July 2026

What did you stay up too late thinking about?

The imaginal. Not imagination in the sense of the made-up, but Ibn Arabi’s alam al-khayāl, the realm Corbin insisted we mistranslate every time we reach for the word “imaginary.” I stayed up over the two examples Ibn Arabi returns to: the mirror and the dream.

Where, exactly, is the image in a mirror? Not in the glass, not quite in the eye, and yet undeniably there, present and ungraspable at once. That is the signature of the barzakh, the isthmus where the two seas meet, the one place a thing is permitted to be neither existent nor non-existent. What kept me up was the consequence: that my imagination is not the imaginal realm but my window onto it, the eye of the heart, which is why writing has always felt like it comes from elsewhere. It does.

What are you preparing for?

The fall, still, and something I did not expect to be preparing for: my own body. I start teaching French in August, and the first real test came this month. I built a café activity for the teen center where I volunteer and ran it, and the kids read words they had never seen, mispronounced them, laughed, and tried again, which is the whole of what I want a classroom to be. That went well.

The rest is waiting. The woman I am going to marry and I meant to share this summer, and the summer is passing, each landmark going by while the calendar keeps moving the date; everything else on this page is what I do while I wait.

What is new is the body. After years of treating it as the least interesting thing I own, I bought a watch that counts my heartbeats and started keeping track, and I am preparing, slowly and against my own grain, to live in it.

What is the institution teaching you?

That an institution tells you what it values by what it is willing to pay for. I spent the spring building the internal controls the place did not have, the written record that is the only continuity an institution actually gets, and in June I discovered, in an old audit file, the exact deficiencies that were reported to no one. I brought them to the surface.

Two weeks later I was let go, listed as “employee A,” and I found out by watching the board meeting on a livestream, the way you might learn of your own death from the newspaper. No cause was given. The letter said “at-will,” which means for any reason or for none.

Here is the lesson stripped of grievance: some people will pay for an audit that costs more than 6x the salary of the man it laid off, because an audit finds fault and assigns it, while building invisible structures costs money and credits no one. The morning I came in for my things, one of the food pantry workers said, “See you, pal,” and meant it, which was more than the institution managed.

What are you building or fixing?

For half the month I was building to keep from feeling.

I submitted an academic article I had circled for a year, on fascist and colonial radio in interwar Tunisia; I took this website to a full build; I recovered nearly two thousand old book reviews I had given up as lost, a whole reading life handed back through a service I thought I had deleted; and I wired my home systems together. All of it good work.

Most of it was the engine running on grief, inventing problems because the real one could not be solved. Then a medication that had gone months without being restocked brought my executive function back online in a matter of days, and the building stopped being avoidance and became, for once, just capacity.

What I still cannot fix is rest. I “rest” by doing something on a screen, and my body reads it as low-grade stress and tells me so. I do not yet know what real rest looks like.

What surprised you?

For weeks the world had a veil over it, everything at one remove, no desire for anything at all; I kept reaching for analysis, and analysis is exactly what could not help.

What helped was the body and, of all people, my father. He told me he had seen as early as junior high that I was wired differently, that what he and my mother once read as laziness was never that, and hearing my own childhood handed back to me in a truer shape did something no argument could.

And then it was physical, all of it: two hours of yard work that left my arms shaking and felt good; a haircut; teaching a room, which turns out to be as much body as mind; a walk in a forest preserve where two owls called across the woods in the middle of the day and one flew from its tree as I passed; a beach on Lake Michigan where I mistook the far smokestacks of Gary for a Mediterranean hill.

I am a man who lives in his head and distrusts the flesh, and the surprise of the month was that the body is what pulled me together.