I have a new face.
Reintroducing myself and Castles in the Sky
You may have signed up for Castles in the Sky because you read Do the weirdest thing that feels right or A Pilgrimage for Book People. I have taken time off for medical reasons this summer and have been posting irregularly. This is an essay to catch up, reintroduce myself and the blog, and set expectations for the future.
Several years ago, I got this crazy idea that I should make YouTube videos. I ordered a cheap tripod off of Amazon and hooked my phone to it. Then, I recorded myself telling a story in my backyard. I filmed myself in different chairs wearing different shirts and hairstyles to simulate a kind of one-man show.
The story was about one time when I was 11 or 12 and I visited a kid’s house and his Dad told me, sincerely, that he worked in the world’s greatest lawnmower repair shop. That story had always stuck with me. The video was about purpose and how everyone should seek their superlative–what do you want to be the world’s greatest at?
It was a good video save for one thing–my diction was almost unintelligible. It was hard for me to even write captions for the video because I had trouble understanding what I was saying. I flashed back to a painful memory from sixth grade when I was answering a question in math class. The alpha-kid, Stephen, who was like a year older than us all so he hit puberty first and was smarter (and is now a surgeon in NYC–go figure) turned around to look at me and said, “Jesus! Just swallow!”
Growing up, my excitement, tendency to slur through my words, and a “sloshy” voice made me hard to understand. My family and friends had an inside joke about being able to “speak Charlie.” Editing the YouTube video was an uncomfortable form of smacking up against that cold hard reality. If I was going to make videos, I needed to speak clearly enough to get my message across. So, for the second time in my life, I went to a speech therapist.
The first time I went to a speech therapist I was twelve. My Mom took me to a school we paid taxes for but I didn’t go to, because my school didn’t have a speech therapist. In that unfamiliar library I would only visit once in my life, this nice older woman said I had a “tongue thrust.”
If you’re reading this right now and you’re like most people, your mouth is probably closed and your tongue is gently pressing against the top of your mouth as you breathe through your nose. Because you’ve done this unthinkingly your whole life, your tongue has built up muscles doing this. So when you chew or swallow, your tongue’s muscles push it up against the roof of your mouth.
The speech therapist I saw when I was twelve explained that, because I had terrible allergies my entire childhood, I couldn’t breathe through my nose. My tongue never developed the “go up” muscles and so it would “thrust” the back of my teeth rather than the roof of my mouth when I chewed or swallowed. This gave me buck teeth, which was all I thought would happen at the time. She advised me to hold a lifesaver at the top of my mouth with my tongue until it dissolved a few times a day to build that muscle. I never did that but I did wear braces for five years to fix my buck teeth.
Twenty-four years later, when I went to my second speech therapist, she did a small battery of tests. She informed me I probably had pain in my upper middle back, was a mouth breather, and likely had tight hips, especially my left. She explained she could deduce all these things from my bite and posture of my head. She asked what I wanted and I was totally honest and said I wanted better elocution and breathing so I could make YouTube videos.
The gist of her response was that it would be unethical of her to treat me when what I needed was a procedure called double-jaw surgery. I fretted that I wasn’t interested in a cosmetic procedure, plus my insurance probably wouldn’t cover an elective surgery that wasn’t medically necessary. She explained that I was a textbook case: if I wasn’t a candidate for medically necessary double-jaw surgery, nobody was. She said it wasn’t just cosmetic, but that my bite would affect my breathing, voice, swallowing, and sleep–and that I probably had undiagnosed sleep apnea and many other problems I didn’t know about. She said fixing my bite would fix my sleep and diction and may even have knock-on effects like weight loss.
Two sleep studies, three doctors, a dentist, an orthodontist, and a surgeon later–she was right about everything.
I got braces to get my teeth ready for surgery. I started losing weight to reduce complications during the intense surgery. The surgeon spent almost a year prepping me for surgery. I scheduled my work and life around the procedure and recovery. I had it scheduled and had to cancel it twice due to complications in my schedule and with the orthodontic preparation.
But finally, on May 7th, I went under general anesthesia for about six hours to have double-jaw surgery.
