Jesus Laughed

As you age, you begin to accrue griefs large and small that then stick to you like cold mud on your boots. When I was younger I didn’t realize how universal grief is; my parents, especially my dad, held the grief over my sister’s death in a drunk driving incident tightly, and it was so overwhelming that I understood it to be unique. And it was, in its way. Just as every person is different, every person who grieves their loss feels it differently. But in many ways it was completely ordinary. I now know several people, some my own age, who have lost children. I, personally, am down one sister, one foster brother, one niece, and three grandparents, not to mention a plethora of estranged uncles, beloved pets, and old acquaintances. I wear these feelings of grief all the time, more as tattoos than as clothing. Like tattoos they fade, but they never really go away.

I heard this morning that one of the best people I have ever known has died, at the age of 65. He was a priest and a teacher at my high school, decency embodied, more than anybody I have ever known. Father Ron watched out for me in a way he didn’t need to; I was the atheistical son of atheistical parents at a Catholic school, and there were certainly those there who viewed me as an interloper, one who did not belong, either to the faith or wholly to the student body. But Father Ron, though he was one of the most sincerely devout people I have ever known, wasn’t that sort of person, and he didn’t view me that way.

We were curious candidates for friendship, really. I arrived at Central Catholic High School keyed-up and combative about religion; as a 14-year-old who wasn’t entirely sure about his sexuality, I viewed Christianity as a monolith of oppression that the world would be better without. Father Ron was almost thirty years older than I was, and so deeply steeped in the Church, and so serious about the good parts of Catholicism — the parts I didn’t believe existed — that he initially interpreted my hostility to religion as hostility towards him. I was in his freshman Christian Life class (right? is that what they called freshman religion in those days? I think it is). I refused to capitalize “God” and was prone to poking fun at some of the more ancient and backwards (to me) aspect of the Church. Hell, I still am. Just as I am today, I was a person with sharp edges as a kid. Father Ron was one of the people who got cut.

He called me into his office after class one day to ask me: did I have a problem with him? It wasn’t a power move, or a scare tactic; he wasn’t that kind of priest. He genuinely wanted to heal what he saw as a wounded relationship. I explained to him, as best I could, that it wasn’t him I was hostile to, but the Church. The Church was such a part of him that I might not have expected him to understand, had I ever though about it. But he did what he always did: his very best. He took my explanation at face value, and for the next four years seemed to take a special interest in my well-being. To this day, I’m grateful for that. I can’t say I would have done the same in his place.

He was a beloved figure in our class, bearded, sweet-natured, somewhat heavyset — behind his back some of us called him “Father Rolo”, though I swear to you it was affectionate. When we had mass, all 700 students in the big gymnasium at the back of the school, he gave homilies on decency and fellowship. One of his favorite parables was about a group of people sitting at a table with bowls of soup and spoons longer than their arms, which made it impossible to feed themselves. It wasn’t until they realized that they had to feed one another that they were able to eat. That was his ethos.

Not that he was all sincerity and serious homilies. At one of those same masses, for some reason, the lights cut out. You can imagine what that scene must have been like: seven hundred keyed-up teenagers, bound up in their good church clothes, plunged together into darkness. Just as it was beginning to dawn on us that we had the teachers outnumbered and they had no way to hold us accountable, Father Ron’s voice came over the soundsystem: “Strangers in the night / Exchanging glances / Wondering in the night / What are the chances . . .” It wasn’t the most dead-accurate Sinatra impression, but it rendered a restive crowd of agitated adolescents neutral by making us all laugh. That was his ethos, too.

News of his death has been making the rounds among my peculiar group of Catholic school misfits today. It’s totally emblematic of the way Father Ron lived his life that all of us, the atheistical public school refugees who sweated out four years of religion classes and being gently but distinctly othered, remember him in much the same way, as a man of decency and humor who took seriously Christ’s admonishment to love everyone, even those of us who didn’t believe what he did. He was the kind of teacher you told stories about, years after you’d last been in his class, and the kind you could always look up when you went back to your hometown, and he’d be there, as open and good and gracious as he had ever been. I’ve never known a man quite like him.

