Jacob Clifton

Don’t threaten me with a good time

King Baby’s in the kitchen reading aloud from the Google screen thing as he cooks chicken, which I can’t eat unless it is diced rather thinly, as otherwise it just feels and tastes like biting into Zooey. He has taken to cooking with gusto and really overcoming his fears of the kitchen. I don’t care about food one way or the other so I tell him, “The stakes couldn’t be lower.” 

I tell him that a lot. How deliberately I’ve curated my life so that it is very small and only the good parts. Zooey Glass, Ambrose Tuxedo, King Baby Jason, Me Jacob: Kings and a Queen. The stakes are low, that’s how they’re designed. I only want the kind of conflict you can wrap up in 40 minutes. The stakes are low, but the hits keep coming anyway.

Jason’s emotions arrive in short, intense bursts that even casual friends have noted. “He has big feelings,” as Karen said. He feels things strongly then zaps back to normal, no problem; hotel smile on his face. My own emotions are not like that. I’m not sure I know what they are like? 

Slow-moving black tar, deep underground, occasionally burping up gold. 

I’ll take it. I have felt bad my entire time here on this Earth for finding so much emotion incomprehensible. So much emotional experience filed away as “grownup stuff I’ll figure out one day,” and continuing to consider it that for oh, 40 years or so.

Now that I live with Jason, it’s like having one eye on the microscope at all times: Why are we having a meltdown? What has been done to you now? Why are you looking so blackpilled? The weirdest person I’ve ever met and the one I’ve loved the most. He has feelings and I am blessed by them. So many of them are about me, you see.

We are all the thirteenth brother who didn’t quite turn back all the way from being a swan. All of us have one wing where an arm should be: one room in your house that you can’t go in. And we will spend the rest of our lives hobbled and jealous of that room, and for me it’s Feeling that is in that room. Ask someone with an undeveloped Feeling function what they’re feeling and they will have to slowly haul it up from deep in the Earth like slow tar, like underground gold.

“The stakes couldn’t be lower,” I say, and his shoulders hunch like I’ve just draped something across his back. Adding to his travails. If they’re that low then why do they feel so high?

Therapist says it sounds like Jason has an “anxious” attachment style, which requires patience and compassion and endless praise and comfort. These are the things I love to give him every day, so that’s fine. Worth noting this style is incongruous, if not opposite, to mine, which is closer to “the cat at the end of Breakfast at Tiffany’s.” Whatever attachment style that is. 

I’m joshing, my mother was a brilliant early childhood major and I was raised as issue-free as possible. Whatever’s wrong with me is most definitely chemical; a hormonal state that likes to dance around in the clothes of actual real-world problems, animating them, like sinister ghosts.

Something’s going on with Zooey’s left hind leg and it already seems to be getting better even as it feels like we barely just noticed she’s limping. She is the smartest girl, of course, and basically speaks telepathically like Jean Grey. «This is embarrassing,» she told me last night, «but I’m going to need someone to lift me onto the bed.» Jason picks up her messages too, so he didn’t even say a word, just lifted as requested.

Ambrose is mystified, intrigued, upset and a little bit LOL about Zooey’s leg, which leaves her sitting in the most strategic spots around the house all day instead of making him run laps. 

His afternoons have always been about lying prone on the bed and curving his impossibly long back so that he can, without relinquishing the horizontal, nip at Zooey until she growls at him to stop. There were a limited number of places on her body he’s not invited to explore, and now there’s one more, and it’s confusing for him.

But Zooey is sneaky, and hates to be a bother; she wants to be the helper, not the helped. And so she hides it, really well, displaying a kinesthetic sense that’s truly remarkable as she shields her injury from all sight. «It’s embarrassing to be weak,» she says, «when enemies are everywhere.» I know what she means. 

Otherwise, Ambrose is well. Jason has experimented with taking Zooey for walks despite her ungovernable nature, and it tears Ambrose up when she’s gone. He prefers my company to anybody else’s, but take Zoo out of the picture and he loses his mind with worry. It’s remarkable.

He’s come to love the three of us a lot, as if he got an “affection” patch in a recent download, but I think about his Bad Year and I am so grateful he’s alive, and that he lives with us. He is a good argument for the fact that dog owners will fall for anything. Any old flimflam or horndoggle.

