirroring of the narrator and his lost brother throughout has lingered with me ever since, as have the words of WG Sebald in perhaps my favorite single piece of literary analysis.
3. Paul West's Words for a Deaf Daughter evokes a parent's particular lament: that the gulf to a child's inner world is uncrossable, and after a certain age, whatever closeness we might have achieved will inevitably wane.
4. George Stewart's Earth Abides, a book most centrally about letting go of that which is unspeakably close to us.
5. Kay Sage's work generally.
6. Hailu Mergia's seminal album Wede Harer Guzo, especially the title track.
7. Various ambient and near-ambient albums that approach a form I previously wrote about.

A few years ago I filled my free time primarily with writing and occasionally with reading - now that balance has flipped, as I seldom find my inspiration aligning with the time, energy, and focus required to write. Occasionally I will read some old story of mine and find myself nodding - the images that inspired them still feel true, though I seldom know how to improve meaningfully upon them. Perhaps that's simply a sign they are done, even when they haven't achieved the release I sense is possible.

I have spent the last 25 years gradually accepting life's fundamental loneliness. Where I once thought I would eventually discover ways to find people "more like me", now I suspect that very premise was always a projection, that it is primarily myself I remain distant from, that I don't yet fully understand who I am or what I need. Will my life pass with a greater version of myself still undiscovered?

To wit: I continue to struggle as a father to Eamon, who just turned four, and the persistence of my frustration suggests the problem is me. Is my anger that Eamon disobeys me just mirrored anger that I so often disobey myself, failing to follow through on my own intentions? Not for the first time, the race is on to discover how to fix myself before I permanently damage someone I love.

Much of life seems to be variations upon this, and as despair creeps in, I increasingly wonder where I can possibly find shelter. Simultaneously, the knowledge that my family needs me takes precedence over anything else - the exciting destinations I desire to visit, having a bigger house or better things. Instead, I ask: what will give me the strength as I get older to hold out against the wolf at the door, the ever-shrinking world around me? Of this, I see only the faces of my children and Merry, and I know that it is only if they should dissolve away that I would be truly defeated.

Despite all I have just confessed, I am basically content. I get to be close to my family and my parents and I have many long-time friends that I can always pick back up with wherever we left off. Only today, I woke up 45 years old! The path in front of me is, in a sense, easy to understand: with my feet stable beneath me, I must reach for any forms of greatness I can while the chance to do so still remains.

The Threshold of Pop Music

Of pop music's defining attributes, I believe its most essential is its immediacy. It is difficult, if not impossible, to ignore a great pop song playing. It is infectious, it compels us to feel the joy or pain or desire it expresses. And the greater of these heights it reaches, the greater it is generally considered.

And I love that as everyone does - at least I do on my own terms. I often find the most popular pop songs to be emotionally saccharine, leaving the equivalent of a bad taste in my mouth. But the heights of the form that speak to me - the ecstatic moment where melody reaches out from within the musical form - can still take my breath away.

Despite all this, for a long time I haven't been much interested in the 'melodic moment'. For many years, I have been drawn, instead, to ambient music, as best expressed long ago by Brian Eno: "If you leave your personality out of the frame, you are inviting the listener to enter it instead." Indeed, that may be the opposite of that 'ecstatic moment', the moment when our attention is most intensely compelled. (Indeed, Eno has also stated that ambient music is "music you can ignore".)

This may feel like a binary, but I'm interested in it as a possible continuum, because what I'm attracted to lately isn't the magnetic pole of "ambient", but what happens when we turn the dial up ever so slightly, to where form and ego first begin to materialize. What are the 'primitives' that first emerge, and how do they cohere as sound moves into the known realm of music, where instrumental and vocal personas form the familiar framework of songs?

Just as exciting, perhaps, is the idea that we may not know all the primitives that are possible, nor the range of the known, nor the ways they might combine and break apart, or move, or mutate. Can a voice be made egoless, neither embodied nor disembodied? Can we reproduce our own internal monologue as it exists at the liminal state of sleep, or disinterest, neither the language we know, nor incoherent, true to some unexamined form? Can footsteps be neither the sound of walking nor a 'found rhythm', yet without decoupling into 'phantom sound'? Can we hear the sound of breath without presuming a person who breathes? If the ambiance of the room I now sit in were a starting point, what embellishments would make this room both unfamiliar and interesting, yet not simply uncanny? What are the smallest changes to the sound landscape that would tug on my attention, and why?

