I / The void

 

“All I do is keep on running in my own cozy, homemade void, my own nostalgic silence. And this is a pretty wonderful thing.”

— Haruki Murakami

I’m running a lot lately. Or what, to a non-runner, would probably seem like a lot. Four, maybe five, miles right around dawn and another two or three just after lunch.

I used to think of running mostly in terms of efficiency. You need aerobic exercise, and in my estimation quite a bit of it. Of all the ways to go about meeting that quota, running has a certain economy. You can do it more or less anywhere (although some places are better than others) and pretty much anytime. Other than a decent pair of shoes (and even those aren’t obligatory), you don’t need any equipment to run, nor do you require a giant concrete hole filled with overchlorinated water.

I don’t know the science or the physiology of this, so maybe I shouldn’t comment on it, but it’s always felt, to me, like I get more “bang for the buck” for any given period spent running versus a comparable period engaged in some other sort of cardio. Maybe swimming’s the exception, but — well, you need that hole full of water.

In his 2009 memoir, “What I Talk About When I Talk About Running,” Haruki Murakami, the celebrated Japanese novelist and marathoner, talks of running in a thoughtless bubble.

“I’m often asked what I think about as I run,” he writes. After offering a few deliberately flippant observations on the subject (“On cold days, I guess I think a little about how cold it is”), he concedes he doesn’t “think much of anything worth mentioning.” Rather, he says, “I just run in a void.”

True as that’ll probably feel to a lot of long- or even medium-distance runners, it wouldn’t be very interesting but for the nuance Murakami adds. “Or maybe I should put it the other way,” he goes on, zeroing in on an important distinction. “I run in order to acquire a void.”

That’s why I run. Or it’s a big part of why. Running’s a form of escapism. Healthier, probably, than other kinds of escapism, some of which are off limits to me (alcohol) others disagreeable (I find social media abhorrent and I don’t care much for TV shows), although that depends on whether you view solitude as healthy. It’s entirely possible my escape hatch plays directly into deleterious isolationism.

Murakami delineates the nature of the runner’s void. “An occasional thought” slips in, as do “random memories.” “People’s minds,” after all, “can’t be a complete blank,” the human disposition being unsuitable for “sustaining a [mental] vacuum.” But those thoughts and memories merely orbit the bubble rather than pierce it. Or if they do invade it, they “remain subordinate” to the void.

You could call that mindfulness, although you’d have to do a little reconciliation work with the idea of “subordinating” the intrusive. Mindfulness doesn’t subjugate invading thoughts, it teaches you to reframe them — to classify them properly and to thereby change your relationship to them. As Murakami puts it, “lacking content, they are just random thoughts that gather around that central void.”

If that “central void” is synonymous with the present, then running is perhaps a short cut to mindfulness. Or at least a method of attaining something conceptually akin to mindfulness.

II / Bone music

 

“In public, we all believed. In private, nobody did.”

— Late Soviet aphorism

“It was a bit like dealing or buying drugs, actually,” Stephen Coates told NPR’s All Things Considered, explaining the process by which bootleggers and music fans sold and purchased forbidden music from behind the Iron Curtain in the 1950s.

Coates, who leads a British cult band and runs The Bureau of Lost Culture, a conservation project dedicated to preserving countercultural artifacts for posterity, spoke to NPR in 2016, shortly after the release of “X-Ray Audio: The Strange Story of Soviet Music on the Bone.”

The book tells a story that’s as incredible as it is quirky. By his account, Coates stumbled on the secret history of banned Western records while visiting St. Petersburg in the mid-twenty-tens. While wandering aimlessly through a flea market in the city, he spotted what appeared to be an X-ray fashioned to look like a record. “The guy whose store it was was a bit dismissive but I brought it back to London, and I was fascinated by it,” Coates recounted, in the NPR interview. “So I started to dig.”

That digging turned into a veritable excavation project, which eventually produced two books, a touring exhibition, a short film, a TED Talk and a BBC documentary.

