When the Wind Turned has reached a moment where it needs a brief pause.

Chapter Eleven was scheduled for this Wednesday, but before moving forward, I’m taking a short break in the serial to bring the story under review—to make sure the ground beneath it is as sound as the weather above it. This isn’t a delay born of uncertainty, but of care. The story has earned a closer look.

During this pause, I wanted to gather the journey so far in one place. If you’d like to revisit—or catch details that may land differently now—here are Chapters One through Ten:

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

Chapter Ten

Thank you for reading this as a serial—for staying with it in real time. I’ll share an update soon about when the story resumes. For now, consider this a moment to step back, breathe, and look at what’s already been built.

With gratitude,

Ashley

Heavy Crown Press has grown quickly — essays, fiction, literary experiments, the Signal Universe, cultural criticism, serialized fiction and autofiction.

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A deleted “Christmas in July” scene that did not make the cut for my novel, The Signal Between Us: A Father/Daughter Discovery Story

What’s Inside the Paid Subscriber Library (so far)

Shotline

A quiet work of fiction about inheritance, silence, and what survives.

Deleted Scene from The Signal Between Us: A Father/Daughter Discovery Story

Just a phone conversation and an opening to a thaw between Jeff (the dad) and Carly (daughter’s mom)

My Life from Solid to Vapor, From the Beginning

A personal excavation on memory, healing, and reclaiming consciousness at the source.

New Adulting

A reflective and deeply personal piece about learning to be OK in the in-between spaces.

Thirst in the Bayou

A Louisiana story about devotion, loss, and the quiet rituals that hold families together. Inspired by an elder cousin of mine who coined one of my favorite phrases—make it do.

Boomers & Zoomers

A generational meditation wrapped inside a Fringe Festival night.

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My first interview published under the Heavy Crown Press label—and the first to go out over the podcast waves—was in April 2022. The subject was John Mese, fresh off the Wild Son ride. I had seen him perform the prior summer in a one-man show called Wild Son: The Testimony of Christian Brando, written by , an author of noir detective fiction and sometime writer for People magazine. The show toured venues up and down California, in Louisiana, and finally at Festival Fringe 2021.

I saw it performed on Father’s Day (a good date for a play about a son lamenting the misfired signals between himself and Marlon Brando) at Bistro Byronz in Baton Rouge. That first interview with was easy; he’s one of the chattiest, friendliest, most easygoing people I’ve had the pleasure of knowing. My neurodivergence is scarcely an issue when talking to someone like Mese. You ask him a question and he’s off to the races—telling stories, feeding analogies, giving vivid descriptions of what it’s like to step on stage and become Christian Brando. With a guest like that, you don’t have to do much heavy lifting.

(Footnote for the record: Mese has since written and performed his own one-man show, Wild Son & Then Some, about his late father. After portraying Christian Brando talking about Marlon, he’s now both pen and performer in his own reckoning. The show debuted at the Unurban Coffee House in Santa Monica on October 18, and he also contributed a short story to the debut issue of .)

That first interview felt like running through the starting gate at full speed.

II. Learning the Hard Parts

I don’t remember exactly what my motives were when I started doing these interviews. Maybe part of it was simply to see if I could do it. I’m not an outgoing person, so it was a real battle of wills—a test of stamina—to push through the outreach emails: Hey, would you like to talk about XYZ on my show?

Composing questions, asking them—that’s the easy part. The hard part, the part I still haven’t mastered, is listening—truly listening—and giving that my entire focus without letting the critic inside my head take over.

The technology, too, keeps me humble. For the John Mese interview, everything rolled without a hitch. For Derek Sitter, there was a portion Zoom somehow decided to record off-meeting—don’t ask; I still don’t know how it happened. Luckily, Derek had a vault of film footage (Bugtussle, Tutu Grande) that he generously let me borrow. The interview itself became an exercise in discipline, attention, and focus; post-production was a hellscape of endurance, impatience, and editing. Some moments were simply lessons in lighting. Those were cases where an AI copilot could have set me straight.

And then there’s Amanda, whose story reminds me that creative life isn’t limited to books or stages. Hers is the art of caretaking—of a tortoise, of a marriage built on imagination, of costumes stitched for Comic Con and small daily kindnesses. She finds her signals in the final frontier, where wisdom travels in starships and in gentle hands offering watermelon. Listening to her, I understood that the work of listening isn’t only for writers; it belongs to anyone who tends something with love. I saw that the tortoise in her backyard is embodiment of the patience, endurance, loyalty and love that is required to be fully present for any interview.

