WHY NIXON?

born to be mysterious, forced to make everything my personality

Last week Alen and I rode together to pick up Lola from daycare and then detoured to the library as a family. Alen, carrying Lola in his arms, veered right toward the media section and I climbed the stairs alone, on the hunt for something I hadn’t known I wanted until a few hours earlier.

Nonfiction>Biography. 20th-century Presidents.

I scanned the shelves.

Nixon: The Education of a Politician, 1913-1962

Nixon’s Darkest Secrets: The Inside Story of America’s Most Troubled President

Richard Milhous Nixon: The Rise of an American Politician

And right in the middle, Richard Nixon: The Life, a bold, black and white tome. I picked up the book and hauled it, substantial and satisfying, into my arms. The crisp cellophane jacket crinkled. At the checkout desk, Alen stacked some Sesame Street DVDs on my book and Lola stared, fascinated as I poked at the self-checkout screen.

we noticed your vibe

Why Nixon?

Alen had just gotten home from work, and this was his reasonable response to my greeting of “Hello, should I read a 700-plus page biography about Richard Nixon?”

It was a fair question. I don’t know anything about history (child left behind) and have never taken a particular interest in presidential figures of decades past, let alone read any huge tomes detailing research-rich narratives of their life stories.

I retraced my mental steps, but lost the thread. I’d been careening across the internet, and read one sentence about Nixon that somebody wrote somewhere at some time in the distant to recent past. The line referenced Nixon’s so-called famous paranoia (new to me but ok) and alluded to a dark mental and emotional descent.

Cool, I thought.

I should know more about history, I thought.

What was Watergate exactly…….

And suddenly I was looking up the call number on the library website and requesting that we drive there after daycare.

Why Nixon?

It was a familiar happening in my life! I had an impulse. I let the impulse take me.

It just sounds like ADHD hyperfixation to me, Alen said in the car later.

Our first conversation over three years ago involved discussing the detailed mythos of Paul Bunyan. I flirted by saying the chore boys should unionize.

I knew I liked him when he said

there’s a lot here

I don’t know if I can make this my whole personality by wednesday

but I can try!!!

the butterskates were real

After the library visit last week, I had been thinking about why I latch onto things when I read Ankita Shah’s “In Defense of Temporary Obsessions” and I was struck by her reframing of devotion as a way of tending to grief.

Temporary obsessions are always timely. They arrive after a heartbreak, during a career crisis, in grief.

It’s noble to let things matter to you, knowing you won’t care about them forever. Being alive means loving what’s temporary.

It’s not about Nixon!!!

It’s about seeing the book and thinking, I want to hold that book, and then holding the book. It’s about seeing the book and feeling like I can be a person who reads and knows things. It’s about understanding a person is safe because they can talk about how Babe the Big Blue Ox was seven axehandles wide between the eyes before we even meet. It’s Nixon but it could have been old Survivor or making liking Post Malone a personality trait. Each one a way of trying to love something or someone in front of me.

PS I’ve read ten pages 😛

Ramadan is over but everything Aminatou writes is forever:

They’re saying that Eid will be tomorrow or Sunday or Monday. Imagine explaining to your boss—y’all are my boss now— that you need a day off, but you are not sure if Eid is going to be on Saturday or Monday. You won't know for sure until the night before, since you have to wait to see if the crescent moon is actually spotted. That damn moon. A real reminder that it is not practical to be Muslim in the western world. I unfortunately find this whole thing endlessly charming. It’s so unpredictable and weird. Westerners could do with embracing some unpredictability and cultural weirdness. It’s good for everyone.

Eid Mubarak