Or not really worry, but maybe to think about if you can’t get to sleep some night. That’s how the question came up in the first place. My friend, who apparently often can’t get to sleep, asked me on the beach if I ever considered what would happen if the earth stopped spinning even for just a second. He thought everybody would fly off into space. 

I told him I never have considered that. He thought that if it’s true that the earth has been spinning for couple of billion years, isn’t it quite possible that it would stop for just a second and then we’d all be flying off? I then went in the water. 

Later that afternoon, while lying in my hammock at home, I thought I might reassure him by suggesting that he put a stake deep in the ground with a bungee cord attached that he could hook to his belt if he felt the spinning start to slacken (for surely it wouldn’t stop all at once, but begin to slow down, then stop, and presumably start up again).

When apprised of this thought, my wife, who is much smarter than I am, told me that actually gravity was holding us onto the ground, and the spinning of the earth was a counter force, and that the opposite would happen if the earth stopped spinning: We would be held more firmly on the ground, maybe even pushed into it. Since I knew the soil here was very sandy and not rock-like, could we then be sucked toward the center of the earth and bump into the people from the other side who suffered the same fate?

I knew I would see my friend on the beach the next day, so during the Yankee game that evening (which I always watch with the sound off to facilitate my thinking) I endeavored to come up with a solution, since obviously the stake in the ground would also be sucked toward the center of the earth.

The next day I apprised my friend of all this reassuring thinking when he told me that he was not worried about it anymore. The earth stopping to spin, he meant, of course. “I mean, what are the odds?”

I had to agree with him.

He was concerned with something else. Asteroids. 

“If an asteroid wiped out all the dinosaurs, one could wipe out all of us, couldn’t it?”

I agreed, but to lighten things up a bit I suggested that I’d like something to wipe out all the jellyfish. There are only so many things to talk about when you go to the beach every day. My friend seemed to forget about the asteroid and started in about dinosaurs.

“Probably it was good that the dinosaurs were wiped out. How would you like it if one of them ate you for dinner?”

I countered that not all dinosaurs were carnivorous; some were plant eaters.

“Imagine what our bushes would look like then. You think the deer are a problem.”

As I said, my friend often can’t get to sleep at night, and that’s when he starts thinking about these things. The earth spinning, or not, asteroids, dinosaurs — none of these kept him up last night, however. As I said, when I tried to lighten things up and mentioned the extinction of jellyfish, he quickly interjected, “No, not jellyfish, squirrels.” 

Squirrels were the cause of last night’s tossing and turning.

It seems these squirrels — there were quite a few of them — had managed to infiltrate his supposedly squirrel-proof bird feeder. He told me he saw them coming from blocks away on the overhead wires, and he actually observed them pilfering his bird feeder, despite the guarantee he offered to show me that this was impossible.

“How do they know it’s here? Even when it’s empty I notice them hanging around. How can I get rid of them?”

I said I had no idea, and I quickly went into the water.

When I got out my friend had started a conversation with the man in the neighboring beach chair: “Do you have trouble with squirrels?”

This gentleman turned his chair toward my friend. “No, but the voles are driving me crazy. There are these tunnels all over my lawn. I put these radio transmitter stakes in the ground that are guaranteed to repel them and they’re still there!”

I went back in the water and stayed there a long time.

Art McCann lives in Springs.

For nearly two years, starting with the breakup of my marriage, I regularly ventured during the fishing season to a secluded beach along an eastern Long Island bay known for holding good-size striped bass in its shallows. There I would walk, spinning rod in hand, casting and casting, often piercing with my lure the ripples and swells made by rolling stripers. 

Sometimes the fish would show themselves, or parts of themselves, revealing a flash of a fin, the curve of their backs, their bucket-shaped mouths as they rose to the surface and sucked in sand eels, peanut bunker, or whatever bait they were chasing. But my offerings stayed untouched, and during that time my rod never once bent in defiance, nor did my line tighten against a formidable foe. 

Fishing was something I learned how to do and did do with my father, starting at an early age, when we would target fluke and flounder, porgies and blues during summers spent vacationing on Long Island. After college, as often is the case, time spent with my parents, my father, was less frequent, and so my time fishing decreased as well. There were several years, in fact, when I fished only once or twice, and even then the experience lacked meaning. Somewhere along the line, I had lost interest. 

Getting divorced changed that. I needed time to lick my wounds and to figure things out, to be alone but not to feel lonely. Fishing filled the bill. I found solace and solitude in the sport, gratefully distracted as I tried to decipher meaning from the elements, from tidal currents, wind directions, and moon phases. Fishing served as a guided mediation, helping me navigate through the pain, allowing my subconscious to work on deeper problems while my conscious self was concerned with the mechanisms of angling. 

Perhaps because I was so grateful to feel better while I was fishing, I didn’t feel bad about not catching fish. But as I began to heal emotionally, when my head finally held more answers than questions, it began to bother me. No longer was I satisfied to return home empty, to not even entice a strike from a striper. Yet I did not change my approach, my tackle, or my mind-set: I fished the way I was taught, and the way I knew. 

But then I met and fell in love with the woman who would later become my wife. Her beauty matched a pristine pragmatism I admired and needed. Early into our relationship, when she joined me on a walk one morning on the beach and watched my futile casts amid water-breaking bass, she asked me what I was doing wrong. I told her I didn’t know. 

She responded without pause: “Maybe you don’t want to catch one.” She was right, of course, but it took me some time to accept the idea as true, and longer to figure out why. 

Basically, I was conflicted. Ever since I was young, I often felt a sense of guilt when catching a fish, for wounding it during the fight or for taking its life if I didn’t release it. This feeling had gradually intensified as I got older, contributing to my staying more or less away from a hook and line for several years. Yet as my first marriage imploded, I was drawn back to the water, to the sport, and so I fished with a psyche divided: one half desiring the thrill of landing a striper, the other dreading the emotional consequence that might come after. 

