Influences: skateboarding

It is fun to develop obsessions, fascinations.  By that I mean interests that can be described as “nutritive”, that absorb attention and make your life better.  And at the age of 43, skateboarding has become one of a few such nutritive obsessions. It is because of the anarchic nature of at least the way the videos are filmed and the attitudes of the skater’s - I really liked to hear skateboarding described as the demimonde of outsiders.  I am struggling to deal with my status - do I embrace my inner outsider or do I hide it, repress it in some way?  Up to now it has been the latter especially since I started at the cemetery. In an easily approachable sense my job is outre with the routine placing of human corpses or ashes in the ground or in columbarium wall niches.  My wife feels it is neat and I do too - it makes me comfortable in a place in society that is necessary and in some ways (intentionally?) overlooked, shuttling bodies off to these repositories, a social need for the post-death respect that we hope we all may merit. 

So I’m in what is an outsider profession - is that right?  What of my colleagues at the cemetery? I would say they definitely are unique and wild in their own outsider-like ways.  I will leave it up to them if they would actually regard themselves as outsiders. Dudes down to have a good time and keep things “ladish” on the job.  And that is an aspect of the lives that skateboarding videos capture - a community with smiles on their faces, allies in something outside of the mainstream - yet a society at peace with itself.  I accept that mirror to my own life and I accept that in my private life this vibe is modified yet still resonant - off work I am a different person yet still one who revels in being different. 

I’m sure skateboarding has attracted many, many paeans, odes, etc.  And I seek to add to that because, when you are moved by something - especially unexpectedly moved - you want to understand it.  And just as with graffiti - that fellow traveller of skateboarding - it only counts when it is seen. So I might publish this - always a debate about what to share. 

I feel the pull of sport and consider myself to be an amatuer athlete.  Whatever psychological needs are satisfied by my athletic endeavors I get similar, sympathetic satisfaction through watching sport.  American football, basketball, baseball. Even tennis, hockey and rugby I have spent time in front of the tube watching. But no sport have I watched more of than world football/soccer.  I’ve played a bit of footy - one of the main reasons I like soccer, along with for me, its innate watchability, is that I look like the guys playing - they are runners. Yes, they perform a string of near-miraculous touches and passes in a match but this comes on a foundation of mobility with the more speed the better. 

Skateboarding’s recent appeal must be similar, that I see myself as close to the prototypical skater.  And I’ve skated a bit too so, as with soccer, I have a sense of the difficulty involved and thus how hard it is for a football forward to score a goal or a skater lands a difficult trick - both are movement-based and both rely on fancy footwork.  Bodies in soccer, skateboarding, running must conform to demands of speed and balance: a certain grace is attained, success relying on this grace. In running this is seen in the runner’s gait, how they move and how they meter their effort over distance.  In soccer this is seen in the timing of runs and the player’s deftness in bringing the ball under control. In skateboarding this grace is seen in the body positioning, how the arms provide balance as the skater ollies up to a rail and then complete some complicated board-flipping trick when they dismount. 

It has been slightly jarring to come back to skateboarding after a couple of decades and hear the skaters describe what they do as “tricks” - sympathetic with my interest in magic, I suppose.  A series of tricks to unlock a goal, a recorded video segment that lands a skater sponsorships, the rolling and clacketing of skatewheels an incantation. If magic is intended to change the world in accordance with one’s will then what is skateboarding?  Whether a busy city streetscape or a graffitied swimming pool in some atrophied suburbia, skateboarding is a melding of a person with an environment - skateboarding is a re-interpretation of the built environment, an altering of the landscape to suit one’s will. 

When I see a skater do some trick that utilizes an odd, slopey bit of infrastructure I marvel at how a bit of canal or sidewalk or whatever it may be takes on a new meaning, a meaning different than the people that designed it and built it intended.  Handrails are now urban downhills. Stairs become chutes seemingly purpose-built for providing a corridor to sail through. Unseen back alleys with loading docks and concrete poured to suit commercial needs are now gathering sites where the skateboard crowd meet to share acts of bravado and serve each other as surrogate families in lieu of perhaps problematic or non-existent real families.  The demimonde of the outsider, the outsiders who re-create the world in their image. 

