Mage of Mind

it's still actually perfectly fine to do it

and you shouldn't stop yourself from starting just because it won't be a permanent change.

Like if starting a new daily planner gives you an amazing afternoon of planning and four days where you feel in charge of your life,

why not do it?

It doesn't matter that it won't be a permanent change - 4 good days is still worth it.

If you ever catch yourself thinking, "I wish I could pray/stretch/prep/plan/do the thing, but I always get started on that and it never lasts more than a couple of days,"

what this really means is, "hey, I can feel better for a couple of days."

if this post is making you think of things in your own life that you wish you could stick to because of how good they make you feel,

just be aware:

you're not thinking of a list of ways you've failed to commit

Beethoven’s “Hammerklavier” sonata, first published over two hundreds years ago, is notoriously considered one of the most difficult-to-play piano pieces of all time.

In particular, when Beethoven sent it to his publisher in 1818, he allegedly said, “Now you have a sonata that will keep the pianists busy when it is played 50 years hence!”, and much has been made of the fact that it wasn’t publicly performed in its entirety until eighteen years later, by Franz Liszt himself.

Except that’s a bit of a deceptive statistic. See, when Beethoven published Hammerklavier, public solo piano recitals/concerts weren’t really a thing yet. Symphonies, sure; concertos, definitely. But sonatas were “parlor” music—a thing played by amateurs, often skilled amateurs, but amateurs nonetheless, in little sitting-rooms for a bit of entertainment after dinner, or at private salons with a guest list in the low dozens. (And mostly they were meant to be sight-read! The culture of obsessively polishing a piece to make it “performance-ready” wasn’t as much of a thing, back then.) People bought these things the way they bought novels, and, just as someone might buy a copy of Joyce’s Ulysses today and enjoy puzzling over the thing, even if they never read the whole thing or feel like they fully “get” it, well… some folks would enjoy sonatas the same way.

So yeah, Hammerklavier didn’t have its first public performance until Liszt played it in the Salle Érard. But also, Liszt basically invented the format of “star virtuoso pianist hogging the stage for two hours” in order to get a public audience at all.

But in the meantime—I think about how wonderful it must’ve been, tooling around on the piano during that 18-year-span where there was no evidence that thing even was playable, or that, if playable, that the thing even made sense. Beethoven was nearly totally deaf by this point, after all, a fact that was publicly known—had he totally lost it? people had to wonder. And the only way to find out would be… well, trying it out yourself!

It has the sound of a gimmick. And I’ll bet it was, at least a little bit—but just because something’s more interesting to play than listen to doesn’t mean it’s failing in its goal. (Though fwiw it is very interesting to listen to.)

It also has the sound of, like, Dark Souls, to be honest. Proto-video game culture. A new game drops and people are asking each other: can anyone beat this boss? can you beat this boss? do you still consider your time on the game well-spent even if you never 100% it?

Biographies generally agree that Beethoven’s metronome markings (which only appear in his later work, and only *some* of his later work) are preposterous—often borderline-unplayable, and certainly not very musical. I couldn’t find a recording of anyone trying to play Hammerklavier at the marked 138bpm tempo, so I got a computer to do it—and burst out laughing at the result because, yeah, 138bpm is fucking NUTS. But whether intentional or accidental, I love the audacity of its being there, like a taunt: I dare you to do more. I dare you to do better. I dare you to try.

Much has been made of how difficulty’s a way of keeping people out—but it’s also a way of inviting people in, I think. It says: do this hard thing and you will be rewarded. You will be rewarded in the trying. Because the trying is the thing that makes the music live; there is no music without you.

Here’s an old bit from an interview with the game designer Porpentine:

“The purpose of a puzzle [in a game] is to provide resistance. For me, that resistance doesn’t need to be coercive or challenging, just interesting and aesthetic. My mechanics are to be touched. Games are perhaps the most intimate art because the player must remain touching at all times. They must touch or the game does not exist.”

Beethoven’s “Hammerklavier” sonata, first published over two hundreds years ago, is notoriously considered one of the most difficult-to-play piano pieces of all time.

In particular, when Beethoven sent it to his publisher in 1818, he allegedly said, “Now you have a sonata that will keep the pianists busy when it is played 50 years hence!”, and much has been made of the fact that it wasn’t publicly performed in its entirety until eighteen years later, by Franz Liszt himself.

Except that’s a bit of a deceptive statistic. See, when Beethoven published Hammerklavier, public solo piano recitals/concerts weren’t really a thing yet. Symphonies, sure; concertos, definitely. But sonatas were “parlor” music—a thing played by amateurs, often skilled amateurs, but amateurs nonetheless, in little sitting-rooms for a bit of entertainment after dinner, or at private salons with a guest list in the low dozens. (And mostly they were meant to be sight-read! The culture of obsessively polishing a piece to make it “performance-ready” wasn’t as much of a thing, back then.) People bought these things the way they bought novels, and, just as someone might buy a copy of Joyce’s Ulysses today and enjoy puzzling over the thing, even if they never read the whole thing or feel like they fully “get” it, well… some folks would enjoy sonatas the same way.

So yeah, Hammerklavier didn’t have its first public performance until Liszt played it in the Salle Érard. But also, Liszt basically invented the format of “star virtuoso pianist hogging the stage for two hours” in order to get a public audience at all.

But in the meantime—I think about how wonderful it must’ve been, tooling around on the piano during that 18-year-span where there was no evidence that thing even was playable, or that, if playable, that the thing even made sense. Beethoven was nearly totally deaf by this point, after all, a fact that was publicly known—had he totally lost it? people had to wonder. And the only way to find out would be… well, trying it out yourself!

It has the sound of a gimmick. And I’ll bet it was, at least a little bit—but just because something’s more interesting to play than listen to doesn’t mean it’s failing in its goal. (Though fwiw it is very interesting to listen to.)

It also has the sound of, like, Dark Souls, to be honest. Proto-video game culture. A new game drops and people are asking each other: can anyone beat this boss? can you beat this boss? do you still consider your time on the game well-spent even if you never 100% it?

