Compromise. Nobody’s indispensible; nobody was bluffing. They’re not giving me what I want, but they’re giving me a little. I’m not leaving in a huff, but I’m leaving.

I don’t know when. Might be the end of the summer. Might be the end of the year. I don’t know where to, either. I need to run some numbers; I need to make some lists. I need to figure out what the hell I’m going to do with all this furniture.

I think this is going to turn out all right. But it’s going to take some getting used to.

A link to IndieBound is like a big “fuck you” to anyone who doesn’t live either in the United States or in Mission City, BC. On the other hand, your favorite web-savvy indie bookstore that’s on IndieBound probably has an order form that works anywhere.

I know this isn’t intentional, and I’m certain it’s not obvious; so, in case it matters, I thought I should let you know.

By the end of this week (by the end of the day, I hope; but by the end of the week in any case) I should know whether I’ll still be in Switzerland this summer, or whether I’ll be back in the States, flat broke and looking for work. It’s lucky for me that even grand gestures and matters of principle have a ninety-day waiting period over here.

A year ago I had a plan. A month ago I had a different plan. Today I have contingencies.

I was going to write some sort of month or year or decade or life in review, but I’m too busy with the future to give the past much time right now. (“No point in trying to figure out what went wrong — too much plowing ahead making everything worse to do!”) But I will share my last accomplishment of 2009: Learning to play Rock Band. This seems somehow appropriate.

Under my coffee table there’s a Moleskine full of scribbles to write up about my trip to Ethiopia. Land Cruisers. School uniforms. Chain-gang guards with MAC-10s. I’d be lying if I said Michaela Wrong hasn’t slowed me down, and rightly so. Though if things go south here this week, by summer I’ll sure be wishing I’d sold some slick a few thousand words of narcissistic fluff. Fat Man in Famine Country, I could call it.

I don’t remember now which New Year’s Eve was 1999. I think it was the mellow one where we drank cosmos and ate a fancy dinner somewhere in SoMa that may or may not be there any more, and in the car on the way back to Brandon and Fran’s I kept trying to text-message HPY NEW YR to people but couldn’t get a signal. Could be I’m running two or three together there, though.

It doesn’t seem like ten years. It seems like just yesterday I was in my dreary apartment in Seattle, fighting with the apartment manager and living a life of quiet-with-occasional-outbursts desperation, and wondering how it had gotten to be more than five years since I moved there.

I just tweeted that this last decade was the craziest decade, and it was. But if we can just have a little more of the meeting fantastic people and seeing amazing things and making stuff to be proud of, and a little less of the feeling rudderless and becalmed and entangled in dirty plastic somewhere in the North Pacific Gyre, I’m feeling pretty good about the next one.

I read more than forty-one books in 2009, but only forty-one new ones. By the time I’d fallen four months behind on these write-ups, I was scared to read for fear of adding to the queue. As a result, I’ve still got what I’m sure is at least forty-one more new books waiting to be read, including half a dozen I’ve bought just in the last five days. I may do this again, but this time I think it’s better if I don’t make any promises.

