White Elephant is something of a spiritual Irish twin to my son, Graham, conceived when he was a week old, still sporting his umbilical cord and sleeping twenty-one hours a day. Though disputable, I trace the project’s lineage back to the following text exchange with a friend and former professor:
HIM: how’s it been so far? besides lack of sleep
ME: it’s been like a week-long acid trip, moments of indescribable, profound love, optimism that the cosmos is redeemable, followed by existential terror and fear and shame, like—what have I done? He didn’t consent to being yanked from the void
ME: and then over again, staying up all night drinking coffee to make sure he doesn’t die, and then getting loopy the next day
HIM: Lol Jesus
HIM: I’ve always wanted to read an account of what it’s like having a child by an intelligent male writer.
HIM: But I guess none of them ever have the time lol
I disagree with him; there are no doubt many intelligent fathers who have somehow found the time to write about their experiences. Whatever delusions of grandeur I entertained, none were ever so detached from reality as for me to believe that I would be or should be the first man to write intelligently about the experience of becoming a father. In fact, even more than lack of time—of which there truly was little to spare during the first months of Graham’s life—it was my sober appraisal of the state of the genre that surfaced each time that I thought: you should write that down, and then thought better of it.
I obsessed over the qualifiers of my friend’s ideal author: Intelligent. Male. Parent. A low bar. I’d seen the tote bag, the refrigerator magnet: carry yourself with the confidence of a mediocre white man. Although a little unkind, the pithy injunction works only because it exploits a real stereotype: the white man, of middling intellect and dubious talent, who is an unsung savant in his own mind. It also indicates a real cultural phenomenon, a zeitgeist wherein the cultural cachet once the birthright of white men has been replaced by—not liability, per se—but a sort of reflexive, oftentimes antagonistic skepticism.
Like many mediocre white men, I was just self-aware enough to sympathize with the sentiments fueling the cultural shift. I tried to come up with an identity metric that might grant my otherwise unremarkable perspective some or another idiosyncratic virtue. I am a felon, I thought, a former heroin addict. An ex-vegan. A downwardly-mobile philosophy major, brought up Christian, became an atheist, until LSD turned me agnostic. Nothing felt convincing: I hadn’t written a sentence, but was already an imposter, a fraud.
The awareness of my white, straight, male, cisgendered mediocrity plagued me until I was disabused of it in an unlikely place: on the toilet. Like the milquetoast I am, I scroll mindlessly through an algorithm-generated news feed each morning while I shit. Google keeps tabs on what I seem interested in and suggests articles and blog posts that it predicts I might like. The occasional gem notwithstanding, most are trite listicles whose content is ripped off of Reddit, interspersed with commercials, and—after monetization—published by (for instance) Bored Panda.
Since the explosion of ChatGPT, however, I’ve found myself increasingly skeptical of the feed. That fateful morning, my virtual breakfast didn’t just seem banal and uninspired. It struck me as unconscious. I suspected that—rather than the product of an insipid, but ultimately human, mind—I was consuming the noisy, insentient excrement of a machine. I am conscious, I realized. I am an organism for whom there is something that it is like to be that organism. What further justification did I need?
About me, the author
The first thing I remember writing as a child was a knockoff of a chapter book called Wordsworth and the Roast Beef Romance. The best that can be said of it was that it was not wholly plagiarized: I replaced the main character in Wordsworth—a talking basset hound named Wordsworth—with Cowboy, a talking Siamese cat, who was himself loosely based on a childhood pet, our family cat Cowboy, also a Siamese, but who could not talk. In Roast Beef Romance, Wordsworth gets into some appropriately-absurd hijinks; I no longer remember the specifics, but I know that their hilarity so deeply affected me that I found mere consumption of the story somehow insufficient. I wanted not just to tell the joke, but for it to have been my mind—not Todd Strasser’s—that created it. I required ownership.
I set to work at my father’s PC, retooling the plot of Wordsworth and the Roast Beef Romance and laughing breathlessly to myself as I imagined, instead of Strasser’s hackish hound, Cowboy—our cat!—pulling off Wordsworth’s outlandish shenanigans in his quest for human food. Feverish in the throes of creation, I couldn’t get to the big joke quickly enough, and when finally the moment arrived, I consulted my source material for the first time to make sure that I didn’t miss a single, integral beat. I finished. The story ended somewhat abruptly, but no matter. I replaced any instance of “Wordsworth” with “Cowboy.” I generously enlarged the font, until the text sprawled across a respectable nine pages. Then: I took my opus to print.
“Mom!” I (probably) shouted. “I wrote a story! Read it to Joe and me!”
Thus began my doomed debut. As my mother acquiesced and began to read my manuscript aloud, I could barely contain my mirth. But something was wrong: my scowling little brother had caught on. “You stole that from Wordsworth!” I looked to mom—who should have been my most steadfast advocate—but even she was suddenly a critic. “It does sound a lot like the Wordsworth story we read last night,” she conceded.
“It’s not Wordsworth,” I insisted. “It’s about Cowboy.” But it didn’t matter; the reviews were in. Cowboy and the Roast Beef Romance was a flop, and—just like that—my nascent publishing career was stillborn, dead on arrival, plucked green from the vine. You don’t come back from criticism like that.
Why subscribe?
Although my first literary endeavor was harshly received by uncharitable readers, its humble genesis is a justification of art itself. Todd Strasser has written 130 novels; nearly three decades ago, I read one of them that inspired me today.1
A white elephant can be defined as something of little or no value. I intend to produce at least three pieces for this Substack every month. Many will, no doubt, be white elephants of this variety—the unwanted and unsolicited musings of a mediocre white man. But you might encounter white elephants of a rarer breed:
white elephant
b: an object no longer of value to its owner but of value to others.
I will write something that you couldn’t have read anywhere else, and it will strike you as poignant, funny, or deeply true. You’ll be—perhaps almost imperceptibly—inspired. You’ll say, “So that is what it’s like to be an unremarkable caucasian dad.” Maybe you’ll find it vaguely depressing. But maybe you’ll recognize in it something of your own experience, regardless of your race, your sex, your class, whether or not you have kids, whether you and I are uncannily alike or strikingly different. You will understand some aspect of our shared condition in a way that, before, you did not. Yes, you’ll think. I feel the same way; it is like that for me, too.
White Elephant’s white elephant artwork/logo is by the talented Joseph Mahaffey, my brother. His other work can be found in various corners of the internet, but—like Banksy in reverse—you’ll never know it was him.
An early draft of this page identified Wordsworth and the Roast Beef Romance as “some book about, I think, a basset hound.” Surprisingly, some internet sleuthing helped jog my memory, and I rediscovered this foundational series and its author, whose name, before today, I could not have told you.