Biographies generally agree that Beethoven’s metronome markings (which only appear in his later work, and only *some* of his later work) are preposterous—often borderline-unplayable, and certainly not very musical. I couldn’t find a recording of anyone trying to play Hammerklavier at the marked 138bpm tempo, so I got a computer to do it—and burst out laughing at the result because, yeah, 138bpm is fucking NUTS. But whether intentional or accidental, I love the audacity of its being there, like a taunt: I dare you to do more. I dare you to do better. I dare you to try.

Much has been made of how difficulty’s a way of keeping people out—but it’s also a way of inviting people in, I think. It says: do this hard thing and you will be rewarded. You will be rewarded in the trying. Because the trying is the thing that makes the music live; there is no music without you.

Here’s an old bit from an interview with the game designer Porpentine:

“The purpose of a puzzle [in a game] is to provide resistance. For me, that resistance doesn’t need to be coercive or challenging, just interesting and aesthetic. My mechanics are to be touched. Games are perhaps the most intimate art because the player must remain touching at all times. They must touch or the game does not exist.”

Highlights include:

For your first two years (when you were small) you lived in a foster home with people who raised you into a very polite young man. Two is like you plus me, that's what two is.

Some people adopted you before me and they called you Timmy (which is a stupid name) and they returned your ass almost immediately because you were so annoying at that age.

Like think about how annoying you are right now at seven years old, but way worse.

I'm better than them though, I don't call you Timmy and I wore earplugs to bed for three years because you love to scream at bedtime. Earplugs are like when I roll over and go back to sleep even when you are yelling so so so loud.

I got you at a time in my life when I was really sick (being sick is like when I'm up late because I'm throwing up and you are a very handsome good boy who sits with me) and they had to put me asleep for a procedure. A procedure is like what happened to you when they put you asleep and took your balls away.

Eridians are further behind than humans technologically right? They dont have computers, relativity, quantum mechanics, etc. In fact, Eridians probably dont even know about the Big Bang because their atmosphere would filter out most of the cosmic microwave background radiation we use to detect it. On a human timeline, theyre anywhere between like early-mid 20th century. Rocky's basically a cosmonaut.

So the human civilization is pretty advanced from Rocky's perspective. Rationally he understands this. On a conceptual level he knows this to be true.

• Jake wakes up.  It’s a Southern California day like any other: sunny, 70, chance of aliens.  He showers, slumps downstairs, pours himself a bowl of Frosted Flakes.  Does his best to ignore the controller sitting across the table and staring at him.  Brushes his teeth.  Catches the bus.

Jake goes to Homeroom.  Jake goes to Algebra.  Jake goes to French.  Jake goes to U.S. History.  Jake goes to lunch.  Jake goes to Remedial English.  Jake goes to Biology.  Jake goes home.

“Remember,” Marco says, as they’re heading out.  “Tonight.  The usual place.”

Jake sighs, nodding.  It seems like that’s all they do these days, meet and try to talk their way up to going on the next mission.

He’s tired.  They’re all tired.

Maybe none of them more than Rachel, who is already grinding her teeth when she walks through the door.  “I can’t tonight,” she says.  “My mom needs me to babysit Jordan and Sara again.”

“Seriously?” Marco asks.

Jake knows why — this has been happening a lot lately.  It’s unlike Rachel to put off a mission, and yet.  It’s the yeerk pool.  None of them want to go back, even her.  Even if it means destroying an entire kandrona shipment Erek has pointed them toward.

But Jake’s in charge.  It’s Jake’s job to say “Fine.  We’ll try again tomorrow.”  And so he does.

• Jake wakes up.  He showers, he eats his sugar-covered corn, he does his best to hope he hasn’t caught the wrong kind of attention from the thing that looks like Tom.  He leaves for school.

Algebra seems like it’s been getting easier lately.  In French, he finishes a sentence correctly the first time the teacher prompts him.  Maybe he’s been getting better at balancing it all.

Or maybe it’s just been forever since they’ve been on a real mission.

“I can’t tonight,” Rachel says, when they’ve barely started the meeting.  “My mom needs me to babysit Jordan and Sara again.”

Marco’s response is sharp and sarcastic.  Jake curls his head forward, pressing it against his knees.  He gets why Marco’s annoyed.  This keeps happening.

“Jake?” Cassie asks softly.

He lifts his head.  “If this happens again tomorrow, we might need to plan to go without you,” he tells Rachel.

«That makes no sense,» Tobias says sharply.  «We can’t go without our strongest fighter.»

“Tomorrow.”  Jake can hear the tiredness in his own voice.  “We’ll make a decision tomorrow.”

• Jake wakes up.  He goes to school.  He sits through classes, through lunch.  He confirms with Marco that they’re still just meeting in Cassie’s barn for tonight.

“I can’t tonight,” Rachel says.  “My mom—”

“We know.”  Jake speaks more sharply than he means to.  He’s just.  He’s tired.  It feels like he hasn’t slept in weeks.

“She’s just really busy right now,” Rachel mutters.

«Yeah, dude.»  Tobias glares, or maybe he just looks Jake’s way.  «Chill.»

“We go tomorrow,” Jake says.  “No matter what.  Tomorrow.”

Marco salutes.  “Tomorrow it is!”

• Only they don’t go the following day.  Jake suggests it, and the others all shout him down.  It’s just one night, Rachel and Tobias keep telling him, it’s just for now.  The kandrona shipment can wait one more night, Ax says.  Cassie suggests they all just take a breath, take a break.

• Jake messes up.  They don’t go the next day either, and this time it’s Jake’s fault; he fell asleep during what felt like the world’s most repetitive History class, and got detention.

“You doing all right?” his dad asks, picking him up after school that day.

“Yeah.”  Jake stares dully out the car window.  “Yeah, I’m fine.”

“And...”

Jake can tell, by the change in tone, that they’ve gotten to the real reason his dad started this conversation.

“And Tom.”  Steve clears his throat.  “Has he seemed... off to you, lately?”

Yeah, Dad, he seems like he’s been replaced by a fucking alien, thanks for asking.  Jake wants to slide off his seat and onto the floor.  He wants to curl up in the footwell of the car and cry himself to sleep, right there on the spot.  “I don’t know,” he says.  “He seems fine to me.”