I believe this is why I never mimicked the methods of other fishermen who were catching bass, or never once asked a tackle shop owner for advice on a lure or type of bait that would bring me luck. Finally, I realized I needed to make a decision, that I could no longer sit on the fence — either I was going to fish to the best of my ability or I was not going to fish at all. I chose the former. 

And with that decision I began to study other fishermen, I spoke with the owners of tackle shops, I purchased new equipment, I restocked my tackle box. And, not long after, I began to catch bass.

Several years later, I was faced with a similar choice, but this time it involved my writing career. I had worked hard to get an M.A. in creative writing, and after that had worked just as hard to write and publish many short stories. When I figured I had pushed the limit of that genre, I set out to write a novel. It took time and effort, and several rewrites, but I finished a book I thought good and immediately set out to sell it. 

But just as I hadn’t educated myself on how to catch bass, I did not take time to learn about the publishing industry. Basically, I sent my novel out without much thought, using a scattergun approach to get it into the hands of as many decision makers as possible. The result, not surprisingly, was uniform rejection. 

As with my wife’s remark on the beach, it was the words of a mentor that finally woke me up. It was after yet another round of rejections, and I was considering rewriting the novel yet again, when he suggested, gently, that maybe it was time to let go and move on. It was sound advice, but devastating for me to consider. Faced with the realities of my situation, however, the drag on my emotions caused by the constant turn-downs, and the holding pattern it put me in regarding working on new writing projects, I realized I needed to make a decision: move on, or continue to try to market the book. 

I chose the latter, but instead of sending out more queries, I took time to better understand the field, to determine the publishers most receptive to my book’s genre (dystopia), to improve my website and presence on social media, to hone my synopsis, and make my cover letter pop. I did everything I could possibly do to encourage a publisher to accept my novel. And, not long after, one did. 

It is easy to say that the connective tissue between my not catching bass and my not selling my novel was ignorance. I didn’t know (well enough) how to fish for bass or how to pitch my book, so I failed in both attempts. But in each case there was a deeper issue fueling my reluctance to seek out the knowledge I needed. For fishing, it was guilt. But for writing, it was fear. 

Because I feared my novel might be rejected, I did not do all I could to sell it, thus, when it did get rejected, I tempered my disappointment by telling myself it was not the quality of the book that was lacking but the quality of the approach. In this regard I kept up the illusion that my novel was perfect. And with each rejection I retreated deeper into this fallacy, lured, in a way, to the safe and sheltered haven of failure. 

I would like to say that I now fish free of guilt, and submit manuscripts without fear of rejection. Neither is true, but recognizing I have these feelings, and accepting them as part of who I am, has helped me to not be limited by them, to not be held back in being the best I can be, whether it is on the water or on the page.

John McCaffrey lives part time in Wainscott. He is the author of “Two Syllable Men,” from Vine Leaves Press, and “The Book of Ash,” a science fiction novel. 

When writing on spec, all you have is your idea and a blank screen. You stare at a blank computer page with its steady blinking cursor like an artist staring at a blank canvas. If you are writing a book that you plan to self-publish, no matter how much research you have done or what an authority you are on a subject, at some point in the writing of it doubts of whether you are in the final throes of delusional dementia will surely creep in. (No one will read it. Who will want to? This sucks.) 

If you are a self-published writer, if you don’t once think you’re turning into Russell Crowe in “A Beautiful Mind” or Jack Nicholson in “The Shining” as he hammers away at his typewriter knowing that no one will read his words, then you’re doing something wrong. Let the hopeless thoughts visit; they may linger a bit but will pass. 

I am nauseatingly self-deprecating by nature. It is a crutch if not a character flaw, but let me take a moment to be serious and brag a little: Despite big setbacks, all three of my self-published books have made money (and continue to), and all three have gotten press and attracted big publishers and Hollywood producers. One book, “Caught,” landed me a contract with an established TV production company. Sections of my books have been excerpted in major magazines. 

Don’t get me wrong, this is all B-level stuff, but really, on paper, I am a self-publishing success story. Like my writing or not, if you are a writer, by definition, you want what I have. No, I did not win the brass ring like E.L. James (“Fifty Shades of Grey”) or Andy Weir (“The Martian”) or make hundreds of thousands of dollars a year and develop a loyal following like a handful of other self-published authors (albeit no more than 20, mostly sci-fi writers, 15 of whom have either a vampire or a werewolf as their central character). Nevertheless, on paper, it would appear I won the lottery.

Let’s consider the facts: Back in 2001, I self-published a typo-ridden, incoherent memoir. By a bizarre stroke of luck, it was optioned by a major production company. Six million dollars was raised to make the film. Big Hollywood actors were attached. The film was made. It got a glowing review in Variety. I got an agent. My book got sold at auction to Simon & Schuster. The movie got released by Lionsgate Films, and later (drumroll, please) “Trainwreck” — a.k.a. “American Loser,” the name changed to stir association with the “American Pie” trilogy — was an HBO feature presentation in 2015. “American Loser” was trending in February 2016 as a popular movie on Hulu.com, a top streaming site. 

Isn’t this what all authors want? Self-published or traditional? I also eventually received just shy of $160,000. Plus speaking gigs (25 grand). So who am I to complain? Why am I calling it a horror story? 

In 1998 a literary agent passed on my manuscript “The Little Yellow Bus: A Special Education Memoir” (later to be called “Trainwreck: My Life as an Idiot”), citing, among other things, the memoir’s lack of a strong narrative. Driven by vanity and all of its byproducts, I did not take the agent’s advice or advice from anyone else in the publishing establishment. All passed. All cited the same flaws. This is where my horror story begins.

The film had no obstacles for the central character to overcome, hence no arc, and, worse for me, no humor. I say this without the slightest trace of sarcasm: The agent was right. A weak memoir was turned into a weak movie.

You might say I have become a connoisseur of self-publishing disaster stories. I simply can’t get enough. Misery loves company — the worse the story, the better. But some of these book launchings are such trainwrecks that they are indeed funny. Even hilarious. 