The story begins in 1946, when a soldier from the victorious Red Army returned from the war with a recording lathe, which he displayed in a shop in St. Petersburg, then Leningrad. Locals saw the machine and by and by made their own. The improvised lathes were then used to create bootleg copies of Western rock, jazz and other music banned by state censors.

Because vinyl was generally unavailable, or at least for this purpose, bootleggers had to get creative. Although they used a variety of surfaces and substrates — including road signs and cake plinths — for the recordings, the most famous medium was discarded medical X-rays. Radiographic film, as it turns out, could hold the grooves cut by makeshift recording equipment.

And so it was that chest and skull X-rays, images of broken bones and so on, became the canvas for “Rock Around the Clock” and countless other chart-toppers from the other side of the Curtain. The same underground business also (and on some accounts predominately) reproduced forbidden Russian music, particularly that written or performed by emigres.

The industry and the black market which grew up around it had a name: Roentgenizdat from “roentgen” (X-rays) and “samizdat” (banned, self-published literature). It was deeply intertwined with the stilyagi, a forerunner to successive iterations of subversive Russian counterculture. The records themselves were called “rock on bones” in Russian or, simply, “bone music.”

As The Guardian wrote in 2015, of the symbiotic relationship between roentgenizdat and stilyagi, “For teenagers who didn’t much fancy joining the Leninist youth brigades of the Komsomol, the lure of a hipper subculture that embraced all things jazz, rock and roll and Hollywood must have seemed irresistibly exotic.” In other words: Demand for an escape route, in this case through prohibited music, was voracious.

Where there’s demand, someone will supply, even if becoming a supplier means going to extraordinary lengths. Or chancing prison. Rudy Fuchs did both. Fuchs, dubbed “the last bootlegger standing” when Coates traveled to meet him as an octogenarian, was a Soviet-era “culture trader” — a merchant of illicit escapism. By his own account, Fuchs sold his own blood to raise money for a recording lathe which he used to pirate forbidden tunes. “Blood money for bone music,” as The Guardian put it.

As a tale of how tyranny fosters a sense of longing so desperate that the oppressed are driven to risky endeavors in pursuit of mental respite, the story of “bone music” is uniquely poignant. But other examples of Soviet-era “internal emigration” are at least as evocative.

Escapism wasn’t just ubiquitous in the USSR, it was an essential psychological survival mechanism. Confronted daily with the bleak realities of an unfulfilled utopian promise, hundreds of millions trapped behind the Curtain sought mental respite wherever they could find it.

Manifestations of escapism ran the gamut from science fiction (which was hugely popular in the USSR, offering both readers and authors an outlet for semi-subversive speech veiled by allegory) to tongue-in-cheek political commentary (“anekdoty”) to commiseration sessions convened in so many cramped flats (“kitchen culture”).

As British journalist Angus Roxburgh, author of “Moscow Calling: Memoirs of a Foreign Correspondent,” once put it, recalling two years spent behind the Curtain during Leonid Brezhnev’s “Era of Stagnation,” “If I were to design a monument to the Soviet Union it would be a kitchen table. Around it would be seated a group of friends, cigarettes and vodka glasses in hand, a loaf of bread and some pickled gherkins on the table.”

Paradoxically, Roxburgh meant that not as a testament to the dire plight of an oppressed populace, but rather as an attestation to the power of community (and, ironically in the context of escapism, the power of alcohol) in the face of dire circumstance. Light in the darkness, as it were.

That light, Roxburgh said in 2017, has largely gone out in Russia, where “those meaningful (drunken) conversations about life have given way to the mundane preoccupations of Western societies — jobs, money, holidays, gadgets.”

III / The merchant

 

“He came home in September and got shot in December / Hard to forget ’bout all the things I try not to remember / Know it get so cold in the game you need a scarf and plow / It’s gon’ be some things that you see gon’ make it hard to smile.” 

— Boldy James

If mindfulness anchors you in the current moment or, more accurately I suppose, trains you to notice when you’re drifting from the present so that you might reorient, it’s impossible for me.

