The Saturday Night Ghost Club

Reality never changes. Only our recollections of it do. Whenever a moment passes, we pass along with it into the realm of memory. And in that realm, geometries change. Contours shift, shades lighten, objectivities dissolve. Memory becomes what we need it to be.

Imagine trying to hold the tail of a comet as it blazes across the heavens. It’s burning your hands, eating you up, but there’s no malice in it; a comet can’t possibly know or care about you. You will sacrifice all you are or ever will be for that comet because it suffuses every inch of your skin with a sweet itch you cannot catch, and through its grace you discover velocities you never dreamt possible.

we are only human, a condition of perpetual uncertainty and failure.

I figured some people have edges that don’t allow them to slot neatly into the holes society expects them to fit into, that was all.

No boy owes his parents. Parents owe their children everything, always and unconditionally, and that’s just the way it goes.

I was scared—with that crystalline, childish fear of being caught and punished. That fear thrashed behind my rib cage like a bird in cupped hands, perhaps the last truly childlike instance of that emotion I’d ever feel. That fear is a kind of magic. As you get older, the texture of your fear changes. You’re no longer afraid of the things you had absolute faith in as a child: that you’d die in convulsions from inhaling the gas from a shattered lightbulb, that chewing apple pips brought on death by cyanide poisoning, or that a circus dwarf had actually bounced off a trampoline into the mouth of a hungry hippo. You stop believing in the things my uncle believed in. Even if your mind wants to go there, it has lost the nimbleness needed to make the leap. That magic gets kicked out of you, churched out, shamed out—or worse, you steal it from yourself. It gets embarrassed out of you by the kids who run the same stretch of streets and grown-ups who say it’s time to put away childish things. By degrees, you kill your own magic. Before long your fears become adult ones: crushing debts and responsibilities, sick parents and sick kids, the possibility of dying unremembered or unloved. Fears of not being the person you were so certain you’d grow up to be.

The truth is that abandoned dog following you over sea and land, baying from barren clifftops, never tiring and never quitting, forever pining after you—and the day will come when that dog is on your porch, scratching insistently at your door, forcing you to claim it once again.

You always fall hardest the first time, don’t you? There’s no bottom to it.

You might think my chosen career would lend me insight…. But while I can tell you about the brain as a physical object…, beyond that I am a glorified techie. I know the nuts and bolts and can diagnose flaws within the mainframe. While I can identify and sometimes fix structural maladies within that organ, I do not remotely understand it. That is an impossible task, like trying to guess the path rainwater will take down a windowpane. There is simply no way to know with any accuracy what is happening inside someone else’s head. I only faintly comprehend what is going on inside my own.

Everybody could be doing something better without their lives. Name me one person who is doing the best, most righteous thing with their life this very minute.

Sometimes, Jake, disappeared is worse than dead. With dead, at least there’s an end.

I stood in the hallway, unable to offer my uncle any comfort for his wretched need. I understand now that I was just a kid, at that stage where we’re good at forcing others to deal with our own outbursts but less adept when dealing with the painful emotions of others. I had no idea how to help, and . . . and I was so scared.

Our boy owes us nothing. No boy owes his parents. Parents owe their children everything, always and unconditionally, and that's just the way it goes.

Funny how meaningful those small tender gestures can be: a friend picking burrs off your shirt, the ones you can’t get because they’re stuck in that unreachable spot on your back.

Honestly, my dear, I find myself struggling to care.

I was scared- with that crystalline, childish fear of being caught and punished. That fear thrashed behind my rib cage like a bird in cupped hands, perhaps the last truly childlike instance of that emotion I'd ever feel. That fear is a kind of magic. As you get older, the texture of your fear changes. You're no longer afraid of the things you had absolute faith in as a child ... That magic gets kicked out of you, churched out, shamed out- or worse, you steal it from yourself ... By degrees, you kill your own magic. Before long your fears become adult ones: crushing debts and responsibilities, sick parents and sick kids, the possibility of dying unremembered or unloved. Fears of not being the person you were so certain you'd grow up to be. Looking back, I wish I'd relished those final instants of childish fear: that saccharine-sweet taste of terror curdling like sour milk in my mouth.

As far as I was concerned, there was nothing wrong with being an odd duck. I figured some people have edges that don’t allow them to slot into the holes society expects them to fit into, that was all.

Fears of not being the person you were so certain you’d grow up to be.

That special power goes real quiet until it feels like the universe must have stolen it from you—but guess what? You may have stolen it from yourself.

As you get older, the texture of your fear changes.

Our memories change over time. Some of this change comes through aging. But a much greater part of the change has to do with how we want to remember. The more distant a memory becomes, the more our minds manipulate it. The reasons for this are multiple, but often render down to: I want to remember myself, my own history and the people I care for in this specific way. So, our brains oblige.

My mom says Dove lives like a sun does. In this never-ending state of heat and light that would burn the rest of us up.

That magic gets kicked out of you, churched out, shamed out—or worse, you steal it from yourself. It gets embarrassed out of you by the kids who run the same stretch of streets and grown-ups who say it’s time to put away childish things. By degrees, you kill your own magic. Before long your fears become adult ones: crushing debts and responsibilities, sick parents and sick kids, the possibility of dying unremembered or unloved. Fears of not being the person you were so certain you’d grow up to be.

The brain is wider than the sky, For, put them side by side, The one the other will include With ease, and you beside. The brain is deeper than the sea, For, hold them, blue to blue, The one the other will absorb, As sponges, buckets do. The brain is just the weight of God, For, lift them, pound for pound, And they will differ, if they do, As syllable from sound. —Emily Dickinson

It was great, wasn’t it—because it was ours.

You hear about the guy who took too much blotter acid and had a lifelong trip?” he asked me once. “The cops were outside his door, coming to bust him, so he ate his whole stash. Now he thinks he’s a glass of orange juice. He’s in the nuthatch, bug-eyed and shivering, terrified someone’s coming to drink him.

If a blind, three-legged racehorse named “Next Stop: Glue Factory” were racing down at the Fort Erie track, you can bet Lex Galbraith would’ve bet his life savings on the nose of that nag.

Crickets leaped from the long grass, kamikaze-style, hitting the spinning spokes on my bike and pelting back into the scrub.

Lying to my father was risky—he had a bloodhound’s way of sniffing out deceptions—but Uncle C had sworn me to secrecy. I opted for diversionary tactics.