Scott Kraus

Fiction, Poetry, Essays, and Podcasts

Fiction, Poetry, and a Blog

Meet Scott Kraus, a writer exploring themes of loneliness and isolation in the connected age.

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Scott Kraus - Da Vinci Wing

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Latest Stuff coming right up!

Latest Stuff

On Doing A Daily Podcast, Three Years Later

I had a daily podcast in 2020. It was just me, a subscription to a royalty-free music library, and a determination to record myself talking to myself every day.

Honestly – it was my most successful podcast.

It had an eclectic, growing following that consisted of people who were friends and then eventually people who had no idea who I was and to this day, I have no idea how or why they subscribed, only that they did.

One day, without warning, I stopped.

It wasn’t because it wasn’t a rewarding show, it was quite rewarding, particularly in a creative sense. And it wasn’t because it was a drain on my time.

I stopped recording the show because I stopped recording the show. A few days went by like this, and the practice became cold, and… well there you have it.

The end of a thing is often that simple.

So if the end of a thing can be that simple, the beginning can too.

This is a new beginning. I decided this Sunday morning afternoon to put out a daily post on this website for as long as it lasts. Follow along by visiting the site, or subscribe below to my weekly email and I’ll share my favorites each week. I don’t know where this is going, or how long it will last, but that’s part of the fun, right?

Do things where failure is a success condition

PS: The podcast is still on the internet, you can check it out if you want.

What It Means To Be

The heart asks more than life can give – from Moonlight by Sara Teasdale

Let me list a few things, do they resonate with you?

  • A riverboat on a clear night with yellowlit windows
  • The moment you first recognize a voice from outside while approaching a party
  • The taste in the air the first morning after everything had changed…

I have been obsessed with this specific feeling for as long as I can remember. The older I get, the more I notice the patina, like looking at an antique that has no practical use any more. At some moment in my life, I could swear I felt it for the first time and it was new.

It’s unnameable as far as I can tell, this feeling, but I constantly see people writing around it, like we’re all circling something ineffable.

A couple more things that may resonate…

  • When you hear a good cover of a song you’ve forgotten
  • When a melody makes you tear up before the words make sense

Music seems to be the closest way we can approximate this feeling. I remember being in New York City for the first time and hearing a choir and orchestra play a famous Christmas song, but they played it in such a way that I never heard or felt the same way again, but I can bring it out from the archives of my mind and play not just the sounds but the feeling that crawled up my spine and lifted my eyes to the sky, something akin to worship, but without an object of worship, an ejaculation of spirit into the void.

A strange, snickering way to put it…but accurate.

If the human condition is one of reaching for something glorious then maybe the feeling I’m obsessed with is the space between the reaching and the glory.

They say music is about the space between the notes as much as the notes themselves.

When I was in Buenos Aires, I felt like almost every moment was some kind of waiting. I was waiting for this to happen, or that. I would get bored at times and I would get impatient.

Looking back I don’t remember any of the waiting, or what it was like to wait. I remember the little things I did to break it up, but only like noise in a greater picture of the things I remember with vivid clarity, moments I can bring to mind in full resolution. I can remember seeing Julia’s face for the first time, but I don’t remember ducking into the back of the car she hired, though I do remember my knee bumping into hers on the drive into the city. I can point to the spot on my knee. If there was a way to prove it I bet I would be accurate within half an inch.

I’m trying to write a novel about this feeling I hardly understand. Aspects of it come to me clearly when I’m about my normal weekday routine. Things come to me best when a certain level of loneliness creeps in. When I’m not talking.

Ultimately I think all feelings precede thought, that thought is just a bantering language over something incredible. A steel case or a suit of armor. I don’t expect anything from my writing – certainly not a career or social acclaim and if not for Jason Storms I wouldn’t even expect a reader. But I write a lot anyway. If I can get closer to the core of whatever it is to be, it’s all I need.