  

Old or new, normality is our home

What is happening to the average American?  What about the exceptional American?  What about me?  What is happening to all of us with what is going on now?  Changes to the waist lines of all those successfully sequestered.  Americans staring at their hoardings, their hoarding staring back and saying “Eat me!”  I’ve seen an increase in people outside recreating which i assume means these are people whose jobs allow for working from home - professionals who I see riding their bikes on Hill Road.  And what of those that have been laid off - are they also self-quarantining only waiting for the arrival of unemployment checks, their subscriptions to various streaming services about to run out - and the free previews of all the services that “stepped-up” to give these people something to do.  But weighing on their minds at some level they must be wondering when the freebies will be revoked. What then?  Where is the money going to come from? The other side of the paywall.

I’m glad to get out as much as I have.  One thing I take note of is a hope that the US will return to normal.  I say this because of my desire for stability for my family and I ask my ancestors to help protect us … and to make us stronger.  I want to go out and eat with my family when we feel like it.  I want to take my kid to new bike parks.  I want to buy beer from Jackson’s without feeling like I’m imposing on the clerk’s health.

We will return to normality - normality is our happy place.  It may be a different normal or a new normal but it will be our ever-present home room soon enough.  What will change? It is being studied right now.  A social science experiment is being conducted on a mass scale.  As we seek to return to a semblance of the old normal, pundits are already asking what that will look like.  And linked to that “what” is a “when” - if our attitudes of proper social intercourse are being altered then when will it be deemed satisfactory to sit in an office, venture out to restaurants, or attend sporting events?

When will we be ready to pollute more?  This is a topic being studied and commented on right now, roads populated by essential commuters - if the old normal traffic can be allowed again it will surely return.  If people can live less simply in order to satisfy manufactured needs they will and though pollution and consumption are kind of looked at as negatives they really symbolize success - in our society - and will absolutely be abided.

The ruling, what, cabal?, are still ruling.  I say (and don’t just about all of us?) I want a return to (the old) normal, that place of stability, that place of the known and somewhat predictable.  And this desire does also accept some negatives associated with the way “business was done” in pre-pandemic days.  Not just things like pollution and materialism but other things that more completely exemplify the social structure, that are sadly more essential features of the system.  And their essentiality/essentialness is marked by a commensurate level of opaqueness, hiddenness, things partially visible but mostly existing in the shadows, the American Shadow in a Jungian sense.  I.e. the air we breathe.

These are the meaner parts of our civilization, the parts that are discussed in broad philosophical-religious-psychological terms yet manifest in very real ways.  Progress becomes pollution and free competition becomes gross materialism.  And this “becoming” has now “become”.  Progress is pollution, making money is a desire to wastefully spend.  I remember the Kyoto Protocol, in the 1990’s, how the US would not be subject to measures to protect the environment because it “would seriously harm the economy of the United States”.  Two decades since then and during those intervening years the knowledge of damage to the environment has increased while the US as a money maker (in different proportions) for all classes has flourished.

We know but we still do it.  We deny facing this contradiction and place it in the bag of shadows.  We then lose the ability to talk about these issues and cannot find the words.  But perhaps not finding the words is actually a skill.  Perhaps it is a good thing.  We block out the things that challenge us and settle into our “normal”.  Which is feeding the shadow.  This is the structure of the world.  This is the social structure. Our system of government.  Our system of finance.  Our system of acceptable mores and conventions.  Our fallible human natures cast upon the American landmass.

The dancers in the wings

The dancers in the wings

“We are in the middle of a coronavirus pandemic right now.  Three billion people are on lockdown so hopefully we understand there is some bigger issues involved now” - Dan Carlin

The big topic is the big topic.  How much government influence should there be? Like prising apart an atom or like trying to look at the back of your own head.

To my mind some sort of sea change is necessary and I’m being uber-utopian here.  The current shit going on would require a shift in the public, private, corporate segments of society - all of society.  The shit we are in dependent on mutual cooperation, a confederacy of dunces. New, sea change-inducing mechanisms may be put in place.  New ways of doing things that would symbolize and make real new attitudes that would seek to make a more stable world. At the government level, say, a pledge would be made to be a True Public Servant, to dutifully uphold the Public Good.

And “the public good” would be different, the current covetous spirit exorcised - and now may as well say it - my values would be the ones by which most lived by - less cars, more travel, no giant Winnebagos - and damn, maybe hard work would somehow be de-incentivized and the whole thing collapse.  Whatever. I will be the solitary philosopher king.