Looking back, many self-published authors like me are able to laugh at their own expense. One friend admits that even though he got a couple of good reviews he sold zero copies of his children’s book on Amazon. As in not one copy! I saw the book. It was good. 

Others cannot see the humor in it. Another friend spent $20,000 on Facebook ads and got 275,000 likes for a cover with a cute cat on it, yet when he checked Amazon sales at the end of the month he was horrified to find that he’d sold only 23 books.

A host of problems brought my “would’ve been successful” story to its current horror story status — in short, the memoir was written as a comedy. The movie was not a comedy. In fact, it can be interpreted in no other way but as a bleak, sad drama. Make no mistake: It was a stink bomb. So what? I got paid, you say. Yes, and I am happy for that. And for a while I did brag that my book got turned into an HBO film. Wouldn’t you? But most of the time I am reminded that there is a very bad, unfunny movie, not about my book, but about my life. (Second in importance only to one’s own life must be how it is portrayed. The words “American Loser” will certainly creep their way into my eulogy at some point.)

To add insult to injury, the movie about my life, “American Loser,” seems to have a life of its own. Unlike my “Trainwreck” life, it may even be a very lucrative “American Loser” life — for somebody, somewhere out there. After a robust DVD push, the movie has been on cable constantly for the last five years (Cinemax, Showtime, Time Warner On Demand, and now HBO). 

Perhaps worst of all, the movie just misses the “it’s so bad it’s good” genre. (Mind you, it came very close.) Developing a cult following like “The Room” would have been good enough for me.

Jeff Nichols lives in Springs. This is excerpted from “My Life (Direct to DVD): How to Sell Your Self-Published Book to Hollywood, and Other Disaster Stories.”

We returned to the tangle of place called home in 1994 — me, my husband, and our young daughters. I was afraid of it, terrified of myself in it, loved it the way you love food you think you’re not supposed to eat and fear will make you sick. 

This is where when I was a child Claribel the angry Angus cow taught me caution. 

This is where Trill, the Welsh pony, reared up each time I attempted to slip my leg over her back, my stepfather, the farmer, and his brother trying to hold her down.

This is where my mother and her friends showed me how to start something (a school) in your community, at the kitchen table.

This is where the vast salt ocean and rough wind soothed my agitated mind; I learned that in the physical world one could locate a sense of belonging and mystery.

This is where I got the train from the spit of a stop in Bridgehampton back to my father’s life — the city and its grit, activism, my Jewishness, art.

This is where I was the only Jewish kid in John Marshall Elementary School.

This is where I learned to hide my fear.

This is where I couldn’t/can’t hide. Because it’s where I live. The fields, sea, the spectacular beauty, the farmers and what they grow, my family, and the bald glare of contradiction and old plantation segregation. 

This is where the landscape of race rode up on me, closed like a barn door locking in the rat of injustice.

This is where I saw how people live in daily acceptance of inequity and don’t name it.

This is where I sometimes joined on the harvester after school. 

This is where I sometimes rode in the pickup truck with my stepfather to take Geraldine, who was black and from the South and up here to pick potatoes, back to her shack a few miles from our so comfortable barn-turned-home near the beach.

This is where Geraldine and the others working the harvester welcomed me, showed me how to pick out the bad ones, toss them off to the side — dirt on my hands, brush of wind, red crank of the tractor, the stories, her pipe and deep voice. 

And this is where something felt so wrong when I saw where she lived — the tattoo of two worlds divided by train tracks. This is where those who lived on the Turnpike didn’t make that decision, didn’t say: We want to live here in shacks while you have your bigger homes across the tracks and we take care of your kids, clean your messes, and pick your potatoes. 

This is where in fourth grade I witnessed a young black female slammed against a cement wall by a white gym teacher, couldn’t shake my inability to intervene, a rock of guilty silence lodged in my abdomen, prodding me like a splinter.

This is where as a young woman I returned after travel to war zones. This is where the summer of ’82 I was called an ignorant self-hating commie in the letters section of this newspaper after writing that American Jews (me) should protest Israel’s invasion of Lebanon. 

This is where when we decided to come home, a number of progressive white friends said: You’re moving there? Why? And most of my friends of color said: That’s wonderful. Can’t wait to visit. And did.

This is where whenever someone visited for the first time I was afraid she or he would judge me, find out my secret. 

This is where I returned. To live inside contradiction. 

This is where once a week as I write my poems or take a run, a woman from Central America cleans my house. 

This is where more than one black woman friend traveling on the bus from the city to visit us was asked by a white woman sitting next to her: Oh, are you going to work? This is where, in our backyard, under the mimosa tree, we laugh in that uneasy way when the friends report the story over pasta and poems, as I step back from the squirm of my whiteness.

This is where when our younger daughter was in high school some of her white classmates threatened her Latino and African-American classmates, made swastikas and emblems of white supremacy, so a group of us, parents and teachers, formed a committee. This is where the black former teachers and administrators told about their daily pain working at the school. We didn’t use the phrase white supremacy. This is where the committee soon stopped talking about race and focused on drugs and alcohol. This is where I learned that drugs and alcohol don’t discriminate, even though law enforcement does. This is where I knew that project was urgent, tapping into my own scab and flood of denial. At the same time this is where discussion of race was once again erased. 

This is where our older daughter and her friends were told to return after volunteering in New Orleans post-Katrina. The leaders of the unlearning racism workshop led by the People’s Institute for Survival and Beyond instructed the group to go home and find the Katrina in their own communities.

Here the hurricane lives underneath the belly of the good life and enlightened conversation.

This is where the storm lives, where I live, in my body and the body of the split. In the ZIP code 11962. Under our floorboards. On Shinnecock land. Where many who speak the language of Lorca and Neruda are called alien while digging up weeds in other people’s gardens and mopping other people’s floors, often living crammed in motel rooms and also running businesses or making art. 

Here not all residents go to Pilates classes and the ocean on weekends. 

This is where it’s hard to find a hair salon that does black hair. Unless you know who’s opened up shop in her living room.

