Volume 5, Entry 18: For Reals

The satisfying permanence of physical media

On the day in ninth grade when a doctor misdiagnosed me with a fractured wrist, I came home to a bricked computer.

That was my first personal computer, the first one I didn’t share with my parents. When I discovered it bricked right after getting back from the doctor’s office, I felt the universe turned against me. I pressed the on button inward over and over again to no avail. Defeated, I couldn’t even muster the energy to be angry.

Just like with my wrist, things turned out okay with that computer. Not that it ever worked again; it was definitely bricked, and I definitely lost everything on it. But seeing the life leave my eyes that evening, my parents agreed to buy me a new PC.

A PC with a CD burner.

I already had a stack of albums by then, a collection of music that began with soundtracks to The Birdcage and George of the Jungle, the Spice Girls’ first two releases, and every John Denver record my mom could find. I’d grown up with cassette tapes, playing albums in the car off them and sprinting with my boombox to the TV to record theme songs and jingles onto them, but shiny silver CDs fascinated me.

I had a cheap plastic player next to my bed that I’d gotten the day we moved back to Elk Grove. On that player, you could skip to the precise start of a song and repeat it automatically without imprecisely rewinding. There’d be no more waiting through the orchestral score on the Lion King soundtrack; “Hakuna Matata” could be jumped to effortlessly—even left to play forever if I so desired. Mind-blowing.

That CD burner blew my mind even more. I could create my own CDs with whatever songs I wanted. I was an early Limewire user who dutifully located and downloaded his favorite songs to compile collections. These days, I can throw together a playlist while removing my socks to shower, but before that burner, compilations suited to my present tastes might well have been flying cars. They, like so many limits, did not exist.

Still, the CD burner mainly served as a novelty in the beginning. I’d burn school projects onto CDs rather than save them on floppy disks just because they fascinated me. I felt powerful when my computer’s strained whirring gave way to an automatically opening drive, and a shimmering circular chimera of my own making appeared. I was the wizard, Harry. I took digital music files and made them into an actual album.

As a sophomore, I actually did something with the CD burner. My mom taped our Vocal Ensemble performances on a camcorder, and I found software to let me import the audio from those videos. The rips weren’t great, accompanied by a heavy buzzing sound wrought by the camcorder’s weak microphone, but I methodically organized our 2001-2002 opus and began burning. I designed a CD jacket with photos and track lists, slurping up my parents’ ink like an RYB milkshake, and then folded them into these ultra-thin jewel cases I had found at Staples.

I entered the choir room with a massive box a few days later. I’d let no one in on my secret, not even Joey; I was Taylor Swift, casually releasing evermore out of nowhere. When I distributed the box’s contents, people flipped—even Mr. Souliere seemed excited. I shrugged off all the praise and gratitude, pretending it hadn’t taken hours and hours and decimated my CD supply, but I don’t know that I had ever felt happier.

I have no doubt nearly every copy of that CD has disappeared or been discarded—even my copy has vanished¹! That’s okay because staying power wasn’t the point. My goal in making those CDs had been achieved: I wanted to commemorate our incredible year, that transcendent musical experience with a group that would never be topped. And I’d wanted to commemorate it tangibly, with something I could hold onto.

When I completed the first copy of LCHS Vocal Ensemble 01-02 In Concert, a tense knot inside me unraveled. I had never acknowledged it before, never even realized it was there, but I relaxed when I cradled an orange jewel case with a splotchy photo of us mid-song in the Black Box.

Up to that point, treasured memories and music were fragile figments of my imagination. When our catalog became physical media, I wept with relief.

Suddenly, miraculously, our year’s music was real.

Real enough to touch.

*****

It’ll be May 2024 when this first posts on Substack, meaning five full months will have passed since I finished the first draft of The Gray Valley. In the elapsed time, four people read the book five times, counting me; it would have been six by five, but I advised Alyiah to wait.

As most of you know, I composed every word of The Gray Valley on my phone while walking around my living room. It’s how I write everything, including this piece. Each syllable you see erupts from my right thumb in the Notes app. Sometimes, I copy my output into a Google Doc or email drafts to myself for safer keeping, but most of what I write remains app-exclusive.