• The following day, Jake gets to the barn early.  He doesn’t like going on this mission without Rachel, but there’s a difference between waiting for a day and waiting for... he doesn’t know how long.  Several.  It’s been forever.

“Hey.”  It’s Cassie, standing in the door.  “You ready to go tonight?”

“Yes.”  Jake pushes to his feet.  “Yes.  Even if Rachel’s busy, we need to get this over with.”

Cassie frowns.  “Rachel didn’t mention being busy.  I know she’s had to babysit a lot lately, but she shouldn’t need to tonight.”

Jake snorts.  “No kidding, she’s had to babysit a lot.”

The doors of the barn swing open.  Rachel’s there, Marco trailing behind.  Two raptors land in the rafters, one after the other.

“Okay,” Jake says.  “I talked with Cassie, and we go ahead no matter what.”

“I can’t tonight,” Rachel says.

“Wow,” Jake mutters, “how did I know that was coming.”

Everyone stares at him.

He stares back.  “No one else is getting frustrated with this?”

“My mom’s just really busy right now.”  Rachel crosses her arms.

“When is she going to get un-busy?”  Jake knows he sounds mean.  He knows it.  But it feels like they’ve been having this conversation since... Since... He doesn’t know when.

“Definitely by this weekend she’ll be fine,” Rachel says.

“Weekends.”  Marco sighs, flopping his wrist against his forehead.  “I remember what those were like, back in the days of yore.”  He’s overdoing it, trying to break the tension.

“What...”  Jake frowns, a sudden uneasiness saturating his stomach.  “What day is it today?”

“It’s Thursday,” Rachel says.  “So the weekend starts tomorrow.  I promise, it’ll be fine.”

“Thursday.”  Jake looks at his watch, not that that’s any help.  “I could’ve sworn it was...”  He trails off, looking into space.  He’s never sure what day it is anymore.  And yet, that answer doesn’t sound right — this whole thing doesn’t feel right — for some reason he can’t put his finger on.

«Let’s just go tomorrow, yeah?» Tobias says.  «We can’t go without our strongest fighter.»

“Yeah,” Jake mutters.  “You keep saying that.”

Still, they go home.

• Jake wakes up.  He doesn’t feel rested, but at least he doesn’t remember dreaming.

“Jake?” his mom asks over breakfast.  “Have you seen Tom this morning?”

Jake shakes his head, hoping that’s not a bad sign.  He leaves for school.

“Remember,” Marco says, as they’re heading out.  “Tonight.  The usual place.”

It’s not like Jake was at any risk of forgetting.  This is their third? fourth? meeting in a row.

He goes to Cassie’s barn.  “I can’t tonight,” Rachel says.  “My mom needs me to babysit Jordan and Sara again.”

“I thought you said she’d be free by Friday,” Jake points out.

“Yeah, and today’s Thursday.”  Rachel crosses her arms.

“It can’t be Thursday, yesterday was Thursday,” Jake snaps.  “We’re already at the weekend.”

“Weekends.”  Marco sighs, flopping his wrist against his forehead.  “I remember what those were like, back in the days of yore.”

Jake stares at Marco.  His whole brain is tilting, spinning, horizon losing its contours.  It’s not unease he’s feeling.  It’s dread.  Panic.

“Hey Ax?” Jake says, voice very small.

«Yes, Prince Jake?»

“N...”  He takes a breath.  “Never mind.”

• Jake wakes up.  He checks the level of the Frosted Flakes.  He should’ve gone through the box, and yet...

“Hey Mom,” he calls, still inside the pantry.  “Did you replace these lately?”

A shadow falls over the door.  Tom is blocking the opening, staring hard at Jake.  “Why are you asking that?”

Jake tries for a natural smile.  “Just wondering.  Did Mom ever find you?  She was looking for you yesterday.”

“Wait.”  Tom’s eyes narrow.  “What?”

The shelf impacts Jake’s lower back, which is how he knows he stepped back.  “Just wanted to make sure that...”

“Jake?” his mom calls.  “You said my name?”

He grabs the cereal box and runs.

When he gets to school, they’re still on integer-valued polynomials.  And conjugating “tournoyer.”  And Chumash-Mexican alliances.  And split infinitives.  And the krebs cycle.

“Remember,” Marco says, as they’re heading out.  “Tonight.  The usual place.”

And for the first time in his life, Jake doesn’t even bother to go.

• Jake wakes up.  Jake stays in bed.  He’s tired.  He’s tired, and he’s starting to understand what’s happening here.  If his mom asks, he’ll fake sick.  But either way, fuck school.

• Staying in bed gets old fast.  Jake spends an entire day actually teaching himself the one-hour lesson on polynomials.  And then another day on regular conjugation of multipart verbs.  And then two more, one each for the Chumash and Mexicans.  And then skips another school day, because he doesn’t give a damn about infinitives, and then finally the krebs cycle.

• He hasn’t been on an Animorphs mission in...

A while.  It’s been a while.

And he’s feeling fine.

• “I’m telling you, if you even tried kidnapping Spider-Man and adding him as a Robin,” Marco says over lunch, “then Aunt May would just go out, buy a shotgun, and cap Bruce Wayne’s ass.”

Jake stares at him.  He’s been letting this conversation wash over him, but now... “Don’t you ever get sick of talking about this stuff?” he asks.

Marco’s face does something complicated.  It takes less than a second, before his smile is back in place.  It has an edge now.  “It’s not like we can talk about anything real here, you absolute gravy stain,” he says through his teeth.

Jake nods.  He pushes to his feet.  And then he stands up on the table.

“Marco!” Jake says, and the cafeteria falls silent.  “Marco Sant-Alonso Grant Dominguez, will you marry me?”

There’s laughter, and then there’s whispering, and then there’s booing.

And then there’s detention, for breaking the school’s policy against homosexual conduct.

It’s something different, anyway.

• Jake lives.

• Some days he walks out of the house before anyone else is up.  He goes flying, and spends the day with Tobias and Ax.  He morphs wolf, runs out to find Toby, and spends the day there instead.  He attends a Sharing meeting, walking uninvited to its back room and noting as many faces as he can before they drag him back out.

• Maybe it’s not fair to everyone else, Jake thinks on some days.  Maybe they deserve to live and grow.  But maybe they deserve to not be at war, and maybe they’re not, not really, not while they’re in this holding pattern.