III. The 2025 Conversations

The first of the 2025 conversations was with , a writer whose steadiness you can almost feel through the screen. She works at the Library of Congress—a setting perfectly matched to her patience and precision, the quiet authority of someone who lives among stories.

Georgina grew up with her father and stepmother, a woman she credits with helping her overcome learning obstacles—and who must have been at least partly the inspiration behind the book Tales of Virtuous Stepmothers. The tales are her own inventions, original fairy stories that push at the boundaries of the genre to honor different kinds of motherhood, especially the “stepmother” who’s been so often maligned in traditional lore.

Talking with Georgina reminded me that quiet realism and imagination aren’t opposites. She writes from empathy rather than spectacle, and listening to her describe how compassion becomes myth made me realize how powerful gentleness can be when wielded with intent.

A few months later came a very different kind of dialogue: J.M. Celi, returning to talk about The Unlife of Lisa Cooper: Vengeance, the second half of his vampire duo-logy. Where Georgina’s stories illuminate virtue, Celi’s sink their teeth into consequence. Yet both writers are chasing redemption in their own languages—hers through mercy, his through fury.

Celi spoke about endurance, about characters who wrestle with conscience long after mortality has left them. The conversation was a reminder that genre isn’t a cage but a mirror; whether you’re writing fairy tales or vampires, you’re still writing about what it means to be human.

IV. The Art of Listening

Looking back across these four years of conversations—from John Mese’s kinetic energy to Georgina Warren’s calm precision and ’s haunted lyricism—I’m beginning to see a pattern. Every interview, no matter the subject or setting, is ultimately a study in how to listen.

Listening is harder than it sounds. It isn’t waiting for your turn to talk, and it isn’t nodding at the right intervals. It’s surrender—the choice to stop rehearsing what you’ll say next and to step fully into someone else’s tempo. You have to tune your own signal low enough to catch theirs.

When I started these interviews, I thought I was chasing stories. Now I think I was chasing connection—the invisible thread between people who create and people who try to understand why. The guests change, the microphones change, but the question underneath stays the same: what does it mean to stay human?

Whether it’s Lisa Cooper fighting to keep her individuality through unlife, or a woman exploring maternal virtue without being defined by it, or a father and daughter in a novel trying to decode silence—or a “wild son” breaking the silence and exploring the heartache of his father—each story begins where listening begins. It’s the one act that always survives translation.

—AR | Notes from the Loft, 28 October 2025

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Yesterday and further back (time folded on itself)

The pond was the color of old glass—green with a tint of blue, a hue you can’t mix, only inherit. In 2020 and now, I walked across the little footbridge, the air hushed and heavy, the kind of quiet that feels awake. The gazebo stood then on the small islet at the center, white and slightly crooked, like something the house had dreamed into being. (It had to be moved in 2024 after storm damage.)1 The low wooden chairs that remain on the spot seem fixed and content.

Across the water, a small raft made of logs used to drift near the island. Now it’s tied to the opposite bank, still loyal to the pond that has stopped moving but not stopped breathing. Sound doesn’t carry here; it folds back on itself. Voices from the house dissolve before they reach this side.

Cabins rim the pond, their porches half-hidden by ferns. Closer in, behind the restaurant, the inn keeps its lights low. Across the courtyard sits the Elta café, sharing its open floor with the gift shop. The porch swing has been brought indoors, facing a couch where travelers sip coffee and watch the rain collect on the windows.

I ordered an oat milk cappuccino and sat there, half in 2020, half in childhood. Chickens wandered the courtyard like they owned the place. Ducks circled the pond, indifferent and content. Up by the long drive, two goats huddled under their shelter, soft silhouettes behind the fence.

Part II: Into The House

And there it was again—the scent. Cypress wood, warm and damp and unmistakable. The smell of the house itself, its truest voice.

It hit me before I realized the memory it carried. It was the same breath I’d felt decades ago, walking into the main hall for the first time. The scent of wood that has learned to remember.

I’d done the day tour decades ago, but this was my first time seeing the Myrtles at night. A rainy day with a docent called Rainy Day.

Our guide, Rainy Day—real name, she swears, birth certificate to prove it—wore a swishy Southern-belle dress as she told tales entirely incongruous with her warm demeanor. Her warmth gave balance to the chill inside the house, as necessary for preservation as the discreetly humming dehumidifiers.