In December, I read the entire book aloud from my computer. This helped me catch several typos, but mostly, it helped me calibrate the narrator’s distinctive voice. I had a rhythm in mind for him while I wrote, but what sounded sharp and percussive in my head might not have translated to the human ear. So I read it right off the screen, like reading a bedtime story to my monitor. That his voice mostly came through left me giddy. I shared the file with my first reader, R, after that.

Roughly two months later, R and I met to discuss the book. Our conversation thrilled me; we didn’t harp on flaws or rip apart the lacking cultural detail. Instead, we earnestly talked about the characters and story like we’d just stepped out of the original Star Wars and couldn’t wait to battle with imaginary lightsabers. Every author should be so lucky to experience two hours of another person treating their work like that. It lifted me up.

With that joy came another feeling. I can’t conjure a word for it, so I’ll go with its closest cousin: foolish. I felt foolish afterward. To anyone looking at us during our marathon gush-fest, we were two crazy people gesticulating wildly about a book that didn’t exist and characters no one else knew. Our discussion might well have been elaborate performance art, a rehearsal for an improv show. We’d spent our entire conversation empty-handed, talking about 84,000 words in a Google Doc. If a systems engineer unleashed a doomsday virus or an electromagnetic pulse slammed the planet, all we had thrilled over would vanish.

This bothered me. Deeply.

While preparing to release Sweet Appeal, I explored publishing the book simultaneously through Amazon and Barnes & Noble. Kindle Direct Publishing remained my intended platform, but B & N Press caught my attention because I could order personal copies of projects without any obligation to release them publicly. Whereas KDP always slaps PROOF across prototypes, B & N treats every project like a finished product. It rocks.

Eventually, I ran out of time and settled on KDP as the exclusive platform, but I returned to B & N Press in March. I had invited two others to read The Gray Valley and provide feedback, but I squirmed when I thought about sharing another Google Doc. Thus, attempting to maim two birds with one digital stone, I decided to try out B & N to produce a barebones zeroth edition of my new novel.

It took an hour or so to format the novel into a reasonable facsimile of a book. Borrowing all measurements and fonts from Sweet Appeal (which is to say, from How Lucky by Will Leitch) and generating shoddy placeholders for all interior elements and cover components, I uploaded my haphazard file and ordered four copies: one for R, one each for the new readers, M and L, and one for me.

Opening the humble box a few days later, I felt a rush. I’m tempted to describe it as exhilaration, but I really do think the appropriate noun is, again, relief. Holding the book, flipping through its pages, and reading the names Nick, Kacie, and Gattis on the pages printed in professional press ink transformed the project. Before, I could only access it through a screen or via the clicks of a mouse; now, I could inhale the scent of it. I had feared the digital edition was catfishing me; holding my non-description placeholder pages proved I’d not been corresponding with a literary Lennay Kekua.

On our first day back at school, I handed R his copy, with a silly 1/4 handwritten on the inside cover. Busy with an assignment, he set it on the desk behind him to avoid further distraction. I lost track of the thing for a bit as other people entered the classroom, but when I looked up from a math question and glanced over, I saw the bound document in the hands of B, another morning regular. But B wasn’t inspecting it.

B was reading it.

I’d never before seen someone physically reading something I’d written. Set aside the terror of B reading what was a draft, entering into a world that still wasn’t proofread; I still got a lump in my throat. I teleported into Laguna’s choir room in 2002, watching someone hold something I’d made—and hold it carefully. B’s eyes moved intently across line after line. He flipped a page eagerly to reach the next one.

A few weeks later, M and L sat across from me and tore apart everything they questioned or disagreed with in the novel. Several points matched issues I noted, too, but many more were transformative and insightful. Whenever the final keystrokes mark the finished version of The Gray Valley, their ideas and contributions will have helped make it infinitely better.

I didn’t write a single word down during that discussion. You’d better believe I raced to type it all out when I got home, but in the moment, I felt transfixed. As L described their thoughts, I watched their fingers leaf through pages. Their hands used the little rectangle in demonstrative gestures. Sometimes, they tapped its corner gently against their knee for emphasis. They squinted at page numbers to reference specific lines. The book made sounds that weren’t hollow clicks or Candy Crush taps. The thing was imaginary before; the Barnes & Noble Blue Fairy had rendered it real.

