Note: For the second week in a row, I am pushing aside my original essay. I didn’t intend to share this—outside of the introduction, I just wrote it to process—but I passed the self-censorship line many entries ago. You can probably predict what this is about. For greater context, you might reference Volume 2, Entry 50 “A Violent Exercise” as well.
I had perfect attendance in high school, never missing a single day. The threat of PE makeups scared me off of my old habits: I couldn’t imagine running an extra mile on a weekday morning to recover credit. (The version of me that would not only willingly run three miles every morning but pine for doing so while trapped inside was still nearly two decades away.)
Granted: the old SISWeb system didn’t report mine as perfect attendance. Those random letters sullying my record all have logical explanations that fail to disqualify my achievement. Senior year I left after Calculus to attend UOP’s honors day and realize how little I wanted to go there; I was at Honor Choir for that all-day field trip Fs in November. Junior year I left Spanish 3 halfway through on the day before Thanksgiving break to get my wisdom teeth removed—that shouldn’t count any more than the two failed attempts at anesthesia the dental surgeons billed—and I got sent home after vomiting four times in Music Theory and Vocal Ensemble before Ms. Larry stopped letting me talk her out of sending me up. And sophomore year featured two days of Honor Choirs, explaining a few more columns of Fs. No, I wasn’t fully present on campus those days but all are partial absences or school-endorsed functions. Those don’t count; I’ve asked!
Now, my freshman year? That is 100% spotless. I didn’t miss even—
Fine. It’s nearly spotless. There’s one interrupting letter visible. It’s an “I” for “ill” during a single sixth period in quarter four. I object to its marking in the first place—I made it through 75% of the period—but I know the system records things automatically so I won’t blame anyone.
There’s a story there too, of course. I was in Health class and, as part of the Tobacco Awareness unit, our teacher brought in a former smoker to speak. But not just any former smoker: this woman had a breathing stoma, IE: a hole in her throat. She spoke through a voice synthesizer and took these long labored breaths between every sentence.
None of what she said remains with me, but that isn’t for lack of attention. I listened so intently that I began to match my breathing rhythm to hers. I became lightheaded then nauseous and then stopped feeling like I could breathe. I raised my hand mid-sentence and asked to be excused. Ms. Boyce nodded me onward with a confused look on her face.
Collapsing a few feet from her desk, I never reached the door. The class crowded around me, security drove me to the office, and Merry picked me up to drive me home. I had no explanation for what had happened, but my doctor did later when I tried to explain the situation.
“You started breathing just like her and couldn’t get enough air,” he said with a chuckle. “Those are empathy pains, kid. Empathy is good but it can be a scary thing sometimes too.”
Yes. Yes it can.
Especially when it fails.
*****
Once the doctor explained it to me, I began to recognize empathy’s presence across so many things I did. That it was also present in my mom and her father explained a lot but it never felt hereditary in the way their sentimentality did. I’m convinced that part of my empathy draws from my affinity for storytelling.
When someone comes to me with a problem, I work to orient myself into their mindset and perspective. I listen closely, trying to reconcile what they say with what I already know about them or the situation they’re facing. I ask leading questions, probing at the fidelity of my anticipated responses with what they authentically reveal. I seek parallels from my own life to offer toward the same purpose, submitting them for approval in pursuit of common understanding. The routines I follow align nicely with numerous trainings I’ve undertaken but their development and application have never been anything but instinctual. If I want to help someone, I need to be in their head. The process I adhere to helps me achieve some semblance of that.
The storyteller takes over from there. With a sturdy character profile, I can put myself in their shoes and reason out appropriate responses with greater confidence. I interpolate what they say into a progression, intellectually role-playing iterations of their story in search of one that deescalates the crisis for the imagined version of me wearing a mask of their face. My eyes and ears remain on them, but my brain is crunching futures like a benevolent supercomputer, projecting possibilities and outlining crude tree diagrams in hopes of finding one plot line that my words will nudge forward with the greatest probability.
