( Originally Presented at Fight Club 5)

Every boy's childhood is defined by the moment that they realize their father is mortal, and is eventually going to die. That's the first glimpse we get of our own mortality as well, the first time one of the fingers of our childhood gets peeled away, the first time we look at the world with less than both hands covering our eyes. I woke up to this during my fourteenth summer, on Turtle Lake in Northern Minnesota.

I was kayaking in the twilight, twenty yards offshore with my father aside, letting my wake ripple the silver-edged blackness of the lake. Wordlessly, our gentle paddle became a contest. I heaved to and put all of my one hundred and twenty pounds into the contest, digging as deeply and swiftly into the water as I could. With a grin, he matched my effort. For a hundred yards, we made speed with grim determination, scaring birds and confusing grandmothers, who had been expecting us to pull in neatly by the dock for supper. My father was thirty-five years old.

We didn't have a finish line- the race just ended, and I won. Winded, straining with every stroke, my asthma not yet entirely conquered by my seasons of soccer, I pulled ahead and stayed ahead. I watched him as he tried to keep up with me- genuinely tried, his truck-driving, baseball-playing, small child-spanking arms plunging his paddle deep into blackness with every stroke. It was no use, though- I was several lengths ahead of him, and staying there. Wryly, he slid his kayak to a stop and signalled that we should return to the dock and the cabin. It was the first time I had ever beaten him in a physical contest.

When I was little, my father and I ran sprints at family picnics, usually between trees or other landmarks while avoiding smaller cousins still too young to realize that it was a bad idea to walk into a moving object ten times your size. I remember those races- my father was twenty-five or twenty-six years old. He would let me win, or run backwards just out of reach, sticking his tongue out at me while I giggled and puked up hot dogs on my endless supply of maroon sweaters. But he always let me win. I had never run faster, lifted more, hit harder, or borne pain longer than he had. That evening on the lake was the first time he had pulled no punches- and still lost.

That night was dark and lonely, because I had a secret. To my father it had been just another race. But to me it meant all the world. My father was flesh, just like I was, and he could fail. I already knew that Scott Lynch could screw the pooch like nobody's business, but it had never really occurred to me that my father was the same way- doomed and living.

I thought until recently that I had come to terms with my own mortality as well- I'd seen and lost enough in twenty-two years to understand how it all worked, that all this I amwill someday be over. I don't know exactly when it happened. I used to stare out my windows on winter morning in my late teens and watch small neighborhood children on sleds and toboggans. They aimed deliberately for trees, and threw themselves off their sleds in mid-air. Some of them rolled for yards and yards. I had done that once, and then it seemed that I woke up one morning and the laws of pain and gravity suddenly applied to me. Someone had replaced all my damn silly putty with actual flesh. Awareness of death is like that- you wake up one morning and it's crouched on your back like it's always been there. When did the law of gravity start to apply to Scott Lynch? I can't tell you.

Not too long ago, I was riding my bike in downtown Minneapolis, scudding down Washington Avenue in the fading light of evening, evading motorists and beggars with casual paranoia. I don't know why my mind wandered as I approached Fourth Avenue. For some reason, I began thinking about Stephen Baldwin. One of the Baldwin Brother Mill- you know, The Usual Suspects.He also played Barney Rubble in The Flintstones: Viva Rock Vegas.This bizarre train of thought was only squeezed from my awareness by the realization that I has mistaken solid curb for access ramp, and had about half a second before I went assholes over elbows on concrete at thirty miles an hour.

I avoided disaster with the reflexes of the young and stupid, but a horrible thought broke across the surface of my awareness as I continued my journey. If I had struck the curb, injury would have been certain. Death would not have been out of the question. And if I had died so suddenly and foolishly at the intersection of Fourth and Washington, my last conscious thought in this life would have been of Stephen Baldwin. Not my beloved Jennifer, my parents, my brothers, my writing, my collection of Star Wars action figures, but Stephen fucking Baldwin. Conventional English has no description beftitting the profound wrongness of this- to kiss life goodbye with Stephen Baldwin firmly in mind. That's just fucked up.

In the wake of my metaphysical incident, I found a great desire to withdraw to my office and write for hours. I lost my appetite for video games. I became fascinated by my books, my online and real-life friends, their works, their complaints, their brilliance and stupidity and questionable taste in Street Fighter II characters. I played with my girlfriend's fingernails, made farting noises at my new cat, and talked to a Hershey's chocolate bar for twenty minutes about my short stories in progress. Of course, I supplied its voice. In short, I felt reprieved. I gained a vicarious interest in the madness and stupidity of my everyday life. My delusions, my strangeness, my quirks- they are my life, along with your quirks, your frank stupidity and your unassuming brilliance. I treasure them in a way I never have before. This feeling fuels my creativity as it never has before.

The number of times that I can address you, the number of times I can explain my vegetarianism to you, drive you insane with my love of digression, lie to you about the true power of my roleplaying characters- these numbers are all set, and ticking down, all fading away. I don't really know any of you- I only know you as ciphers, a cast drawn up before my eyes, with your blank spots filled in by my educated guesses and prejudiced assumptions. But I trust that you are all equally real in your own minds, equally aware of your own certain ends, and hopefully equally ready to share your strangeness with the rest of us.

This club of ours is a showcase. It isn't a showcase for the pretentious, the witty, the educated, the widely read, the confident, or the beautiful, though all of us are some of those things. This is a showcase for our delusions, our honest delusions, the tiny symptoms of our humanity that make us real people. When I was a boy at Elementary School, I spent my recess hours pretending that I was a ship. I looked like the SDF-1 from Robotech. Every cell in my body was a tiny crew member. My legs were engines, and my arms were photon torpedoes launchers. When I answered a friend across the playground, I was being hailed on an open frequency.

I swear to God that I never ate paint chips.

I don't have anything to lose by telling you this. I suspect most of you have childhood fantasies that you think are even more embarrasing. Why are they embarrassing? They're us. For three or four summers in my youth, I was a lonely spaceship. I called myself SL-19. Sometimes, I still am. My delusions are my middle finger raised to death and boredom, and yours are no different. My stories are as real and important as plate tectonics, and so are yours. Bring your bad poetry. Write a story and read it, even if your bowels clench in embarrassment. Show up with something in hand, some small fragment of your own creeping weirdness, and share it with us in this spotlight we raise once per month. Our great advantage is not that we are all geniuses and royalty fated to succeed together, but that we are all doomed weirdos, and our arcs of descent fall just close enough together. Our mortality is certain, but we are immortal in our little delusions. Bring them on.

Scott Lynch, Summer 2000