This spring we’re doing things a bit differently. The sun will emit sunshine, but now so will the horizon. Flowers will colourfully burst into bloom, but so will the wind and the clouds and the snakes and the lizards. Trees’ buds will sprout and turn green, but the trees’ trunks and roots and branches will also turn green, and the melodious birds that dive from the sky to alight on the branches will themselves turn green, and the sky into which they return greenly singing will turn the greenest green of all. The snow and ice will melt as usual, but everything they touch will melt too, flowing out into the waters of rivers and lakes and seas and underground oceans, and somehow even the waters will then find a way to melt, flowing out into the Earth, and the Earth will then melt, flowing out into space, and space will then melt, and so on, until autumn. Clocks will turn forward another hour each night.

Tomorrow night Nine Inch Nails kills me dead and extinguishes my ecstatic soul’s weeping wave function and dissolves my unholy mortal remains in a transdimensional dancing fountain of thermonuclear rock n’ roll hot sauce. I’ll try to enjoy it. I look forward to the light show. See you on the other side.

Three days till No Introduction Иecessary takes my horse to the Old Town Road and rides till they can’t no more. Numbing Industrial Иoise. Nonstop Inner Иarrative. Nihilistic Identity Иightmare. Nineties’ Incredible Иaïveté. Nowhere Is Иice. Nothing I Иeed. Now Isn’t Иever. Nostalgic I’m Иot.

Five days till Nine Inch Nails boils the flesh off my bones in a shrieking hot whirlpool of my teenage self’s tears. Hope it isn’t a faux pas to attend a rock show of livid misanthropic hellfire, execration, and vitriol while wearing ear protection from a brand named Happy Ears. At least I have them in black.

Seven days till Nine Inch Nails piledrives my self-help psychobabblings and powerbombs my therapy bingo words. This’ll be my first time seeing them live. I almost saw them in the fall of 2005 but it didn’t happen. At the time Hermano Dave was living in San Francisco and he got tickets for the two of us to see them at the Oakland Coliseum, and I flew out to stay with him for the week, but at the last minute the show was cancelled. (It was ultimately rescheduled for six weeks later, but I was unable to return to California for the new date.) On what would’ve been the night of the concert, we instead walked over to the Independent and saw Mike Doughty of Soul Coughing with opening act Erin McKeown. And it was pretty fun! Sure it’s kind of too bad that my first trip to California denied me the chance to have my fresh twentysomething face liquefied by Quarant Reznor on the With Teeth tour, but I appreciate that that night I got to witness the Queen of Quiet crushing the showtune “Rhode Island Is Famous For You,” and Mr. Bitterness cheekily covering “Paradise City” and “Hungry Like the Wolf” and “The Gambler,” and an intimate venue’s worth of Bay Area dirtbag indie-rock hipsters all singing You got to know when to hold ’em! Know when to fold ’em! Know when to walk away! Know when to run! even though I don’t know any of those four things.

Nine days till Nine Inch Nails violently subjects my feelings to explosive decompression and reduces them to purest acceptance-jelly. Today is the ninth. Am I really going through with this? If you subtract from any integer the sum of its digits, the result is always a multiple of 9. Also, the sum of the digits of any nonzero multiple of 9 is always 9 or another multiple of 9.

Twelve days till Nine Inch Nails electroconvulses my prefrontal cortex into a frolicking heap of catharsis-kittens. Slightly belated confession: I hold the dubious distinction of having started the #nineinchnailsfoodtrucks hashtag that ended up trending on Twitter one day back in the innocent summer of 2013. At first it was just me and a few timeline friends amusing ourselves, but then Maura signal-boosted it to her follower army of Gen-X pop-music smartasses and very quickly all hell broke loose. Some of my contributions: March Of The Pork Bellies. The Downward Special. Lunch Is Not Enough. The Becrumbing. And All That Could Have Beans. How To Destroy Angel Food Cakes. A Warm Plate. Wrap (With Decay). Some tweets by others that somehow all these years later continue to live rent-free in my mind: Bread Like A Bowl. Samosa I Can Never Have. Hyperchowder! TERRIBLE FRIES!