In her pleasant, conversational way, she sanded the sharp edges off horrors that might otherwise splinter the air: an ear cut off in punishment, a man shot, a child taken by yellow fever—half her small body already stiffening, even in the portrait that still hangs in the card-table room.

Most of our group stayed quiet, as I did, wary of disturbing whatever still lives here—hoping even small movements wouldn’t be mistaken for disrespect. Yet every haunted-house tour seems to invite at least one or two childish provocateurs, eager to poke the beast. For them, Rainy’s warning became a dare when she pointed toward a doorway she called a portal—a place, she said, where visitors had felt unseen hands brush their arms.

The “portal” links the ladies’ sitting room to the gentlemen’s. In the latter, my eyes went straight to the bookcase. I tried to read the titles on the tomes—was that a full set of Waverley?—before being informed that someone had been shot in that spot. A book by Troy Taylor and David Wiseheart explains that there are at least ten murders according to legend which happened on the Myrtles property, but only one can be verified. It was in that room—the gentleman’s parlor—where the shot struck William Winter in 1871, who collapsed onto the side gallery. Someone stood trial, but the murder was never solved.2

The air there seemed denser, as if the room were still holding its breath.

Part III: Determination

There’s only one word for the story Rainy told in the small room just off the main entryway: determination.

It’s called Chloe’s Room, apparently—a refuge for porcelain dolls arranged along the mantel like quiet witnesses. One of them, legend claims, has a face that distorts itself in phone photographs—features blurred or rearranged by something that doesn’t want to be exploited.

But that isn’t the story Rainy emphasized.

She spoke instead about the test. To become a docent at the Myrtles, she explained, one must spend a night alone in the house. She was already working there in another role, but she wanted to give tours—to speak for the house itself. So she chose this room.

When she shut the door behind her, the chandelier began to spin. Not sway, not tremble—spin, slow and deliberate, like the second hand of a clock that had just remembered time. Thinking it must be mechanical, she called a coworker for help.

“What do you mean, Rainy? The chandelier doesn’t spin.”

That’s when she realized she was not alone after all.

Ashley Rovira, for one, would never have stayed in a room where the chandelier was spinning.

But Rainy Day is not Ashley Rovira.

Rainy Day wanted to be a docent at The Myrtles like Ashley just wants to read books and write things on Substack.

And by dawn, when the chandelier ceased its rotary amusement, Rainy earned the right to tell the house’s stories in her own calm, luminous way.

Part IV: The Mirror, the Legs Under the Table, the Stiff Child, and Other Creepy Things

Everyone who knows haunted lore knows about the mirror. It’s introduced without ceremony, as if its reputation walks ahead of it—the most haunted piece of furniture in America, they say, and no one bothers to argue.

The caretakers do what they can to preserve it. But there’s only so much you can do to a mirror that, once wiped clean, re-smudges itself. The same marks return, within hours, fingerprints where no hands have been. Like the house that shelters it, the mirror doesn’t want to be pristine. It only wants to be.

Elsewhere, the hauntings hide in the details: the legs under the dining-room table that appear only in digital photographs, the sword that once hung above the mantel when I was a child and now rests across a side table in the card-room. Over it hangs the portrait of a Confederate soldier—expression fixed, eyes flat, the kind of painting that watches back.

Two other portraits hold court in that same room of games: a man whose eyes do not leave you, and a girl—about three years old—whose small body shows the unmistakable signs of rigor mortis. Her name was Kate. She died of yellow fever, yet the portrait painter, as was apparently common practice, was obliged to continue his work. Her likeness, finished after death, seems to have fused with the vibration of the house itself.

Rainy Day told us there are more soldiers on the property, buried somewhere beyond the fence line in a mass grave. No markers, no names. The site was deliberately obscured, she said, after too many YouTubers came hunting for bones.

The sword, the portraits, the mirror: objects that seem to know the human weakness for reflection, for proof. They wait, patient and unblinking, for someone to mistake evidence for understanding.

Notes: I decided not to publish the few photos I dared to take inside the house. As exploited as the house has been for decades, my own choice is to not participate in that exploitation. I realize The Myrtles is a huge business that runs on humans’ endearing fascination with the afterlife, that the hotel and the restaurant and the cafe all thrive on the perpetuation of its spooky legends. Photographs are allowed inside the house as long as you don’t use the flash. It’s just a personal preference, born of a respect for the silence that endures there. I will, however, share with you my YouTube playlist of the walking tour I took of the grounds in 2020. If you would be so kind as to subscribe to my YouTube channel, I would be eternally grateful.