Whereas other conversations provoke a desire to play devil’s advocate, empathy engineers a different role entirely when I am called to action. I seek to become a second voice, an angel on the shoulder; any guidance I offer is mine but filtered through a sieve crafted from my understanding of them. My manner and message might be consistent across scenarios and conversations but the delivery—vocabulary, tone, rhythm—has to suit the recipient if it has any hope of landing. And there is only hope of landing when I can get into the person’s mind and began to craft a story for my version of them to inhabit.
At its sharpest, empathy is a powerful tool. At school, its potential value is obvious—Therapy Thursday is a pop-up empathy stand, if anything—but it also resists the tendency to vilify that lingers in the air. Given a few minutes, I can construct a reasonable interpretation of almost any behavior. When it works, it’s like dominoes: I can imagine where an idea began and I can envision one domino later in that line logically knocking over the next. I may note wild leaps of faulty logic in that reasoning and vehemently disagree over whether they should be toppling at all…but I can see how a person could arrive there. I can construct a different version of me that might arrive at a similar conclusion in their position.
This doesn’t preclude me from bad takes or angry outbursts, mind you. Empathy, even after years of practice, still requires a preheated oven and calibrated cooking on 350°F ‘til golden brown. Put me on the spot and I’m as prone as anyone to blowing up. I need space and time to nurture empathy from seedling to plant. But I do get there pretty much every time.
Well…no. I can get to empathy pretty much every time with one notable exception:
A school shooter.
There’s this block there when I try. No, it’s more than a block: it’s a wall. It’s a ceiling. It’s just a cold empty void. I find no dominoes to topple; I find no shoes to walk in. I stare at the photos and read the articles and soak in every milliliter of information I can about the person and nothing happens. I can’t close my eyes and open them in a constructed version of them to explore, I can’t craft a story or a logical progression that leads to their actions, I can’t even get myself out of the third person POV I stare at their photos with. Nothing I can conceive leads to killing that way. I can’t find their path; I can’t even imagine it. There’s something inhuman that defies my abilities. I’ve described it before: their faces are alien to me. This isn’t figurative language: my brain literally warps their images. Regarding their photos provokes the same nauseous repulsive fear that The X- Files did to me as a child. The actions they undertake transfigures them in my mind.
And I try so hard. It isn’t by choice; it’s a compulsion that dates back to the Jonesboro and Columbine massacres I’ve written about before. I wanted to understand why, but the actions literally don’t compute. There’s a wire ripped out between the human being whose name appears hours later and the demon whose face becomes indistinguishable from the CGI sci-fi horror creative given no humanity whatsoever save for its limb movements lent by Andy Serkis. That this doesn’t compute as my empathy encounters an impenetrable line of abject darkness only thrusts my brain into overtime mode trying to rationalize it, like a police dog sniffing desperately for clues in a sterile room. There are no leads; there are supposed to trails of bread crumbs to follow. All I encounter are alien monsters with brains operating on alien principles committing atrocities that short circuit my most fundamental abilities.
This week was no exception. Home with COVID, I was on Reddit when a post mentioned an elementary school in Texas locked down with a gunman on campus. The commenters were convinced this was not a school shooting; they insisted that an assailant had scurried into a school while law enforcement pursued him. There was no danger, they insisted. They’d report it if there was. One demonized the headline writer for insinuating such a scary situation and frightening parents in that community. But I pictured Ms. Trost putting on a tape and herding our kindergarten class of thirty away from the street side of our room. I felt relief. We all made it out okay, I thought. That guy was right outside. They’ll lock down until they get the guy.
Everyone will be okay.
Hours later I returned to Reddit and learned the truth. I retroactively choked on the sighs of relief I had exhaled earlier. In the hours that followed, I watched the casualties climb, a non-decreasing function graphed by an unseen evil entity.
I read everything. When that sickened me and the sobs started, I swiped away, shoving my phone into my pocket and climbing onto the treadmill to try to hide in the huffing coughs of COVID-positive lungs. I watched MLB highlights; I replayed old favorite speedruns. I tried to bat back the oncoming rush of empathy that would fail to comprehend the monster but all too easily topple dominoes with the victims.