Fourteen days till Nine Inch Nails drains the blood from my body. YouTube comment on “Erased, Over, Out”: This is the type of music that Daleks listen to.

Sixteen days till Nine Inch Nails incinerates this city and everyone in it. In honour of the halfway point of winter I am listening to “The Way Out is Through.” In honour of the condition of our streets and sidewalks I am listening to The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo soundtrack’s “Hidden in Snow.” In honour of Groundhog Day I am listening to “Every Day Is Exactly the Same.” In honour of the temperature and this post I am listening to “All Time Low.”

Much to my surprise and terror, Soixant Reznor and his merry men will be descending upon the lifeless frozen winterfilth of downtown Hamilton in eighteen days, to perform selections from their rich back catalog of feel-good sing-along ditties at a newly-renovated arena a mere five minutes’ walk from our home. I have nervously purchased a ticket. What will I wear?

In 2025: My inner child and I continue to wander this stormy dream-beach we find ourselves lost on, where, despite the weather and topography, we every so often fling ourselves down to scribble in the sand. Happy new year.

I didn’t know what to give you so I got you this gift card redeemable for unlimited blankness, silence, absence, stillness, disengagement, disconnection, unproductivity, unambition, cessation, seclusion, removal, refusal, noncompliance, nonparticipation, unaccomplishment, unconcern, calming meaninglessness, soothing uselessness, relaxing profitlessness, rejuvenating directionlessness, voluptuous renunciations, decadent abandonments, exhilarating abnegations, and various and sundry additional nothingnesses to be named later. Valid everywhere. Expires never. Subject to no conditions. Check your balance at about:blank.

Unfollow, unsubscribe, close tab, close account, unlike, unfavourite, leave page, leave group. I have it on good authority that it’s all going to be OK. Those bad things that could happen, they’re not going to happen. And if by some ridiculous chance they do happen, or if they’re already happening, they aren’t going be as bad as you think they’ll be, and they’ll lead to such ridiculously good things that you’ll think it was actually ridiculously good that the bad things happened, and that they happened when they did, right at the right time, and got it all over with. So the consolations say, yes? Let’s believe them just for laughs. It’s snowing again and I’m drinking a bottomless mug of yerba mate green tea mixed with matcha genmaicha green tea and it’s been seven years since I gave up coffee and this is what my life has come to. Also all those things that you always feel that you’re supposed to do or think or say or deal with, guess what, you don’t have to do or think or say or deal with them. Any of them. Effective immediately! There are no supposers. Nor are there expecters. Or requirers. Maybe there used to be, but they’ve fucked off. You yourself told them to fuck off, even though you may not have known you did, but you did, perhaps directly or perhaps by subtle suggestion, and either way they followed orders and fucked off. Green tea is just warm water and leaf-dust and a light caress of caffeine and a hundred thousand million billion merciless antioxidants dooming me to long life. Actually maybe it was me who told them to fuck off? It’s possible. Anything is possible. Maybe I saw or sensed that you were being tormented or intimidated or deep-fried to extra-crispy by those nonexistent supposers and expecters and requirers and I intervened on your behalf, sorry not sorry, and I’d do it again in a heartbeat. I’m pretty sure you told them yourself. We’re in this together, whoever we are, whatever this is, wherever together is. Here and now. Health and wellness. Form and emptiness. Save and quit.

Vingt ans dans ce pays vaste, vide, froid, fort, désolé, doux, lumineux, libre.

I’m grateful
For having been forty-eightful

I’m mindful
Of now being forty-nineful

I don’t fear
My forties’ final year

I’m prepared
To be seven squared

Hello from the inside of a jack o’ lantern, from the centre of a spiderweb, from the top of a creaking stair, from the bottom floor of a catacomb. Hello from halfway between trick and treat, between toil and trouble, between sickle and scythe, between hallowed and heathen. Hello from the footsteps in the attic and the bonfires in the fields and the draft under the door and the skull under the skin. Hello from a rattle of chains and a rustle of wings. Hello from all the saints and all the souls. Hello from ancient superstition and brand new bad luck. Hello from the full moon that howls right back.