YouTube @heavycrownpress (The Myrtles Playlist)

You can learn a lot more about The Myrtles in St. Francisville, Louisiana at their website (www.themyrtles.com) or by following them on Instagram @the_myrtles.

Well, it’s only a crowd because two people are competing for energy from one person.

Heather comes along and wants to be friends with Danielle, but Danielle already has a friend called Petra. The only way to have Danielle all to herself is to undermine Petra. A pattern of gaslighting takes hold. Petra gets fed up and bows out—see? Three’s a crowd.

The girls get older. One of them gets a boyfriend, and three’s a crowd again. Danielle has one of those attractive, upbeat personalities that people are drawn to like flies. She goes to college, makes friends easily, dates a few boys, makes the Dean’s List every semester. People look at her and think, Life seems pretty easy for that one.

Only it’s not as easy as it looks.

The boys really like her because she’s upbeat, she’s cute, she likes to party, and she’s funny. She’s not reckless or damaged. Far from it, in fact—she’s delightfully uncomplicated. But boys, you know? They want to hang onto a girl like that, and Danielle? She doesn’t want to be hung onto. So she breaks up with them one by one, never really knowing why things didn’t work out, never really examining it much.

She goes to a big city, does the career thing. She has a cool apartment. Drinks with colleagues after hours. Betsy becomes a good friend. Charlotte likes to tag along. Everyone wants some of that Danielle energy. It’s intoxicating. Exhilarating. She’s going places, they all say. She’s one of the eagles.

A big opportunity comes up at work. They’re all qualified, but Danielle has the energy. She gets the promotion easily. Charlotte hooks into her. She’ll get the next opportunity, if she plays her cards right. Betsy moves on—new city, new company, apartment with stunning views.

She’s got two neighbors—Petra and Cole on one side, Alicia on the other. Petra and Cole have been living together for a couple of years. They’re nice, super sweet, but standoffish. They’re sick of people drama, so they stick together mostly, spoiling their little dog, Tucker, and building up their savings account, dreaming of marriage and kids, eventual retirement and grandkids, the whole nine yards—if they can ever slow down enough to enjoy it.

Alicia, though, doesn’t really have time to date, let alone think of marriage. She works in a hospital, and her specialty is rare. In fact, she’s only one of two people who practices her particular medical specialty. It’s hard to get people in to do what she does because it’s hard—insanely hard. And depressing. And exhausting. She has a passion for it, but when she gets home all she wants to do is get cozy in pajamas and curl up in her window seat with a book. Forget about drinking and dating.

She likes Petra and Cole because they’re not demanding. Three’s not a crowd for Alicia. She doesn’t need any more from Petra than Petra has to give. She’ll do girl night with Petra and gladly send her back to Cole.

It’s not a crowd. It’s balance.

No one’s draining anyone. No one’s keeping score.

We call it chemistry when the atoms hold, drama when they repel.

But it’s just energy moving, looking for balance.

Sometimes three isn’t a crowd at all; it’s a constellation.

You just have to find the shape that doesn’t burn out the light.

I guess what I’m trying to say is that none of this is right or wrong.

It’s just dynamics. It’s energy. Or synergy.

It’s what works in this human dance we do—looking for validation, for love, for acceptance and joy.

It’s the static, mixing up the signals, and sometimes, if we can get present enough, we catch the signal that clears the static.

From the Loft — essays on connection, distance, and the quiet middle ground.

—AR

Ashley Rovira is the author of The Signal Between Us, a novel about the signals that break a father’s long silence long enough to reconnect him with his daughter — and with himself.

She writes about connection, distance, and the static between them from her creative home at Heavy Crown Press.

I can still see her in my mind’s eye, knuckles on her hips, that big grin, asking Alvie if he needs a ride.

“I got a car, I got this VW,” she says.

He’s going uptown, she downtown; (paraphrasing) “Oh, what the heck, I live uptown,” she says, laughing off her desperation — a lonely soul who’s reached a point in life where she’s willing to sacrifice a little pride if it means earning some companionship, even fleetingly. Because, if we’re being honest, a little companionship is worth ten bruised egos.

That was Diane Keaton’s gift. She could channel the everywoman — funny, flawed, hopeful, neurotic, brilliant. She tapped into the marrow of human vulnerability and held it up to the light until we saw ourselves in it. She didn’t act emotions; she translated them. You could feel it even if you hadn’t experienced it, because she made it real.

