Dispatch from the Hiatus: The Architecture of a Hard-Won Free Will
I’ve been gone for six months. Not by choice, but by necessity.
There is a popular delusion that free will is a birthright—a default setting we all just have. It isn’t. For someone like me—an adoptee with a severed biological map and a body currently being rewritten by Parkinson’s—free will isn’t a gift. It’s a territory you have to seize and defend daily. It’s a muscle you build by defying your own programming.
The last half-year has been a “hiatus” of the most physical kind. When Michael J. Fox called PD “the gift that keeps on taking,” he wasn’t being poetic. He was being literal. It takes your gait, your precision, your “polite” mask. But what it leaves behind is a brutal clarity. You find yourself in an exclusive fight club where the prize is a keen eye for the beauty in small things, and the appreciation of every single contact made.
The Construction Site
I haven’t been idle; I’ve been building. If the body is a failing hardware, the software must become more robust.
The Tonic Website: I’ve been leaning heavily into AI for the Tonic for the Bones project - not the writing itself, but the ‘experiences’ around it. Why? Because when your hands don’t always obey your brain, AI becomes a high-fidelity prosthetic for the imagination. It allows me to maintain my “earned” free will by bypassing the physical friction of creation. It’s not about manual labour; it’s about maintaining sovereignty over my output. Like a director over his actors.
The House of Awe: A showcase of my ‘internal’ life - symbolised by a surreal house - turned into a playful quest for the meaning of life, defined by the visitor of the site - you.
The Music: I’ve been composing/generating tracks that mirror that internal state; from dancing to a melancholic electro beat, via a sing-along about insomnia, to lamenting life; the deepest expression of the Jewish/adoptee/Parkinson experience - which are oddly entangled.
The Photos: They are there like a warm blanket for the soul.
The Return of the Cocoon
While my body was fighting its internal war, the external world decided to remind me of the “back door” I never asked for: my Jewish lineage. [That unnamable tragedy that led to the loss of the entire Enker family (minus my grandfather), the broken generation of my mother and her siblings, and ultimately to the emotional incapacity of my mother, leading to my adoption.]
In my 20s, “Jewish stuff” was an intellectual curiosity. Today, amidst a surge of mainstream antisemitism and the echoes of war, it has become a front line. It is a strange paradox to spend a life “crawling out of the cocoon” of an unchosen identity, only to have the world try to shove you back into a different one. But there is a power in that lineage too—a 3,000-year-old tradition of wrestling with The Unknown/Void/Truth. I’m taking the challenge.
Still Building at 56
To my son, ‘7’: if you’re reading this as an adult, know that your father didn’t just “have” a life. He built one.
We are still under construction. We always will be.