In the Gospel of John one can find the very shortest verse in all of the New Testament: Jesus wept (11:35). There are a thousand ways to interpret the verse, and more: that Jesus’ tears are proof of his humanity; that he is outraged over the coming destruction of the Temple; that he is afraid to die; that he is moved by the grief of his friends. That last one is the one that makes the most sense to me today, the day I learned my old friend, Father Ron, has passed away. I am moved by the grief of my friends. It is a testament to the man for whom we grieve.

I wouldn’t be me, of course, if I didn’t find something lacking in the Bible, so here it is: Jesus never laughs. He is angry, and he is sad, and he is generous, and so on, but there is no verse that reads, Jesus laughed. For many centuries much was made of this absence of mirth, though most of that has gone out of fashion these days. I miss Jesus’ laughter, though, because that would be the balm we need in the wake of Father Ron’s passing, the one that would be most appropriate. Father Ron was a kind and gentle and decent man — and he was a man who laughed, often and well, and presented a version of Catholicism that was much less dour and stern than I had understood it to be, before I met him. I learned many things from him, not least of which was that there is goodness to be found in places where you don’t expect it, and that such goodness is a reason to smile.

I have no doubt that Jesus laughed; someone just forgot to write it down. Father Ron, though, was Jesus’ laughter, embodied. Good-bye, old friend. I miss you.

Blah Blah Blah: Why the Law?

Why the Law?

I suppose because of where I come from and where I went to school, I know or have known many many lawyers. A cousin, two or three friends from grade school, a half-dozen from college, and the moms and dads of what seemed like half the people I knew as kids. Despite this, I didn’t grow up with any particular interest in the law. Like many people, lawyers were associated in my mind with avarice and mendacity, people who exploited loopholes to get rich and keep their clients rich. It didn’t help that so many people I knew went into the law, not out of any kind of dedication to its recondite and occult ways, but as a method of maintaining social class: we had gone to private schools and grown up in large-but-not-ostentatious houses and traveled the world and so on, and if we wanted the same for our children, we had to find ways of making a lot of money. Lawyering, if you were smart and educated and dedicated, seemed as good a way as any to maintain that.

As my adulthood sort of floated by, I maintained a faint thought that I might do the same thing one day, for more or less the same reasons. It sounded like a sort of slow death, but a respectable slow death that included a gym membership and a pair of Priuses in the driveway and a certain amount of social status, the kind that America wrongly affords to its haute bourgeoisie. I took the LSAT once in my late 20s, more or less out of curiosity, but I didn’t really want to be a lawyer and I hadn’t yet begun to fight my losing battle with the publishing industry. As I flailed about trying to find ways to feed myself — teaching, chiefly, which I had expected to love and had instead loathed — it always hung in the back of my mind that I could probably go to law school if I felt like it. But I never felt like it. I swore to myself I would never do it unless and until it started to feel like something more than a social obligation.

I’ll be frank and say that it was the advent of the Trump era, and its peculiar form of lawlessness, that drew me inexorably toward the law, even as my writing career began to falter. This was something of a paradox: many of my lawyer friends were telling me that their careers, while lucrative, were exhausting and stultifying, while simultaneously I was noticing many lawyers in public life whose careers seemed fascinating and admirable. I’ve always been a liberal — increasingly so, as I get older — but the life of the prosecutor, the investigator, began to call to me. I started telling people, I wanna be Robert Mueller when I grow up. The joke being, of course, that I was already 37 years old by the time this brainwave came to me, and would be past 40 before I was able to even try.

But I’ve begun to perceive a place for myself in there, despite all the hazards and ways in which I might seem like a strange fit. I sometimes can’t get over the sensation that I’ve been little but a leech on society in my life, a half-assed artist-cum-party-boy who did virtually nothing for anybody but himself. This is not the kind of life I was raised to admire, and it’s not really one I’ve enjoyed living. The idea of being a public servant calls to me, in part because it feels like the opposite of what I’ve done with myself to date. I suppose I feel like I’m paying a debt.