Can we paint a picture of sound that works like great cinema, to a profound and singular effect with minimal attachment to our existing auditory vocabulary? What I'm thinking of is an aural equivalent to the visual impression of the bedroom scene at the end of 2001: A Space Odyssey. In a world where electronic musicians have now had access for decades to synthesizers and computer-based audio generation and engineering capable of forming most any sound imaginable, is there still a lexicon of undiscovered sounds, and within it something that could be considered a language waiting to be discovered?

Almost all of my creative time over the last decade has been devoted to writing (I've probably even spent more time drawing than making music). If I had taken the path of music instead - or if I were still to veer towards it - the questions above are the ones I would most want to explore.

Elon Musk Purchases Twitter

Today, Twitter accepted Elon Musk's bid to buy the social network. I am optimistic that he will make improvements which will increase Twitter's value substantially, perhaps even 1-2 orders of magnitude over time.

Most of the debate around Twitter rests on the premise that it (and other social networks) must strike some careful content curation balance in service to The Truth. Unfortunately, The Truth in question is not the objective truth (as we might assume), but rather something like the Overton Window, comprised of the current set of our society's consensus beliefs. This means that consensus untruths are welcomed while inconvenient truths are often forbidden. (For instance, Twitter banned many users in the spring of 2020 for claiming that masks wouldn't stop the spread of COVID-19. The given justification was that this was not "scientific consensus". Of course, a few months later, consensus emerged that... drumroll... masks didn't stop the spread of COVID-19! Did Twitter management learn anything from such episodes? Anyway, I digress.)

I think Musk's plan to allow anyone with a government-issued ID to become verified (the current "blue checkmark") will circumvent this issue over time, because your credibility will become yours to protect or waste, as you see fit. The second piece is allowing users to customize their Twitter feed filtering and sorting, ideally by open sourcing content curation algorithms, so anyone can be a curator.

Wait, you say: people don't care about credibility - many verified accounts will lie as much as ever! Well, that's true. But, Twitter's problem has never been liars; rather, it has been keeping liars' tweets off the feeds of people who don't want to read them. Those people (like everyone else) would have a rich ecosystem of curation algorithms to choose from, both free and paid. Interestingly, I think this approach strengthens Twitter AND established media institutions, by giving them an opportunity for greater relevance while binding them to Twitter's platform. Certainly an organization like the New York Times would have tremendous opportunity in curating a feed for their subscribers. Twitter could even facilitate payments between the three stakeholder groups - Twitter might charge a content curator a platform fee per user who subscribes to that curator's algorithm (in which case the subscription would be free to the user), OR, at the curator's election, Twitter could handle user subscription payments - an amount offsetting some or all of the platform fee, and remitting any balance above back to the curator. In other words, the curator can choose to price their product to the user at a level above, below, or breakeven with Twitter's per-user platform charge. (And, advertising could still exist within this framework - served by Twitter at a frequency set by the curator, with ad impressions and/or click-thrus offsetting the platform fee.)

If curation will be a free market competing on quality, then why verify accounts at all? Quite simply, because it is likely to be a powerful data point helping algorithms to isolate signal strength.

Policing the truth of tweets (regardless of how it is defined) is unrealistic and will remain so for a long time to come. After all, who arbitrates the truth? (A hopeful answer: blockchains, eventually.) At a minimum, the effort is enormously expensive. But, pushing curation into a third-party marketplace will spur competition for effective algorithms. It may be that arbitration above and beyond optimizing user engagement is unnecessary. (I know, I know, engagement selects for sensationalism. But is that still true when many options exist?) A more elegant solution would emerge from the data itself - the network and emergent sub-networks of tweets and tweeters, constantly forming, shifting, and dissolving. Is Charlie Munger's "seamless web of deserved trust" possible amongst large groups of people, who seldom experience reciprocation on a one-to-one basis? Or does that miss the point, that the problem isn't "in-group" trust, but tribalism itself - our innate tendency to polarize into factions that stop listening to each other? Solving for gradual de-polarization (perhaps in the guise of empirical thought) sounds like a big market opportunity, itself! At a minimum, lots of things become possible (yes, both exciting and terrifying) when curation is allowed.