He’s still obnoxious in most situations, and we have not attempted to introduce him to anyone else after his all-out war against my friend Brad. When we thought he was just a large puppy (which I mean, he is, but we honestly thought he was like 6 mos younger) we used to say that he knows nothing but our home, nothing but our love.

But knowing there was that Bad Year, I can say I don’t think what’s wrong with him is chemical. (Except of course what Anna once called the “bad messages” in his bloodstream, “telling him the wrong things to do,” which is the best description of testosterone I’ve ever heard.)

I haven’t inquired into Jason’s most-searched terms on YouTube this week but the thought did kick loose a memory. When I left the living room one night, he was watching Downton Abbey; when I returned he had paused it, his #2 comfort food show (Absolutely Fabulous, darling, will remain at #1 thank you), and was watching on his phone what turned out to be a video compilation of every time the Predator has pulled someone’s spine out of their body. I just loved him so much at that moment.

He loves architecture like a child loves dinosaurs. His favorite YouTube videos are about this couple who go all over Japan eating food. They explain the food in subtitles, then buy the food, then the wife gives it a thumbs up, then they eat and describe eating it in the subtitles. I am telling you this man is crazy for this couple. He wants them to enjoy every dish and hates it when they’re lukewarm about something, which they almost never are. 

Sometimes Zooey says Can I steal you a minute? and leads you down the hallway, looking back over alternating shoulders to make sure you’re there — and making sure we’re not playing peekaboo, which she also thinks is brilliant — all the way to the living room, where her fave treats are, and with a gleeful pounce, she settles into the dog bed where we’ve trained them to sit for their treats, which sometimes include meds but are usually just a cube or two of freeze-dried chicken, which she loves.

I’ve joked about not knowing where Zooey ends and I begin, but this letter certainly makes a strong case. I think it’s because we are both in the Meredith Grey part of life where we were already crazy and howled at the Moon and did wild things but eventually you just want to stand in the rain and get clean and hopefully help the ones who come after.

I keep my life simple because the big bad things are going to come either way. I stay relentlessly cheerful because there are days I’m fairly certain we are witnessing the end of the world. Or I guess the end of a world. One I’ve just learned recently to enjoy.

How much of your (our) depression, trauma, marijuana use is directly attributable to the fact that things are so bad, in so many places?

Listen, If you think I’ve been ignoring you I haven’t. It’s just literally that every time I think of something to tell you, I’m not halfway done before another loose brick comes slamming down from somewhere else in the wall holding everything together. The tragedies are coming weekly daily now.

I think partially we’re all waiting for some kind of reckoning, which is scary but not as scary as the truth: the reckoning never, ever comes.

Justice, fairness, these aren’t immutable concepts but human ones. They aren’t natural laws; in fact they’re not natural at all. The only justice you will ever see is the justice that we make—it has never once happened on its own. You can seek justice, but you won’t find it easily: it must be made. The only way anything is ever fair is when you fight very hard to make and keep it that way.

In the videogame I’m playing, we’re searching for a dragon beneath a city. He’s very angry at a friend of mine who has a squid for a head, and it’s my understanding that they once were lovers. When the squid man was still a human and the dragon was, presumably, a dragon.

I was a teen when I had probably my favorite dream ever: We were hanging flags out the window of every room in the castle, one by one, and then everyone ran outside to see which windows didn’t have flags — to find the secret rooms in the castle, so we could open up and let them breathe again. A fairly lovely, rather big dream to have, but one I take seriously.

I easily won a Challenge of Bravery in the game, for I am very brave. Then there was a Challenge of Strategy, a chess match, but I am roleplaying as a happy-go-lucky half-demon so I just had the vampire strike the opposition’s king over and over with lightning and eventually it fell apart and we were the winners. Whatever works! 

I just don’t love a tedious dungeon puzzle like I used to. Could be a sign I’m growing up. Although I presume I’d still love any opportunity to find a hidden or secret room.

There’s a malaise over the house, a bit of an ill wind. Friends ignored, emails unrequited. Quietude all around. Jason’s possibly in a bit of the darkness I’ve been in lately, and Zooey is of course very low-energy right now.

But I mean damn, you step outside and the weather is perfect. I finally understand what they mean when they say the weather was “sweet.” So we have that. We step out into the sun and breeze and remember weather can be sweet and we give thanks.

Ambrose doesn’t know what to do with us, here in the very cold and bright Winterpalace, but he’s getting it right nonetheless.

xoxo JAC