I also feel like I’m righting a wrong, however. One of the chief flaws with government and law enforcement, it seems to me, is that it has come to be the bailiwick of the reactionary, with an emphasis on punishment, a blindness to society’s iniquities. I’ve been on the outside criticizing the system forever; if you want to see my views on criminal justice and race, scroll back through this blog and you’ll find some things. Perhaps nothing specific, but you’ll understand my point of view. But then — what use is it to complain, if nobody’s listening? Over the last couple of years the phenomenon of the “progressive prosecutor” has started popping up in America. Not long ago that would have been a contradiction in terms, but today it seems like a necessary corrective to a system that is completely out-of-whack. These are people who go into government, not just to enforce the law, but to see it enforced justly, whether that means ending onerous prosecutions for minor drug crimes, holding police accountable for their errors and abuses, or throwing the book at corrupt politicians and corporations. That’s the kind of justice I can get behind. And it seems to me that, if we really want progress in this country, more people with my sorts of views should have a hand in serving that kind of justice.

The kind of law that draws me will never make me rich. Not that I won’t be fine — so long as prolonged furloughs don’t become a regular element of life as a federal employee — but if I have kids they’ll probably go to state school and the house they grow up in will be far more modest than the one I grew up in. But I’ve been rich, or rich-ish, before, and I gotta tell you, it’s over-sold. Not that having money has been the cause of my problems, and not that I can’t see the ways in which having very little would have made those problems much worse — but having money certainly didn’t solve my problems, either. I was still depressed, lost, angry, and alone. Those are things you could feel at Bill Gates’ house or in a studio apartment, and nothing to do with your material circumstances is going to make them go away. What I have lacked, all these years, was purpose. I lost the writing vocation a long time ago; for many years, it has simply been a thing I’ve done because I’ve put so much effort into becoming good at it. That doesn’t feel that different than being in the rat race my old friends who went into corporate law have been running.

I don’t know. That last paragraph is making me feel weird, as talking about the many and vast privileges with which I have lived my life usually does. But it’s also the truth: the American idea that getting rich is a noble or important goal is just wrong. It’s far more important to feel useful. And I’m trying to put myself to use.

The Blah Blah Blah Law Blog

I’ve been thinking of late that I need a project, some creative outlet to pull myself back from the brink of insanity. Since last May, when it became clear that my novel was probably never going to be published, I’ve been lost in a miasma of my own making, a kind of identity crisis fueled by depression, shame, and relapse, and a midlife reckoning with the fact that the thing I always thought of myself as — an artist — was probably not the thing I was going to be anymore. It’s hard to explain how all-consuming such a thing can be unless you’ve experienced it. In all likelihood, at least if you’re past a certain age, you’ve had some version of it before, though when such an identity crisis is combined with addiction, there’s an extra layer there — because, if you’re like me, you feel so protective of, and frightened of, and ashamed of, your addiction, that you end up in a place where you’re hiding it from people. I’ve been sober-er for the last six months than I was for the six months before I got straightened out, but not all the time, and not enough to keep an even keel.

I’ve been working my way out of it for the last few weeks, as best I can, but the problem has remained that my life is without purpose. I mean, the healthy thing I did when I realized that my cozy little dream of artistry was about to turn into a nightmare of adulthood was decide, once and for all, to go to law school and try to get a real job. The problem with that, of course, is that law school is many months away, and here I am, stuck in neutral, and there’s nothing worse for depression and addiction than being stuck in neutral, let me tell you. I’ve been telling myself that I was going to write a second novel before I left for school, but every time I try to plunk away at the one I was writing when this whole thing began, I feel like I’m playing a detuned piano — everything sounds wrong, and feels wrong, and it’s hard to get a rhythm going as a result.

So here’s the new plan, at least for now: this blog, largely dormant for the last few years, is now my project. It’s a project about sobriety, and creativity, and eventually it will be about what it’s like to go to law school in the early stages of recovery. There will be a lot fewer huge political posts — less in the way of essays, more in the way of, I dunno, life-recording, or something.

