What are we doing here?

An introduction.

It’s either tomorrow, or maybe 2007. Perhaps it’s 2016.

I’m obsessed with time, but I no longer have a concept of it.

It started to leave me in young adulthood, flew almost all the way out the door in 2014 when my wife and I welcomed the first of three children into the world, and was completely obliterated during the COVID pandemic.

I’ll look up a movie that I’m sure came out in the last five years, only to find out – nope – that was 13 years ago. I’ll wonder about a baseball player that I imagine is still a veteran playing the final years of his career, only to find out he retired in 2015 at age 38.

If Billy Pilgrim “has come unstuck in time,” as the opening passage of Kurt Vonnegut Jr.’s novel “Slaughterhouse Five” tells us, let me just say it is relatable.

Maybe you feel that way, too?

The calendar says today is the first day of 2024, which seems logical and impossible.

How did we get here – the royal we, maybe all of us? Change the emphasis to here – to a dot on this planet in this galaxy, to this moment in time, to this place on this page?

I don’t know.

We all went through a lot to get here. Some of us more than others, some of us for longer than others, but all of us a lot.

All I know is that I’m excited to be here. I hope you are, too.

If we are merely talking about here in the context of this site I just started, perhaps an explanation and introduction are in order.

Hi, I’m Michael Rand. For the past quarter-century, I’ve been a sportswriter and editor at the Minneapolis Star Tribune media company. That is still my job to this day, and I plan that it will be for a long time to come.

For even longer than that, though, I’ve been a creative writer and thinker. I’ve been a life observer. I’ve had a brain that doesn’t easily switch into “off” mode.

At least that’s how I think of myself.

I’m also a grateful husband and dad who loves his wife and three kids. I’m constantly wondering where the time went, even in 24-hour bursts. I’m firmly middle-aged, even if I wince and do a double-take every time I write down “47.”

I love sports, even if (or maybe because?) I know this love is completely irrational.

And I’m a person with a chronic disease, multiple sclerosis, which was diagnosed nearly a decade ago – just five days before our first daughter was born. I’m grateful that since that diagnosis, my symptoms have generally been mild and manageable, but it is still a part of me.

These were all parts of my identity a few years ago, in March 2020, when COVID hit.

Nobody was ready for it. I don’t think a lot of us understood what we were going through, for however long you might define the time that encapsulates “the pandemic.” I still don’t think we are close to realizing it even now that “normal” life has been back for a while.

I’m certain that I didn’t grasp what was happening to me: A sort of aimless depression, the life drained away as everything became smaller – even while pushing so hard to feel like there was some sort of normalcy and to give sufficient energy to the things that needed me most for survival: my job and my family (all of our kids were 5 and under, including a newborn, when COVID began), who were going through it all right next to me.

It left little space for myself, for any sort of reflection on how I was feeling. When there was time, there wasn’t space. When there was space, there wasn’t time. There wasn’t usually either one.

So I retreated into my own head and found myself a real problem masquerading as a thrill: for the span of several months, I developed a nasty compulsive gambling problem that all still feels like a bad dream but which had real consequences.

I am lucky. I was on a bad, secret path. I don’t like to think about how much worse things could have been if my wife hadn’t confronted me about a bank statement and sent my cascade of lies spilling out into the open. July 11, 2022 – the last day I gambled, and the last day I ever will – was one of the most painful days of my life but also strangely one of the best.

It forced me to reckon with myself in an honest way. Who is this person? What has happened? How can I reclaim the life I thought I was living?

What are we doing here?

Therapy, meetings and family support have helped tremendously. I don’t know if I always outwardly appear as a different person, but I feel like a different person. Or, maybe, a better way of putting it is that I feel a lot more like the version of myself that I want to be.

Even as I was struggling, before my recovery began, I knew I needed a new writing project. In my mixed-up mind, I thought I could just magically quit the bad thing (gambling) and start the good thing (a writing project) and nobody would have to know about the former.

What I know now is that was impossible. The aimless depression was the root; the gambling that accompanied it was the expression of it, my drug of choice so to speak. Until I started doing the work to understand and dig deep, my energy and spirit would be as empty as the page.

That process – surprise! (not a surprise) – takes a while. It is still ongoing. Early on, even as I started to feel more like myself and began repairing both myself and my relationships, I became frustrated that I still wasn’t able to produce any meaningful creative writing.

I knew I wanted to write about this time we are all living in, from a number of perspectives, but I kept burying ideas deep inside riddles. I was caught up on the idea of writing a novel, and the plot just kept getting messier and messier. At one point, my oldest daughter (now 9) was going to be an adult in 2040 tasked with writing the definitive story of what happened 20 years before.