Her genius was never about prettiness, never about surface. It was in the tilt of her head, the nervous laugh, the way she said “La-di-da” as if it were both a joke and a shield. Her performances were symphonies of authenticity — the eyes, the voice, the physical rhythm of thought and hesitation. She embodied what most of us try to hide: the tremor of being alive.

Woody Allen saw that gift early and built much of his cinematic universe around it — the way a writer or painter might build their best work around a single, perfect muse. As with Robert Redford, Diane’s talent wasn’t something that could be taught. The Actors Studio can train students in craft, but it can’t implant the essence. Keaton was the essence.

And what always amazed me about her was her ageless quality. She seemed timeless not because she denied age but because she transcended it. The years never muted her vibrancy — they clarified it. She wore experience the way other people wear clothes: naturally, beautifully, unapologetically.

When I think of her now, I don’t just think of Annie Hall or Something’s Gotta Give. I think of a woman who embodied curiosity. Who showed us that fear and joy can occupy the same heartbeat. That sincerity can still be magnetic. That imperfection is, in fact, the only thing that lasts.

She made us believe that real is worth the risk.

Keaton understood what I keep trying to write about: the courage to be seen, even when the light feels too bright — the willingness to risk the temporary pain of losing the protective but unreal layer in order to experience the aliveness that’s always there.

About the Author

Ashley Rovira is a writer, publisher, and the author of The Signal Between Us: A Father/Daughter Discovery Story, the first installment of what will become her Signal Series. She is the editor of the annual Heavy Crown Voices literary magazine and host of the Heavy Crown Press podcast, where she interviews creators about art, story, and the creative life.

What is Groundhog Day—a quirky tradition, a folklore festival, a favorite movie? Besides being all that, and my mother’s birthday, it represents for me a key spiritual principle. Of course, when I look into its history, it is fascinating to notice the static theme of anticipation, of hope for warmer, brighter days. In medieval times, Germanic peoples observed Candlemas on February 2nd.1 Candlemas familiarly hinged on whether a badger or a bear would see its shadow; if it did, then the superstitious would gear up for more freezing cold days. If no shadow was observed, they allowed themselves to consider spring just around the corner. German and Dutch immigrants who settled in Pennsylvania started the “Groundhog Day” tradition, and the movie Groundhog Day centers on the eponymous festival in Punxsutawney—a real place, as it turns out, in Jefferson County, PA, although locations in the movie are actually set in Woodstock, IL.2 The film, directed and written by the late Harold Ramis, conveys a plot in which weatherman Phil, played by Bill Murray, is anxious to get through what he anticipates to be a boring, typical day, but finds himself trapped in a paradox of time and space that won’t allow him to move forward. The film was well-received at the time of its release in 1993 and, in my humble opinion, it stands the test of time as an exhibit of what it means to be human and the struggle to lead a meaningful life. On the surface, we have a story that centers on a supposedly silly event. Phil himself dismisses the Groundhog Day tradition as a repetitive exercise based entirely on superstition rather than the science of meteorology that pays his bills. The day before Groundhog Day, Phil travels up to Punxsutawney in a van with producer Rita (Andie MacDowell) and Larry the cameraman (Chris Elliot). We see Phil’s attraction to Rita in their first dialogue, although he is slightly dismayed by her optimistic attitude. She is ready to make the most of the time, even if she is on a work assignment, and just enjoys the novelty of the quaint town far removed from the hustle and bustle of Pittsburgh. Larry is just kind of a go-along guy who leaves himself open to Phil’s insensitive teasing. Phil is obviously intelligent, a competent weatherman, but he is not getting much enjoyment out of life. The job is too easy, the weather too predictable, his colleagues too…uninteresting, and frankly, he’s bored, and probably suffers from some kind of low-level depression. He’s in for a pleasant surprise, however, at the outset. Rita surprises him by having reserved a room for him, not at the usual inn near the town square, but at a bed and breakfast with a white picket fence in a residential street. If it’s not quite enough to exactly excite him, he at least looks forward to an increase of solitary space and isolation from the uncultivated locals who are so irksome to him. If he sounds like an asshole…well…that’s because he is, but I never find myself unsympathetic to him. It is a boring and repetitive assignment, after all, and as he says so despondently in the film, it’s cold out there—“It's gonna be cold, it's gonna be grey, and it's gonna last you for the rest of your life.” And so the plot unfolds—day 1; day 2, same day; day 3, here we go again, and on and on. In the first round, there is just disbelief. What is going on? What is this? Why is this happening again? Am I really having this conversation, with this person, again…or am I dreaming? Disbelief, and confusion. He says to Rita, “Well, what if there isn’t a tomorrow? There wasn’t one today!” Before he goes to sleep, he breaks a pencil and puts the pieces on the nightstand beside the alarm clock. That will be his test. And when he wakes up again, at 6 AM, to Sonny & Cher’s “I Got You Babe,” the first thing he does is look for the pencil. It’s there, but not broken. “Yesterday” never happened. “Today” is Today, Groundhog Day, to be lived all over again. He panics. He talks to Rita and Larry about it and they recommend him seeing a doctor. He gets a brain scan. Director Harold Ramis plays the doctor who tells him there’s nothing wrong with his brain, but if he’s really concerned, maybe he should talk to a psychiatrist. That’s not much help either. 