One of the important things I’ve had to realize as part of getting myself back on track is that not all artistry has gone from my life just because I’ve decided to get a grown-up job. I mean, I said that out loud a million times before, but I didn’t really believe it until lately. This is not just in the “oh, plenty of lawyers write books” sense, but in the sense that a key part of my sanity is the pushing of words back and forth across the page, and if I stop doing it completely I lose all sense of myself. I spent a lot of the last half-year thinking, “Who am I if I’m not a writer?” And then I spent a lot of it trying not to think anything at all, which is the danger zone. So, at least for now, the answer is that I’m still a writer, and I’m still me, whatever that means.

Here we are. My plan is that when I’m feeling purposeless and lost, I’ll turn to words, not to naps, or to drinks, or to whatever other nihilistic things I was letting suck up my life. Good luck to me.

My Semi-Annual Blog Post

Yesterday my shrink mentioned that I appeared to be struggling with a lack of hope these days. I see him via a HIPAA-compliant internet portal, and in the upper right hand corner of my screen when we talk is an image of myself, peering into the camera. I usually try to avoid looking at this, because it makes me self-conscious and its split-second delay has a slightly nauseous effect on me, but I glanced up at it then. I was sitting in semi-darkness, my face shrouded in a digital shadow that left me looking pale and puffy. It was as though, without intending to, I’d managed to mimic my state of mind with my webcam.

He’s right. Hope has been thin on the ground for me lately — thinner, even, than it was during the long, dreary years when I was writing the book that nobody will ever read. I was doing better for a while, then worse, then better, then worse. For a long time, I neglected the basic chores of living, and it’s started to seem like all of that is catching up with me this winter. My physical health isn’t so hot, my sobriety has wavered a few times, my finances are in an uproar because I basically ignored them for four years, and I find myself facing a future that I don’t understand: I don’t think I have the heart to write another book, and I certainly don’t have the financial wherewithal to sit on my ass while I do it, so it’s starting to seem like I’m abandoning a lifelong dream, one I spent years getting thisclose to, in order to compromise and settle down to a life as yet another prosperous legal drone with no meaning.

I know that’s not true — I didn’t pick the law out of thin air because it would be a way to get rich again; I don’t have any particular interest in practicing the kind of law that makes you rich, anyway. But because I have no clue what my life looks like if I’m not always striving, if not for literary fame, then at least for literary respectability, it appears in my mind’s eye as a void. That, combined with the fact that if I don’t maintain my sobriety there’s no way I’m going to make it through law school, leaves me reeling a little bit.

This is the first thing I’ve written in a long time. For a while I was sort of soldiering on, telling myself I was going to finish another manuscript before I left town, but time keeps slipping by and I still can’t druge of the motivation. What’s the fucking point, I wonder, if I’m just going to fling it down another black hole. And there you have it — I already have flung it down a black hole. I have a lot of regrets about my life. For years I used alcohol to keep from thinking about them, but now that I’m mostly sober that’s not really an option anymore. They wash up in my mind: why didn’t I realize when I was 24 that life wasn’t going to just happen to me if I didn’t do something to make it happen? Why did I leave New York if I’d already written the story that would be (what I thought was) my big break, and had already begun to write the novel that has come to be such a source of pain and frustration now? Why, if I was going to be half-assed about my freelancing career, didn’t I just get a job at a bookstore or a coffee shop when I came back to Portland? Why had I mistreated the women who were good for me and got hooked on the ones who were bad?

You know, it’s not that shocking that I didn’t become a famous writer; there are hundreds upon hundreds of very good writers who, for reasons of luck, or temperament, or distraction, or whatever, never made it. I suspect my problem is temperament; I lacked drive and often spend months on end wallowing in the fact that I wasn’t writing, rather than pushing hard to make my work the very best it could be. I’ve never been the kind of artist who wanted to be surrounded by art and artists all the time; I’ve got little use for most criticism and don’t care to write it, I tend to find other writers precious and tiresome, especially when we’re all together at once; I read a lot — or I used to, I seem to have forgotten how to do it in the last few months — but I’m not the relentless bookworm that a lot of writers, including those I most admire, seem to be. I wander astray, get distracted by politics and current events. I harbor resentments toward the fanatacism and mediocrity of the American humanities that make it impossible for me to work in an academic setting. In the end, I wonder if maybe I wasn’t supposed to do this at all.