I try. I’ve tried. Really I do. Really I have. Sometimes I convince myself it’s working. But it isn’t. Running aside.

The truth’s the same as it ever was. The same as I’ve described it over and over again. I have no present tense anchors. There’s no “here here.” Nothing to drift from, nor reorient to.

I can’t notice what’s happening now, because I’m not entirely sure anything is. I can’t be aware that I’m present, because I’m not sure that I am. I’m sure that I was. But that certainty ended a very long time ago. Every day since is limbo. Suspended animation, marooned betwixt and between like a question someone forgot to answer.

Ostensibly, the present is something I should want to occupy. My circumstances being objectively favorable, both in an absolute sense and certainly relative to the less fortunate. But my overriding tendency is to escape, and nostalgia’s my preferred diversion. An ironic retreat to the romanticized tale of a decade spent merchandising chemical escapism.

I spend most of my waking hours — and on the rare occasions I dream, my resting hours too — lost in a past replay. The scenes are visceral.

Friday night. A second-floor apartment. A table placed in the center of the back bedroom, hands in chalk like on the parallel bars. I never wore gloves. He always did. “That’s gonna get in your blood, C.” “No it’s not.” “Well it’s gonna get under your nails and your cuticles.” “What’d you schedule me for a manicure tomorrow or somethin’?” We laugh.

In the living room, a 23-year-old Jordanian diva, Fahema. Daughter to an overbearing, borderline abusive, father who eventually shipped her back to the Mideast for an arranged marriage, Fahema was a hostess at a steakhouse on weekdays. On weekends, she worked for me. Her’s was a unique role. She was an emissary of sorts. And arm candy when I needed to meet someone higher up the local distribution network than myself.

Fahema was also a crack shot with a Heckler, a talent I discovered when she tagged along for a meet-and-greet at an indoor firing range, where she won a thousand dollars off me and even more from our new acquaintances, who were as amused as I was surprised. Her performance that day endeared our operation to what became my most lucrative upstream business partner.

From then on, Fahema’s portfolio included guarding the door on bagging nights. For $500/hour. And free product, of course. She’d poke her head into the back bedroom at predictable intervals for another bump. I had to pace her: “I gave you half a gram 20 minutes ago, what happened to that?” Pouty lips. “Christ. Here. And slow down.” Kissy lips.

516 grams of product plus 775 grams of cut is nearly 1,300 grams at an average of $30/gram to five lieutenants who’ll owe me $39,000, give or take, between them. Dozens upon dozens of people I’ll never know will be up all night Friday and all day and night Saturday too, all over the city. By Sunday afternoon, I’ll have my $39,000, or most of it. My profit will be $25,000, again give or take. Rinse and repeat next week.

I’d say I didn’t deal with any end customers, but that’d be a lie. I had a list of seven or eight people I knew from less risky endeavors. People I half-liked. Friends, I guess. Or they were friends to me. I don’t know what I was to them. God, eventually, once they were hooked. Probably not a friend, though. What kind of friend sells you poison packaged as a vacation from a reality that’s destined to get worse the more you take?

There was R., the former stockbroker from Philadelphia who could scarcely afford the cost of one more bad habit on top of a serious poker addiction. (It didn’t help that he was terrible at poker. Sometimes I’d take his money ahead of a game, then take more of it during.)

There was J., the Jewelry Television employee whose eating disorder made her an easy target for stimulant addiction.

There was Em and her brother, the college-age children of a restaurant manager I was quite fond of, but apparently didn’t respect enough to refrain from ruining her kids’ lives.

There was an enterprising bartender I’d known from way back whose latest gig put her on the main drag next to the university, which is to say in a position to tap a clientele I’d long coveted: The college crowd. She’d be a new, improved version of my top lieutenant, G., who’d abruptly moved to Florida with her new wife. (Alas, “New G.” got in over her head while trying to juggle an arbitrage trade involving three different products, one of which was heroin, which she couldn’t handle. I remember holding her pony tail up so her head wouldn’t fall into the toilet during fits of vomiting.)