Keep Going

I wake up without an alarm to a quiet house. After a good sleep I perceive things clearly enough to notice them. At night I’m so distracted by my own mind that it’s all I can hear but in the morning I can hear the fridge humming and tires sloshing on the interstate a half mile away. I make coffee, go to the bathroom, then pour a cup and sit on my couch where I work. In this way I think of all the things I need to do that day and it doesn’t worry me yet because I still have the day. Here I make a list. I order it so all I have to do to keep going is look at the top of the list. It’s very important to keep going.

Dreamers and Seers

I know two types of people: people who dream, and people who see.

Dreamers live in their heads. They live in the hope words inspire. Language to them isn’t a tool, but magic. Imagine an artist or a lying politician. Imagine anyone who speaks things into existence. Dreamers look out to the horizon and see possibility, and feel restless.

Seers live within their arm’s reach. Their world is one of touch and fog. They like to call themselves realists, but their reality is only what they can grapple with. They have loyalty and compassion, but only for those they can touch. Seers look out to the horizon and see God, and feel fear.

Most people bounce between the two modes, but there is always a primary mode.

I know people who are clearly dreamers, but because decades of their lives were spent in fruitless moments of miscommunication, they become like seers. They live in fear of the horizon they chased. They become aware that ambition, hope, desire, and longing are all functions of distance, that closing the distance only reveals another distance, and like Heraclites they realize the world is only ever what it is now, despite our flowing through it.

It is more rare for seers to become dreamers. When you close your eyes to possibility, you close your eyes to change. The walls you build around you trap you. Eventually these walls crumble and seers are left with a blank horizon and the face of God rising over it. They can only imagine that this is a cruel thing, and so their dreams are nightmares.

When you speak in dichotomies, the reflex is to imagine a middle way. It’s soothing to describe the world in extremes, and to then console yourself that you are a true mix, that you are multitudes. And we all are, of course, in our own ways. But I see too much of the extremes to believe this.

In the course of my short, secluded life (am I a dreamer or a seer?), my closest friends have been poets and businessmen, soldiers and protesters. The people I love are all caring, and they are all completely certain that their view is clear from their vantage. I am certain too in my view, though I feel wrong in saying it.

I haven’t suffered enough to understand reality, and somehow this is apparent whenever I talk at length about anything. I wouldn’t trade my life for another’s, and this is supposed to mean something. It turns out the basis for self-satisfaction is opting not to be in a body-switch comedy, though this was never in the cards.

No matter how far you chase the horizon, it is still there. No matter how tall you build the wall, there it is, the horizon looming up ahead. It is so constant that I’ve begun defining the horizon not as the curved line of the earth, but the space under my own feet, always slipping further away.

Things Nowadays

I’m in my thirties. This means I won’t age again until I’m in my forties.

Meanwhile, I get to enjoy the finer things in life with newfound sophistication. No longer am I harried by carpe diem, the Latin equivalent of YOLO. No longer am I expected to chain-drink shots to start a party. Shots are now for the end of the party: this way I can fall asleep quicker.

And nothing is really a party anymore. It’s just called a night. “What are you doing Friday night,” they ask. The same thing I do Tuesday night, invariably, but maybe with vigor. Either way I’ll be up tomorrow morning at the same time. This is called a routine.

I like my routine. I like my mornings and nights. Days come and go but they’re surrounded by these immoveable slabs of behavior that occur without the use of willpower. I like that.

Willpower is a polite way to refer to the indignity of doing something you don’t want to do. You can see willpower become indignity if you wear it down. It’s like the pyramids of Egypt, their marble veneer now worn down by erosion, leaving exposed a long-suffering limestone structure.

I imagine this is inevitable, but I still have some willpower left, thanks to my routine. I wake up and somehow my legs know to cart my body to the bathroom. Somehow, after this, my hands know to start some coffee. Before I realize it, I’m at a desk and an email has been sent off.