But what is discouraging is that there were other goals I had, very normal, everyday goals, that I never got anywhere near, either: a family, a job at which I could be good, a sense of having done something with myself. Those were all things I wanted when I was younger, and to this day they seem strange to me, a part of life that other people are somehow able to do and I’m not, as though there’s some kind of magic underlying the world that nobody told me about, and now it’s too late. I’m keenly aware that starting over again at 38, especially when progress is so precarious, is risky, and that I’m operating on a limited timeline. And yet I don’t feel any more equal to these tasks than I did at 28, or 18, or 8. I sometimes I think I’ve learned nothing but a well-earned sense that life will kick you around and leave you with scars that never go away.

Many days, it’s not as dreary as all that, though I’m still struggling with motivation in a way that I’m finding increasingly frustrating and confusing. Even if I’m able to maintain a realistic perspective on things — that, for instance, there are plenty of lawyers who are writers, and plenty of people who have families in their 40s and even 50s, and the law may in fact be more suited to my particular than the arts anyway — I’m still struggling with basic life maintenance, little things I know I can and should do to keep myself feeling better, more confident, and sober. Exercise. Work. Meetings. All things I can do, and have done. But every morning I wake up and the room is empty and the day stretches out before me and by the time I’ve taken the dog to the park and gotten all the animals fed and so forth, the day is half over and I’m out of energy for things like job-hunting or writing or running. Soon enough it’s dark and another day that I’ve spent alone, not moving forward, not doing anything to make myself feel better, has gone by.

You know I don’t know if I’m feeling this way right now because of some external cause or because I missed a couple of days of my somewhat neolithic psychiatric medication, a pill that makes my stomach hurt and sometimes gives me the sweats but at least keeps my spirits relatively bright. In theory missing it for a couple of days shouldn’t lead to this kind of anxiety spiral. I took it again this afternoon, and I did manage to get some things done today, though by 3 PM I once again found myself lying in bed wondering what the hell the point of anything was. I’m writing this more or less so I can feel like I did something, anything today, even if it’s just bleat about my first world problems on my mostly-defunct blog.

At least I managed to fill the last 30 minutes or so. So that’s nice.

Parts Unknown

The thing that troubles me most about suicide is thinking how completely alone a person usually is when they kill themselves. For months after my foster brother shot himself, I obsessively imagined the last hours of his life, which he spent drinking and allegedly looking after his daughter, though of course it ended up that he himself was the danger she needed to be protected from. It was hard to fathom the violence, of course, but the thing I couldn’t let go of was how completely alone he was inside his own head, how the echo chamber of his own mind became a place where an insane idea took shape and ultimately came to seem a practical response to whatever problems he had. Jesse was out of his mind in the last few months of his life. I won’t have this thing where we’re supposed to use fakey, kid-gloves language out of a desire to be “sensitive” — he was crazy, and in his madness he completely lost himself. If that turns you off, maybe you would feel better to know that I’m crazy, too, and so maybe I get to use that word by whatever logic you use to reach your opinions about words and what they mean.

Maybe this explains why I’ve been struggling with the news of Anthony Bourdain’s suicide. I’m not usually one who gets too worked up about celebrity deaths; I see no reason to borrow trouble, as my mom would put it, by getting sucked in to a stranger’s passing. But Bourdain is — or was, I guess — different. It’s not that I was his biggest fan in the world, or that I idolized him, though I suppose I probably did, a bit. It’s that he, his life and the way he led it, seemed so big, so full, so admirably adventurous and brave. I know that that was almost certainly a concoction, a self-conscious fiction that allowed him to write good books and make good television — one doesn’t end up a drug addict out of sheer happiness, and Bourdain was quite frank about his past addiction. There was, however, something that felt really genuine about his relentless pursuit of all that people had to offer, whether that meant great food, unusual rituals, cheap booze, or the deep and lasting pleasure of simply knowing them. Bourdain wasn’t a politician, of course; he wasn’t even particularly polite to people, especially if he found them phony or venal. He was a man with a life full to bursting with friendship, though. That must be it. That’s why it’s so grieviously sad too imagine him reduced to the state of utter aloneness he had to be in when he hanged himself.