And then there was K.

IV / Checking out

 

“We’re watching ‘Friends’ instead of having friends.”

— Robert Putnam

On July 4, 2024, writing for The New Republic on Independence Day, Kristen Ghodsee compared the plight of today’s Americans to that of Soviet citizens during the Cold War.

A populace thoroughly disillusioned with a government run by leaders who “seem old and out of touch began to fracture [as] citizens despaired at the possibility of real social change,” Ghodsee deplored, painting a bleak picture of America on the country’s 248th birthday.

In the face of pervasive disaffection and creeping despondency, “anxiety, depression and substance abuse soared” while “life expectancy at birth began to decline,” she went on.

Ghodsee, author and professor of East European Studies at Penn, cited a hodgepodge of evidentiary statistics, public opinion polling and research in drawing a parallel between 21st century America and the Soviet Union in the two decades leading up to the fall of the Berlin Wall.

Although she overstates the case (life in America today isn’t anything like life in the Soviet Union), Ghodsee’s overarching point resonates. Indeed, my own Monthly Letters (beginning with the inaugural installment, “Exiles On Main Street“) tell a very similar story and rely quite heavily on the same evidence she cites, including Anne Case and Angus Deaton’s “Deaths of Despair,” which I dare say supplanted Robert Putnam’s “Bowling Alone” as the canonical study of American socioeconomic decline in the five years since its publication in (ominously) March of 2020.

Ghodsee’s goal in the piece was to steer disenchanted Americans away from the kind of fatalistic detachment Soviet citizens surrendered to during the darkest days of the Cold War. “America, don’t succumb to escapism,” she beseeched, on the way to warning that “internal emigration can cultivate the habit of apathy.” That’d be the apathy I described in “Resignation.”

In May of 2025, a CivicScience survey found that almost 80% of US adults were stressed out, and nearly half of them said the psychological burden’s so acute they need to “escape” on most days. A quarter said they “mentally ‘check out'” every day. The escapist urge is most prevalent among GenZ, whose economic struggles in the post-pandemic era are well-documented.

As the figure shows, running (exercising) is pretty far down the list of preferred escape hatches, barely edging out weed-smoking and alcohol. Americans’ preferred escape routes go through Netflix, sleeping, eating and doomscrolling.

The poll apparently didn’t ask about hard drug usage. If that was a deliberate omission, it makes sense: People won’t readily admit to using cocaine and opioids like they will marijuana and liquor, and even if they would (admit it), people on coke benders, to say nothing of opioid addicts, can be difficult to track down and survey.

A separate CivicScience survey found that more than half of Americans depend at least “somewhat” on their devices (Roxburgh’s “gadgets”; the “lambent contraptions” I described in “Imagined Pasts“) to “check out.” “Devices are a form of escapism for many Americans,” a January 22 poll reads. “52% of respondents say they’re dependent on technology as a form of escapism from everyday life.” The point of the poll was to highlight the extent to which the escapist routes preferred by Westerners are contributing to America’s loneliness epidemic.

The 2025 installment of the American Psychological Association’s annual stress survey confirms Ghodsee’s suspicion that divisive politics and fatalistic pessimism are now major sources of stress.

“Years of societal division may be taking a toll,” the APA said, noting that nearly two-thirds US adults said the collapse of social capital in America and the accompanying societal rifts are “a significant source of stress in their lives.”

As the figure shows, only misinformation, housing costs, mass shootings and, tellingly, “the future of our nation,” were cited more frequently than social divisiveness.

Fully three-quarters of US adults in the APA survey cited America’s future as a significant source of stress. Underscoring the point, Gallup gloomily noted in February that American optimism, defined as the share of US adults who expect to live “high-quality lives” five years from now, fell below 60%.

The chart, below, paints a disconcerting picture. Americans’ outlook in the Gallup survey reflects an ongoing deterioration in perceptions, consistent with consumer sentiment polling.