The meanness that lets the average American support policies of genocide reverberates through our American life.  Meanness with its best friend and travel partner Stupidity.  I’m for a more engaged and informed populace. Less bad television, more history books, diminished valorization of the automobile and an increase in muscle-powered pursuits, running, hiking, biking and rowing.  The mountains being so popular that climbing reservations years out would be made - smartly peopled nature a good thing. More smart engagement, less stupid meanness.

And too a vow in corporations to care aoub the society at large that this business wants to go about acting in a corporeal way within.

Alas, I feel the current shit isa  manifestation of the trained inability of masses of people to actively self reflect and make changes.  This obviously goes beyond seeking change through current political channels yet in the mass-mind the dance between Republican and Democrat is the only dance capable of being perceived.  Change must come from without and that means coming from the world of the unseen. Republicans and Democrats dance in the spotlight as though the spotlight was more a projector generating reality.  Change exists in the shadows among the other dancers in the wings. Occluded from the current reality tunnel.

The current shit has already had a narrative placed on it, those that have a little more intelligence (i.e. those that are in positions of power and have money) seeing what may extend the status quo/their existence.  The rich and powerful are suffering at a level they deem acceptable - not to villainize this class really, just noticing the vibe right now. We don’t blame that class, instead we blame the government.

The plebeian counterpart to that pledge of the politicians are mass movements, people taking to the streets, people deciding what the parameters of allowable obedience-disobedience are, voting with the public presence of their bodies.  And, interestingly, currently as we are in the shit of this virus the main response is to ban gatherings of more that ten people and urging people to just outright stay inside. Not deliberate, maybe more an artifact of actual real treatment fo the Covid-19 pandemic: it's not like some critical mass was about to be achieved.  Current (pre-pandemic) public policy concerns weren’t near to even getting close to the threshold of what would make Americans take to the streets. 

My Ultra-running Summer or: How I learned to balance family, running and racing


by Chris Chigbrow


Groveling at Mercury’s feet: a dream, chaotic pre-waking thoughts. Before I wake I have that feeling of being pursued in a race: someone catching up to you as you approach the finish line. Not a nightmare but . . .


I wake and look at my phone 3:57am. Once again I wake before my alarm goes off. I slide off my bed and into a sitting position on the floor. The plantar fasciitis stretch my podiatrist instructed me to do doesn’t seem to help much but I do it anyway – it is part of the ritual now. A ritual gesture too, I lay my head on the bed, smell the warm soporific smells, listen to the breath and sleep-stirrings of my wife. There is the soreness in my feet as I stand. A few ginger steps as I adjust my balance and try and make my feet happy.


Running is like a religion: it has taken over a decade to get to my current level of devotion. I turn the coffee maker on and soon enjoy, once again, that sweet tasting rocket fuel; dare I say coffee is a sacrament. And then out the door for a morning 10.


***


The appeals of running are many. You may enjoy the fitness gains, the weight loss/management, or the increase in overall health. I love to eat so running helps justify whatever intake of pasta and beer I find myself craving although those cravings have been moderated through running. The social aspect too: all of a sudden an avowed introvert like myself having a social circle, going on group-runs now a thing. And there is the aesthetic, the things you see, trails and city scenes, odd moments like startling a coyote in the hills or the spontaneous creation of an Eadweard Muybridge motion picture produced by your running-shadow cast by auto headlights against fence slats.


I’ve described it as a compulsion, my desire to run, which is convenient shorthand for a web of needs and desires happening on conscious and subconscious levels. From a pure physical level there are the endorphins: Oh. Man. The endorphins. Speed is fun and so is that connection to your environment that running lets you attain. For millennia – via running – man has been able to approximate the whirling, mind bending landscape-in-motion which Modernist painters sought to capture after the introduction of trains. This is why cruising through a forest, every footstrike in tune with the terrain, trees whizzing by, is so viscerally satisfying. A heady combination, those sensations together with those stimulated parts of the brain.


But these feels are available at 5 or 10 miles a week, through being adequately, minimally conditioned to run. Why run 30, 40, 50 miles – or more – a week? The longer distances – in training, races, or projects – is where conflict with my loved ones was created. I’m 41 years old. I’m married. I have two kids. I’ve got a full time job and – gasp! – I have a few other interests besides running. Balance? Yes, a balance was required. And reaching that balance wasn’t easy. Wait. Let me rephrase that: reaching that balance is a constant task, something I’ve learned is perhaps even more difficult than getting those desired miles.