The reason I can imagine it so vividly, despite the fact that it seems so implausible — so implausible that some part of me frankly doesn’t believe that Bourdain died, and died in such a way — because I have found myself in that state so often myself. The reason I’ve been so open about my struggles with addiction and mental illness is because I’ve spent so much time contemplating the suicides of others. In so doing, suicide came to be dangerously understandable. I had for years, basically since the start of adolescence, had almost daily thoughts of suicide, though they were never more than quick flashes, a fantasy usually provoked by a riot of anxiety that I couldn’t control. But at some point it went beyond that. I could imagine exactly how it would work. And I scared the shit out of myself thinking about it. And I decided that the only way to prevent it was to start talking about it, because talking about it made it that much less likely I would ever find myself so alone.

So to see Anthony Bourdain, almost certainly the greatest food writer ever born, the seeming embodiment of living a life full of good company, leave all that behind on a dark night of the soul — it troubles me. It troubles me to think that no amount of friendship or fame or achievement or anything else is an adequate safeguard against the grinding loneliness of depression. That’s what depression so often amounts to, you know. The extended sensation of being completely marooned. It wears you down. It exhausts you.

I would like to end with a tribute to Bourdain, but every time I try to write honestly about all that made him a hero of mine I find myself crying. Actually, uncontrollably weeping at my desk. I feel ridiculous about it, and try to make myself stop. I can for a little while. But then I start thinking again. About how vividly alive the man was, and about how magically gifted he was at bringing that life to the page and the screen. He wasn’t just the funniest food writer I’d ever read, though he was; he wasn’t just the smartest and most sensitive writer we had about the privileges and glories and pitfalls of travel, though he was that, too; he wasn’t just a voice of surprising moral clarity in the face of a world that glorifies cheap commercialism and excuses rank hipocrisy, though he was that, as well. What Bourdain was, at least to this fan, was a shining example of all that was possible if you lived bravely and survived the landmines of addiction and failure. It’s been hard for me to imagine a life of fulfillment and excitement over the years. Bourdain seemed to suggest that it was all possible, if you just did it. And now he’s gone. Whatever pain and fear and loneliness he was masking with his bravado and cool crept up on him one night in a hotel room and he hanged himself. I don’t really believe it. But I can imagine it. It scares the shit out of me.

He’s an irreplaceable figure. There was never one like him before, and there will never be another like him again. I’ll miss him. I miss him already. Goodbye, Tony. The world will never be the same.

Drkqs

In trying to trace the path of my life, sometimes I find myself shocked at how quickly it’s gone, and how little has happened in that time. Because I have a tendency to undertake big projects and toil away at them for months — sometimes years — at a go, it’s easy for me to spend vast swathes of time in which the “big” events are all a part of a larger whole that dwarfs them. No matter the satisfactions of writing a new scene or having a new idea, such things will always fold back into the greater work, like a swell receding in the ocean. I complete a project every now and again. It’s hard for me to look back a year and know exactly what I was doing.

Then there’s the strange nature of publishing, at which I am a still a newbie. But it all seems to work at a glacial pace, especially by the standards of one who has grown acclimated to the internet. Your book is sold, then it’s unsold, then it’s sold, and no matter what, it’s going to be months — sometimes years — before anybody sees it. It often feels as though I’m shouting into a vacuum. All there is, for me, is this blog, and its various appurtenances. What was happening to me this time last year? I can look here, I guess.

There are a few problems with that. One is that this kind of public record is, by its nature, performative. Often times I’m trying to amuse or entertain, in my own small way, in this space; that means that what’s happening here, no matter how frank or honest it is, is never a whole picture. I can write from the depths of a depression in a way that people find funny. Often the only islands in said depression are those moments when I’m writing. And if, as was the case last September, I’m deep enough in it, then I won’t write anything at all. In September of last year, I wrote no entries for this blog. Why? I can guess. But there’s no contemporary record.