“Since 2020, future life ratings have fallen a total of 9.1ppt,” the editorial accompanying the latest survey remarked. That equates to nearly 25 million fewer Americans who are optimistic about their future.

Needless to say, there’s a partisan divide underneath the data. But far from an extenuating caveat, the underlying political chasm speaks to and accentuates the problem (by begging the question).

The same Gallup polling also reflected a new record low for the share of Americans who rated their personal circumstances high enough to count as “thriving.”

Methodologically speaking, “thriving” counts as a self-rating of seven or higher on a 0-10 scale for current life assessments and an “anticipated life” self-rating of eight or better.

As the figure shows, the share of Americans who meet both of those requirements on Gallup’s ladder scales was just 48% in Q4 of 2025. That share’s only been lower during the onset of the pandemic and in the three months around Lehman’s collapse.

“While both the current life and future life ratings have declined since 2021, the future life metric has had an outsized influence over eroding thriving rates because it has declined much more substantially,” Gallup emphasized.

In 2023, Ipsos described the impact of the escapist zeitgeist on the economy. “From the summer of Taylor Swift and Beyonce concerts to the record-breaking Barbie movie, ‘anywhere but here at any cost’ was where Americans were putting their money,” the market research firm wrote.

Unlike downtrodden Soviet citizens, Americans were at least allowed to indulge their musical escapism publicly, in the official sector, rather than having to purchase it on the black market, like an illicit substance. But some worry Donald Trump’s social engineering project — his quest for “a golden age in arts and culture” — may be eroding that freedom, however incrementally.

Following the 2024 US election, Ghodsee revisited her exhortation against the siren song of escapism. In a follow-up article for The New Republic, she mentioned Roxburgh’s fond recollection of Soviet “kitchen culture” in the course of fretting that Americans may be incapable of it. As Roxburgh suggested, Western societies opt for less rewarding, and inherently solitary, pursuits and activities when it’s time to “check out.”

“When escapism was pursued collectively, rather than individually, it forged important social bonds,” Ghodsee wrote, citing a Bulgarian historian who explained an otherwise perplexing nostalgia for communism by way of lost sociability in the free-market era. Political scientists in Romania, she added, have made similar observations about “the selfishness and loneliness of nowadays.”

If Americans do ultimately succumb to “nihilism resembl[ing] that which marked the last decade of the Soviet bloc countries,” as Ghodsee put it four months previous, she recommended we take care to recreate the spirit, if perhaps not the spirits, of Soviet “kitchen culture,” lest we should make a desperate situation worse.

“If we must retreat into the private sphere, we should populate it with cherished others,” she wrote, two weeks after Trump’s reelection. “Friends don’t let friends binge-watch alone.”

V / Runaways

 

“Ours was only a small sorrow. We were grieving more for ourselves — our individual vanished youths — than for the deceased.”

— Han Ong

“Hi!!! Haven’t talked in a while. How’s it going?” It was G. And we hadn’t talked in a while. I’d promised her in January that we’d take a trip to Destin this May, but I still needed to book the Airbnb, and I was procrastinating.

“Hey there. It’s been busy with the Iran war thing,” I told her. “You doing good?” “About as good as one can be in the current state of things,” she said. Then: “K. passed away 10 years ago today — that’s crazy to think about.”

K. was a good person. Generous. Earnest. Kind. She helped run a popular dive bar known for its genial staff and equally amiable clientele. It wasn’t quite Cheers (no real bar is like Cheers), but it was a mostly welcoming, easygoing place. Then they hired G. Winter set in shortly thereafter. Within nine months, all of the key staff and, I dare say, most of the regulars were zombies.

I got to know K. well enough, and trusted her more than enough, that forcing her to buy marked-up, adulterated product second- and third-hand was untenably awkward, so despite not having known her for very long, I put her on the list of people who could call me directly. She was with me the night I died.