But I couldn’t stay away. The YouTube algorithm understands me: I clicked on videos of the coverage it suggested. Whenever I caught glimpses of parents or trapped myself replaying the grainy footage of the killer’s entry onto campus over and over and over and over and over and
It doesn’t make sense. This is a horror movie. It’s so impossible to conjure the thoughts of this monster whose face is already warping into a demon in my brain, but so fucking easy to imagine looking up at him an alien creature with no fucking dominoes. There’s nothing there but darkness down either path.
But nature abhors a vacuum and the storyteller in my head, absent a human mind to probe, redirects its empathy into the humans trapped and lost in the horror itself. I picture my classroom from fifth grade in Irvine whose door faced the parking lot [[ how often did Mr. Colbert prop open the door? ]] and the unlocked gates I walk past every day [[ which gate was Charles going to enter through my senior year? ]]. I imagine ten thousand close calls [[ they were watching Lilo & Stitch ]]. I picture the police officer wearing body armor during the tactical exercise but he dissolves into an alien monster before I can remember the jovial face and backwards cap he sported during our orientation. [[ in fourth grade we read By The Great Horned Spoon and went to the Balclutha ]] I feared him who wasn’t even real so what must it be like to
And I see my own classroom. I think about the ones along the way to mine. I can’t push away the thoughts about which are propped open and whom inside I care about and how fucking plausible the story is. I repeat my instructions to myself of how I will react—fuck that “will” is the verb tense I use automatically—and I note the calm that comes with the neat row of dominoes that line up in my mind to the decision I already made. I’m hyperventilating as I think through all of this and the images of aliens with mundane genuses that sound like human names flash in my head as I blink and realize I am reading an article about the victims and counting the years and realizing that she started teaching the same age I did and he’s the same age as
but I don’t want to finish that thought because my body isn’t primed for this kind of reaction and I was an emotional wreck just saying goodbye to seniors last week for graduation but imagine saying goodbye to these little kids and never
So I force my way back to those alien faces and try to tear through the images in my head and find some shred of humanity behind them to scream at them and just scream and scream like they could understand it but it’s just a fucking wall a fucking wall there and that means that I can’t reason it out and I can’t help and I can’t solve anything because their invasion is complete because I can’t open my eyes to those faces like these monsters did I can’t crack through and I keep hearing the old Challenge Day adage of “there are no bad kids” and thinkingscreaming WHAT ABOUT THIS ONE??! before I remember the comforting lie that they are aliens and that’s why they defy my empathy but these children and their teachers don’t and aren’t and I am torn apart thinking that I too believed that stray headline was nothing because I wanted it to be nothing after the grocery store in Buffalo and every other fucking one of these atrocities but it wasn’t nothing and now I am staring at these faces preserved forever in photographs instead of starting their summer breaks and looking forward to fifth fucking grade and one day remembering the benign silly field trips and historical fiction they read in fourth fucking grade because now they are just faces tragically human faces in sharp contrast to the alien menace that [[ don’t make me say it think it write type it ]] slaughtered children watching Lilo & Stitch after an awards assembly.
This doesn’t go anywhere. There’s no ending. This is a circle. This monster won’t be the last gruesome extraterrestrial that lodges itself in my memory. Those tiny faces won’t be the last that I stare at in miserable meditation trying to stave off the empathy and story scribing for their siblings and parents and friends and community. I wish this was an impenetrable wall that marked the last time time time time time time TIMETIMETIMETIMETIMEANDAGAIN anyone had to experience this unfathomable
Wait, no. That’s wrong. I can’t—that’s blatantly false. That’s the biggest lie of them all.
It’s horrifically fathomable. It’s not hard to fathom in the least because it happens with enough frequency to feel routine. This isn’t new. None of this is new. Different monsters but the same fucking violence. Different cities and victims and vigils and pleas for change but the same fucking grief and agony and blood and inaction. I’ve been down this path before. This is deja fucking vu. I’ve already written this, haven’t I. I’ve already done this. They were different faces the last time but it all blurs together because I feel the same anger and confusion and fear [[ that I will recognize the faces ]] that I did the other times. That I did for Columbine. That I did for Sandy Hook. That I did for Maitland and Oxford and Jonesboro.