1. 1 January: Teleology is the new cosmogony
   (Greg Bear, City at the End of Time)
2. 2 January: Don’t try this at home
   (John McPhee, The Curve of Binding Energy)
3. 3 January: Before I talk, I should read a book
   (Stephanie Dalley, Myths from Mesopotamia: Creation, the Flood, Gilgamesh, and others)
4. 4 January: Sex, drugs, and (in moderation) bugs
   (Steph Swainston, The Modern World a.k.a. Dangerous Offspring)
5. 5 January: Space is big. It’s dark, too.
   (Alastair Reynolds, Diamond Dogs, Turquoise Days)
6. 7 January: The toad is the hunger that appears when the gift stops giving
   (Lewis Hyde, The Gift: Creativity and the Artist in the Modern World)
7. 10 January: Me so big naughty heart all one stone
   (Sarah Vowell, The Wordy Shipmates)
8. 12 January: Hemos pasado
   (Carlos Ruiz Zafón, The Shadow of the Wind)
9. 13 January: One: we are lost and have no idea what we’re doing, or two: we’re on an adventure
   (Kazu Kibuishi, Amulet, Book One: The Stonekeeper)
10. 14 January: Lt. Hall, did you go through the Infantry School? No, I went under it
    (Roger W. Hall, You’re Stepping on my Cloak and Dagger)
11. 16 January: Where chance cannot penetrate and the only source of pain is memory
    (Roberto Bolaño, Distant Star)
12. 23 January: But that would not be a serious answer to a serious question put to him by a specialist
    (Gabriel García Márquez, Love in the Time of Cholera)
13. 2 February: and some have thought in consequence that the Babylonians were Monotheists, but such was not the case
    (E.A. Wallis Budge, Babylonian Life and History)
14. 5 February: “In the center of Basel, you can defend a few houses. Otherwise, forget it.”
    (John McPhee, La Place de la Concorde Suisse)
15. 11 February: At the very moment when children really did begin to disappear
    (Sven Lindqvist, Terra Nullius: A Journey Through No One’s Land)
16. 17 February: ‘A penitential pilgrimage,’ he cried. ‘Two hundred times around the restaurant! I invoke double pneumonia!’
    (Peter Høeg, The Quiet Girl)
17. 20 February: I trusted that the rain forest’s mysteries were not occult
    (Elizabeth Royte, The Tapir’s Morning Bath: Mysteries of the Tropical Rain Forest and the Scientists Who Are Trying to Solve Them)
18. Indeterminate February: We are always already in the hands of a Teller
    (John Clute, Scores: Reviews 1993–2003)
19. 25 February: Happy endings must come at the end of something
    (Salman Rushdie, Haroun and the Sea of Stories)
20. 26 February: After Marco joined us, the morality became complex
    (Brian Francis Slattery, Liberation: Being the Adventures of the Slick Six After the Collapse of the United States of America)
21. 2 March: Valentine’s eyes felt glazed; his mind wandered
    (Robert Silverberg, Lord Valentine’s Castle, Majipoor Chronicles, Valentine Pontifex)
22. 2 March: I must say, sir, you have adopted a decidedly unfriendly and accusatory tone
    (Mohsin Hamid, The Reluctant Fundamentalist)
23. 4 March: Perhaps it will turn out all right, in the next thrilling episode
    (Margaret Atwood, The Blind Assassin)
24. 7 March: The gap between those who want games to entertain and those who want games to be art does not exist
    (Raph Koster, A Theory of Fun for Game Design)
25. 18 April: We are for freedom and international peace
    (Oleg Steinhauer, The Bridge of Sighs)
26. 6 May: Too busy to be afraid. Too busy to scream.
    (Jeff Vandermeer, Finch)
27. 27 April: I think that explanation would be difficult to tender in the gardens of Soochow
    (Jay Lake, Escapement)
28. 9 May: Is there any point in keeping up the pretence, Ambassador?
    (Alastair Reynolds, House of Suns)
29. 6 June: “Hey, mister, you wanna buy a god?”
    (Greg van Eekhout, Norse Code)
30. 3 July: Through her annoyance she wondered
    (Lydia Millet, Oh Pure and Radiant Heart)
31. 3 August: But today take advantage of our journey, you old wretch, and continue your story
    (Jan Potocki, The Manuscript Found in Saragossa)
32. 10 August: Grown women are the chief agents and arbiters of this unfortunate business
    (Laura Miller, The Magician’s Book: A Skeptic’s Adventures in Narnia)
33. 23 August: It is only in the performing of them that they can prove to be impossible
    (Ernest Hemingway, For Whom the Bell Tolls)
34. 16 September: If the schema I have outlined has any value at all, it will be in the questions
    (Farah Mendlesohn, Rhetorics of Fantasy)
35. 28 September: the Emperor, as a gracious benefactor, could not issue vexatious or plaguing decrees
    (Ryszard Kapuściński, The Emperor)
36. 1 October: Whatever happens to me and however I deplore it, I shall never in actual fact become a ‘hardboiled man of the world’
    (Evelyn Waugh, Remote People)
37. 15 October: What kind of doubletalk was this?
    (Roméo Dallaire, Shake Hands with the Devil: The Failure of Humanity in Rwanda)
38. 17 October: But in any event it is a remarkable case of that holier-than-thou duplicity which has become so familiar in the propaganda of this present century
    (Alan Moorehead, The Blue Nile)
39. 28 October: Fucking humans everywhere
    (Richard K. Morgan, The Steel Remains)
40. 28 November: “We’re something different now,” she said. “A little of us and a little of them.”
    (Scott Westerfeld, Leviathan)
41. 23 December: It was much harder for girls to become astounding characters in the fabric of Tres Camarones culture
    (Luis Alberto Urrea, Into the Beautiful North)

Luis Alberto Urrea, Into the Beautiful North

No one really noticed, it happened so gradually — but there are (almost) no men left in the Sinaloa beach town of Tres Camarones. One by one they’ve all gone north. Now the gangsters are moving in. Fired up by a showing of The Magnificent Seven, nineteen-year-old Nayeli, football star and karate champ, sets out with three brave companions to bring them back. It’s funny and touching, and probably as close to my dream of a suburban backyard epic fantasy as I’m going to get without writing it myself.

Young guys joked and called insults to one another, cursed the migra. They made kissing sounds at Yolo and Vampi. Nayeli got up and walked to their seat and stood there, facing the boys, looking like an Aztec warrior priestess. Before the bus could roll, though, the migra matron who was driving with an armed cohort told her she had to sit down. But someone had taken her seat, so she sat on Tacho’s lap.

“Everybody,” the guard with the big shotgun announced, “we are going to register you. A quick interview. And you will all be going home. Stay calm.”

Tacho said nothing.

Nayeli couldn’t tell if he was angry or depressed.

Vampi was so scared she could not stop crying.

Yolo was so mad, she wanted to slap Nayeli’s face and go back home.

Tacho was thinking: The United States is a little disappointing so far.

Right after I finished Into the Beautiful North I saw “Sin Nombre.” Very different vibe, of course. But both made me think that in a hundred years we’re going to feel as stupid about borders as we feel now about slavery.