I think people forget that Elon Musk is the most successful product manager of his generation (this coming from a mediocre product manager of seventeen years). By obsessing over the idea of getting content curation *just right*, Twitter management have ignored that they are still in pole position to someday be *the* platform for all self-authored content. It is reprehensible to me that in 2022, Twitter still hasn't scaled to longer-form content (e.g., buying Substack or building a competitor), not to mention reached out to meet other similar mediums (e.g., visual and performative arts) wherever they are found online. But those are small irritations compared to the ability to surface valuable and worthwhile content to billions of people. After all, that’s what's at stake.

Eamon Glen Hubbard

Our son and Signe's brother, Eamon Glen Hubbard, was born just over a week ago. All went well, Merry and Eamon are healthy, now we are all home again.

We had a harder time naming Eamon than we had with Signe, a fact we explained first with gender (we had several girl names we liked when Signe was born, but had trouble finding inspiration for boy names). We knew (or perhaps justified) that we needed to see him before we named him, as we had with Signe, and indeed, his scrunchy face and head of thick blond hair prompted us to eliminate most of our list.

Eamon was a name I first liked because it seemed vaguely western and cowboy-ish (though perhaps this was just a liminal influence of Longmire). Caring for him in our room, the name took on a certain appropriateness when Merry realized it was a near-anagram of "no name"! We settled tentatively on it and started looking for a complementary middle name.

We first considered some options which "flowed well" (e.g., Eamon Gray, Eamon James) but these held no meaning to us. On the last morning in the hospital, I suggested Glen, telling Merry that Glen Canyon was a place my grandmother had first told me about. It was her I had most wished to link Signe's name to, though no workable opportunity had presented itself then.

What does it mean to name a person for a place, albeit one eliciting association to another person? First, it's worth noting that "Glen" is actually two references - the specific Glen Canyon in Southern Utah and Northern Arizona, named by John Wesley Powell on the 1869 expedition of the Colorado River and submerged beneath Lake Powell in the 1960s, and glen, the term for a secluded valley. Extrapolating from the latter, Eamon Glen implies a fictional or undiscovered place, ("a glen named Eamon") and, to me, at least, is euphonically pleasing (i.e., Tolkien's "Cellar Door").

This also provides a foundation beneath the specific place of Glen Canyon, a place neither my grandmother nor myself ever visited (though I did jet ski on Lake Powell in 2002 and visit Hole in the Rock in 2008) and which Eamon and I remain unable to visit - at least, until such a fortunate future age when Glen Canyon dam may be removed.

At that time, the sandstone will be 'bleached' by the water and the old riverbed and stream beds covered in a thick layer of sediment, much of which may be toxic. Riparian zones could take decades to reappear, and the canyon's original biodiversity may never recover. Assuming Glen Canyon re-emerges, it will resemble a wasteland, of no use to either of its previous constituencies - those who enjoyed the canyon, and those who enjoy the lake. What meaning could someone possibly find in that third state?

It wouldn't stay inhospitable forever. And within that slow recovery it powerfully evokes the archetype of redemption, in which something lost is recovered, in a diminished form which nevertheless retains a core essence. Or stated from the perspective of the redeemer: the process by which meaning is derived from loss (such as the loss of a loved one), honoring its memory and finding new life within it.

My grandmother passed away fifteen years ago, yet she is often the one I think of even now when I am struggling with moral decisions - what would she think if I did [x]? Clearly there is still life in my memory of her, a small part of which I give to Eamon Glen. We are thrilled he is here with us.

R.I.P., Walter Scott, Jr.

Walter Scott Jr., a prominent Omaha philanthropist, recently passed away at 90. I had a link to him: for a couple years, I threw his money down the toilet.