This is where my paragraphs break down because I’m afraid of what I’m writing. It will never be right. I will never be right in it.

This is where I returned after standing on the bridge in Selma last year marking the 50th anniversary of the bloody march. And couldn’t move for a moment. And couldn’t write about it. Couldn’t find an adequacy of language in my throat.

This is where as in so many wheres I often hear white people asking the one or two persons of color in the room to be the expert, the wizard of addressing race, the flag carrier, burdened by teaching. 

Where the mirror is confused.

This is where I get calls and emails from people who identify as white asking if I could recommend a person of color for their activity. I believe they are driven toward inclusivity and change. At the same time I want to suggest they ask themselves what prevents them from knowing black or brown people where they live. Will white people fight white supremacy living in isolation, when the reality can be turned on and off like a TV show? 

This is where I fear alienating friends and neighbors.

This is where this summer, 2016, I march with my daughters, mother, and husband in support of Black Lives Matter in our villages, following new local leadership. Where in our home we make signs as we’ve always done. This time: Black Lives Matter/White Silence Kills/Cultural Equity/Don’t Shoot. And our older daughter’s boyfriend, who is white, joins, for whom this is a first, and that is powerful. This is where I know again that the young leaders of Black Lives Matter are doing my job for me.

This is where I sit with my coffee after a dunk in the magnificent Atlantic, watching the strolling turkey family, small chicks, and a lone big-antlered buck on our nearly two acres. I hear my best friend’s voice. A brilliant and acclaimed writer, a black woman, and our daughters’ godmother, she recently said to me: “I want to wake up one day and hear that people who identify as white are calling the demonstrations so we who are being killed can stay home for a change.” Her voice vibrates in my chest. 

This is where one of the people who have bravely stepped up where we live was a friend of our older daughter from high school days. A young black man, it turns out he is the son of a man who worked for and alongside my white stepfather, the farmer. 

This is where I live. I am steeped in the story. I seek an ethical, lyrical language and the courage to do the next right thing. To end the systemic, structural denial and brutality that is white supremacy and is killing us, and my participation in it. So we can all live well where we live.

This is where I live, in this gift of a place, in this particular America, where in mid-August on a Monday evening I go to enjoy Escola de Samba BOOM, the band my husband and a number of friends play with, on the beach, under a nearly full moon, kids of all sizes and colors dancing in the ocean and on the sand, the sound of multiple languages infusing the air, piping plovers still alive. A truly community formation, when I look around, inhale, it smells like hope, it tastes like joy, the sweat and beam emanating from a group of people who resemble the world. For an hour. Making music, in music. By the sea. 

Kathy Engel is chair and associate arts professor in the department of art and public policy at N.Y.U.’s Tisch School of the Arts. 

The two-week period ending with Labor Day was one that my family and I usually spent at our place on North Haven, enjoying what was left of our summer vacation before a return to work and school. On the Tuesday after Labor Day, I was back at court, immersed in the mix of cases awaiting all of us. On that day in 2001, Sept. 11 was a week away. Now, it is the ordinariness of that week that was so striking.

My memory of Sept. 11 is not of the horrendous pictures of planes flying into the Twin Towers or of the fog of smoke that quickly engulfed Lower Manhattan. Our court, the Appellate Division, First Department, at 25th Street and Madison Avenue, was not in the immediate area of the attack, as was the Supreme Court at 60 Centre Street and the other courts downtown, but I — and, I am sure, many of my colleagues — have deeply etched recollections of that day.

What first comes to mind about that absolutely gorgeous late-summer day is the disconcerting quiet inside and even outside the courthouse after the attack was known.

Some of us sought solace in the chambers of colleagues; the conversation, if there was any, was short, and whatever words were exchanged were spoken quietly. Perhaps the enormity of what we had seen on the one television at the court foreclosed the ability to speak in detail.

Toward the later part of the morning, I left the courthouse and walked aimlessly around the neighborhood. There was virtually no automobile traffic, and hoards of pedestrians were beginning to trek northward on Park Avenue South, apparently a favored route. There was a stunned silence to these throngs as they maneuvered northward, maybe with thoughts of making it home or of removing themselves from further danger. The sky was quiet, air traffic having come to an enforced halt, except for the occasional supersonic fighter jet that crisscrossed the sky, ready to intercept some later terrorist attack.

When I returned to the courthouse, I received a call from a young lawyer I knew who had arrived at his firm’s office at the top of the Woolworth Building in Lower Manhattan, not far from the World Trade Center, early that day to prepare some exhibits for trial. From his office window, he had seen the horror of people jumping from the buildings in an attempt to escape. He was very agitated and asked me if he could stop off at the courthouse to chat on his route north toward Grand Central. Of course I agreed, and we talked for almost an hour. I hope I helped him cope.

I was surprised that no one in authority called off the scheduled arguments at the court that afternoon, or for that matter the rest of the week. I know we often make determined efforts to enforce normalcy — the show must go on, and that sort of thing — but this day was so extraordinary that I could not understand acting as if it were not.

Most of all, I remember that for days and weeks afterward, hundreds of photographs of missing workers and first responders were plastered on the outer walls of the large armory on Park Avenue South between 25th and 26th Streets, a block or so from the court. For me, more than anything else, the printed-out photos of fathers, mothers, sisters, brothers, and other loved ones that gently weathered on the armory wall told the story of that day. On my way to and from court every day, I made it my business to walk past their faces. I wondered then if we realized that we were officially ensnared in a conflict unlike any previous one.

Fifteen years is almost a lifetime for a court. Only five of us from that era (Justices Peter Tom, Angela Mazzarelli, Richard Andrias, David Friedman, and me) still preside on the Appellate Division, First Department. On that Tuesday afternoon, Justices Milton Williams, Richard Andrias, Richard Wallach, Alfred Lerner, and George Marlowe sat on the bench in order of seniority. 

For me, the gathering of our judges in our communal lunchroom that day served as a source of sustaining comfort.

