WRITE CLUB: SHARP

Write Club is a monthly, literary bloodsport in which contenders face off against each other with 7-minute essays on competing topics. Below was my combatant essay based on the prompt “SHARP,” facing off against “FLAT.” This essay was performed on June 10, 2025, at The GMan Tavern in Chicago. It was defeated in its bout.

I am four or five years old and my dad has just started teaching me to play chess. He doesn’t know it at the time, but he is about to instill in his firstborn son a lifelong fascination with using the game of chess as an extended metaphor. For far too many things. As if he were the only person in the entirety of recorded human history to have ever had such a burst of inspiration.

Everyone relax. I’m not doing that tonight. It has been four decades since I first learned how to play chess and I have many other metaphors to inflict upon you instead.

I’m mentioning this moment when my dad first taught me to play chess because four or five years ago I sat down with him and asked if he’d like to play a game. He tells me he would, but that I’ll have to explain how to play it. We manage maybe half a dozen moves before his frustration becomes apparent, and we never play a game of chess ever again. Today my mom or my brother will send me videos of him from San Antonio, in the wheelchair, under hospice care. There are intermittent sparks of recognition in his eyes and nearly imperceptible traces of a smile on his lips as he plays catch with a small rubber ball. He uses his left arm because his right arm is no longer mobile.

I have now watched him at a range of distances as the unrelenting colonies of protein have ravaged his gray matter, have transformed a keen consciousness into a vague, diaphanous version of itself. As if someone had covered my dad with a sheet of paper and rubbed the side of a pencil tip over the texture of him, and the etching is all that remains. I watch him and I wait for the inevitable end of his journey. 

And I worry every time I myself struggle to recall random bits of information that I feel like I should easily remember. Whether or not we’ve run out of coffee creamer. The first name of the parent of the attacking midfielder who just joined my son’s soccer team this spring. Several key plot developments from a previous season of television shortly before the latest one drops.

For my dad this process has been physiological. Circumstances beyond the control of medicine and subservient to the chaos of our individual chemistries. For me the process of my diminishing acuity has felt different — it has been sociological, philosophical, allegorical. I’ve had to stare into the shattered funhouse mirrors of my own subconscious and recognize that the blunted corners of my mind are the result of mere existence within the gurgling kettle of the last decade.

Of persistently refreshing the headlines.

Of attempting to locate logic within bowl after bowl of wilted word salads.

Of the mad rollercoaster of my own blood pressure and heartbeat spikes.

Of the dreadful sense that there’s no use in starting to do anything, even something as simple as cracking open a book, because the moment in which you might find joy is the moment in which that joy will be interrupted.

Nearly ten solid years of enduring the miserable cadences of that shrieking stack of fetid Velveeta, the void-hearted ghouls who set themselves forth as his enforcers, the very culture of twisted, sneering Mr. Punch puppets that sprouted up in each of his footsteps and then went berserk at every available opportunity.

This has done to me, in its way, the same thing that the Lewy bodies have done to my dad. And if you perceive that I’m drawing one-to-one comparisons between the temperament and character of our current American regime and that of a cruel, incurable disease of the mind then you perceive correctly. 

If you also perceive that such a comparison is me being undeservedly kind, then you also perceive correctly.

There’s a common shorthand of our time: The world is on fire. Everyone says it. You probably say it at least twice a day. And sometimes I feel this is apt. Other times I find it reductive. But when I take time to consider the metaphor I find it painfully inaccurate. Because if the condition of the world were that it was on fire it might be a problem you could solve by depriving it of fuel and oxygen, when in fact the essence of this kind of fire is that it continues producing its own sustenance the longer it burns.

So I say to you that the world is not on fire. I say to you that the world is sharp. 

It is needles, it is thorns, it is fangs, it is talons, it is cold and rigid, it rends and tears at you like a Cenobite in an especially playful mood. It is constantly this. And that may seem worse.

Except.

While the aphorism is at least as old as Aeschylus, you can’t actually fight fire with fire, because when you introduce fire to an inferno it always defects to the other side. But when the world is sharp, you can also be sharp, you must also be sharp, because when both you and the world are sharp then you are duellists, and if you are a duellist you’ve leveled your odds. So I say to you: Be sharp.

When these dollar-store dictators come to bludgeon you with their daily dose of ugliness, wrench the stone from their hands. Begin running your dull edges across it. Be sharp.

When they reach their hands into your communities to pluck your neighbors from their homes, place yourself in between their fingers and stiffen your spines. Be sharp.

When they complain about the tone of your words to ignore the content of your voice. Be sharp.

When they tell you that there is only one song and all of its notes are flat. Be sharp.

And know that when I stand here and tell you to be sharp, I’m not only referring to the edge of your blade.

I’m referring to your knowing when to draw it from its scabbard.

And knowing the proper technique of your slash and your thrust.

And knowing at whom the point should be directed.

And knowing where to strike the blow.

Be sharp. Be sharp. Be sharp.