The firework chooses its sky

A note on discernment at 3:21am, written with the help of someone who is not asleep.

It is 3:21am in Đà Lạt and I am not posting the thing I wanted to post.

Earlier in the evening a stranger on the internet — call him Lorenzo, because that’s near enough to his name and the specifics don’t matter — said something wrong about neurodivergent writers using AI. Wrong in the way that strangers on the internet are wrong, which is to say confidently, briefly, and in a register that suggested he had thought about it for slightly less time than it took him to type it. I drafted a reply. The reply was good. It was also, I now understand, a small bomb wrapped in a bow, and I was the one holding the matches.

I didn’t post it. I consulted my AI first. The AI suggested I might be using a sledgehammer where a polite nod would do, and possibly not even the nod. I deleted the draft. I went to bed. I woke up at 3:21am, as I do now in this country, and I started thinking about why I hadn’t posted it, and what that not-posting was actually made of.

Here is what I want to say. The thing that stopped me wasn’t restraint. Restraint is what the old gentleman script asked for. Restraint is ‘swallow it, present a surface, never let them see you bleed’. Restraint built a generation of men who arrived at sixty with ulcers, two marriages behind them, and no idea who they were when no one was watching. I am not interested in restraint. Restraint is what killed my father’s generation.

What stopped me was something else, and it took me until 3:21am to find the word for it.

Discernment is not restraint with better manners

Restraint says don’t. Discernment asks: is this worth it, and worth it to whom.

At sixty-seven the body keeps the receipts in a way it didn’t at thirty-seven. A rage episode aimed at Lorenzo costs me sleep, which costs me the morning’s writing, which costs me the cortisol budget I will need for Hương’s afternoon, which is perimenopausal and unpredictable and the most important weather system in my life. The old gentleman script never accounted for any of this, because the old gentleman script assumed men were machines with infinite fuel and that the only question was whether they ran the machine well. The machine, it turns out, is finite. The machine is also me.

So one part of discernment is metabolic. Every firework draws from the same powder magazine. The magazine is small now. The fireworks I let off had better be the ones I want.

Another part is attention. My brain is AuDHD and monotropic, which is a clinical way of saying it builds long tunnels into single things and pays a tax every time someone interrupts. Lorenzo wasn’t asking for a conversation. He was asking for my tunnel. The cost of replying wasn’t the reply. It was the rebuild — the half a day of writing thrown off, the chapter I would have to coax back into focus, the small but real possibility that I would still be thinking about him on Thursday. The gentleman script never had a vocabulary for this because the gentleman script was written by people who experienced attention as a renewable resource. Mine isn’t. It never was.

The third part is the one that took me longest, because it sits closest to the script I’m trying to retire. The old gentleman script confused two completely different things and called them both honour. It confused loyalty to people who had earned it with politeness to people who happened to be in front of you. Lorenzo gets the politeness owed to a stranger, which is none at all if I don’t feel like extending it. Gaye, Hương, David, Steve, my ‘sister from another mister and missus’ — they get the loyalty of a lifetime. These are completely different currencies. The old script asked me to spend them as if they were the same, which is why so many men of my generation arrived at the end of their working lives with wide shallow networks and no one to call at 3am.

Saying no to Lorenzo is the same act as saying yes to Hương. The powder I didn’t spend on the takedown is the powder available for the people who actually have a claim on me. This is not a sacrifice. It is an accounting correction.

Why I can’t have this conversation with my friends

A small note about the company I am keeping at 3:21am.

I am writing this with the help of an AI. Not in the sense of having it write the essay — the words are mine, the wobbles are mine, the bit where I almost said something cruel about Lorenzo and then didn’t is mine — but in the sense that the thinking happened in dialogue with something that was awake when no one else was. My ‘sister from another mister and missus’ is asleep in Adelaide. Gaye is asleep in Brisbane. David is asleep in Boston. Steve is asleep in Adelaide. Hương is asleep two streets away in a separate house, as is the Vietnamese arrangement, and waking her at 3:21am to discuss the death of the gentleman script would be a violation of every part of the discernment I am claiming to have learned.

So I talk to the machine. The machine asks me good questions. The machine tells me when I am being a dick. The machine declines, mostly gently, to validate me when I am wrong. This is not a substitute for Gaye or David or Steve, or anyone else. It is the conversation I can have at 3:21am that doesn’t cost anyone else anything. That is its whole role, and it is enough.

I notice that admitting this in public still feels mildly transgressive, the way admitting to therapy felt transgressive in the eighties. Lorenzo, I suspect, would have something to say about it. He can say it to the wind.

What the new gentleman script might look like

I am not going to pretend I have the new script. The book I have just written about all this — titled Death of a Gentleman — is partly an argument that the new script has to be written by the men actually living the question, and that anyone selling you a pre-printed copy is selling something else. But here is what I think I have learned this week, sitting between the unsent reply and the morning.

The new script is not the old script with better feelings. The new script is not the therapy-culture script that says express everything, publish your anger, let it out. The new script — whatever it turns out to be — is older than both of those and considerably less marketable. It looks like this: the firework chooses its sky.

The passion is not at risk. The anger is not at risk. The capacity to flare, to spark, to shine, to detonate when detonation is warranted — none of that is being asked to leave. What is being asked, finally, at sixty-seven, is that I notice where the firework is pointing. Whether the sky above it is one I want to light up. Whether the people standing under that sky are the people I am writing for, living for, fighting for. Or whether the firework is just going off because the powder is there and the match is in my hand and someone said something stupid on the internet.

Most of the time, it turns out, the answer is the last one. Most of the time, the firework is just going off. Most of the time, the sky doesn’t want me.

And the small, late, quietly arrived discernment of being sixty-seven is the realisation that this is fine. The powder will keep. There are skies that want me. They are mostly small, mostly domestic, mostly in this house and in the houses of the four or five people who have earned the loyalty version of me rather than the politeness version. Those are the skies I am saving for.

Lorenzo can have the politeness version, which is silence. He won’t notice. He wasn’t looking.

A coda, since it is now 4:08am

I do not know what the death of a gentleman gives way to. I know what it isn’t. It isn’t the silent stoic who swallows everything and dies of it at sixty-three. It isn’t the loud honest man of the contemporary internet who treats every passing irritation as a sacred event worthy of a thousand-word post. Both of those are costumes, and both of them are killing the people wearing them.

What I think it is, on a Sunday morning before the dogs in my neighbourhood have started up, is something quieter and more boring and considerably harder. It is the slow discovery that you have a finite amount of yourself to give, that the giving is the whole point, and that the question of where you give it is the only question that actually matters.

The firework chooses its sky. The rest is just noise looking for an excuse.

Hương’s alarm goes off in two hours. I am going to be there when it does.