I was a Walter Scott, Jr. Scholarship recipient in the college of Information Science & Technology (IS&T) at UNO. I found out a few weeks before I graduated high school, and having applied to too few other colleges, I had already decided to attend UNO anyway, to stay close to my high school girlfriend. At my parents' urging, I called to check in on my application - because I had never heard anything - and they called me back the next day to tell me I had been accepted!

Walter Scott had big plans for the IS&T program at UNO in 1999, but at the time it was just the Peter Kiewit Institute for Technology and a lot of empty land. I was most of the way through my first semester when I fell into a severe depression. I ended the semester with two A's, a D, and two F's. Two weeks into the spring semester, I stopped attending classes altogether.

That May, my parents helped me make an appeal to Scott's scholarship administrator to reinstate me that fall, given that I was undergoing treatment and, we believed, showing progress. They agreed. This time, I was an inaugural resident in the new Scott Dorms, intending to focus myself on school life.

I didn't. I moved in, but only lived there a week. I never attended a single class. Over Thanksgiving, my dad went and got my stuff out of my dorm - I was too ashamed and embarrassed, I couldn't face my dorm mates. I couldn't even admit to myself what I had done - I didn't have the strength to face the darkness of my own failings.

It took me almost a decade to fully recover from depression, during which time I developed myriad coping mechanisms. One of these was to "reverse engineer" equanimity for my life situation - whenever I made a mistake, I would say to myself: who was I to have known where that decision would lead me? I was an 18-year old whose naiveté and ignorance were not only plausible, but to be expected. The consequences of my actions, I concluded, were tragic, but they could hardly have been avoided.

It took me many more years to fully internalize my sense of personal accountability, and to think frankly about what I threw away - not just a philanthropist's money, but my own opportunities, and time. And yet, to try to dig the root cause out of the past - not my academic failure or depression, but the behavior that precipitated those - seems so intractable as to be pointless. Those propensities were a part of myself as far back in my memory as I can reach. It was inevitable that I would have to face them. Could I have maneuvered around them so as to limit the damage? The question seems detached, by my estimation, from reality.

A different question: was I predestined to this particular outcome, or should I have been more accountable?

Well, both, along a continuum, I guess. The reconciliation of the two requires a belief that every day is an opportunity to become a better version of ourselves. If I lacked resilience from a young age, then the right time to start building resilience was whenever I became aware I needed more. Same with temperament, same with discipline, same with patience, same with focus, same with anything. And it's still true.

We can all fall victim to the vicissitudes of life. But resilience is our defense, and even without knowing where I would've ended up, I do wish I would have known the value of possessing resilience earlier.

Goodbye, Avantas

Today is my last day at Avantas. I started working there just under 17 years ago, in August of 2004, while I was in college. My first job was as the receptionist. I had applied for an early-morning job running reports and doing other "office work" for a department called Agency Management. The shifts were 4am to noon on Tuesdays, Thursdays, Saturdays and Sundays. The idea of waking up early terrified me, but it was by far the best paying job I could find that fit with my class schedule, so I applied, then followed up the next week, and was more than a little surprised to get an interview.

I wandered in uncertainly and was soon taken into the main conference room to meet the HR leader and the Director of Operations. I was in a good mood - which must have been apparent - and they were in good moods, we all laughed, I gave honest answers even when they were unflattering and I remembered their names when we parted. I got a call the next day - they thought I'd be a good fit for an IT internship instead, which was fine by me, but I'd work at the front desk the first two weeks while the IT leader vetted me. Avantas managed hospital staffing, and the receptionist position was normally filled by one of the secretarial pool staff that were not on assignment. But, business was booming and everyone was on assignment. Having built websites in high school, I immediately started helping the Marketing director rebuild the company's. Meanwhile, the IT director gave me data entry tasks and some rudimentary data analysis.