• Jake thrives.

• “Detention, young man,” Chapman says, because Jake hasn’t bothered to go to English class for quite a while now.

Jake whirls around, staring him down.  “Did you just try to put my host in detention, Iniss 226?” he demands.

Chapman’s face freezes.  His whole body is caught between one motion and the next, mouth hanging halfway open.

“That’s what I thought,” Jake says.  And then he spins back around and walks out the door.  He’s laughing by the time he reaches the sidewalk.  Laughing uncontrollably, laughing with stupid little snorts mixed in.  Laughing like he hasn’t since...

A while.  It’s been a while.

• Jake goes joyriding in his mom’s car.  Jake goes joyriding in a stolen Bug fighter.  Jake’s lonely, but Jake’s been lonely for a long time.

• “My name is Jake!” he announces, the next time he feels like standing on a cafeteria table.  “And I’m an Animorph!”

• Jake messes up.

“Hey Jake?” Jake’s mom says over dinner one night, the way she often does.  “Cassie called a few times.  She sounded worried about you.”

Jake stirs his food (he’s so so sick of stuffed cabbage), not looking up.  “Don’t worry,” he tells his mom.  “She’s annoyed because I’m not planning our ten thousandth attempt to bring down the Yeerk Empire.  But it started to feel pointless after a while, you know?”

His dad asks if this is something to do with a video game.  His mom asks if he and Cassie are dating.  His brother’s face is blank, twisting into horror.

Jake throws Tom a wink, and waits for the explosion.

It never comes, to his surprise.  Instead Tom stares at him in silence for the rest of dinner, not eating, not talking.

The yeerk must be — and Jake laughs aloud at the thought — planning on doing something about it tomorrow.

• Jake wakes up.  He wakes up, because he can’t breathe.

There’s a hand pressed over his nose and mouth.  There’s a two-hundred-pound human body pinning him to his bed.  There’s a knee jammed into his diaphragm.  Any one of these could account for Jake’s drowning-man struggle, clawing at Tom’s wrist as his body starves for air.

“Don’t worry.”  Tom’s voice is silky-low in his ear, and Jake doesn’t care because THERE’S NO AIR.  “I’m not going to kill you, you little shit.  Then I’d be alone in this loop.”

He lets go, sitting back.  Jake sucks in a breath so violently his whole chest arcs off the bed.

Jake sits up.  They stare at each other.

Yeah, Jake fucked up.

“Hi,” Jake says at last, hoarse.  “My name's Jake.  You are?”

The yeerk doesn’t try anything cute, like claiming to be Tom.  “Ardek 5851.  Sub-Visser Two-Oh-Nine.”

Jake nods.  “You’ve been in the loop... how long?”

“For me, this is the eighty-sixth time it’s been Thursday, May tenth,” Ardek 5851 says.  “What about you?”

Jake has no freaking clue how many days it’s been since he noticed, and he has a nasty suspicion it took him at least a week to notice at all.  He settles for shrugging.

“Fine.”  Ardek sits Tom upright, cross-legged on the end of Jake’s bed.  “On to the elephant in the room.  You’re helping the andalite bandits.  And so is Cassie Moises.”

Jake is aware that he’s the stupidest person ever to live, thanks.  There’s no need to point it out.

“Well?” Ardek raises Tom’s eyebrows.  “I gave you my name and rank, midget.”

“Don’t call me that,” Jake snaps.  He shoves to his feet, fists clenched, chest aching.  “And yeah, I’m helping them.”

Ardek snorts loudly.  “Clearly they’re not helping you, or else you wouldn’t still be here.  What, no Time Matrix on loan for their lowly human ally?”

Jake shrugs.  He has to play this carefully.  The variables have changed overnight: now his survival is likely to hinge on that of this creature.  This is bad.  “Maybe I like it here.  Maybe I haven’t bothered telling my andalite contact, because I don't think it's worth the trouble."

Ardek squints at him.  “If I didn’t know you, I’d think you were telling the truth.  Since I do know you, midget, I know you’re telling the truth. Damn.”  He laughs, shaking his head.  “I mean, I knew you were fucked up, because Tom knows you’re fucked up.  But this...”  He shakes his head again.

“So.  Guess we’ll go back to how it was, then.”  Jake shrugs again.  “You do your thing, and I’ll do mine.”

“Jake.”  The name seems like a deliberate choice.  “Jake, you know we can’t go on like this forever.  Work with me, kid.  If you don’t want out, what do you want?”

Jake lets his gaze flick to Tom’s body, and then back up to his eyes.  “I think you know.”

Ardek grimaces.  “Fine,” he says.  “Agreed. He sucks as a host anyway.  But you can’t let him go blabbing the truth after I give him back.  And you let me go my own way."

"Fine."

"There’s this bod I’ve had my eye on anyway, this local cop who’s also a ranked weight-lifter.  Shouldn’t be too hard to grab.”

“I wish you hadn’t told me that,” Jake murmurs.

“Hey, you get Tom, I get Officer Jenna Richards.  Everyone wins.”

“Just...”  Jake presses his index finger and thumb to the bridge of his nose.  “Tell me what you've already tried, to end the loop."

• When they part ways, Jake doesn’t go to Ax.  The part about not wanting to trouble him was true.  And after their little trip to the Cretaceous, Jake is pretty sure Ax has no idea what he’s doing when it comes to sario rips.  Instead, Jake finds Erek.

He doesn’t start by asking about time loops, but with “You remember when we helped you guys fix the pemalite ship?”

Erek nods, because of course Erek remembers.

“Okay,” Jake says.  “So this is going to be one hell of a return favor, but...”  He smiles weakly.  “How do you feel about breaking the space-time continuum?”

• Jake wakes.  Ardek is sitting on the end of his bed again.

“Rise and shine, little bro!” he says.  “Who’s ready for some breakfast?”

Jake groans, rubbing a hand over his face.  “I’m not your brother.”

“And I’m guessing Tom got better sleep on the last-ever May ninth than you did.”  Ardek grins at him.  “So?”

“My contact didn’t get an answer right away.  I’m supposed to come back.”