I have decades worth of notebooks filled with scribblings of similar ideas, threads for books. Some of them even get 10-15 pages in. One of them half a lifetime ago made it all the way to the 250-page finish line, and if you are lucky (or unlucky) I might follow through with my plan (threat) on this site to publish at least a condensed version of it and give it an audience beyond the select family and friends who saw it so many years ago.

Maybe six months ago, though, I had something of an epiphany: Hey, maybe I’m not meant to write novels. At least not now. But that doesn’t mean I wasn’t meant to write.

Maybe what I should be focusing on are essays and short stories – bursts that I can finish in a day or a few days, topics that can change, ideas that I don’t have to wrap up and hide inside fictional characters.

I started working on an idea that I’ve had for 20 years, but instead of making it a novel I turned it into a short story. Then there was a flood of ideas and words that followed. I started drafting ideas for this site, both things I wanted to write about and what this thing would even be.

I finished several essays, many of them during wonderful Saturday sessions when my wife and I often sit together while she does homework (she just started a Ph.D program in addition to having a full-time job and those aforementioned three kids). While she does homework, I write and we both bounce ideas off each other.

Wait, you are asking. When do you have time for this? Your three kids are still 9 and under, you somehow managed to add a puppy to your house in June, you have a demanding (albeit extremely fun) job, you teach an adjunct class at the University of Minnesota that starts in two weeks and your wife is just as strapped for time and bandwidth (if not more).

Why do you even need to do this when you already talk and write for a living almost every day?

(OK, maybe you’re not asking those questions. But I’ve asked them).

The short answer is that when there is something that I am excited about, and I’ve been excited about this project for quite some time without it diminishing, I know that I must do it.

Time becomes either malleable or inconsequential. The project will take countless hours and abundant energy, but it will give back to me in much larger ways.

The thing that seems like it will kill you will actually make you live.

The longer answer is that I hope it also gives back to you. That in some way we can create a sort of community here of people going through or coming out of a period of time we didn’t really like or understand, still trying to make sense of the pace of change and what’s ahead, but doing so with a sort of lightness, optimism and shared perspective.

In my professional life, I’ve only felt this sort of “must do” energy twice: One when I started the sports blog “RandBall” in late 2006 and again a few years ago when I started the Daily Delivery podcast. Both of those things still endure at the Star Tribune and continue to give me great energy.

Here on this site you will not find anything about sports. What I hope you will find, though, is some of the same spirit I have tried to bring to my career.

The main components will be personal essays – a lot of them about being a parent, others just about life as we know it right now – and short fiction. At least that’s what I’ve been working on so far, though I’m open to suggestions (and eventually, perhaps sooner than later, guest submissions).

The Friscalating Dusklight, by the way, is an homage to the early RandBall blog days. For reasons I can’t quite recall because it was 17 years ago (100 in Internet years), I started labeling the last post I did every day “The Friscalating Dusklight,” which happens to be a throwaway passage from a fictional novel written by the character Eli Cash in the Wes Anderson movie “The Royal Tenenbaums.”

I suppose I wanted to signal that we were reaching the end of the day, dusklight was a way to do it, I’m a huge Wes Anderson fan, the passage was just quirky enough to be an inside joke, and it stuck for a long time before search engine optimization ultimately rendered it obsolete vernacular.

My wife suggested that I give the name to this site. The more I sat with it the more it made sense. (A lot more sense than the dramatic title I was originally going to give it, which was “To Be Alive in 202X.” Then again, I wanted to name the RandBall blog “The Sports Hole” 17 years ago. Maybe I’m better off letting other people name things.)

Friscalating is an entirely made up word as far as I can tell, created only for use in The Royal Tenenbaums, but it is given a definition of, “An effect caused by the sun setting over the horizon creating an optical illusion of shimmering, liquefied light.”

That sure sounds nice, even if it is a trick of the eyes.

Everything I write here will be available free, though I would be grateful if what you find here moves you enough at some point to become a paid subscriber. I plan to donate a portion of any proceeds to worthy causes important to me – suggestions again are welcome – including the Multiple Sclerosis Society.

I’m not setting any deadlines or hard goals for how often I will post here, but a soft goal is a couple times a week. I’m a daily journalist, after all. I work better with accountability.

I keep thinking about reader engagement meetup opportunities and the potential for a related podcast, and maybe those will come to life in due time.

For now, I just want to write. And I hope you will want to read.