Two weeks later I got a cubicle next to his, and along with the other intern (a guy named Jerome who I incidentally knew beforehand) the IT group grew from two to four. Jerome was doing statistical research to predict patient volumes and I was running & modifying Crystal Reports, then learning to build them, later I started using ASP.NET to build an online portal & dashboard, learning as I went. The latter took me a few months, I coded all the graph rendering from scratch using the drawing libraries (I was too naive to know there were 3rd party packages to do this). A lot happened in the first year - Jerome and the other IT guy left, then my boss was let go. I had already been promoted from Intern to Analyst - within a year I was promoted to Analyst 2, then Analyst 3. The two guys I worked closest with then were both cynical and endearing, I had a fraction of their experience, but they were patient, they accepted me, and they taught me a ton. I didn't appreciate it enough then, but looking back, I'm tremendously grateful we crossed paths.

We modified a mostly-finished version of a web-based shift signup application that a contractor had previously built - fixing some glaring omissions and hard-coded parameters, while I softened the shrill UI. We had enough time for functional testing, but not load testing, and the night it went live (at midnight, for reasons lost to time) it timed out on the users due to the database load. No customer support plan existed, and when users called into our 24/7 staffing office, they transferred them to us. We hacked together a series of fixes that night and the following days.

Soon after, we started building version two of the app. We convinced our new director that it would have to be rebuilt from scratch - too many of the foundational assumptions in the code were wrong and couldn't easily be refactored, plus the database was horribly un-optimized. The process of defining the requirements and technical design of the new version was one of the joys of my professional career. My coworker friends taught me how to think about requirements, business object definition, database design, coding standards and more. I look back in awe at what I learned that year. Mid-way through the project, one of them left - then the other six months later. We hired a new UI Developer and I was promoted to Lead Developer. As I was finishing up the last pieces of version 2 - testing the [properly modular] interface I had designed to our 3rd party staffing software - work halted. My boss had signed a contract for another company to build us our own staffing software from the ground up! Being reliant on a 3rd party solution had long held our consulting and business intelligence businesses back, so this was a huge strategic opportunity for Avantas, and one the company subsequently capitalized on. But it meant that version 2 - the only software app I ever designed and built from the ground up - would never see the light of day.

I moved into a Product Manager role and began collaborating daily with the owner of the other company. He and I collaborated to craft and execute an initial product vision and iterative roadmaps - I was a liaison to the users and a subject matter expert, he had experience bringing new software solutions to market, which we did with Smart Square in less than four months, in the spring of 2007.

The following year and a half was a whirlwind, spent building out the rest of the toolkit that we had long envisioned providing our customers. Meanwhile, the idea of going back to school nagged at me - I had never finished my degree, having accepted a full-time position with my second promotion after my internship. I went part-time in 2008, then left completely at the end of the year to do a semester abroad in Finland (I started this blog just prior).

I came home in mid-2009, when the the financial crisis was weighing most severely on the job market. Avantas had done a round of layoffs during my absence and any hires were out of the question. But at the end of that year, a woman who had started our Data Analytics department in 2008 hired me back to work on our patient forecasting - she actually contracted me back for a set number of hours (80, if I recall correctly, mostly to build and validate some data cleansing improvements in SAS), afterwards I proverbially 'kept showing up'. Soon thereafter, she left, and I found myself the sole member of our Analytics team!

When I graduated in the spring of 2010, I was hired back full time into a senior version of my old role. If there is one time in my history at Avantas that I wish I could go back to, it is then, so I could tell myself: "make sure you stay on a track you want to be on." Instead, I stayed - almost mindlessly - in the same role for eleven years. Why?

Because it was good enough in the right ways, I think. It paid enough, I knew enough, it was occasionally satisfying and I was always ready to believe greater things were just around the next corner. But too often in eleven years, they haven't been. The size of our team has increased by an order of magnitude, but it feels like the ability to innovate died years ago, and ultimately the promise of innovation is what has motivated me to work there since the earliest days. I am endlessly proud of the string of achievements from my first five or six years at Avantas. But the solidifying organization strangled our degrees of freedom, leading to a step-change down in our ability to deliver incremental value to our users. Successes now are small and isolated things, and many days it feels like the company - or at least the product - is in some sort of slow "run-off" mode, even though we're still signing contracts and growing revenue.