“So Prince Whoeverthefuck can start running the calculations again?  From the top?”  Tom’s fists are tight on the bedspread.

“Yep.”  It’s Jake’s turn to grin obnoxiously at him.  “So I’d better get over there, don’t you think?”

Ardek flips him off, and stalks out of the room.

• Erek starts from the top, every morning.  Usually after an hour’s worth of exhausting the same suggestions he made yesterday, with Jake shooting down each one at ever-increasing speed.  Erek hits a dead end, every evening.  And he gives Jake something to memorize and recite back to him the following morning.

• Jake comes home to find Tom splayed out on the floor, the whole room stinking of strawberry schnapps.  Ardek is vague-eyed, loll-headed.

“What are you doing?” Jake says slowly.

“Livin’...”  Ardek hiccups.  “Livin’ like there’s no tomorrow.”

Jake considers.  And then he sits on the floor next to Tom.  “Strawberry schnapps, huh?”

“Yep.  Dad’s got shit taste.”

“He’s not your dad.”

“Thank god for that.”  Ardek hands over the bottle.

Jake takes it. “No tomorrow, right?”

Ardek fumbles behind himself in the pantry, comes up with cooking sherry this time.  “No tomorrow.”  He toasts with it.

Jake sips the schnapps.  Yep, even more awful than it smells.  He sets the bottle on the floor, grateful when Ardek doesn’t push the issue.

“So how’s the world’s slowest war-prince doing for you?” Ardek asks.

“‘Slow’ is about it.”  Jake doesn’t sip again.  “Why can’t you ask any of your fellow sub-vissers for help, while we’re waiting?”

Ardek snorts.  “I wish.  Cooperation within the Empire isn’t...”  He trails off.  “It isn’t.  Period.”

“Sounds like a pain.”

“Okay, so.  You got Visser Three, stomping around on his itty-bitty hooves like he hung the stars and we should all be kissing his ass.  You got Visser One, whose deal is...”  Ardek blows a raspberry.  “I don’t even know.  Scary-ass lady.  And you gotta pick one or the other or else your ass is grass.  But you’re stuck either minioning for Visser Three, or betting everything on some alleged revolution that inn’t even going to come through ‘cause...”  He hiccups again.

Jake chuckles.  “Sounds like politics.”

“Y’know, every time I try to tell people my host used to live next door to Visser One’s host, they think I’m making it up?” Ardek says.  “That I’m trying for, like, the position of kissass-in-chief.”

“Would you take it, if you could?” Jake asks.  He takes another wincing sip.

“What, a vissership?”  Ardek slurs the word, stopping to work Tom’s mouth when he’s finally got it out.  “In an instant.  An instant.  It means being safe, being visser.  It means not having to kiss up anymore.  It’d mean no longer having to deal with this...”  He flicks Tom’s finger against his temple, like getting rid of a bug.  “And getting a nice, quiet, voluntary host instead.  I’ll kiss all the ass in the world for that.”

“I guess I never thought about it that way before,” Jake says quietly.

Ardek snorts.  “Like you’re not kissing the ass of some war-prince, just to be allowed to be in the war at all?”

Jake hums noncommittally.  Sips again.  Wonders if he should try to hide the bottles before his parents get home.

Let them ground Tom.  It’s not like it matters.

• Erek makes little progress.  Ardek comments on it constantly, but Jake still won’t let him come along to meet this contact.

• Jake wakes.  This time, it’s because he’s been dumped out of bed and onto the floor.

“Hey.”  Ardek crouches next to him, straightens up, bounces on the spot.  “Hey, hey, asshole.  I tried your idea, man.  I tried your brilliant damn idea of, of, asking our technician about time loops.”

Jake sits up slowly.  “And?”

“I died, man!”  Tom’s voice rises into a screech.

Now Jake scrambles to his feet.  “You died.  Yesterday.  Last loop.  You—”

“Those utter grass-munchers reported me, said I was losing the plot, and of course they didn’t want to deal with me, we’re already over budget and understaffed, yadda yadda, so they shot me!”  Ardek is still bouncing, wide-eyed, manic.

“They shot Tom,” Jake says.  “And you both died.”

“Yes, you stupid human, he died too!”  Ardek makes a dismissive gesture.  “I’ve done the drills, we’ve all done the drills, on how to get out of the skull in an emergency, but all the blood was coming out everywhere, and all the circuits were shutting down, and the stupid host was screaming, and...”  He wraps both arms around himself, shuddering.

“I’m sorry that happened to you,” Jake says slowly.

Ardek punches him in the arm.  “Damn straight you’re sorry.  ‘Why don’t you try asking your people’s technicians?’” he says in a truly awful imitation of Jake’s voice.  “‘See if they can help.’”

Jake gets a hand around Tom’s bicep.  Gently pulls Ardek down to sit on the edge of the bed.  Ardek curls forward, both hands pressed over his face.

“You people aren’t even worth it, you know that?”  Ardek speaks through Tom’s fingers.  “You don’t have blades, you fall over all the time, and pretending to be you involves wasting so much time on the most inane crap...”  He lifts his head.  “You know, if you’d take one tenth the time and resources and brainpower you people spend on this shit—”  He plucks at his shirt hem — "and ditch the clothes, you’d be shuttling to deep space and outgunning the andalites by now.”

“Probably,” Jake says.  “Why are you here, then?  If we’re such a crappy species.”

“No choice,” Ardek says dully.  He flops back onto Jake’s bed.  “If you try to not go to whatever shitty backwater planet they assign you and recruit the locals, you end up...”  He shudders again.  “Like me, yesterday.”

Jake never expected to feel this much sympathy for a yeerk.  Much less the one currently puppeting his brother.  “You could stay,” he offers.  “In the loop.  Just... hold.”

Ardek rolls onto his side.  “I,” he says slowly, “have not eaten—” He pokes Jake’s leg.  “A single drop of kandrona.  In one-hundred forty-three fucking days.  I was scheduled to go first thing, the morning of May eleventh, but nooo.  I haven’t talked to my friends in that long either, because I can’t exactly pick up the phone and do a check-in, now can I?”

Another angle Jake has never considered before.  “Do you even... want a host at all?” he asks slowly.

“Beats being stuck in the kandrona tank twenty-four-seven,” Ardek says.  “I don’t like eating that much.”

