I asked that they please just give me one minute to try and find something to read. I had taken them to the library to keep them entertained, and now they wanted to go to the play area. My kids, however, made different demands. Only that amid all this I was trying, of all the things I could’ve been doing, to do what I am always trying to do: redeem my reality by converting it into fiction. Only that the detritus of this chaotic survival-uncapped needles and disassembled pens, plastic spoons and spent condoms, half-drunk Mountain Dew bottles and empty Cup Noodles containers-kept accumulating in my backyard. Only that I lived with my family across a dirt alley from a liquor store and saw, almost every time I looked out our living room windows, someone shooting up or heating up aluminum foil and inhaling or hallucinating or peeing or fighting or starting a fire. Only that middle age was here and it was hard to believe I was still here: exhausted and uninspired in the long shadow of the pandemic, trying to keep my kids occupied on yet another scorching afternoon of yet another climate-change summer, in a midsize city where I knew almost no one.
Only that I was unemployed and weeks away from turning forty. I was, let’s say, having a bad day when I came across Donald Hoffman in the stacks of the downtown Spokane Public Library last summer.
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