Dear Danny. Today is the second of my two fiftieth pre-birthdays, because fifty years ago today, on 17 September 1975, your tiny unfinished heart gave out, and nothing could be done, and no one could save you, and you died. You were sixteen days old. Your death fell on Dad’s thirty-sixth birthday, and one week after Mom’s twenty-eighth. I was born thirteen months later.

I’m sorry, Danny. I don’t feel entitled to talk about you. About any of this. This is your and Mom’s and Dad’s tragedy, not mine. I’m just what came after the tragedy. How could I ever understand? I wasn’t there, I never knew you, I didn’t have to see you die, I didn’t have to bury you. And of course I’m not a parent, so who am I to even attempt to find words for what Mom and Dad went through. I feel like I’m trespassing on sacred ground, selfishly intruding where I don’t belong. As if you’re a secret I have no right to share.

But I have a secret too. There’s something a little unusual about me. I’m not actually a human being. I may look and act like one, but I’m not. Not really. What I am is a manifestation of Mom’s and Dad’s grief over you. I’m literally made of grief. I don’t feel grief; I am grief. Slice me open and you will find a griefskeleton packed with griefguts, a fully-formed griefheart circulating ten pints of griefblood, and an elaborate mess of griefmuscles, griefnerves, griefveins, and griefbrains. I’m a grief-being. Mom and Dad appear to have tried their best to bring me up as though I were a real live human person, educating me and providing for me and sending me out into the world to make my own way, and I think I’ve been blending in with the other humans reasonably well, but something’s always kind of felt wrong. And no wonder! I’m built entirely out of grief! This is all just a theory of mine, but I stand by it. It might sound a bit dramatic, but what do you expect from a grief-being?

But let me shut my griefmouth and hold my grieftongue and get back to unentitledly talking about you, if that’s all right. Mom and Dad didn’t talk about you, or couldn’t, but I only recently discovered that all these years they’d kept a little memory box devoted to you, a hinged wooden cigar box blank on the outside except for two small white-and-baby-blue oval stickers on which a cartoon stork announces It’s a Boy, and into this box they placed the cards and letters of congratulations they received following your birth, the cards and letters of sympathy they then received following your death, a pang of paperwork in your name from the funeral home, and the deed to your cemetery plot. Into this box they also placed your hospital ID bracelet and a perforated cardiotocograph sheet displaying your fetal heartbeat in scribbles of ink. And into this box they placed an envelope of twelve square-format rounded-cornered photos, along with the negatives, of you alive in the hospital. One is the photo of Mom holding you that she showed me when I was a kid. Three other photos show you freshly newborn and crying. Another shows you yawning. Another shows you sleeping. The remaining ones show you making cute faces as Mom and Dad hold you in their arms, as they gaze down at you, as they smile tiredly but brightly at the camera. Their first child. They’re parents at last. All is well. All will always be well. These twelve photos of your life preserve the three of you in a calm, tender, fairy-tale happiness together. A dream of the family that might have been.

The memory box is in my possession now. It’s here on the desk beside me, and I’ve been carefully looking through it as I write to you, trying and failing to maintain my composure. Being the keeper of your memory box and its fragile, irreplaceable, half-century-old contents has been making me feel in a way like you’re now my baby, Danny. Like I’m your guardian, or maybe just your long-term babysitter. And I have to say: you are not a quiet baby. You’re on my griefmind a lot. You seem to cry out all the time for attention, for soothing, for care and feeding. And I want you to know that I’m here for you, and that I’ll do what I can for you, though I hope you’ll be patient with me, as I’m laughably inexperienced in the art of parenting. But I know that another thing you need, as all babies do, is rest. So I’m going to end this sad lullaby and close the memory box for now and tiptoe out of the room and leave you in peace. I love you so much. I’m so sorry you’re gone. And I’m so very grateful for what little I know of you, my dear brother, no matter how bereft your absence has left us, how guilty, how haunted, how heartbroken.

