Jed Wolf

In some dreams, I’m on my porch not seeing anyone or hearing anything as if I’m the only one left. In others, I’m in an eight-story building searching for my coat. My searching leads me further from where I started—parking garage, outside the building, then on a mountainside without my jacket, when I wake up.

Even a hot bath won’t stop me from thinking about how I’ve just emailed my 100,000-word Golden Ballroom of a memoir to my editor.

The kitties meow, “who the fuck do you think you are?” as I feed and water them. My garden whispers similar sentiments as therapy-speak admonishes me for negative self-talk.

I’ve just revealed—in organized chapters with Italian musical subtitles, for Christ’s sake—every shameful thing I’ve ever done. The girls I abandoned. The men I used. The decades I spent constructing an elaborate apparatus designed to prove my worth while simultaneously destroying it.

While the world order teeters on the edge of collapse—democracies failing, climate accelerating, everything we thought was permanent revealing itself to be illusory—so what if I’m just another Donald Trump constructing a monument to my own reflection.

And painting frogs.

Actual wooden frogs. Fifteen fucking fuck of them, to be exact. Guiro frogs—traditional percussion instruments that, when scraped with a stick, make croaking sounds that carry. I found them online, ordered them, and have spent the last few days on my porch trying to write two, technically three sane-sounding words on the sticks in their mouths with atrocious penmanship while my ill-fated memoir sits in my editor’s inbox like a confession of pure evil.

I should be doing something important. Reading the news. Understanding geopolitics. Learning which plants are edible. Figuring out how to purify water. Building a bunker. Preparing for societal collapse.

Maybe the world will end before my editor gets back to me, I think, spelling “WE’RE HERE WE’RE HERE WE’RE HERE” on wooden frog handles with shitty pens, unnerved by the haunting effects of occasionally forgotton apostrophes.

Our former sandbar neighborhood has flooded quite severely three times since we’ve lived here. We know it’s not sustainable. We know we should probably leave. But we stay. So I’m giving my neighbors frogs for Christmas not only as a reminder of our amphibious natures but as tools for communication.

I’ve written a little card to go in each gift bag explaining the porch tradition I hope to be starting here and revised it seventeen times describing why hearing a distant croak might make neigbors croak back if so inclined.

Since learning sbout myself through writing, it’s embarrassing how much I relate to being needed, heard and noticed. And since admitting it, even more so.

I keep telling myself these frogs aren’t about me. They’re about all of us being here. On purpose. Despite and in appreciation of everything.

I admit to displacing some anxiety onto this craft project—a distraction from checking my email for “Jed, have you lost your mind?”

And I’ve always been a bit of a poison dart frog. “I don’t want your help” oozes from my pores around Christmas. Though I try to act nice, I exuded a touch of poison today buying Hobby Lobby paint pens, which don’t work very well on southeast Asian wood carvings. Just imagining clear-cut forests makes my heart hurt enough to croak.

My memoir—if anyone ever reads it, which fills me with equal parts dread and desperation—is about a man who spent seventy years avoiding himself. Geographic flight. Emotional dislocation. Sexual moves. Any kind of action that would keep me and others from me.

Like pointing to my penis in a bathtub as a toddler, my need to show others what I’ve discovered through writing feels nuts. Have I just created an elaborate public humiliation that will confirm every fear I’ve ever had about being too much, too broken and too desperate for validation?

Maybe.

I also worry the next hurricane will convince all our friends to leave. My memoir might be unreadable. The world might actually be ending and my cats will die.

But mostly I worry that even these frogs—meant to say “we’re here” instead of “look at me”—are just another performance. Another way to matter. Another apparatus.

Maybe they are.

Seventy years of trying to stop needing validation hasn’t worked. Writing a memoir didn’t cure me. Painting frogs for my neighbors won’t either.

But when I hear them croaking on Christmas morning, I’ll respond. Communicating with neighbors instead of alone in my head. Doing things anyway, without knowing exactly why.

Because knowing why paralyzes all of it.

We’re here.

We’re here.

We’re here.