On every survey I receive, I’m asked if I feel safe at school. I answer the same way every time. The only thing more unfathomable than the mechanics of these alien monster creatures’ minds is answering any differently than I do.
I was directed in a staff meeting to make my decision right there and then. The expert said these monsters are broken non-humans whose frayed wiring precludes human logic, so we must make human decisions before their evil reaches us. We must choose how we will react when the face of a demon-alien stands at our door or our window. I renew my decision every day, even in a year in which regarding those doors and windows made me feel ill. Those dominoes already toppled and, morbid though they are, there’s a comforting calm that comes from watching them tumble and bump one another. To be able to find dominoes, to understand their progression, is a comfort to me who was prompted to decide in a staff meeting whether he would choose to die when the next warpable face arrives armed by evil unknowability.
[[ WHY ISN’T ANY OF THIS UNFATHOMABLE ]]
Content Consumption
FILM
Moonfall (2021)
The moon is crashing toward earth! Nanobots are chasing down astronauts! Nukes are being loaded! Families are being tearfully separated in the name of saving the human race! Is that a Dyson sphere? Wait, no, a character has sacrificed himself for another person! Wait, hey, I’m going to do this dangerous thing, not you! We’ve made it but can we survive this final challenge? Hooray happy ending, though we’ve gotta come together and pick up the pieces. // I like the Roland Emmerich schtick more than the average person. There’s a comfort in watching it play out, familiar beats of heroism, sacrifice, and family swelling against epic-sounding orchestral scores. He is a master of destruction: Independence Day. Godzilla 1998. 2012. White House Down. I genuinely like these movies (although only the first do I love) and I genuinely enjoy watching them play out. But, when they don’t work—I’m looking at you, Day After Tomorrow—they fail hard. And Moonfall failed so hard that I managed intricate work with digital photos the entire time and never missed a beat. Because the beats are always the same beats. // The moon’s orbit has shifted overnight—at least that’s what crackpot “mega-structurist” KC Houseman (John Bradley) claims. At first ignored, Houseman eventually gets his wild theories heard by disgraced former astronaut Brian (Patrick Wilson) and his former colleague Jacinda (Halle Berry), both of whom have seen their stars fall and families fracture in the wake of an earlier tragedy. Soon the moon is hurtling toward earth and, while the government aims missiles and the families sprint through gravity disruptions and monstrous enemies toward some semblance of safety, KC, Brian, and Jacinda mount a plan of their own that will reveal the moon as far more of a mystery than anyone but KC had been led to believe. // What works here? The beats are so familiar that there’s a rewarding hit of dopamine when every prediction for what happens next comes true. The script is weak but Bradley brings a manic energy, Berry is always cool (though her part is severely underwritten here), and I could see Wilson acting his ass off trying to elevate what he had. Michael Peña is here but gets just one syrupy joke in a film that could have used a steadier dose of humor, and the story doesn’t fully line up, even if the outlandish premise is taken at face value. There’s also the whole thing of important scenes suggesting that Emmerich’s team watched Jodie Foster’s Contact and believe everyone’s favorite part was the aliens appearing as her father. // Had this been a theater movie for me, I might have gotten into it more…but I somehow doubt it. I love the scale of Emmerich films, but this story—like its moon!—was hollow and his once fantastic effects were mediocre CGI that stood out to even me. (Seriously: the New York scene looks like a student project. It would be a great student project but was disappointing in a professional film.) // I dunno. Maybe I’ve outgrown this recipe of his? Maybe it was COVID sapping me of the strength to relish the destruction and redemption story he’s told so many times? Or maybe this was just a misfire that grafted an interesting premise to a B disaster movie and no amount of Wilson, Berry, Bradley, and moon mystery boxing was going to change that? // Let me sacrifice myself for you: this isn’t worth renting or maybe even watching.