But I don't want to dwell on this, and even now it's not what I think about when I take a step back to assess the whole arc of my journey at Avantas. Even from the last decade, I'll remember working in good faith with coworkers and customers I liked and respected. And I hope - if I choose to work in technology again - that I can recapture the feeling of those early years, when I walked into an opportunity I couldn't then comprehend, stumbled around, somehow falling mostly forward and upwards, and came out the other end with the skills and experience that would define my career.

What is Impenetrable? + On getting older

In My Struggle, Karl Ove Knausgaard recounts a long series of failed attempts to write about his dad, redeemed only by the completion of My Struggle itself, in which he talks about him at length. Something about the subject of his dad and their relationship was hard for him to capture in writing - below I offer what is likely a flimsy and/or unoriginal hypothesis.

Capturing the essence of any real thing is not trivial, but it is harder yet when we are close to it. In our myopia, our understanding is often distorted. What I think is happening in these instances goes like this: we possess a mental construct of some thing (such as Knausgaard's concept of his dad) for which the core contents are inaccessible, the construct itself being impenetrable. In such instances, the 'surface' of this construct (the part we can still examine) are associated emotions which we have reinforced through repetition - an example being Knausgaard's reports that he felt anxious when he thought of his dad, even when he wasn't there - indeed, even after he had died!

Evidenced by the fact that My Struggle was published and it talks about his dad, Knausgaard got past his writer's block. But did he successfully capture the essence of who his dad was? I'm unsure.

It's been said that the best part of his book is his focus on the real, meaning what actually happened. He writes plenty about his dad and how he acted: the strict discipline and swift punishments, his fear from a young age, his dad's alcoholism and their awkward relationship as he becomes an adult. This brings the reader into Knausgaard's own state of doubt, rendering it clearly. But it never produces a satisfactory explanation as to why his dad is how he is, and Knausgaard draws few conclusions of his own.

It's a limitation of style, to be sure - Knausgaard mostly avoids speculating - and trying to answer why -which helps keep the book in the past, where it is at its best. But those why's might have been evident from what is written - certainly a person's actions can tell a coherent story, which I'm not sure they do in this case. It's odd in a book that he has said is about his dad that his dad's motivations remain so inexplicable (and note: saying he was "just an asshole" categorizes - and thus similarly fails to explain). 

Other readers might find the inexplicability interesting - I think it was a drawback for me, but that's okay, I did greatly enjoy the book as a whole. Left nagging at me is the intuition that there is something left un-penetrated in Knausgaard's understanding of his father. I suppose my flimsy hypothesis, then, is that Knausgaard hasn't fully come to terms with his memories and feelings for his father.

Before I go further: it's entirely possible that if I'm right, it just makes the book interesting in a different way. The risk, of course, is that I'm armchair quarterbacking his writing in a way that isn't useful or is off base. That's okay, it's just a sense that I felt compelled to explore by writing down. And besides, I'm getting old, it's about time to start telling stories whose points approach ephemerality, if not total nonexistence.

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In my own past, I've found quite a few topics to be impenetrable in the same sense - on some I've reached a breakthrough, while others I haven't. Sometimes it's hard to know - truth be told, it's probably not binary, but rather a question of degree. If that's true, then it follows that I only have my own intuition to tell me whether I've arrived at a satisfactory place. (Of course, this suggests lots of interesting possibilities, such as the epistemic uncertainty regarding how completely we have penetrated such a topic.)

I recently started writing about my early 20s. Disconnected as I've been from facts about that time period, my preconceptions were mostly made up of the things I've repeatedly told myself, which are self-reinforcing and reductionist. But a truth still existed! I just had to penetrate the surface that had formed over those memories. The process of doing so seemed to correlate with a period of intense dreaming, which I imagine as the psychic equivalent of how massaging a knot out of a muscle releases toxins.

Today I turn 40, and I find myself pondering what remains impenetrable in my past, and how to go about massaging those mental knots away. One of my biggest realizations this year has been that such 'humanist' pursuits (and not material ones) need to be my primary emphasis in the second half of my life. Otherwise, what may become impenetrable is my own pathological avoidance of the feelings and experiences of everyday life.