Devil’s Beggarticks: The Phenomenology of Fire

A personal Eden

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Most people have a personal Eden, a point in their lives that they hope to get back to someday, where things were at least mostly right, a day or a season where it all came together. I don’t feel like this is a particularly controversial statement to make; I know there are wide disparities in privilege and experience, but most people have a good day at least once in their lives.

For me, the personal Eden was a season during that mild, worldwide apocalypse we all shared. I say “mild” but, of course, the foundations were laid bare – and it became obvious that they were not strong. I lost friends to sickness and death as well as epistemological drift. And even now, the threat continues to linger like a tang in the air.

My wife jokes that 2020 was hell for extroverts and introverts alike, because the former were locked inside, and the latter were locked inside with them. But even as an extrovert, I found that the unexpected break from the chaos of the social calendar was a breath of fresh air. Somehow, suddenly, we had time to ourselves, and lots of it. And in that space I became something I had never been: a morning person.

We were the parents of young children, and the dynamic years of taking turns to get up several times a night or 5:30 in the morning to care for a child were coming to a close. There were magical moments. I love my kids. But there were also moments of dark doubt, and little mini-explosions of immature rage over losing time that I thought belonged to me. Moments of indignant ungraciousness that I hope I’ve mostly left behind, especially when I think about how much it cost my wife to actually bear these children.

Even now, as I think back on those first steps as a father, I feel some embarrassment at how childish I could be. To that version of myself, the pre-dawn dark often felt like a mugging. And then I’d try to get back at it that night with revenge bedtime procrastination, which I’ve since learned is a translation from the phonetically cathartic Mandarin "bàofùxìng áoyè." It is, of course, a vicious cycle. But by September of 2020, the kids were finally sleeping in. We were done having babies (until 2021, when we found out we weren’t, and yes, I know how it works) and the winds were shifting. 

Rarely have I regretted a planned early morning. I think the ur-moment might be one of the road trips we did growing up, where our Navy-Pilot Dad had no problem getting us up and packed into the car at 5:00 am. All good early mornings feel like that, with the pre-dawn light unsubtly signifying promise. But that’s the trick—you can wake up for a road trip, or for Saturday morning cartoons, or for that first summer day when school’s out. It’s very hard to do it for your own health. So while I always love those moments, I found that I needed something else to get me there. It’s basic, elemental, but for me, that thing is fire.