It was 2011, and my tiny empire was imploding in real time. G. was still around, but wouldn’t be for long, and the other lieutenants had mostly peeled off. I was spending more and more time at a one-bedroom apartment leased initially as a contingency plan in case a contentious situation at the ritzy condo I shared with the Bonnie to my Clyde proved irrevocably broken. My drinking was getting heavier by the week.

If K. had lived in the Soviet Union, she’d have been great “kitchen culture” company. She liked to talk, especially when she was high, but unlike most people under the influence of that particular substance, she was just as happy to listen. And I needed to vent. About everything.

We sat there for hours in that apartment’s cramped kitchen, me on the counter, her at a small table, talking and smoking cigarettes. She blew through line after line. I downed shot after shot.

“Why do you do it?” I wondered. “What? This?” she gestured at the navy blue plate in front of her, where a few microscopic white crumbs were all that was left of the gram she bought. “I dunno,” she said, sweeping the plate clean with her index finger and rubbing it across her gums. Her teeth were beginning to show a lot of wear and tear, and her breath was always horrendous. (“She really stopped taking care of herself,” G. would say later, after K. died in her sleep in 2016.)

“Why do you do that?” she asked, pointing to the almost-empty fifth of Jack on the counter beside me. I tried, and mostly failed, to draw a distinction. “And anyway, you drink too. Hell, you own a bar!” I exclaimed. She laughed. “Yeah, and even I don’t drink like that!” “Touché.” I remember saying that. “Touché.”

“I guess I’m just not sure what’s next,” I told her. “You mean–” “I’m almost done with grad school and this–” I waved my hand at half a dozen eight balls crammed into a fold-over sandwich bag, a thousand dollars worth of product which must’ve looked like a pot of gold to her. “It seems like it’s almost over now too. I guess I’m just kinda runnin’ away from the future.” “We’re all runnin’ from somethin'” she told me.

I was starting to feel sick. That night was the first time I experienced the symptoms of alcoholic pancreatitis, although it’d be another five years before I was able to recognize it for what it was. “I’m gonna try to get some sleep,” I lied. “Yeah, I have to go into work in a few hours to do some inventory,” she said. It was nearly four in the morning.

“Do you think you could front me a half until tonight?” She fished around in her purse and produced a few crumpled ones. “I’ve got $7. I can give you the other $8 later.” I was getting really queasy by then. I slid the cellophane off the bottom of my Camel pack, tore open one of the eight balls, tapped some into the stiff cellulose, folded the top over, sealed it with a lighter and handed it to her. “Don’t worry about the money,” I said.

She thanked me (profusely) and made her way out the door. As she walked out, I looked at the back of her shoulders. She was emaciated. “Hey.” She turned around. “That $7–” “Oh, you want it?” She reached into her purse again. “No. No. I want you to go get something to eat with it,” I told her. “You need to eat.” She looked regretful but not ashamed. “Is it that obvious?” she asked. “Yes.”

I went back inside and threw up three, four, maybe five times. Within 10 minutes I was in the throes of what I imagined was the worst panic attack anyone’s ever had. I thought, and still think, I might’ve died a few minutes later, right there in that apartment in 2011. Not in a literal sense of dying (or probably not, anyway), but at least metaphorically.

I either fell asleep or passed out. (Is there a difference?) When I woke up, or came to, it was dawn. The blinds were that blue color they get in the morning when the sun’s just starting to rise. The sheets were soaking wet. So were my clothes. “Jesus,” I mumbled.

I got down off the bed and walked gingerly into the kitchen, checking the refrigerator for Gatorade I knew wasn’t there. I needed electrolytes and Pepto. I changed clothes, brushed my teeth and steeled myself for what was sure to be a nauseating drive to the store.

When I stepped out the front door, there was a plastic Walgreens bag on the doormat. I picked it up and looked inside to find a cup of Kraft microwaveable mac & cheese, a Nature Valley granola bar and a Minute Made apple juice.

There was a note scribbled on the back of the receipt over top of the back-side printing. “You need to eat,” it read. “Luv, K.” I turned the receipt over. The total was $6.98.

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