***


I was caught unawares when my wife confronted me about my running. But it only took a few seconds to completely understand. It was one of those things that simultaneously had to be brought up but which is so awkward a good time really never comes up. I was conciliatory – honestly conciliatory – our track records were littered with passive aggressive interludes, casual trespasses registered and abided until later coming to a head. I recognized the confrontation for how necessary and timely it was. I had finished a race a few days before and now was expressing my desire to run a local ultra, the Resort to Rock. The phrase “not spending time with the kids” was spoken and I understood and agreed. A metaphysical mirror was held up in front of me and I mustered enough humility to take a glimpse. I would learn that there are different kinds of being and that just because I was home with fam didn’t necessarily make that time quality time. I would have to look at running – which has become a key part of my identity – and make a change. 41 years old and still learning.


And of course I said I still wanted to run the ultra.


***


Full disclosure: during my ultra-running summer I ran only one ultra. Yes, just one, but also a trail marathon. But that previous spring I adequately pre-funked, running 3 ultras in three days, the last day covering some 40 miles.


Owyhee County – the southwest corner of Idaho – encompasses some of the most remote, inaccessible land in the US. It is the second largest chunk of wilderness that is not in a National Park. The utilitarian, wedge-shape of the county belies the rugged, varying terrain, high desert cut with canyons. The idea to run across this amazing yet forbidding land was conceived by friend/running partner Micah Lauer who is a science educator. He painstakingly devised a route that would see us cross the remote and rugged county from south to north, 116 miles all told. The start date was early May 2018.


Describing this plan to most people – to non-runners – garnered the usual comments one receives when you express the desire to a) run and b) to run distances longer than a 5k. “You’re going to do what?”, “Why?”, “You’re crazy”. However, with the Owyhee Crossing, I did hear the unusual addition of “Don’t die”, an awkward but validating indicator of worth coming from my boss.


There is something different and special about having your wife give you the “You’re crazy” line. Of course there are all the endearing, loving sentiments at play. These are the sentiments that make her giving you the “Don’t die” line all the more poignant. Training would take me away from my family for hours each week, dying in the high desert would take me away forever. Training for the Crossing therefore carried with it a weighted imperative. My wife knows that me doing such – crazy as they are – adventures are a bedrock of my sanity. So agreeing that I could attempt the crossing was also an implicit acceptance of the time needed to prepare.


***


My training proved adequate, the Crossing successful, a success in many ways. For one, Micah and I delved into those difficult mental states that adventure often necessitates. And we emerged emboldened and unscathed. We saw ranch ruins and rattlesnakes, a bobcat and a set of monster bull elk antlers. Through bushwhacking and following faint and growing-fainter jeep tracks – tracks being reclaimed by wilderness-designated sagebrush – we followed an historic path.


My wife was impressed, perhaps dutifully so. After the Crossing my weekly mileage dropped but after three weeks I was back, averaging 65 mi/week for a period spanning late May and into early June. I picked a race to run, the Dirty Dog Marathon, figuring that my fitness was high enough to have fun. But, truth be told, I didn’t want to just have fun . . . I wanted to be a top 10 finisher. I wanted to have my name show up on the best results section of UltraSignup. I didn’t want to just finish it, I wanted to crush it.


***


I mean, like I said, we all run for unique, personal reasons. I didn’t get into running to create conflict and by and large I would say running has invited positives into my life. But running does take time and the boundaries between amateur/semi-pro/expert/pro are all-too fluid. Like anything you get out of running what you put in. And also, like anything, you must engage/indulge in the activity in a manner that balances with your life.


Balance might come easy to some folks. It may come naturally or with only a modicum of conscious will. But for me balance has proven to be subconscious alchemy, the domain of dark rationality and the un-scientific. 50 miles a week seemed healthy: a challenge, sure, but still possible to assimilate into my life. You won’t be going pro with that mileage but, if you include a healthy dose of elevation gain in those miles, you will be able to compete in various longer race environments.


I finished 5th in the Dirty Dog, had fun and hobnobbed with some of the local running royalty. It was an awesome time and before I left the parking lot I was wondering what I was going to do next. I kept the 50 mile average up and eyed running once again the Foothills XC12k in early August. Summer was winding down and the need to run was still with me. It was after the 12k (PB and 10th overall) that the discussion with my wife was had. Two weeks after the 12k was the Resort to Rock 50k. In my sweaty, beer-soothed, post-race state after the 12k I decided to run the Resort to Rock. I knew I had the fitness to finish, but – in my heart of hearts – I knew I could do good. My only prior 50k was an over 6 hour affair. I would go on to snag 4th place overall in this one and, like at the Dirty Dog, have the winner hook my up with a beer. The little things. So cool.