For most of my adult life, I thought I had an underbite. In other words, I thought my lower jaw was too far out. And that was true: functionally, my lower jaw went out further than my upper jaw. However, the truth was that my lower jaw wasn’t overdeveloped, my upper jaw was underdeveloped.
When you breathe through your nose, the slight pressure of your tongue which you feel on the roof of your mouth accumulates over time and and gently pushes your upper jaw to where it needs to be. Mine had never done that. So, my upper jaw was “recessed.”
I was lucky to be in Houston with a world-renowned expert who’s done this surgery over 1,500 times—because it was a doozy. He had to cut apart my lower jaw in several places to square it off, then cut apart my upper jaw into three pieces, widen it (literally widening the ‘angle’ that my teeth separated at), and move it 10 millimeters forward.
Recovery was a beast. I was on an all-liquid diet and not allowed to do any strenuous activity where I might clench my jaw. Forget jogging or lifting weights. I had to be very mindful that I didn’t flex my jaw muscles even when doing everyday things like picking up my (toddler) daughter or tying my shoelaces.
The plan was for the liquid diet to be six weeks, but in the fifth week, I got a freak stomach virus that gave me an infection in my face. That infection led to a four-and-a-half-day hospital stay and another three weeks of the all-liquid diet. I was cleared to eat solid foods and exercise but needed one more procedure to remove the hardware that had been infected. On the week that the final procedure was planned, I got COVID-19 and it had to be pushed back several weeks.
Which brings me to today, three days after the final procedure. In a few more days, God willing, I will get confirmation from the surgeon that everything was amazing, and life is “back to normal.” The catch is that I don’t know what normal is.
The journey of this surgery started because I wanted to make YouTube videos. I didn’t have any specific goal in mind, I just wanted to increase the surface area for luck in my life, to make art, and to put myself out there. This predates Castles in the Sky or the blog before it. Now, several years later, I’ve had this surgery and recovery hanging around my neck the whole time.
I’ve lived and discarded dozens of potential lives waiting to get this surgery and recover. I’ve put off so many things, waiting to start or investigate until “after I get that big surgery.” At some point, this surgery grew in my mind into a watershed experience. I thought the six weeks of recovery would give me a lot of time to contemplate and decide what was next.
What a fool I was.
I was either in intense pain or in outer space from painkillers for the first few weeks. Afterward, I was frustrated that I couldn’t eat and grew tired of drinking all my calories. It was a big switch from watching my diet to being worried I couldn’t even feed myself enough to stay awake on the couch while the bones in my face knit back together. And despite having nothing but free time, the truth is that when your body needs all that energy to rebuild bones and you need to re-learn to chew, it’s hard to muster the time, energy, or desire to do the mindful journaling you’d planned on which was going to tell you the direction of your life.
It was exactly like John Lennon said. “Life is what happens when you’re busy making other plans.” I thought all that time I was leaving space open for something big and new to come along, but the real responsibilities in my life were already filling whatever emptiness I had imagined.
If I wanted to do a crazy pivot or start some intense new venture post-surgery, I have no idea how I’d find space for it now: I still have my day job, my wife and daughter, this blog, the family bookstore, a new baby on the way, a second Substack I’m launching soon, and a novel I’m working on in the background.
I started this blog because I thought it would help accelerate me along in my two biggest aspirations in life: to be a “pillar of my community” and to participate in “the great conversation.” I think that this surgery has been something of a mixed blessing in complementing that purpose.
On the one hand, preparing for the surgery gave me a false sense of “now” and ‘then,” as if the “now” of the life I was considering before surgery would be fundamentally different from the “then” when I was through it. In reality, we don’t pass through time that way. It’s not fungible. All the hand-wringing and auspiciousness came down to nothing and I realized great thresholds are just door jambs until you step across them.
On the other hand, finally getting through the surgery gave me the precious gift of now. It made me realize that thinking about doing something cool isn’t doing something cool, and that the life of the mind, the retreat into planning and deliberation–all of that is only worthwhile if you make a habit of re-engaging, of doing, even of–gasp–failing at things every once in a while.