Two for the Money (2005)
Slick and greasy as the hair on Matthew McConaughey’s head while selling picks, Two for the Money attempts to be a thriller, character study, and even a rise-and-fall sports film all at once. Sharp phrases crackle from Al Pacino’s mouth and charisma is nurtured, engineered, and weaponized toward taking money from gambling addicts. This is a fun movie with a driving rhythm that seemed profound to me at nineteen but oily and superficial seventeen years later. Damn, though: sign me up for McConaughey and Pacino talking sports any day of the week. // Brandon (McConaughey) suffers an injury in his last collegiate football game and pivots to become a betting adviser. His impossible success catches the eye of national bet broker Walter (Pacino) who brings him to New York as his new protege and surrogate son while dealing with demons of his own and an uneven relationship with his wife Toni (Rene Russo). This goes swimmingly while Brandon is hot, but a run of stinkers turns up the heat and soon Brandon is worried for his life and Walter’s erratic behavior has everything in jeopardy. // Sports betting is legal almost everywhere now, so Two for the Money becomes a bizarre throwback to a time when everything about this world was illicit. There’s constant talk of bookies and weird mechanics to getting paid that heighten drama in a way that no longer exists with Fanduel and Draftkings accessible and ubiquitous. The online world is so much bigger too: there’s something almost funny about the laborious process depicted here that gets Brandon’s knowledge out to the world. This all contributed to my fascination with the film as I watched. // But story-wise, there was just far less here than I remembered. Brandon is a great character, a gamer used to adrenaline humbled by circumstance who clings to the first thing that feels like a winning drive and the first person who validates him for it, but Walter is a mess that even Pacino’s commanding presence can’t repair. Walter becomes anything at the snap of a finger leading to massive inconsistencies as his character is a source of constant drama but never fully resolves into a cohesive person. Maybe this is commentary on his emptiness outside of money…or maybe the writers just enjoyed writing wild flourishes and then watching Pacino burn through them. // I was a sports nut in 2005 just as now but I knew so much less of the world then. Hell: this is the movie that made me aware of the spread and over/unders. This is still eminently watchable for the sizzling chemistry of a young McConaughey and an invested Pacino; it just isn’t the brilliant film that mesmerized me when it released. Is that more because I’ve changed, the sports world has changed, or the script and story can’t quite match up to the movie’s star power? // Yes, I think. Hell: I’d bet on it.
Ambulance (2022)
One of those pulse-pounding movies that substitutes adrenaline for character and story but you barely notice amid the chaos. Ambulance is exciting, looks great, and features an excellent cast; none of that wholly papers over its flaws but there’s barely time to notice or think which works in Michael Bay’s latest film. // Will (Yahya Abdul-Mateen II) is back from his tour as a Marine but needs money for his son’s medical treatment and turns to his shady brother Danny (Jake Gyllenhaal) for a loan. Danny hooks him into a bank robbery that morning and, against his better judgment, Will is on the job lifting $16M. But, when he accidentally shoots a rookie officer and Danny’s team gets fractured, Will drives them off in an ambulance carrying that same wounded cop and star paramedic Cam (Eiza González) trying desperately to save her while trapped in a high speed chase. // Ambulance soars on the inherent excitement of its premise and the action set pieces it delivers. Car chases have inherent drama with an impossible urgency, and Bay leverages this to the max by setting all sorts of other drama within this chase. Family drama and medical drama play in parallel with screeching wheels and engine whirring, but Ambulance ratchets that up even further with key scenes involving dying phone batteries, violent squabbles, and even a drug cartel all while in perpetual motion. The cramped quarters of an ambulance are a suffocating battlefield and the film maximizes every element of potential they can get from such a playground. // Taking a backseat while the intense drama plays out is character depth. Normally this wouldn’t disappoint me much—I didn’t turn on Ambulance for nuance—but, with such a tight focus on Will, Danny, and Cam, the opportunity was there without a doubt. Will is most richly rendered, full of guilt and hesitation but also I wielding affection toward his brother that traps him in conflict over and over. Danny is a loose cannon, which the film enlists to let him act in whatever way yields the juiciest stakes. He has a jittery explosiveness that Gyllenhaal excels at, but Danny’s motivation and actions are a messy amalgamation of threads that cave under inspection in a movie that offers little time or incentive to do just that. And Cam, the hero of the film, is always in command with a grit that no other character possesses but too often the film sorta forgets about her and we get stuck with brotherly conflict for extended runs rather than keep the magnetic González front and center. To Bay’s credit: the film understands that Cam is the emotional
heart of the film and induced some tears from me. But too often the characters felt far too rote and flat for my taste. // When watching a Michael Bay action flick about bank robbers hijacking an ambulance with a superstar paramedic fighting to keep a patient alive throughout a massive, film-long chase, the attraction is the action set pieces. While I have my quibbles about how an even better film may have been left in the dust, don’t misunderstand me: this is an exciting movie that is overstuffed to be sure but undeniably engaging. It’s one where the critical eye can rest up for a few hours because there’s no time to complain while a paramedic draws blood from a getaway driver while a bank robber screams at an negotiator on the phone while helicopters, motorcycles, and police cars zoom around in the background. // I’ll file Ambulance under “better movie than film” and there’s zero wrong with that.