From this point, now well prepared, a day happens. This is the variable aspect of life. The big movie. Who knows how long it’ll be, or what travails I’ll face, but I will know it has ended when my night routine kicks in. Here, I mentally note a list of people whom it is too late to send a meme to. I look in my pantry for something that won’t bubble all night in my stomach. I’ve had enough dreams about losing teeth that brushing, flossing, and listerine all occur without my expressed consent.

I imagine as I get older these bookends will gradually gain territory. The morning routine will get an addition that takes me far past noon, while my night routine will kick in before dinner is decided.

Eventually, I’ll have perfected my full day, and any aberration to this fine-tuned construct will present as injustice. How dare you barge in at two in the afternoon? This is story time. How do you expect me to come to your dinner party at eight on a Wednesday? And how did the word ‘party’ come back in the lexicon?

But, I’m not quite there yet. I’m in my thirties, as I said. A good portion of my day is variable, chaotic even. The routines I’ve developed are still feeble, yet to be nursed into their full form. And why would I want that yet? After all, I still got a bit of marble on me.

Porkchop

The cupboard was empty except for a box of Shake And Bake sitting like an island in the middle of the shelf, so you walked to the meat market to buy a single porkchop. They asked you multiple times if you really only wanted one, then the cashier didn’t even ask if you wanted the receipt. You paid for the one porkchop with a debit card. It was wrapped in too much wax paper.

You wanted nothing in your possession, not even grocery staples. This was a principle you picked up reading Zero Possessions by Yuval Harris. This was more difficult to accomplish than you imagined.

Walking home, you considered the complication presented by your clothing. You gave most of it away, but could you give all of it away? The problem was the last few articles of clothing. If you were to reach Zero Possessions, truly, you would have to go to some parking lot with a donation bin, fully disrobe, toss your last pair of jeans and sneakers through the chute, and walk away in nothing but a pair of Hanes boxer briefs, hypothetically. You noted that an al fresco green mile through suburbia would probably get filmed at some point and spread like fire on the internet.

“Man Gives Shirt Off His Back… And Pants Off His Ass”

What a legacy to have. Is legacy a possession?

No, legacies are left behind by the dead.

“He Died With Nothing But This Week’s Joke To His Name”.

Coming in from the walk out, you were hit with a contrast. The apartment was empty and you noticed it had the curious feel of move-in day. You walked with impunity, striding where furniture used to be. The vacant living room echoed at least one perfectly intelligible clapback of anything you threw at it (mostly words like ‘fuck’ and fragments from Disney songs). The whole place looked new again, ready for a new tenant.

The Shake And Bake pouch containing the mix was big enough to coat a full porkchop. They added additional bags to the box, which itself was also suited to coating a porkchop, giving you three or four options to coat a porkchop, built-in. You used to buy brown paper sacks in bulk so you could coat a few chops at once, discarding the three or so chop-coating tools offered by the packaging outright. Sometimes, you didn’t even eat all the porkchops you made. Crossing your mind were incessant images of little bags folded package-flat under globs of meat left languishing in the garbage.

You scoffed at the detritus even one damn porkchop makes to coat. Yuval Harris wrote that all the trash made by humans in a year could be stacked to the moon.

You placed the Shake And Bake coated porkchop on the wire rack in the oven – preheated to 425*. You assembled the box and bags and pouch and extra Shake And Bake dust and wax paper over the stove-top’s burner like a tee-pee. You turned the dial to Ignite and let it click a few times before twisting it into Hi. The smell of the gas range kicking on (an overlooked noxious cocktail, studies suggest) brought you back thirty years, nostalgically. You lived with your brother then and literally never cooked your own meal before. The packaging burned away quickly and almost without a trace.

The porkchops cooked while you took off your clothes, one garment at a time, carefully folding them into a pile, like in a department store, on the kitchen floor. You sat bare-assed next to the pile, flanked above by cabinets in one corner and appliances in the other. Everything was obsessively clean and smelled like the chemically formulated approximation of a lemon.