And so, rather than some huge rebrand or recalibration, I wanted to break the seal with this circuitous essay telling you where I’ve been, then take this time to reintroduce myself and let you know that there’s a lot of stuff coming your way in the next few weeks and months.
It is kind of funny that I’ve been writing this blog for over two years, seen decent growth and success, and yet the whole time I’ve been wondering what to call it, and how to market it, and asking myself what I’m doing here. It turns out I’ve always known what I was doing, I was just waiting to see it phrased the right way. But rather than keep waiting, I’m going to throw it out there now.
I am writing books. Castles in the Sky is where I share essays, short fiction, and other thoughts on the way to finishing and publishing those books.
Castles in the Sky is a work in progress, and I think that’s what it will always be. I thought it funny that the first YouTube video I ever tried to make was about my friend’s Dad who worked at the world’s greatest lawnmower repair shop, and how that kind of self-knowledge and confidence in his mission had stuck with me my whole life.
I think that I do want to be “the greatest in the world at what I’m doing,” but the mission I am serving here is too bold to be able to tie up in a neat bow. Rather than wait for the perfect words, I’ll use the words that work now and adjust if I find better ones later. Taking all that time off to recover from surgery made me realize that, when it comes to my life’s work, I have a choice to either try for something less or sacrifice some legibility. I think my mission is too important, so I’d rather risk being misunderstood.
That being said, this is what I’m doing:
The premise of Castles in the Sky is that there is a tremendous number of people under assault by nihilistic confusion, existential boredom, and intellectual loneliness. I think that the cure for this is a combination of earnestness, curiosity, and boldness. I want people to see these principles in action so that they can improve their own lives and, in turn, the world.
As grand as that mission may seem, I am taking it on in the small way I understand how. I am sharing stories from my life, writing fiction, and exploring topics popular and obscure so that people can see the virtuous cycle between the life of the mind and the life well lived.
People are lacking meaning and context. By taking obscure or grandiose things and making them interesting and relatable, or taking mundane things and making them profound, I want to help people feel a little less alone and a little less meaningless.
This is why I originally wanted to make YouTube videos. This is why I’m writing books. And this is the impulse that animates everything I write and make. I had this silly idea that somehow after surgery was over, “what I was doing” would be so clear, but it turns out I knew all along. I just needed to say it out loud.
And so expect a lot from Castles in the Sky in the coming weeks.
Here’s some stuff you may have missed or stuff to read if you are new.
Stuff you may have missed:
Living the Questions, Reading the Clown-Arounds is an extremely long (5,000 words), extremely niche discussion of a series of children’s books from the 80s, and what they taught me about curiosity and embracing the profound in the trivial. If you want to skip to the end, click here to read just the final section, which functions as an essay on its own.
Have you quit social media? Do you want to? is a VERY short essay that is more like a survey. I’m writing a review on one of my favorite books, and if you’ve quit social media or have opinions to share, I’d like to hear them.
Beyond Food and Travel: Remembering Anthony Bourdain is a love letter to one of my idols and how his legacy continues to influence me in new and different ways as I age into myself.
What We Have Given Up in Exchange for This Limitless Bounty is a discussion of my weird phase and the crappy grocery store down the street from my house, and how idiosyncratic stuff like this is harder to come by but still very precious for a good life. (Note: I look back on this essay fondly despite the fact I was pretty tired and doped up when I conceived the idea and wrote it.)
Here’s some older stuff to read if you are new here:
A Dirge for Eastern Redwoods is a meditation on family and how who came before us shapes who we are, told through the lens of an homage to the extinct tree that built America.
A Requiem for Sean in D Minor is a lyrical reflection on friendship, shame, addiction, helping the ones we love, and living with complex regrets. (TW: addiction, suicide.)
A Pilgrimage for Book People is a long essay that is part travelogue, part love letter, part eulogy—a chronicle of an annual road trip my family used to take to America’s largest secondhand book sale.
Do the weirdest thing that feels right is a short essay about one of my most useful heuristics for making decisions and being true to yourself.
Great transformation, Charlie. Glad you're feeling good.
Love it Charlie. Sounds like you’ve found the path right under your feet, which is exactly where it should be. Looking forward to coming along for the ride.