In the next phase we see him in the pit of despair, having a beer in the town bowling alley and talking to the town losers. This is the well-screw-it phase. What is there to lose? If today doesn’t count, he might as well have some fun. He winds up in jail! But it’s ok…because when he wakes up, it’s Sonny & Cher “I Got You Babe” all over again. 

Now he just gets cocky. He’s angry. He punches the annoying salesman, Ned. He throws caution to the wind. He eats whatever he wants. He manipulates the situation to his sexual advantage. He schemes toward financial gain, ill-gotten. It gets old, though. Eventually, he’s just as bored as he ever was. It turns out getting everything you want, when you get everything you want, is a bit of an anticlimax. The stuff you buy, the thrills you experience are all of fleeting satisfaction. They bring a “high” but then you come down. Many people live this way, stuck in a cycle of highs and lows, constantly seeking new heights, new thrills.

This kind of existence, living on adrenaline and chasing dopamine, could not satisfy Phil for long. He clung to the one thing that never expired, the one thing that kept growing in his heart—his attraction to Rita. He tried everything to make headway with her—all the moves he ever learned, all the tried and tired steps from time immemorial: bring her coffee, show interest, learn her favorite things. There is that very amusing scene when he uses his many turns in this bizarre time-space warp to impress her by ordering her favorite drink and pretending it was his favorite too—sweet vermouth, ice, and a lemon twist. Nothing gets him to the finish line. He keeps striking out because he’s still playing as if it’s a game. He hasn’t learned yet to live in the moment—not to plan it out, not to memorize it and redo it perfectly later, but to live it, right then and there, honestly and from the heart, to see it and hear it and taste it always as something new. After many strikes with Rita, he loses hope of ever finding anything to live for. He plummets into a deep depression. He spends the day in pajamas, eating junk food, watching the same shows everyday, and becoming despondent over the sameness of everything. There is nothing new to yearn, no woman to conquer, no adventure left to try. Depression leads quickly to cynicism and bitterness. That’s when, at 6 AM, as Sonny & Cher sing “I Got You Babe,” he smashes the alarm clock with his fist. Not again, not another day! He tries dying, but suicide doesn’t work when you’re stuck in a time loop. You just wake up again at 6 AM to Sonny & Cher singing “I Got You Babe.” 

OK, what gives? He can’t die. He never gets to February 3rd. He’s just stuck here, on February 2nd, in this repeating cycle of moments—moments that change only according to how he approaches them. Is he a god? No, he’s not a god. If he was a god, surely he’d be able to save that homeless old man who died on February 2nd—for Phil, that means the man keeps dying over and over again, no matter what Phil does. Phil can’t die, but somehow this man keeps dying. It was just his time, the nurse tells Phil exasperatedly. I think that’s when the dawn begins to break in Phil’s head. He begins behaving differently, and the world responds differently. As he embraces each moment, the community around him opens up. Everybody in Punxsutawney knows his name. He’s Phil, that nice man with the car jack. He’s Phil, that nice man who knew the heimlich maneuver. He’s Phil, the shockingly good pianist after only “one day” (the day repeated on an infinite loop) of practice. He even takes up ice sculpting. Rita can’t help but notice this new and improved Phil. He is no longer trying to impress her, yet impressing all the more with his sincerity and earnestness. Finally, when February 3rd comes, and it’s not just him and the same damn song on the alarm clock, she inquires, “Is this a good thing?” And he replies, “Anything different is good.”

I think that’s the secret to living well: learning to see everything differently. Be like Robin Williams when he steps on the desk in Dead Poets Society, showing the boys how to look at the world from a new vantage point, or when he tells them, your poem can be simple, just don’t let it be ordinary. 