David B. Saxe is an associate justice of the Appellate Division, Supreme Court, First Department. He divides his time between New York City and North Haven.

As another social season in the Hamptons comes to an end, one is reminded of the importance of friends. If you don’t have ’em you’re dead in the waters of Shinnecock Bay. You can’t get arrested socially in a place like East Hampton unless you have friends. Isn’t this what “The Great Gatsby” is ultimately about? A larger-than-life personality like a Gatsby is a way of attracting bigger fish, say, like flies to excrement. 

Neither Franz Kafka nor any of his retiring characters, from Gregor Samsa to Joseph K., would be likely to thrive in a competitive social situation in the Hamptons. Could you imagine Kafka making a cameo appearance in one of those photo spreads that follow the Hampton Classic or the Artists and Writers Softball Game? Could you imagine Kafka with his arm around some local luminary like Jerry Della Femina or Mort Zuckerman? Could you imagine Kafka autographing copies of “The Trial” after reading at the Hampton Library’s Fridays at Five? Would Kafka fight for his bike at Flywheel? Would you see his pallid countenance reading under an umbrella on Main Beach or trying to get a reservation at Nick and Toni’s?

But you don’t have to be Kafka to get shipwrecked on the shoals of the Hamptons social scene. Some people seem to have been given the handbook that enables them to walk on water or part the seas, as it were. But Jesus himself is another one who might have a tough time figuring out his place in the Great Food Chain of Hamptons Being — for which even bottom feeders play a significant part in the local ethology. 

Here are some helpful tips for those who might feel a bit befuddled and dejected in their attempts to become social in the Hamptons:

First, pretend that social life is like an episode of “Wild Kingdom” or some other nature documentary in which a hyena chases down a giraffe and finally ends up dining on its entrails. Imagine yourself as the fallen creature, its legs still thrashing helplessly as its stalker, mouth covered in blood, dines on living flesh. That’s going to be your experience of going to your first Hamptons party, and you’ve got to get used to it if you’re going to survive. No pain no gain. 

You don’t have anything to sell. You don’t have a reason for being, beyond providing another car that lines the road by the house where the party is being held. You’re only another car that may need to be valet-parked, but you exist in a state of pre-snubual bliss. If you accept your condition, you’re going to do a lot better than if you try to resist and take on airs. You can’t fight back against hyenas or piranhas, for that matter. So if you want to be invited back, be prepared to give in and have your insides devoured.

Second, acquire books like Dale Carnegie’s “How to Make Friends and Influence People.” This kind of how-to guide will not solve the major existential problem you face when you rent or buy a house in the Hamptons and realize you are a fish out of water. For that, you need to read philosophical tomes like Kierkegaard’s “Fear and Trembling” and “The Sickness Unto Death.” Still, it’s important to read the literature.

Third, acquire a trophy dog or pet. This is little talked about by chroniclers of Hamptons life, but dogs can help a person rise socially. At the very least an unusual breed of dog is a subject of discussion. A car full of arguing family members is neither going to register socially nor make the Social Register, but an oversized Saint Bernard occupying the passenger seat of your car will make a huge difference.

Which brings us to the discussion of cars. If you have to be told, then you probably should not be coming to the Hamptons in the first place. But okay, if you’re going to appear in a modestly priced car, let it be a Deux Chevaux. If not, a Range Rover, or preferably a gas-guzzling Hummer, is de rigueur. A Prius, or other practical and uninspired model, is social suicide and tantamount to not possessing the two primary ingredients for social success in the Hamptons, or anywhere else, for that matter — money and looks. Freud talked about “love and work” being the two most important elements of adult life. But he was wrong — at least as far as a hot spot like East Hampton is concerned.

Last but not least, do not be true to thy self. The ability to spew forth with Polonius’s advice to Laertes may have helped you pass Shakespeare, but when it comes to the Hamptons social scene it’s roughly equivalent to standing at the event horizon of a black hole and not wanting to have your being sucked out of you.

Now that the season has passed, you will have time to prepare for the forthcoming year in which hopefully you’ll fare a little better than you did this past summer. Take it one friend at a time. It doesn’t even matter who it is, as long as he has a decent car. There’s strength in numbers. Think of yourself as a hive. If you have the honey, then the other bees will swarm around you.

Francis Levy, a Wainscott native, is the author of the comic novels “Erotomania: A Romance” and “Seven Days in Rio.” He blogs at TheScreamingPope.com and for The Huffington Post.

Having my four kids home for the summer was special. Having them join me for dinner, together, was very special, but trying to fit four big kids as if they were toddlers into a booth at Pizza Village in Montauk wouldn’t work, so it came with great joy when my daughter, Elizabeth, made a startling suggestion after she caught Jeff Foxworthy of “Are You Smarter Than a 5th Grader?” scream, “The best buffet in the U.S.A.!” in a Golden Corral commercial.

“Let’s go to Golden Corral!” she shouted.

“Yay!” they all screamed.

Quickly their “yays” turned to “nays” when I discovered the closest Golden Corral was in Middletown, N.Y., 175 miles away from our home in Springs.

Huh?

Without missing a beat, my determined son Paul grabbed the remote, said, “I’ll take it from here,” and surfed until another appetizing dining commercial appeared.

“Look!” he proclaimed, pointing at the 42-inch flat screen in our living room. “Let’s go to Cici’s Pizza instead!”

“Yay!” they shouted.

Again, their “yays” were muffled when I learned the nearest Cici’s was in North Brunswick, N.J., 148 miles to the west.

What the —

My son Anthony then hijacked the clicker and locked in when he saw two familiar Lenny and Squiggy look-alikes sitting side by side in a car enjoying the best day of their lives relishing tiny hot dogs. It was the Sonic commercial.

“I love hot dogs with all the fixin’s,” he said, fist-bumping his siblings.

“Yay!” they screamed.

Sadly, the only Sonic on Long Island is in Deer Park, 70 miles to the west.

Bummer.