There’s something in there, something about all the yeerks feeling like there are only two choices and both suck, that... Jake has a half an idea.  Less than.  He has to run it by Cassie, and then...

And then have Cassie forget the whole thing, over and over again.

“Why is this happening to us?” he asks Ardek, flopping next to him on the bed.  “I mean, why us?”

“Extremely localized sario rip went off in the basement,” Ardek says immediately.  “Caught us both sleeping, sent us into a loop that’s spiraling slowly down until we both die.  Like that... Jacob’s Ladder movie.”

Jake hums.  He’s already lived that one out, in Brazil, and he’s pretty sure this isn’t it.  “Wouldn’t it have collapsed when you died, then?”

“Yeah.”  Ardek sighs.  “For the longest time I thought it was something you andalites did to us, but that doesn’t explain why you’re here.  What about you?  Any thoughts?”

“Crayak.”  It slips out almost before Jake means to say it.

“What’s that?”

“Cosmic being.”  Jake stares at the ceiling.  “Doesn’t like me.  Would pull crap like this, most likely.”

“Then why am I here?” Ardek whines.

Jake doesn’t answer.  And then he figures there’s no harm in answering.  “I think... he wants me to make a choice.  The same one he’s been pushing me toward for a long time now.”

“And that is?”

Jake rolls over enough to look Ardek in the eye.  Enough to look into Tom’s eyes.  “I’m working with the andalites.  You’re a controller.  Figure it out.”

Then he stands up, and starts getting dressed for school.  One more round of infinitives won’t kill him, and if his suspicion about how to get out of the loop is correct then it beats the alternative.

• Erek works out a shorthand for himself.  Jake teaches it back to him every morning, and memorizes a page of notes written in the shortened code every evening.  He deserves extra credit in Algebra for this, even with his new expertise on polynomials.

• Jake’s parents keep catching him to ask about Tom.  They’re worried — he’s stayed in his room all day today.  All day today.  All day today.

“I’m close.”  Jake stands in the door of Tom’s room.  Ardek is curled in a ball on his bed.  “I swear, I’m getting close.”

Ardek lifts Tom’s head.  His eyes are dull.

Jake has been there.  Jake knows.

He shuts the door when he leaves.

• “Forget all of that,” Erek says, ten seconds after handing Jake today’s notes.  “Forget all of it.”  His auto-generated voice sounds excited.  “How long do we have?”

“The loop resets at midnight,” Jake says.

Erek nods.  He’s grinning.  “We’ll be cutting it fine, but I think you can do this.  Because it all fits, if you just add in the Neuguyn Equation and drop the exponential term—”

“—over lambda,” Jake finishes.  “Because then it’s symmetrical, and simplifying it takes half the time.”

Erek raises his eyebrows.  “Dude, how many Thursdays have you had?”

Jake shakes his head.  “Neuguyn Equation.  Teach it to me.”

• Jake wakes up.  Jake throws himself out the window, hitting the ground hard.  But he’s up, morphing to Homer even as he goes at a mad sprint for Erek’s house.  Neuguyn Equation, in place of the exponent.  Neuguyn Equation, in place of the exponent.

• Jake throws open his front door, three hours later.  “Ardek!” he yells.  “Ardek, we’ve got it!”

“Jake?”  His mom’s straightening up from where she was working in the living room.  “Shouldn’t you be at school?  Tom’s home sick, are you also...?”

Jake ignores her.  He’ll apologize tomorrow, if there is a tomorrow.  “Ardek!”  He pounds on Tom’s bedroom door.

Ardek yanks it open.  “You have an answer?”

Jake nods.  “We got it.”

Ducking back into the room, Ardek yanks on shoes and socks.  “Yes, yes, yes!”  He leans down the stairs.  “Mom!  We’re borrowing the car!”

Jake’s mom says something in response, and it doesn’t sound like an affirmative.  Ardek’s already grabbing the keys.

Jake gives directions to the Kings’ house.  His own heart is pounding, his fingertips tingling.  Please let this work.  Please.

• Erek answers the door, smiling pleasantly.  “Please do not be fooled by my human morph,” he tells Ardek.  “This is just a temporary means of avoiding suspicion by the neighbors.”

Ardek takes this with a nod.

“You’re ready?” Erek asks Jake.

Jake takes a breath, and rattles off the math.  It’s a ten-minute process.

Erek nods.  Then he reaches out, grabbing Tom by the wrist.  “I need you to stay here, as you risk getting hurt if you stand too close to the collapse when Jake sets it off.”

“Yeah, okay,” Ardek says.  “Fine with me.”

Jake walks over to the sphere of what looks like ball lightning, floating in the middle of the Kings’ living room.  It’s hard even to look at, eating light and energy from the world around it.

He grabs the first of the metal rods from the floor, and plunges it into the current.  The power jolts up his arm, throwing off the rhythm of his heart, making his hair stand on end.  He grabs the other rod, closing the circuit.

He shifts them apart, then brings them together, building up the flow.  Does it again.  Does it again.  His body is burning, stuttering.  He’s falling apart.

There’s a pop of displaced air, and the world goes into reverse.

The sun plunges down to the east, the sky going dark.  Ghostly shapes, echoes of past possibilities, shoot past in reverse.  Jake feels those universes collapsing into his chest, thousands of possibilities yanked back into his body in a single brain-exploding instant.  The air sucks out of the room, drops back in.  Shutting his eyes does nothing to help, because he can still feel those branches being pulled back into him.

And then it’s done.  He’s standing in the living room, the ball lightning absent, just Erek and Ardek and Tom.

“Did it work?” Ardek asks.

Erek frowns.  “Did what work?”

Jake’s head snaps around.  “Emergency override: six.  I’m sorry, friend, but we cannot play today.  You require maintenance.”

The pemalite code, despite being translated, despite not having been spoken in forty thousand years, works perfectly.  Erek goes blank and dead, hologram shutting off entirely, body freezing in position.

“Uh.”  Ardek tries to yank Tom’s wrist away, makes no progress at all against that relentless thousand-pound grip.  “What the hell?”

