July 22nd: James Yamada
I wanted today to be cinematic—to trick This Year readers into thinking my life isn’t entirely mundane—so it feels serendipitous when I sleep through my alarm. I don’t have any place to be, but it does sharpen the day with an edge of unpredictability.
As I wait for my girlfriend Nalini to finish in the bathroom (she is ambitiously cutting her own hair) I do my internet things. r/WTF has a video of a cheetah cautiously drinking water. It glances up at the cameraman, then a crocodile lunges. Jaws clamp the cheetah’s neck and drag it under. Within seconds the thrashing stops. Other cheetahs pace anxiously on the banks of the lake, watching the ripples cease. Life, am I right?
Nalini emerges from the bathroom with a tentative smile and very short hair. I smile back because she looks so cute, and she smiles more confidently at my approval. I do my bathroom things, eat lunch, make coffee, and get ready for my writing session.
I can only write with social pressure, so thank goodness for my friends. Gabe and I log on to Google Meet and have our pre-writing chat. One of our friends has recently been laid off from a teaching job. Another friend is worried they might be laid off at a different job. We talk about job insecurity: how it can consume one’s attention so entirely. Life, am I right?
Actually, it is life. We are like the other cheetahs on the banks. Our friend has just been pulled under. All life needs resources, and human ingenuity has only diluted this urgency; eliminating it is physically impossible.
Gabe and I then talk about homelessness (with its undiluted urgency), his previous novel about a homeless man, and his current novel project. We discuss differences between short stories, novels, and flash, especially the questions readers expect to be answered in each form. Which questions do you expect me to answer in this form? Too bad.
We put one hour on the clock, my whole screen shared so he can call me out if I get off task. We’re both revising short stories. Mine is a response to Camus’s The Myth of Sisyphus. Revision is generally painful for me, but today my changes feel like improvements, deepening both emotion and philosophy. It turns out that pushing the rock up the mountain is often useful, which is largely the point of the story too.
After our session, I do my chores. Clean dishes, take out trash, fight the inexorable march of entropy, etc. I can’t do chores without mental stimulation, so I put on a podcast. It’s Sean Carroll’s Mindscape, and he’s talking with a philosopher about language use in animals. One species of apes gestures to signal what they want others to do. Another makes specific sounds to warn of dangers (like hawks and snakes). The communicator benefits because they gain information: others can confirm the sighting, or offer a correction. So I’m expecting, dear reader, some benefit from the present communication. Hand it over.
Nalini decides to help tidy up her mom’s place, where her sister, niece, and brother-in-law also live. I might normally have skipped it and stayed at home for a boring night of reading and doomscrolling, but that’s not good enough for the This Year audience. If the cheetah had lived, I never would’ve seen the video; it wouldn’t have been interesting enough for the internet. So, I look up from the water at the camera.
Nalini’s family is fascinating to me. First, there is her nine-month-old niece, who is in her babbling and screaming phase of life, which, truly, we never leave.
Second, everyone is so well-meaning that they continually talk past each other. They argue—politely at first, then less so—over who should pick up food, who should rest, who is closer. By the end of the night, communication breaks down. Determined to help, someone ignores another’s protests, or doesn’t ask if the other wants help. The mood sours. Frustration simmers. All because everyone is trying to do what they think is right.
Lately, I’ve been thinking a lot about how we can know what is right. In some ways, this is a timeless question, which has been asked by philosophers since ancient times and thus poorly suited for This Year. In other ways, it feels especially timely, as our information ecosystem degrades and the need for agreement presses urgently upon us. The seams of public discourse rip apart, so we claw desperately to patch the fabric back together. How can we agree on what is right? Timeless but timely.
Nalini steps on a piece of broken glass. It embeds in her foot, drawing a trickle of blood. Tension boils over. Voices raise. No one knows where their tweezers are. Someone didn’t clean up well enough after dropping a jar. This is where the baby sometimes crawls. Nalini tries to downplay the severity. Luckily her brother-in-law is a surfer who knows some tricks. We soak her foot in warm water with Epsom salt and disinfect with hydrogen peroxide. But we don’t have tweezers, so Nalini limps to the car and we drive home without achieving the goal of tidying up the back bedroom.
At home, we tweeze out the glass. Finally calm, we unpack the tense family time. Nalini wanted to go over and help, but worries we just added stress. Was it right to attempt to help? I think so, though I don’t know. Maybe we were like the cameraman, complicating the cheetah’s situation with our presence. Or maybe like the other cheetahs, pacing anxiously, unable to help. Or like apes trying to communicate, even if we ultimately failed.
Life. Every living thing doing its best, sometimes coming up short. Still we try, for there’s beauty too. A baby’s babbles dissolve tensions; mother, aunt, and grandmother turn from their quarrels to coo back at her tiny pontifications. Even on sticky nights like these, I get to cuddle with Nalini as she drifts to sleep.
Yes, I have to get up tomorrow and do it all over again. And odds are high that I’ll mess something up, even as I try to do good. But odds are also high that I—and you—will do good. Though the world is cracked through with miscommunication and death, its substance is connection and life. So tomorrow, we’ll connect. We’ll push our rocks up mountains. And we’ll live, or die trying.
James Yamada is a writer living in Tustin, California. After a previous career in engineering and physics, he received a creative writing MFA from UC Irvine, where he won the Henfield Prize. His fiction, which has appeared in Dunce Codex and Big Table Press's Telephone, explores questions of purpose, perspectival scale, and the long-term future of humanity. He also writes about philosophy and politics on his nonfiction Substack, Heat Death and Taxes.