Hatching (2022)
As someone who historically has a thing for stories about kids hatching magical birds, I possessed maybe unique enthusiasm for Hatching, a horror film from Finland about a smothering family augmented by a mysterious and menacing egg. Ultimately Hatching works as a creepy creature feature with dashes of body horror but its ultimate message gets muddled along the way as a promising start fails to stick the landing. // Tinja (Siiri Solalinna) is an aspiring gymnast whose mother (Sophia Heikkilä) documents everything about their perfect family online. When a bird gets inside their home and dies, Tinja finds its egg and raises it herself, even amidst turbulence lurking under the cheery surface of her family. But what emerges from the egg is unexpected and fearsome and Tinja soon finds herself juggling its care against its growing list of horrifying transgressions. // As someone who once dragged friends to Midsommar, I am enchanted by horror in broad daylight. Everything is just so in Tinja’s house and everyone inside is conditioned for endearing smiles and demonstrative affection whiles monsters both figurative and, in this case, squeamishly literal lurk in the shadows off-screen. Hatching is gooey, slimy, grisly, and mangled—enough that I averted my eyes three separate times, lacking confidence in my pre-breakfast, COVID-positive stomach’s hardiness—but also picturesque, rustic, and polished. Every time Tinja hid something gruesome in an ornate quilt or under her designer satin sheets, I grinned. The directness of these choices didn’t bother me; they worked as intended. Add in excellent performances by Solalinna—who juggles a lot on-screen—Heikkila and the other ensemble members Jani Volanen, Reino Norden, and Oiva Ollila (the last of whom perfectly captures that annoying-as-shit younger sibling whose behavior we understand but whose smugness infuriates nonetheless) as well as some excellent doses of traditional horror and there’s a lot to like in director Hanna Bergholm’s debut feature. // (SPOILER WARNING) Where things go awry for me is the ending itself which feels inevitable yet surprisingly unclear. After constructing a film in which every sliver of horror reinforces the themes almost explicitly, the final scene undercuts this: the mother accidentally stabs Tinja, allowing the bird creature to finish its transformation into Tinja 2.0. Based on everything up to that moment, the mother should have done something to capitalize on the tragedy and demonstrate a lack of growth (this was Tinja’s story, not hers)—a “Grab the camera!” or a twisted smile as she embraced the scarred and manic-eyed bird-daughter with Munchausen visions dancing through her head. Instead the camera lingers on the bird-daughter staring with malice in her eyes and it totally lost me. I refuse to believe the mommy blogger grew in a blink—and Hatching does nothing to convince us she has. The movie peters out one frame to early, stumbling on the dismount and leaving a sour taste in my mouth. // Should one shot undo all of the good elements of Hatching? Surely not. But I can’t overlook when that final shot throws into question the direction of every other moment in the film. This is solid horror, particularly for those who like gooey muppet monsters, but I can’t call it better than good after the ending forced me to confront other weak elements. I’ll definitely check out future films by Bergholm, though.
A few hours ago, I tested negative for COVID—finally. I immediately went to the grocery store. I dropped off my cart and jogged back to my car. I am excited to get out a bit. I might even try to run tomorrow morning. Spins around the house stopped doing it for me six days ago.