I want to take this opportunity to thank all of you for sticking with me as subscribers. My Substack will always be free, although I do paywall a few articles. The paywalled articles, “Ashley’s Life Stories,” are exclusive to my paid subscribers, but this is not the only way you can support me. I have a tip jar here, where you can donate as little or as much as you like: https://ko-fi.com/heavycrownpress. I also have a Buy Me a Coffee account: https://buymeacoffee.com/heavycrownpress. Finally, there is a fourth way to help struggling writer-librarian me without reaching into your precious coffers: just give me a follow on Bluesky. Go to your App Store, download Bluesky (it’s free) and follow me @ heavycrownpress.

I was content, however, to ignore my iPhone once inside the beautiful space. Indeed, even outside the space there was plenty to admire. It is, after all, right next to the Seine, almost directly across from the spot where sits Notre Dame. (Hence, the Kilometer Zero affiliation, the ‘Kilometre Zero’ stone being set in the cobblestones in front of the fabled and fabulous cathedral.) Moreover, the staff begin setting up the outdoor book stalls well before the doors are opened. You can also pass the time reading the Walt Whitman quotes written in chalk around the windows and on benches.

Enough about the bookshop.6 I know the pictures are beautiful. My first and thus-far only visit in Paris remains in a sacred place in my heart. I have as yet only spoken of and written about it sparingly. Nevertheless, here are some of my own iPhone photographs of the place below:

I bring it up here principally to convey the magical genesis of my acquaintance with the venerable Mr. Kierkegaard. I first began to read this little text, translated into English from original Danish by Alastair Hannay, while sitting on a chair at the fountain in the Luxembourg Gardens. I began reading the preface, written by Kierkegaard in 1848: “The form of this ‘exposition’ may strike many readers as odd: to them it would seem too rigorous to be edifying and too edifying to have the rigour of scholarship.”7 He went on to say he had no opinion as to its being too edifying to be academic/scientific enough, but he did not think it was too rigorous at all, and in fact he thought that everything in a Christian context ought to be edifying. Apparently, Kiekegaard wrote The Sickness Unto Death (in Danish: Sygdommen til Døden) under the pseudonym Anti-Climacus. Anti-climax indeed! It is, I suppose, anti-climatic to learn that despair, far from being the undesirable and horrific fate commonly misattributed to it, is actually the only path by which one can “know God.” To live without being in despair is to be in eternal misery, and that’s far worse. (Here, I can’t help smirking as I recall Woody Allen’s words to Diane Keaton in Annie Hall: “The world is divided into the horrible and the miserable.” Despair, though, is not horrible either; it is not nearly as horrifying, wrote Kierkegaard, as to live without it—to live without it being pure misery.

Kierkegaard was a devout Christian of a rare sort. His Christianity seems to me more akin to mysticism and even more comparable to Eastern philosophies than the Christianity commonly conceived of today. I’ve written before about Eckhart Tolle, a spiritual guru with Kierkegaardian shades.8 Kierkegaard does not, however, distinguish between the human and the being as Eckhart Tolle does. The human being as a whole is Spirit. The goal of the human being (the spirit) is to become a self. But what is a self? Kierkegaard calls the self a “relation which relates to itself.”9 A human being, as a spirit, is a “synthesis of the infinite and the finite, of the temporal and the eternal, of freedom and necessity.”10 In this temporal world (the finite) the human being is not yet a self. Most humans exist either in Freedom (alternatively called Imagination, an abstract realm) or in Necessity (or what Tolle calls Form—these are the concrete structures of life, in other words, the realm of doing.) Neither of these realms are ideal. Freedom (Imagination) lacks discipline. There, you are controlled by your emotions. Necessity, though it is very disciplined, lacks possibility. I like Kierkegaard’s analogy between possibility and the vowel.11 Imagine trying to speak without the use of vowels. Possibility in a consonant-only universe would be Pssblty, which is nor has no possibility at all. While the realm of Freedom and Imagination can take us to endless possibilities (where “everything is possible,”12 as Kierkegaard puts it) it keeps us perpetually asunder from the self. In contrast, Necessity does keep us on the ground, allowing us to do things and be successful in the world, but the narrow-minded worldly path leaves no room for self-development, let alone self-consciousness. Synthesis is the key, according to Kierkegaard. One way takes you so far away from any chance of a synthesis, the endless possibilities in fact creating more distance between you and the becoming of Self; the other way simply chokes it off. He uses an analogy for this too: every self has “sharp edges.” Necessity rubs the edges until they are “smooth as a pebble”13—advantageous, perhaps, in a world that prizes outward neatness and beauty, but so far from being a unique Self as to be just like everyone else, indeed “as exchangeable as a coin.”14

