This week on Wake Island, we spoke with Adam Axler, author of American Triage: From 9/11 to Fahrenheit 451, a memoir about more than two decades inside American emergency medicine. Adam was a paramedic at Ground Zero and went on to spend years working in emergency rooms before walking away from healthcare and into another life, selling and collecting vintage science fiction books.

What’s strange is that I’m moving in the opposite direction, a choice I’m still not sure is a smart one to be making this late in life. After twenty years working in images and media, I’m training to become an EMT. At times, reading his book had the uncanniness of being handed a map by someone walking the other way down the same trail. But speaking to Adam helped me frame this change as something I might be able to move through creatively, that being able to feel someone else’s pain and offer them more than sympathy might end up healing something in me too. Lord knows that after twenty years working for corporations I didn’t care about, and that didn’t care about me, made me cynical. Now that AI has forced me to step away, I should be happy about taking a detour away from corporate and spiritual entropy. Maybe learning a skill that few people have is worth being excited about. Maybe a few years from now I’ll look back on this time and decide it was a good idea. Hopefully, one day, it will make my daughter proud too.

I’m pausing here on the 25th anniversary of 9/11, in this year of America’s ambivalent 250th anniversary, to think about what it means that this event occurred 10% of our nation’s history ago. My entire adult life so far, a period when I’ve hardly ever stopped working, stopped chasing, stopped pushing myself to manifest more. To reach the potential that I know is inside me, and that I know I’ll die profoundly disappointed if I don’t reach.

Of all the things that 9/11 has meant, clearly one of them is that it set off a frenzy of activity in America, after the lull of the 90s, wrenching so many of us out of personal reveries and back into the grind of history. It caused frantic, delirious intervention overseas and unsatisfying soul-searching at home, a maddening discourse across a widening gulf that has only now, mercifully, dead-ended in silence. Of course it also set in motion the surveillance regime that eroded not only our privacy but even our innate sense of inner sovereignty, leading to the internet as it currently exists and paving the way for AI, trained on unfathomable quantities of personal data.

Listening back over our conversation with Adam Axler, who served as a medic on that day and then experienced total burnout in the medical field in the decades thereafter, I think about the frantic energy of a wounded, revenge-mad, self-cannibalizing America in this quarter century and how it covered over a growing torpor, a growing disorientation and exhaustion leading to despair, and I find, within this despair, just before the point where it becomes total, some mercy in the concept of Rest. Of slowing down and decoupling from the narrative, decoupling from the nation even, if need be: of leaving the macro American story behind for a while and burrowing into the micro, into the subtle but never quite hidden layers of American thought and tradition and eccentricity, of private madness, even, that endure beneath the public hysteria. The quiet but durable forces that have always given this country and those who sync up with its latent energies a unique potential, never quite realized but also never quite extinct.

I also think about the ceaseless, oceanic energies of the internet in 2026, the way that AI never stops processing, never stops sifting and combining and scanning for patterns to offer up in lieu of actual thought, and I realize how thought itself can never be forced or steered or even parsed: how every legitimately new and worthwhile human idea has to emerge in its own time, coaxed perhaps but never forced to the surface, and how allowing this time requires courage. It requires the courage to put your burden down for a while, as so many religions force their adherents to do on the Sabbath day, and to trust that your life won’t fall apart before you pick it up again. It requires the courage to trust that the currents you’re swimming in won’t dash you against the rocks if you slow your pace, and in fact it requires something deeper: trust that the current you’ve been fighting will actually take you where you need to go if you let it.

This is the beginning of a new series for paid subscribers: Blue Light Lounge. More soon.

Intro music by Joseph E. Martinez of Junius.

Outro music: “Espoe” by Black Polygons.