“Mr. King’s in the other room,” Jake says levelly.  “He’ll get you food and water, and he’ll make sure Tom doesn’t die.  But he can’t hurt Erek, or Tom, trying to get you loose.  And he doesn’t have any kandrona.”

Jake doesn’t know if the math suddenly fitting helped him to make a decision, or if it suddenly fit because he finally decided.  But he does know that one thing is always true about Crayak’s traps: that the Ellimist is very good at leaving the Animorphs a third way out.

“Please,” Ardek is begging.  He’s yanking harder now, but Erek doesn’t move.  Can’t move, until Jake turns him back on.  “Please, please, I’m sorry.  I’m sorry!” he screams, in Tom’s voice.  Straining Tom’s throat.

“I know,” Jake says.  And then he walks out the front door.

It’s Thursday.  It’s Thursday, but he’s pretty sure tomorrow will be Friday.

• Jake wakes up.  He wakes because his mom is shaking him.  “Honey, we need your help.”  She sounds frantic.  This is new.

“What day is it?” Jake asks.

“Friday,” she says dismissively, not noticing his sharp inhale.  “Honey, nobody’s seen Tom since yesterday morning, your dad and I have called everyone we know, and —”

Jake rolls out of bed.  “I’ll go looking for him.  I know which friend he might be with.”

His mom rushes out of the room.  It’s Friday.  It’s Friday.

• When he gets to Erek’s place, Tom is slumped against Erek’s unmoving legs.  His wrist is swollen black within Erek’s grip.  Ardek lies dead on the floor.  It’s Friday.

• The cops knock on Jake’s front door, less than an hour after they get home.  This, even though Jake’s mom called to cancel the missing-persons report 30 minutes ago.

Tom answers, right arm tucked into the pocket of his coat.  Tom tells the officers, his voice hoarse and ragged, that it was just a stupid bender and that he’s very sorry for going out drinking underage.  Tom assures them both it won’t happen again.  Tom sees them on their way.

Jake shuts the door, locks it.  “Those were...”

“Controllers, yeah.”  Tom coughs, winces.  Ardek must have screamed all night.  “And they’ll be back within the hour.”

Jake nods.  “Pack your stuff, then.  We’re running.”  He knew this might happen.  He knew.

“They’re going to find us,” Tom rasps.

“Only way out was through.”  Jake thinks.  He hopes.  “Don’t know about you, but I was getting pretty sick of Thursdays.”

Tom nods.  “Should contact your war-prince first, though.”

Boy am i glad that the con has a facebook page so i can post this photo:

The pool is almost empty.

Leandro Erlich’s Swimming Pool creates the illusion of people standing underwater — but only a thin layer of real water sits above a transparent glass surface.

Below it, visitors walk through a dry chamber, while people above see them as if they are submerged.

The work turns a simple architectural element into a visual trick: Surface becomes depth, and the ordinary becomes impossible.

When I asked why, a student answered honestly: It was too long, and she kept losing track of what the paper was about. This was not a remedial class: These were students who had cleared the admissions process and written essays good enough to get them here. Yet a routine academic reading assignment had defeated them.

Every generation of professors has complained that their students cannot read. The lament is usually overblown, but data have caught up to anecdote, and what I am seeing in my classroom is no longer a hunch. There is a measurable, generational collapse in sustained reading and writing, and the academy is responding to it with improvisation and exhaustion rather than the structural overhaul it requires.

In February 2024, Adam Kotsko, who teaches in the Shimer Great Books School at North Central College, wrote in Slate that students who once handled 30 pages of reading per class meeting now seem “intimidated by anything over 10 pages and seem to walk away from readings of as little as 20 pages with no real understanding.” Crucially, he added that this is “not a matter of laziness on the part of the students” but of underlying skills they were never given a chance to build.

The Chronicle of Higher Education’s 2024 investigation found the same pattern across institutions as different as the Stevens Institute of Technology and Wellesley College, where the average SAT exceeds 1400. Nicholaus Gutierrez, an assistant professor at Wellesley, told The Chronicle that the baseline for what students consider a reasonable amount of work has dropped so noticeably that he has cut his readings accordingly; a 750-word essay now strikes many students as long. At Stevens, the science and technology studies associate professor Theresa MacPhail described following the mantra of “meet your students where they are” for so long that she has begun to feel “like a cruise director organizing games of shuffleboard.”

Worse, the national data tell the same story in colder language. On the 2011 National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) writing assessment, which is the most recent comprehensive writing benchmark, only 24 percent of 12th graders reached the Proficient level, and just 3 percent reached Advanced; another 21 percent scored below Basic. The reading side of the ledger is worse, and getting worse fast: The 2024 NAEP results released in September 2025 show 12th-grade reading scores at the lowest level recorded since the assessment began in 1992. Thirty-two percent of 12th graders now score below NAEP Basic in reading, meaning that, in the assessment’s own language, they likely “cannot draw general conclusions based on concepts presented explicitly in a text.” And yet more than half of these same seniors reported being accepted to a four-year college. That last sentence is the whole problem in one line: We are admitting a cohort that cannot read at a college level and are pretending otherwise.

Why is this happening? One reason, of course, is smartphones.

I came into teaching as a skeptic of the anti-smartphone argument: I had a phone in my pocket throughout high school and college in the 2010s, and I read long books anyway. I now think I was wrong, because the neuroscience has caught up. In a 2017 paper, Adrian F. Ward and colleagues at the University of Texas at Austin’s McCombs School of Business showed that the mere presence of a participant’s smartphone — whether that be face down, powered off, untouched, or across the desk out of vision — measurably reduces available working memory and fluid intelligence on cognitive tests, with the largest effects on the most phone-dependent users. A 2022 study by Motoyasu Honma and colleagues at Japan’s Showa University used near-infrared spectroscopy to compare reading on a smartphone with reading the same passage on paper, and found that smartphone reading produced overactivity in the prefrontal cortex, suppressed sigh generation, and led to general lower comprehension scores; the authors argued that the sigh inhibition and prefrontal overload were causally linked to the comprehension decline.

So when a student tells me they “kept losing track” of a 20-page article, I have to acknowledge that they may be describing a measurable neurological condition. The neural pathways that support sustained attention are built by use, and they atrophy without it. Your body is a use-it-or-lose-it system, and the brain is no exception.