The timer rang and you took the top garment from the pile, a t-shirt, wrapped it around your hand, and pulled the porkchop from the oven. You kept the oven on. There was still the matter of getting rid of your clothes, and incineration seemed to be the way to go. You plopped the porkchop on the ash-strewn lemony counter and refolded the shirt, placing the neat pile of clothes, with both shoes on top, each stowing a sock, heel first, in the oven at 425*.

While your only remaining clothes burned, flames licked out above the oven door, black soot-marks growing at the top of the range like a buzz-cut. You grabbed the porkchop from the counter and bit into its crispy auburn-golden edge, chewing blissfully, watching the flashing tendrils spark through the dark smoke. Those were your clothes in there, you reminded yourself. You chuckled and looked for stories in the billowing shapes, all disintegrating one after the other. You were amused with yourself and overall in good spirits.

The fire eventually tripped the fire alarm. You had to put down the chop bone and take the battery out of the alarm. When the screeching finally stopped, you found space to wonder if burning property you leased, like this apartment, was recommended in Zero Possessions. Smoke crawled along the ceiling. And there was still the matter of that chop bone and your legacy.

Dopaminergic

Your life can be summed up as all that you touch and all the insatiable curiosities you saw through to leave behind. A phone lies in your hand, and a stranger sits next to you on the subway. A notification-buzz shakes in your clammy palm and you ask the stranger for her name. You turn the word ‘Christine’ over in your mind, shucking off memories of a high school gym class partner for this new energizing possibility: plain-faced, reading The Tipping Point in a peacoat, ‘Christine’. Your knees bump into hers at an increasing rate of return. She leaves at the next stop without looking back. The knee-bumps become another curiosity branching out in fractals ahead of you.

Your legs shake as you lift your body up concrete steps, your eyes turned up to a night sky bleached by streetlight. You’re happy to trade the flickering subway platform for neon shop signs and windows as opaque as black ink, wondering if you look better in the harsh lighting. Your hands pat your pockets for wallet-keys-phone, then you lurch briskly down 32nd, threading yourself around the slow and the stopped. A little red hand lights up across the street, so you halt with your feet at the curb’s edge and your little heart chugging it’s engine off the flywheel at full steam. Breath rises out of you in vapors. Your gaze is fixed across the street. Your life can be summed up as all that you touch and all the insatiable curiosities you saw through to leave behind.

When Snow Is General

The first road-sticking snow fell last night. Every year this happens, I wake up, lumber about my morning, and inevitably open a window-blind to dazzlingly offensive light. I rub my eyes and marvel at its softness. I mourn fall, an always too short season. I think about Dubliners, a book that ends in snow falling general all over the living and the dead.

It’s one of those days where everybody posts the same things on social media. If you commute, you’ll complain that people can’t drive. If you stayed in, you’ll post a photo of the snow through the same window that dazzled you. If you don’t do either, you’ll check social media and notice how everyone posts the same thing. You might feel pride or superiority for not posting anything about snow, and you might try to exercise your wit with a post about how everyone is posting about snow. You’ll be driven to remark, even if you don’t care to.

When I go out today, which I am blessed to only have to sparingly, I know I will have a conversation about not being ready for snow. Talking about the weather is as natural as dogs barking at strangers; no season announces itself harder for conversation fodder than winter on arrival.

I just paid ten bucks for a state park pass on my license plate. My cat still begs for me to open the window for him to enjoy fresh air. Are my tires even winter ready? You can call the snow pretty as long as you add ‘but not for long.’

For my part, I uploaded a video to the Stories feature on Instagram of my cat Kyle looking outside. I believe Instagram added a comedic brass stab denoting surprise, which Kyle only mildly expressed in truth. Then I thought about taking some online classes this winter, drinking warm beverages. Then I wrote this.