While pondering the dread of driving to Deer Park in the height of summer traffic to eat tiny hot dogs, my wife flung at me a piece of paper and then thrust her index finger in my face.

“You can’t go anywhere!” she yelled. “Allstate cancels at midnight! Pay the &%$@# bill!”

As if on cue, the computer-generated General character for the General Insurance TV spot came on, so, faster than a New York minute, I called the number on the screen hoping they would write a policy so I could avoid being without auto insurance, happily postponing for another month a premium payment.

“Are you in Louisiana?” the agent asked.

“I’m on Long Island,” I answered.

“Our locations are in Louisiana, we don’t write insurance on Long Island,” the customer service agent said.

“But you advertise on a Long Island TV channel?” I asked.

“Sorry, call Progressive,” and she hung up.

Frustrated, I hopped out of my recliner to pop an aspirin to relieve my throbbing migraine, but in doing so I aggravated my already herniated sciatica, dropping me to the floor in damning pain.

“That’s divine intervention,” Elizabeth gasp­ed. “The Spine Institute is on TV right now. Maybe we should take you there?”

Barely able to move from my fetal position, I searched on my Galaxy 5S “Spine Institute” to schedule an appointment.

“We’re in Philadelphia,” the service agent said.

“But I’m in great pain,” I pleaded. “You advertise here on Long Island, so you must have a Long Island location, right?”

“Sorry, our only location is in Philadelphia,” and he hung up.

That sucks.

I sat confused, distraught, and angry, staring at TV channels that rarely advertise a restaurant, hotel, nightclub, store, or activity east of Riverhead. If not for the News 12 anchor Doug Geed having a summer home in Southold or Mattituck, the East End and its hundreds of businesses would be invisible on Cablevision. At least when the plagued and bankrupt Plum TV existed, Channel 18 in East Hampton, many East End businesses, notably high-end businesses but East End businesses nevertheless, were seen. 

For some peculiar reason, seldom have advertisers and their polished commercials from this part of the world bombarded our cable channels as have similar businesses miles and miles to the west. Perhaps Cablevision believes East End businesses do not need to advertise, or recognizes the three-hour drive each way from Bethpage for their account executives isn’t worth the trip.

Too bad.

An hour passed, the pain from my sciatica subsided, and so my four kids, my famished wife, and I squeezed into my five-seat Honda CRV and headed east, back to our ol’ friend Pizza Village in Montauk for two large pies and a salad dripping with their secret, mind-blowing dressing, the recipe for which our waitress, Carmen, for years has refused to sneak to me.

This time, we took up two booths.

Frank Vespe is a regular “Guestwords” contributor.

I suspect the Montauk sandbag seawall provided some protection to properties before it was damaged during Hermine. If the reduced damages exceeded the cost of the seawall, it was probably worth the expense. But as a long-term fix for beaches, seawalls of any type are problematic. They do nothing to restore or hold a sandy beach in place.

Nourishment is also problematic if it entails only sand placement on the dune or on the dry sand beach. And therein lies the problem with many beach protection efforts. Some of the post-Sandy projects are small scale and only place sandbags, nourishment, or vegetation in the dune area. That helps a little and may provide some immediate protection to vulnerable buildings, but it doesn’t fix the whole beach — particularly the underwater part.

My firm helped the town of Nags Head, N.C., on a post-storm dune project after Hurricane Isabel a dozen years ago. The Federal Emergency Management Agency offered enough money to rebuild a dune 6 feet high and 15 feet wide at the crest. What did the town get for $7 million? Only about 400,000 cubic yards, or 25,000 truckloads, of sand, at nearly $18 per cubic yard. And what happened to the emergency dune? Most of it washed out within a year, and the sand became mixed thinly with the beach or underwater bars. That’s what happens when you do small projects and place all the sand — or sandbags — on the dune.

Think of the beach-dune system as a house. At minimum the house has a roof, first floor, and foundation. So, by analogy, the roof is the foredune and the foundation is the underwater bar. That leaves the first floor to represent the recreational beach — where we like to spend most of our time.

When storms come along, we first worry about the roof collapsing because that can ruin our living quarters. Similarly, if dunes wash out and leave buildings open to the sea, the natural reaction is to rebuild the dune A.S.A.P. But such repairs won’t be adequate for long if the foundation has been undermined. And that’s the simplest way I know to explain why beach nourishment works best when it places copious amounts of sand underwater as well as in the dune or on the recreational beach.

Back at Nags Head, the town followed the Isabel dune with a 4.6-million-cubic-yard nourishment project costing about $30 million for construction in 2011. That was over 10 times more sand than the Isabel dune. We recommended that all the sand be placed on the recreational beach and underwater. No sand in the dunes. Economies of scale, offshore borrow areas, and large dredges brought the unit costs down to less than $7 per cubic yard. 

Five years later, 90 percent of the nourishment volume remains within the 10-mile placement area, and almost one million cubic yards — 20 percent of the sand — has shifted into the dunes, building them up at a rapid rate. 

Many experts predicted the same outcome for the Nags Head nourishment as the Isabel dune — rapid losses and failure of the project in the first big storm. So far, Nags Head has weathered Hurricanes Irene and Sandy with negligible damage to property and only small losses of sand each year. And the dunes continue to grow.

The 2014 nourishment project at Bridgehampton and Sagaponack appears to be performing like Nags Head. Sand is shifting to the dunes as well as the underwater zone, enhancing the entire beach profile while staying more or less in place. When there is ample sand underwater, the visible beach has a foundation to hold it in place. And if the dry sand beach stays wide through the winter, onshore winds will shift some sand into the dunes.

Before giving up on nourishment, or opting for sandbags and seawalls, think how a beach adjusts through the seasons. Sand moves offshore in winter because bigger waves have to dissipate over a broader surf zone. Almost as sure as the sun rises, some sand will come back each summer just when we need more area for beach blankets. The shape and height of offshore bars are a signal to alert us where the beach is most likely to cut back from year to year — usually where there are gaps in the bar. If we track these changes carefully, we can determine whether the beach needs more sand and, if so, how long the added sand is likely to stay where we place it.