My copy, 4/4, sits on my nightstand. The interior has a mess of highlighter yellow marks and wet spots from my eyes. Spoilers: there’s a lot of emotion in The Gray Valley. A lot.

But some of those tears that soaked into pages and left them soft and warped weren’t from the story playing out. Sometimes, I teared up just holding the thing, moved that this thing in my head sat in my hands. I could shove a bookmark into it; I could drop it and hear it land with a smack on the linoleum. I could stack it on a shelf with other real things.

The Gray Valley exists now.

*****

Welcome to the era of the Cloud.

We stream films from digital platforms by pressing buttons. We assemble playlists and enjoy 2:00 am album drops from tiny pocket computers. We snap photo after photo on our phones and post them in not places but “places” where others can view them from their phones. So much of what delivers us joy does so digitally.

I’m not complaining about any of these facts, by the way. Streaming services expand my cinematic palate, my Taylor Swift fandom began on Apple Music, and my creative writing and art find eyes because I share them online. I’m anything but a digital hater. I use my phone for six to seven hours daily; it centers my productivity as a teacher and a writer and facilitates my enduring friendships. I believe in the power of technology to connect us: one of the most important relationships of my life has, for twenty years, been almost exclusively through typed words on a screen.

Those facts don’t change my unease in our increasingly digital world. The tension I felt before holding The Gray Valley or producing those Vocal Ensemble CDs surfaces far more widely than I’ve let on. I felt the knot for months while waiting for Past Lives to be released on Blu-Ray and while waiting for the postman to deliver my Tortured Poets Department CD. I craved volume for these things I loved; living rent-free in my head is cost-effective, but I’d rather they take up shelf space.

Digital media leaves me itchy. Files feel fragile, fellable by malware strikes and bumped buttons, blinking hours of effort and emotion into oblivion. Physical media carries vulnerability, too, but even a soggy, smudged book maintains mass. You can still touch it and feel its texture. You can look at it. You can’t accidentally delete a plastic album; a hacker can’t erase a printed page.

I suspect this sensation is not widely shared. Most people I know aim to cut back, to jettison more stuff, to knock off their knickknacks and curb their collections. Marie Kondo compels you to eliminate that which does not bring you joy, but I block that crazy woman to force her further away from my stuff. If I ground myself right now, I spot item after item dense with meaning. A Nick Swisher bobblehead. A hand-stitched cap featuring a seal. Blu-rays of Past Lives, Oppenheimer, Tár, and Beau is Afraid. A skull ornament emblazoned with the Oakland A’s logo. Mini-helmets signed by Matt Leinart and Adrian Peterson. A DK barrel. A framed photo of the 2001-2002 Laguna Creek Vocal Ensemble. A dozen plushes.

Every one of these items conjures a story. So do dozens of other tiny totems, including the round chunk of amber with a fake mosquito inside placed next to a figurine of Jabba the Hut. Those two correspond to recent newsletters; they’re items purchased to commemorate the reflective experience of writing them. I am so attached to physical media that I buy trinkets to imbue them with meaning. I have to!

When I get old, I will slowly forget all the references. I won’t recall every moment and person represented by these trinkets. The only thing more fragile than a cloud storage service is an organic one: the human brain. If I forget what I’m thinking and feeling, it’s gone. I vanish; I become nothing more than brittle dust. It is a relief when a year of music becomes a CD, or a novel arrives in a cardboard shell because then someone will at least have to handle it again. Tell me all you want about landfills and waste—ecology can never erase my fear of erasure.

Nothing feels real until it can collect dust.

*****

Outside of school, there’s no project I spend more time on than this newsletter. Writing my weekly Substack post occupies multiple mornings every week. Although I’m writing this wholly on Monday, I usually draft on Sunday, revise on Tuesday, make art on Wednesday, and schedule the post on Friday. I don’t know the precise number of hours I spend on this, but I do know I’ve been on this piece since 3:02 a.m. It’s 5:52 now.

Diamond Day ended on Saturday afternoon, and I left with four dozen photos in my phone, probably twice as many accumulated hugs, and countless memories from what was a fantastic day—probably my best facilitation ever. But if you really knew me, you’d know that none of those things sustain me. Each, of course, felt amazing but also ephemeral and illusory; each is a fit of amnesia from disintegrating into neurological sand. It took only hours for it to all feel fake. If not for the leftover salads, a part of my brain might taunt me that it was all a dream.