Another reason for the decline in student reading capability is increasing reliance on generative AI. In June 2025, Nataliya Kosmyna and colleagues at the MIT Media Lab released a preprint titled “Your Brain on ChatGPT.” They divided 54 participants into three groups writing SAT-style essays — one using ChatGPT, the second group using a search engine, the last group using nothing — and monitored brain activity with a 32-channel EEG. The ChatGPT group showed the lowest neural connectivity of the three, with up to 55 percent reduced connectivity compared with the brain-only group, and “consistently underperformed at neural, linguistic, and behavioral levels.” Eighty-three percent of LLM users could not quote a single line from essays they had written minutes earlier. When the LLM group was forced to write without AI in a follow-up session, their brain activity did not bounce back to baseline; the researchers coined the term “cognitive debt” for the lingering deficit.

This is the first neurophysiological evidence that early reliance on LLMs measurably alters the brain’s engagement with writing tasks, and it is consistent with what those of us in front of classrooms are watching happen in real time. When I assign analysis, I am not trying to extract a polished product; I am trying to put the student’s mind through resistance in order to make it stronger. Offloading the struggle to a chatbot does not “free students up for higher-order work.” It deprives them of building the strength to do any substantial cognitive work at all.

There is a final factor that is contributing to this decline in reading skills, and that is that the students arriving in my classroom today are the first cohort to have experienced Common Core-influenced reading instruction across the entirety of their K–12 schooling. Whatever the standards’ original intent, the on-the-ground implementation in many districts replaced sustained reading with the practice of pulling “evidence” from disconnected short passages, the same format used on the standardized tests that increasingly determine school funding. The education scholar Natalie Wexler, among others, has documented this pivot in detail: Students drilled on “finding the main idea” in two-paragraph excerpts never build the stamina or background knowledge that longform reading requires. The pandemic then added fuel to a fire that was already burning. NAEP scores for 13-year-olds dropped sharply in 2022 and have not recovered. A 2023 EdWeek survey found that 24 percent of secondary-school administrators described pandemic learning loss in English and language arts as “severe or very severe.”

In July 2025, the journalist Mary Harrington argued in The New York Times that “thinking is becoming a luxury good.” The ability to read deeply and reason at length is fragmenting along class lines as ultra-processed digital media replaces text in everyday life, much as ultra-processed food has replaced cooking. Her longer treatment of the subject in First Things makes the more provocative case that we are witnessing the end of print culture itself, and with it the end of the cognitive substrate on which modern liberal democracy was built.

I see this stratification in the classroom and on the page every week. My students from districts that protected sustained reading through small class sizes, strict phone policies, and faculty who refused to teach to the test all arrive with their attention relatively intact. My students from districts that surrendered to devices and standardized testing arrive cognitively winded. A democracy that requires a literate electorate is now training one fraction of that electorate out of literacy while marketing to the other a “deep work” lifestyle as a luxury good. The students who cannot read a 20-page article today are the voters who will not be able to read a bill, or the jurors who cannot follow a closing argument, tomorrow.

I do what I can in my own classroom to address the problems. I break 20-page articles into two halves and assign the first half with explicit analytical tasks. I require exploratory writing before formal drafts. I model (visibly, on the board) how to track an argument across pages or distinguish a source’s claim from my own analysis. I make structured peer review explicit, because the workshop format I used to take for granted now collapses into “this is good” and “maybe add more details” the moment I step back.

But I want to be plain about the limits of what an individual instructor can do, and all of these solutions have costs. Scaffolding a 20-page article into halves compromises the integrity of the argument I am asking students to engage, just as modeling note-taking in a credit-bearing rhetoric course is using a college slot to teach a middle-school skill. None of the syllabi I teach are designed to deliver this type of cognitive rehabilitation, and pretending otherwise has produced credential inflation. We cannot keep conferring degrees on students who cannot do what the degree is supposed to certify.

I’m afraid I don’t have answers. I do, however, have some questions that may point us in the right direction. If higher education is going to respond to the reading crisis as a structural problem rather than a private burden carried by composition instructors and adjuncts, it has to stop avoiding the following questions: If a majority of incoming students cannot read at a level the curriculum requires, are we admitting students we cannot serve, or offering a curriculum we cannot provide?

Why are first-year writing and reading-intensive general-education courses still the most adjunctified, lowest-paid, highest-load corner of the university, at the precise moment when their work has become the most important work the institution does? What is the responsible institutional response for AI usage: Is it a syllabus statement, or a sequencing principle that requires students to demonstrate the cognitive work themselves before AI assistance is permitted?

Why are most college classrooms still phone-permissive by default? K–12 districts from Florida to California are now banning phones bell to bell; higher education has somehow lagged behind the public schools. Universities benefit from a pipeline they did not build and refuse to repair. What would it mean for a university system to invest seriously in the reading instruction happening in the high schools that feed it, rather than treating remediation as something to be quietly outsourced to first-year composition instructors?

The thing I am no longer willing to do is pretend this is a temporary adjustment period, or that “students will adapt.” They will not adapt on their own. The conditions that produced this collapse are still in place: the phones, the algorithmic feeds, the test-prep excerpts, staffing models that load the reading-intensive work onto the most precarious faculty, and now the chatbots that finish students’ sentences before they’ve even begun to think of them. If we want literate citizens, we will have to rebuild the conditions for literacy deliberately, against the grain of every incentive currently pointed the other way. I know the academy has the will to do that. It also has the obligation."

— Tyler Jagt, 1 June 2026, "My Students Can’t Read"

and then thinking about all the people who call her cold or uncaring or clinical about what she has to do to save earth. eva stratt, who had silly t-shirts and vodka and favorite meals stored in the Hail Mary and treated with the same level of importance as the finely tuned equipment and the centrifuge the entire planet relies on for salvation.

and then thinking about eva stratt nodding and saying, “yeah, I’m pretty awful. that’s why i’m in charge” with a neutral expression and even believing it. as if crafting the most beautiful coffin and homage to her soon-to-be dead friends won’t haunt her always.

thinking about eva stratt being the first person on the “eva stratt is a monster” train, welcoming ryland grace aboard and knowing she believed in him more than anyone else.