I’m encouraged to see that more nourishment will be accomplished along Long Island as a result of Sandy than any storm response in recent memory. Some of the efforts, like Montauk’s, are clearly just a first step. But the cumulative effect of all the added sand will be positive for the beach system and work its way downcoast over time, helping offset many years of erosion. 

The Montauk beach doesn’t have a huge supply of sand upcoast, so it will take a larger-scale nourishment effort to maintain it. If scaled up enough, there are probably some opportunities for economies of scale. But before looking into that, there needs to be a consensus within the community for a long-term solution to erosion. Whether consensus is possible is likely more uncertain than how the Montauk beach will react in the next storm.

Tim Kana, Ph.D., is president of Coastal Science and Engineering, based in Columbia, S.C. His firm designed the Bridgehampton and Sagaponack beach nourishment project, and he is on the board of the American Shore and Beach Preservation Association.

I recently moved from New York City to the town upstate where my children and grandchildren live. It will likely be the last of my many moves, and I gathered a lifetime’s worth of books, writings, photos, mementos, souvenirs, and other accumulated stuff. As I began to sort through it all, hoping to pre-empt my children’s Dumpster, I came upon my college graduation book. Friends and fond memories returned, including a humorous history of our class, which began, “Nothing happened sophomore year.”

While mocking sophomores is classic college humor — “Even freshmen look down on sophomores,” my cousin quipped — in our case, I now realize, the witticism missed badly. Something extraordinary did happen in 1954. On May 17, the Supreme Court ruled in Brown v. Board of Education that “separate but equal” education for blacks, a common practice protected by law for half a century, was unconstitutional.

None of the serious historians of our college years mentioned Brown either, although among reminiscences of football, girls, favorite professors, and movies of the day, they did describe social and political events. They wrote of Joseph McCarthy (“We debated the McCarthy censure issue”), Billy Graham (“The campus was, for a week, a hotbed of religious inquiry”), and uprisings in Poland and Hungary (“We pledged money in large quantities for the immediate relief of Hungarian refugees”).

Nor were we unaware of racial conflict. When Eugene Cook, the attorney general of Georgia, defended segregation in a visiting lecture, “We discussed segregation and the problems involved.” Reports of Emmett Till’s brutal murder in Mississippi in August 1955, and of white students “our own age” assaulting blacks at the University of Alabama, produced in us a “willingness to discuss the problem frankly, in a troubled spirit of moderation.” And after graduation we expected to face “crises” — “in public education, in solving the problems of biracial existence, and in all areas of foreign affairs.”

I’m sure this all seemed reasonable to me. And yet, how did we miss the Brown decision?

The answer, I’m afraid, knowing what I know today, lies in what we meant by racial “problems.” In the eyes of privileged white boys in the 1950s, blacks had their roles in society — as baseball players, shoeshine boys, jazz musicians, waiters and maids, singers, actors, and soldiers — and filled them without problem. Nor was it a problem when Marian Anderson, with a voice that Toscanini said appears once in a hundred years, became the first black singer in the Metropolitan Opera in 1955.

I’m not sure we were aware that in 1939 the Daughters of the American Revolution had barred her from singing in Washington’s Constitution Hall, where seating was segregated, or that Eleanor Roosevelt arranged for her to sing outdoors at the Lincoln Memorial to 75,000 fans. But if we were aware, I believe we would have accepted it all — the segregated seating in our nation’s capital and the respect shown to a great black singer — as simply the way our society functioned. We might have applauded Mrs. Roosevelt’s resigning from the D.A.R., but for a Constitution Hall recital in 1955 we would have occupied our designated section, devoid of any black faces, without shame.

No, the problem for us was not the struggle between freed blacks and white society — a struggle that began in 1865 and was still engaged during our college years 90 years later. We were as blithely ignorant of that long history as of the Brown decision. The problems we recognized arose, rather, when the status quo was challenged, or, in the belligerent phrase still heard today, when “troublemakers” began to stir things up.

I don’t know whether such a view defined us as racists 60 years ago. For myself, what I’ve since learned about racial struggles has broadened my understanding of our nation’s history.

Most important, it’s clear to me that slavery itself has marked race relations, not only when Southern states fought to preserve it in law, but when, having lost the fight, they attempted to maintain at least its social structure. The claim that the South rebelled against an oppressive central government to defend “states’ rights” — a claim that many Northerners accepted at the time and still believe — is belied by the evidence. 

The government that 11 “Confederate States of America” formed in Richmond, Va., in 1861 was a mirror image of the government in Washington, with precisely the same legislative, executive, and judicial structures, and their Constitution was virtually identical to the 1787 Constitution, except for its protection of slavery. The same restrictions on the Confederate Congress are enumerated, except: “No bill of attainder, ex post facto law, or law denying or impairing the right of property in negro slaves [my italics], shall be passed.”

Likewise, in planning for new “territory” and new states, the Confederate Constitution copied the 1787 Constitution whole, with one addition: “In all such territory, the institution of negro slavery [my italics] as it now exists in the Confederate States, shall be recognized and protected by Congress, and by the territorial government.”

As for states’ rights, it is worth quoting in full the “supreme law” section of the Confederate Constitution, which repeated word for word the same section in the 1787 Constitution: “This Constitution, and the laws of the Confederate States, made in pursuance thereof, and all treaties made, or which shall be made, under the authority of the Confederate States, shall be the supreme law of the land; and the judges in every State shall be bound thereby, anything in the constitution or laws of any State to the contrary notwithstanding.”

In short, the vaunted “way of life” that some Southerners still claim they were defending, and what their Confederate flags supposedly “represent” — what in fact their way of life would have continued to be had they won the Civil War — turns out to be constitutionally pretty much the Northern way of life, but with slavery.

So it is not surprising that after the Confederate Army surrendered in April 1865, and the 13th Amendment ending legal slavery was ratified that December, Southerners began to consider how to maintain their way of life. The 90-year struggle was engaged.