Dear Danny. Just so you know, I’m screamingly envious that your full name, Daniel Scott Herman, can be anagrammed to: constrained Hamlet. As well as: nonathletic dreams. Also: nicest normal death. And: heart can’t lose mind.

Photos by Kevin Sinclair for InStyle, 2022

Dear Danny. Here is handsome actor Scott Speedman, of TV’s Felicity and the later seasons of Grey’s Anatomy and many other entertainments. He was born on 1 September 1975, the same day you were. If you’d lived, then of course you would be his exact age, and so I like to think that this might be how you’d look these days, give or take a chin dimple. I hereby adopt him as your secret lost spirit twin. Scott is actually his middle name, like yours is. He’s Canadian, like I sort of am. He was in Underworld, like where you reside. And I kind of love that his current Instagram bio simply reads: Not sure yet.

Dear Danny. The Billboard Hot 100’s number one song for the weeks ending 6 September and 13 September 1975, the first two weeks of your life, was Glen Campbell’s “Rhinestone Cowboy.” But I’m gonna be where the lights are shinin’ on me! The number one song for the week ending 20 September 1975, the week you died, was David Bowie’s “Fame.” What you get is no tomorrow!

Dear Danny. Today is the first of my two fiftieth pre-birthdays, because today would’ve been your fiftieth birthday if you’d lived. Mom very briefly told me about you when I was a kid, sitting me down and explaining that before I was born I had an older brother named Danny, that you were born on the first of September and died on the seventeenth, and that you died because your heart wasn’t fully formed. And she showed me a photo of you, an unfamiliar baby cradled in her arms in a hospital room, your eyes open.

I don’t remember whether she specified that you were born in 1975, the year before I was; nor do I recall her mentioning that your middle name is Scott, and that thus my first name is a necronym. I didn’t learn these facts until something like three decades later, in my late thirties, when I saw your names and dates listed on a cousin’s family tree document I found at Mom’s and Dad’s house in Florida. I delicately wondered in surprise to Mom about your inclusion in a family tree, to which she replied: Well … he was alive.

Mom and Dad didn’t otherwise talk about you, and I guess in childhood and early adulthood I thought of you as a kind of distant curiosity, a sad and gentle memory safely locked away in an indistinct past that had nothing to do with me. Huh, I almost had an older brother, how strange. But what started to dawn on me at some point in my twenties, and weighed increasingly on me as time went on, is that your death must in fact have been a cataclysmic life-shattering tragedy for our parents, and I’d grown up oblivious not just to the enormity of this tragedy but to my having been all this time a result and a reminder of it. Obviously I wouldn’t have been born if you hadn’t died. You are not my older brother. You could never have been older than me and I could never have been younger than you, since we could never have both been alive at the same time. Had you lived, Mom and Dad would’ve waited a few years to have a second child, and that child wouldn’t’ve been me. Your death is why I’m here! The reason for my very existence is that the absolute worst, most harrowingly awful thing that can happen to a parent happened to our poor parents only two and a half weeks into their even being parents!

That is of course just one way to look at it. Alternatively, we might say that Mom’s and Dad’s feelings of love for each other exceeded their feelings of bereavement over their loss of you and my birth was an uplifting expression of their resilience and hope for a joyous new beginning. Hallelujah, right?

Or we might imagine that once Mom and Dad emerged in anguished shock from the hospital and came home to their silent house and its unoccupied crib, they were advised by a great chorus of concerned family and friends and medical professionals to for heaven’s sake have another baby as soon as possible, a nice new healthy fully-formed-hearted baby to help them feel better and get over their grief, in which case I am what’s evidently known as a replacement child, conceived in sorrow, carried to term in dread, born into a vortex of panic-stricken parental fear that at any moment I may die in infancy too, and then raised by two quivering traumatized souls too numb to form secure attachments yet desperately counting on me to somehow heal them, rendering me disproportionately prone to emotional instability, mental unwellness, identity disturbance, relationship difficulties, and other delights, if the replacement child books I’ve read are to be believed. If.