But I also walked out with four letters from participants. I haven’t read them yet—I always struggle with that—but I know they are there. I can see one now, its corner peaking out from my backpack. Their presence calms me. They provide proof that those seven and a half hours happened. They verify that my time there mattered.

I never get that from this newsletter. That isn’t to say it’s without meaningful outcomes: follow-up conversations, comment exchanges, text messages, and even actual hugs sometimes happen. But there’s no physical media waiting for me from this. I send my heart into the digital abyss, as I have done in some form since 2003, and then 150 people receive it.

Or “receive” it, I should say. I have no idea what happens next. I can’t hear it land or see them reading it. I get a couple of digital likes most weeks, but what do those certify except for another click? I have no proof that any of these hours or work mean anything to anybody; there’s no physical output to demonstrate its existence.

My suspicion, most of the time, is that almost no one reads any of it, but even when they do, that awareness doesn’t scratch that itch! Intensely Specific will never pass between their hands like a CD case or bend in their fingers. It’s an email; it’s a tap on an app. It’s digital: they can’t touch it or feel it. Neither can I!

Except that isn’t true anymore. I actually can now.

Sort of.

Remember B & N Press? They really do produce personal projects on demand. Paperbacks print affordably—each copy of The Gray Valley set me back just $7—but they also offer hardcover editions and full-color printing. It’s pricey, but they offer it.

So I printed my newsletter.

This might strike some people as a vain or narcissistic act, but I would disagree. I don’t need to look at it; I don’t even want to. I have much more convenient ways to read those pieces, and unlike in book form, I can fix mistakes quickly and easily. The book, on the other hand, abides. Errors are forever in there.

But the project is real now. It exists.

This only includes Volume 4 from 2023, so compiling and formatting took several hours rather than days. I suppose revision also demanded many hours—I did that while preparing for the Tier List video—but all of that work felt purposeful. Psychologically, I validated the work’s permanence by re-engaging with it, but then I brought it to printed life. It’s such a beefy tome that it took a month to arrive, but it’s a thing now. I love it.

When I removed the book from its box, I felt its weight for the first time. My fingers squeezed tightly to hold it in place; its waxy matte cover rubbed against my palm. It was substantial! There are 637 pages! Until then, I couldn’t quantify the volume of what I’d produced, but now it occupies 115.625 cubic millimeters. I’ve printed fiction before, but never this. The massive brick is one year of me, preserved from the solar flares and techno terrorists.

Please don’t get the wrong idea. This isn’t for sale; it’s not for reading or even for prominent display—it’s for existing. In that deep, spiritual way, I couldn’t believe this invaluable part of who I am existed at all…not until I felt it in my hands. Not until it became physical media. I needed to know it would survive even if Substack melted into a molten mainframe. It wouldn’t have before, but now it takes up space on my nightstand. Actual space.

Because I felt desperate to make it exist, I rushed the artwork on the outside. The back cover summary accompanies quoted praise from one of my favorite Substack writers, Michael Edward, in the blurb, but the front? Well, I misspelled “Intensely” on the cover. Yeah. Like I said, this was a rush job. Still, I’m proud.

For the rest of that front cover, I ran with my first idea. Unlike the book’s contents, I didn’t give it too much thought, but what I landed on is pretty apt.

I stand in front of an empty white void. I’m looking upward and to my left, smiling. When I took the picture, I stood alone in my bathroom with nothing in my hand, but on the cover, I hold a floating balloon. It’s hand-drawn, a dead ringer for the one I scribble out to announce each Therapy Thursday, so the thing carries meaning, but wholly digital it remains. Yet there I am, smiling at a balloon that isn’t real.

To be happy about something I cannot touch contradicts everything I’ve written here, but I think I understand. All that staring at nothing would produce a something. The fake balloon would finally make an essential part of me real. That thought made me happy.

In tenth grade, I burned CDs and gave them to the singers I idolized. Collecting our songs on a CD let me transform something as intangible as sound into a physical gift.

That CD was a gift to them. This book was a gift to me.

---

If what I’m talking about here doesn’t make sense to you, that’s great.

It does to me.

1. I borrowed my mom’s copy for the photo shoot.