But the discussion with my wife had happened. Moving forward, how much would I run? How much should I run? How could running fit harmoniously into my life?


***


In the two weeks between the 12k and the ultra I tapered – and reflected. Looking back at the summer I could see the struggle being played out. We kept up on hikes, camping trips and family outings. But I saw that I pushed the accommodations that my family granted me too far. I melded family and running, my wife and kids coming to the finish line of a couple of races. They had fun and I think it is important for the kids to experience that kind of positive environment. I feel like I was close to my family during the summer but quantity doesn’t equal quality. When my wife said that running was taking away time spent with the kids she was not only referring to actual time spent away but also to me being present while at home. I would cajole my fam into early bed times. I would be tired and inattentive in the evening. Planning on an early run the next morning I would fixate on the clock: my schedule had become the schedule for us all.


After the Resort to Rock 50k I settled down. Now I make the effort to be attentive when I help on 2nd grade homework problems. I don’t sweat it if we get to bed late, even if I have a run planned for the next morning. And if 50 miles is not going to happen any given week then that is fine. Family, running and life: a balance is possible, it just takes work.





Things go in cycles and perhaps next year will see me escalating my mileage and preparing for new projects and picking new race targets. Whatever project or race I move forward with I will be forearmed with what I’ve learned this summer. But this lesson learned was not spontaneous. It was a product of talking with my wife and soul searching on my own. Family life and running life, running life and family life. Like some master-control graphic equalizer for my reality, the balances are constantly being adjusted.

Book Review: A God in the Shed by J-F. Dubeau (book put down, unfinished)

So, still on a horror fiction kick and wanted to stay international (this time Canadian) after reading the wonderful I Am Behind You by John Ajvide Lindqvist (Sweden).  Perhaps it was because Lindqvist's book was fresh in my mind that The God in the Shed by J-F. Dubeau disappointed so: to the point that I unfortunately did not finish reading it.  Alas, not to speak entirely ill of the work - very soon I will describe my putting the book down unfinished (kind of bizarre for me), a book that I purchased, nevertheless - the representation of the titular god was intriguing.  Indeed the characters interacting with the god had some goose bump moments which are the sensations I love in literature (esp. horror lit.).

But, from the start, things were not to my taste.  A town plagued by a serial killer for decades - the result of a man trying to keep the god at bay which would have prevented more bloodshed - was too fantastic.  Tied to this is the beleaguered yet loved police chief who worked so hard to crack each murder/disappearance even though he was aware of the supernatural underpinnings of the towns societal structure.  I just wasn't buying/could not maintain my sensation of disbelief.

What finished it off and which was another source of distaste from the start was the employing of children to take part in the narrative, high school kids and younger, the death and desecration of a kindergarten-aged kid an early lynch pin of the story.  This book has some gory scenes which is fine if it works as it did in Lindqvist's I Am Behind You.  The Swede included dismemberment, vicious hate crimes, and live humans getting melted by acid in his book and it all worked, the stomach-churning placated by well-wrought prose.

The discussion between the middle-school aged characters as they walked out to the shed finished me off - unnecessary prattle that should have been culled.  A novel is of course an accomplishment and I salute Dubeau and wish him further success.  As someone who is over the age of 40 I find the need to maximize my time, to get the most out of each moment and this book, though I made an effort, didn't make the cut.

Book Review: Winners Take All: The Elite Charade of Changing the World by Anand Giridharadas

Anand Giridharadas’ Winners Take All is a very good book that serves up a lesson, one that — to me — is not manifest within the pages itself. The mission of the book is to explore the attitudes and behaviors of the elite and that term — elite — loses any nebulous qualities as Giridharadas goes to the source, interviewing heiresses and philanthropists who find personal turmoil in how their relationship to money affects the world. He talks to financiers in-training who are choosing to join the system while also trying to act on grave reservations they hold about that very same system. He highlights the Clinton Global Initiative’s (CGI) culpability in contributing to negative effects on the world and even interviews former President Clinton himself.

And that is the crux of Giridharadas’ argument, the point of the book — to unpack how things seemingly so integral to the functioning of the world are also — and more importantly so — negative. Now, let me say that discerning how the success of something like the CGI can be another person’s evil is a delicate matter. But Giridharadas succeeds, spotlighting how “marketworld” — the winners — have used their power to limit how government institutes social programs, instead taking on the task of social betterment themselves. And it has worked.