(How dare I make it all about me. I didn’t die. I didn’t lose a baby. I have it easy.)

Still another thing to say might be that there is no birth and there is no death and matter is neither created nor destroyed but only transformed and you were me before I was alive and I am you back from the dead and I’m just talking to myself as usual but this time in more ways than one.

I don’t know. Perhaps simultaneously all of these are true and none of them are true and some of them are true sometimes except when they’re not or don’t seem to be. There is no correct answer. For correct answers we must turn to arithmetic. Arithmetic confidently states that as of today I have been alive for 17,849 days. You were alive for sixteen days. I’m more than a thousand times older than you ever were, Danny! And I fucking feel like it.

Happy fiftieth, old man. Even though it’s not that happy. From your older younger brother who’s half named after you. I love you. Permit me to do what’s become my sentimental 1 September ritual of putting on two songs from Johnny Cash’s The Man Comes Around: to reduce me to tears, track ten, “Danny Boy”; and then to lift me back up, track fifteen, “We’ll Meet Again.”

Five years ago today while out on a walk I see this local theatre’s lockdown incantation and I’m now belatedly filing it here for safekeeping and solace.

It’s that time of year again when the days get shorter, the nights get longer, the mornings get darker, the evenings get sharper, the highs get milder, the lows get meaner, the air gets older, the rain gets ruder, the dawns get stiller, the dusks get duller, the skies get greyer, the clouds get louder, the sun gets dimmer, the moon gets paler, the ground gets harder, the earth gets sicker, the breath gets quicker, the blood gets slower, the hours get fewer, the spirits get lower, the time gets later, the space gets smaller, the winds get sadder, the seas get wider, the quiet gets quainter, the noise gets newer, the light gets lusher, the dark gets drunker, the summer gets summerer, the winter gets winterer, the weathers get weatherer, the nevers get neverer.

It seems erasing.org is now twenty-six and I’m sorry but it makes me think of the part in Nine Inch Nails’ 1991 song “Wish” when Trent Reznor screams Twenty-six years on my way to hell! Trent of course having been twenty-six in 1991. A mere babe. (Forever frozen in my nineties-teen memory: the 1994 Rolling Stone backstage photo of a youthful, Adonis-like Trent smiling cheerfully and/or drunkenly next to Larry “Bud” Melman with a caption referring to Trent as an apple-cheeked lad.) Speaking of wishes, I wish that Trent in his concert performances of “Wish” over the years had continually adjusted that lyric to reflect whatever his current age was at the time, rather than, as documented on the few live recordings I’ve heard, always keeping his journey to hell at a consistent twenty-six-year duration. (Were there any concertgoers who saw Trent scream the line at let’s say age thirty and concluded that he’d set off for hell at the age of four?) I especially wish it given that Trent turned sixty this past spring and is back out on tour again this summer, and even though I have no plans to attend a show, I feel like Sixty years on my way to hell! would sound so much darker and grimmer and more brutal in a way that would be bracingly on-brand for him. Also can we now call him Soixant Reznor? — My little website however is twenty-six years on its way not to any sort of spicily seething Reznorian hell but to the far more heavenly fast-approaching future day when it gets its wish to live up to its self-fulfilling domain name at last and be literally erased, over, out.

I wish to surrender.

I’m told I’m in a liminal space.

No one else I’d rather be lost at the end of my mind with.

We surrender.

No one else I’d rather be lost at the ends of the Earth with. Happy prime-numbered birthday to this devourer of libraries, this defeater of landscapes, this belter of showtunes, this shepherd of bedpigs, this sunderer of amperes, this scratcher of popes, this finder of rocks, this keeper of flames.

Been wedded now for ten plus nine
It’s nice our marriage aged like wine
To mark this nineteenth anniverse
We must ourselves in beer immerse