I’m going to step away from Kierkegaard for a second and try to put this in a more popular framework. I can certainly relate to the person who ‘gets carried away’ by imagination, swept up and governed by emotions, which is no governance at all. In fact, it’s absolute anarchy. It is chaotic to be knocked around by one’s emotions. It’s moving around from place to place in order to find “your home,” “your tribe,” or changing careers often to “find your passion.” It is no less a worldly (and finite, and ultimately miserable) pursuit than the path of Necessity in that it keeps you constantly a stranger to yourself. While you seek fulfillment outside of yourself, you will never find the Self where it truly resides—internally! That’s the path of Imagination, where you may feel that the world is your oyster because endless possibilities present themselves, but it won’t show you the way to stillness. “Becoming oneself,” says Kierkegaard, “is a movement one makes just where one is. Becoming is a movement from some place, but becoming oneself is a movement at that place.”15 He means that when we become something, we are indeed moving, or shifting from one state to another, but becoming one with Self can only happen internally and in the stillness of the present moment. Right here, right now. Therefore, as the adage says, “wherever you go, there you are.”16

I have a harder time relating to the Necessity path. I see plenty of people around me walking it—mostly people I intensely dislike. I could name them, but that would be rude, so I’ll pull examples from fiction instead—Scrooge and Marley amassing obscene wealth, but still paying their most devoted employee, Bob Catchett, barely a living wage. This is actually a great example because we can carry it from Scrooge’s lived experience (his story) as detailed in A Christmas Carol onward to what happens to Marley’s spirit in the afterlife. In life, the business partners acted in such a way that was quite ordinary. Who in observing them could find anything strange in their workaholic behavior, their greed, their ambition? These are qualities which are so commonplace, they hardly raise an eyebrow—unless, of course, carried to such bizarre extremes as the cases of tech billionaires who are household names or the leaders of war-torn countries who seal themselves off in luxurious fortresses while the citizenry live in squalor. But the normal ambition, say in American suburbia, to have a big house and luxury car is so widespread, people rather think it more strange to live modestly and to not upgrade one’s iPhone every year. Indeed, Scrooge and Marley lived in rather subdued circumstances (their modern-day counterparts certainly do not replace their iPhones every year) because their greed overruled any liking to be comfortable or trendy. They would rather wrap up and sit in the light of a single candle to waste coal on unnecessary fires. Nevertheless, these were men who, in a worldly sense, were highly accomplished. They were clever, miserly, and unkind—as narrow as the path they chose to dominate. Kindness has no value in the Necessity realm, where it can even be felt to be a disadvantage and a weakness. It is unnecessary to be kind in order to do quite well in the realm of Form. Cleverness, though! Discipline! Conservatism and maintenance of the status quo! You can be admired, celebrated even! If you happen to be clever and also kind, you might even be remembered as a great person, like Jimmy Carter. But I digress… Scrooge was shown very little kindness as a boy and he learned to rely solely on his own systems from an early age. Marley died without knowing that he was a stranger to himself. He had no understanding that there was even such a thing. If someone had asked him, “Who are you?” he might have said, “I’m a man of business.” Just another cog in the wheel of capitalism. In other words, nothing. His afterlife was one of eternal despair. In death, he became aware of the problem, but had no recourse except to convince his business partner to avoid the same fate. Marley was chained to his narrow-minded vision of success. If he had lived differently, as he hoped Scrooge might do, Marley might have experienced the Kierkegaardian synthesis—the spirit joining the infinite realm, knowing God, knowing itself, emerging from the sickness (the despair) into infinitely expanding consciousness. Instead, Marley was a lost soul, forever and painfully aware of his self-estrangement, and desperate to warn his only friend.17

I saw someone post on Bluesky a curious, and sadly obsolete word from the 16th century: Respair. It means “fresh hope, and a recovery from despair.”18 Kierkegaard wrote about salvation, “the most impossible thing of all in human terms; but for God everything is possible!”19 Kierkegaard’s respair/salvation is the best thing that can happen to a human, and it only comes out of real despair. A life of ease will never know despair, never know God, and thus never be conscious of what it is missing. It will be a cog in the wheel, a coin indistinguishable amongst every coin in the realm.

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