But perception of this status quo, while not the purview of the book — indeed, Giridharadas explicitly meets the elite on their own turf, gauging their attitudes — does not get discussed. The populace, the 99%, or better to say the middle class and everyone below, is a radically ineffectual blob intentionally (in my mind) advertised to by their betters: the message is a continuation and amplification of the Horatio Alger myth. The Americans who would benefit from a change that the elites will not make are not even capable of formulating an understanding of their situation.

“Whereof one cannot speak, one must remain silent” Wittgenstein said and I argue this is applicable in the context of politics as it relates to topics like the brotherhood of man and the global community: seeking justice on these fundamental economic issues is — again, to me — decisively rendered ineffectual based on the inertia of the — of our — system. The same error is made when talking of an ideal libertarian world where some fiscally conservative yet socially liberal regime somehow rules. 

Libertarianism generally is connected with the right and on the left we have Communism, the inevitable outcome of an outgrowth of Capitalism, a system that will rule the future and justly dictates action today. Libertarianism likewise, based on an idealized view of its principles, argues its own importance in making decisions today.

Giridharadas presents an elite who’ve managed to squelch dissent and, though it is nonsensical, are the victims of their own success. Which means they are not victims — they have successfully done as Fredrick Gates, advising John D. Rockefeller, said to do: “Your fortune is rolling up, rolling up like an avalanche! You must keep up with it! You must distribute it faster than it grows”. Giridharadas provides this quote, a word of advice to the successful in an age when public resentment of the rich was being channeled into populist movements.

Today that word of advice is being heeded more than ever — where are the popular movements decry economic injustice? They are there, don’t get me wrong, but — sad and difficult to say — popular action is diverted into so-called social justice movements and not movements seeking economic justice. Done with the complicity of the media, the media an ally to the powerful for many reasons not least that they are owned by the powerful.

Is there hope? I think of Winston Smith’s thoughts from George Orwell’s 1984, words that have stuck with me since I first read the book in high school:
“ ‘If there is hope,’ wrote Winston, ‘it lies in the proles.’
If there was hope, it MUST lie in the proles, because only there in those swarming disregarded masses, 85 per cent of the population of Oceania, could the force to destroy the Party ever be generated. The Party could not be overthrown from within."

That the impetus for meaningful change will not come from the winners is the between-the-lines message of Giridharadas’ book. Today the winners have taken all, the proles have been captured.

Book Review: I Am Behind You by John Ajvide Lindqvist

Despite graphic scenes and tragically well-rounded characters John Ajvide Lindqvist's I Am Behind You (titled Himmelstrand in the original Swedish) will remain for me a surrealist novel.  The obvious dream-like expanse in which the characters wake to find themselves notwithstanding Lindqvist's work dwells on the heavier themes that inspired various surrealist's darker dreams.  Cue Luis Bunuel's Un Chien Andalou for an exempli gratia.  And I do shy away from violence.  However, even as Lindqvist references films like Hostel - abhorrent torture porn - and presents some horrific scenes, these parts are not what linger in my memory, instead existing as necessary moves to get to the satisfying end.

Trite as it may sound the characters prove to be their own worst enemies, something Lindqvist is slow to reveal - the creatures/entities/things that prey on the people do so with the characters consent albeit via some mindfuckery.  At the end the morphing monsters along with the other zombie creatures whom they have a sanguine symbiotic relationship with prove to simply be part of a bizarre ecosystem, a - yes - surreal ecosystem.

John Ajvide Lindqvist (photo by Teemu Rajala)

The concept of "high strangeness" is one I've come to love: use The Mothman Prophecies as a primer, the book and not the movie.  In many ghost/supernatural/religious/ufo experiences there often exists an element of weirdness - a quirkiness to the sundry encounters that seem to be artifacts of a world radically foreign to ours overlaping at a 90 degree angle.  I Am Behind You captures this vibe, describing an arc that is complete yet which contains elements of the nonsensical, a dream-logic that the reader is not privy too.

As some reviewers have said, this book can stand alone but is part of a trilogy.  Some have said that the second novel, I Always Find You, would be helpful to read even before I Am Behind You.  I'm looking forward to reading the next one but almost want to wait a year or so just to let I Am Behind You continue to seep in.