It is impossible in a few words to describe the ebbs and flows of the long racial conflict that culminated in the landmark Brown decision. To anyone with limited knowledge of it, I recommend the following: “Simple Justice,” an indispensable 1975 book by Richard Kluger; “The Strange Career of Jim Crow,” 1973, by C. Vann Woodward; the writings and the life story of W.E.B. DuBois, first black Ph.D. from Harvard in 1895, and the life of Thurgood Marshall, lead lawyer for the plaintiffs in the Brown decision. Here are only a few highlights, and lowlights, of those 90 years.

Education came first. The Freedmen’s Bureau, created by Congress to help four million slaves transition to freedom, built hospitals and provided medical care and food, but its major efforts went to building more than 1,000 schools for black children and to establishing colleges: Fisk University in Nashville in 1866, named for the general who provided space in a former Union Army barracks, Howard University in Washington, D.C., in 1867, named for another Union general, and in 1868, Hampton Normal and Agricultural Institute in Hampton, Va. Booker T. Washington, born a slave in 1856, graduated from Hampton in 1875 and in 1881 went to Tuskegee, Ala., to head the new college there. These institutions trained generations of professional black men and women and all remain flourishing universities today.

However, as critical as black schools and colleges were to improving many black lives, the Southern way of life continued to constrain most of the millions of freed blacks. And while the 14th Amendment (1868) extended the “equal protection of the laws” to blacks, and the 15th Amendment (1870) extended voting rights, they also marked the end of most federal efforts to impact race relations. There were no further constitutional amendments until 1913 (allowing income taxes), and the Freedmen’s Bureau was closed in 1872. 

Over the following decades, blacks in the South did manage to vote in sufficient numbers to elect hundreds of local black officials, and between 1869 and 1901, 20 black representatives and two black senators sat in the U.S. Congress. Still, Southern states continued to press for laws limiting black rights, and in 1896, with the Supreme Court’s Plessy v. Ferguson decision, they triumphed. Plessy ruled that the “equal protection of the laws” clause of the 14th Amendment did not apply to segregation, which left Southern whites free to pass laws further constricting black participation in politics. The intended effect was immediate: Whereas 130,000 blacks were registered to vote in Louisiana in 1896, by 1904 the number was 1,342.

In the aftermath of Plessy, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People was founded in 1909 by a coalition of whites and blacks, and it succeeded in restoring some voting rights. In 1936 Thurgood Marshall, a law graduate of Howard University, joined its legal staff to focus on educational equality for blacks. The decision he won in Brown overturned Plessy and established the constitutional requirement for equal protection of the laws as the basis for legal challenges to segregation.

Sixty years later, the gross mistreatment of our black citizens continues, in grade schools, legal defense, prison sentences, social services, and municipal infrastructure. I can only view it still as a privileged white, because that’s what I am. But knowing what I know, I would urge a new generation of Thurgood Marshalls to continue the fight for equal protection of the laws. I will applaud their successes.

Malcolm Mitchell, who until recently lived part time in East Hampton, is editor and publisher of Investment Policy magazine.

It used to be that if you called someone and he didn’t answer (and there was no answering machine), you could almost see the silence yawning at you. You placed yourself in that imaginary office or kitchen or bedroom and conjured either a void or something going on that was mysteriously alluring and that you were somehow being excluded from. Your wife, friend, or lover might be betraying you in that silence, but there was always an anchor, a place to which the ringing belonged.

Now the landline is going the way of the old Royal typewriter, thank-you notes written in cursive, and the un-air-conditioned car. Remember the smell of the ocean after driving for hours through choked highways to get to the beach on a summer’s weekend in a sweltering sedan? Now cars are like spoiled trust fund babies who don’t need anyone. The music is blasting, everyone is on a smartphone or iPad, and nobody even needs the sea.

The old rotary, which looked like a miniature cash register, the Princess, the touch-tone, even the battery-powered handset that you could walk around the house with are all victims of unplanned obsolescence — their half-lives foreshortened by Moore’s Law and the tsunami of cellphone technology that followed in its wake.

But the death of the landline is creating a revolution that was prefigured by developments in relativity theory and quantum mechanics many decades before. The idea of quantum entanglement is predicated on the notion that a particle can be in two places at the same time. A quantum universe, if such a phenomenon could exist not only among subatomic particles but human bodies, would give new meaning to adultery and cheating since in theory a certain equanimity would mitigate against favoring one body over the other. Promiscuousness itself would be rendered fairly benign as we would all inhabit a universe of multiversic perversity! 

Pretty soon few if any telephones will be ringing in a place. A phone number will be assigned to a person but that person will be the equivalent of a moving particle. In the past you could envision the geographic spot in which the phone was ringing. In the not too distant future, it will be literally a Pandora’s box in terms of possibilities. I might be persuaded you were picking up in Paris, London, or Moscow when you were, in reality, en route to Nice, Liverpool, or Leningrad. 

The phone, which was a creature of Newtonian l9th-century technology, has finally come into its own. The old version plugged into a jack in the wall created the illusion that space could exist alone. There was something stoic and intransigent about these anachronisms. Now the possessor of his cell truly navigates the space-time continuum, a moving body receiving electronic signals from other moving bodies whose positions are continually changing and whose final resting spot (if such a condition truly exists) is ultimately dependent on the motion of other bodies. 

I might, for instance, be drawn by the inertial force of an economic windfall sucking at me with the magnetism of a black hole. Its gravitational spell might be preventing me from making a desired appearance in London. At the same time I could be involved in a conversation with a new lover while catching a plane at Heathrow for the South of France. 

And where is the admissions office for the online university I have just enrolled in? Not even on the cellphone of a human being, but in the robotic intelligence digitally vetting my application in the ether of cyberspace.

Francis Levy, a Wainscott resident, is the author of the comic novels “Erotomania: A Romance” and “Seven Days in Rio” and of the blog The Screaming Pope.