The reason I wasn’t writing here then was that I was massively, borderline-suicidally, depressed. The reasons are various, mostly having to do with the edits I was trying to make to my book, but they’re less important, really, than the overwhelming fact of the depression. Every day I woke up feeling kinda okay, and by noon I would be so low I could hardly move. In the interim I often moved from my house to the library where I did the bulk of the work on rewriting the book, and I would find myself stuck there like a beached whale, suffocating under my own weight. I would sit by the window of the PSU library and look down at a field where soccer teams practiced, feeling anhedonic, and write nothing. Many times I opened up word processing files with it in mind to write a blog post, and every time I found I didn’t care what I had to say. Current events were thick on the ground — wasn’t it around this time last year that we discovered that the future President liked to grab women by the genitalia without their permission? — but I couldn’t muster the energy. I had no opinions on books or movies or my personal life. I just was. And just barely.

And so it happened that I took another step that would be problematic for this blog. I began to take, not for the first time, an SSRI antidepressant. SSRI stands for selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor, a class of drugs that includes Zoloft, Prozac, Paxil, Celexa, and Lexapro. I would like to explain to you how it works in your brain, but it can’t, and not just because I last studied biology and chemistry in 1998. The fact is that nobody’s 100% sure how they work. But we do know what they do, at least for most people. The way I’ve described it to my therapist is that they put a floor under my depression. It’s not that I don’t get bummed out when on an SSRI. It’s that I don’t crash way, way down into the depths, where I was at this time last year. I don’t find myself despondently riding the train out to the end of the line, only to ride it back. I don’t skip paying bills I have the money to pay. I don’t spend hours on end contemplating my impending death.

But SSRIs have a battery of other effects, too, each in some degree a bother: they can make you drowsy, make you retain weight, make it hard to orgasm, make your mouth dry. Though I don’t much care for any of those, I’m willing to tolerate them for the benefit of keeping my depression superterraneous. They’re not why I’ve eventually gone off SSRIs, every time they’ve been prescribed to me. No, the reason I’ve gone off my meds repeatedly is that they don’t just put a floor on my mood — they put a ceiling on it, too. There’s a kind of bright, jagged stimulation that I feel, especially when approaching a period of sustained creativity, that I really love and dearly miss when I’m medicated. It’s a state of mind in which music sounds better, plans seem more realizable, words run together on the keyboard. I’m not manic-depressive, technically. Having seen the real extremes of bipolar-one disorder in the last year of my foster brother’s life, I can tell you for a fact that I don’t have that. But there’s a thin line between what I have and what he had. The main difference is that I only lose touch with reality when I’m feeling down, and he tended to lose touch with reality more often when feeling up. There’s a broad middle space where our paths often crossed.

You hear about the suicide and self-harm statistics for depressives and manic-depressives and you might wonder why we would ever go off our meds. There are times when that’s as mysterious to me as it is to you. But there are others when it isn’t mysterious to me at all. You see, part of why this blog has been largely dormant since about November of last year is that I went on Lexapro around that time, and that feeling of bright, jagged happiness has been almost entirely gone from my life — and along with it, my greatest periods of inspiration, the sharpest edge of my (if you’ll forgive a little self-regard) brilliance, and any real faith I have that anybody will ever want to read my opinions on things. Though I haven’t spent a morning contemplating my own death (different from contemplating suicide, but related) in about a year, there have been countless times when I went to tap away at a blog entry and gave up a couple of paragraphs in because of my total lack of inspiration. I often feel flat, spark-less. Not always. Clearly, I’m still able to write sometimes while medicated. But when I am feeling that way, that’s when the appeal of being unmedicated begins to call.

I don’t want my loyal reader to worry; I’m not about to stop taking my meds, especially with winter coming up, which is always a hard time for me. I’m a little low on projects right now, so I’m not really feeling like my lack of inspiration is an enormous problem, not right at this very second. And I’m going to try a new approach. When you’re a novelist, not every word you write can be inspired; there’s a lot of slogging along, placing dull-feeling sentence after dull-feeling sentence, wondering if it’s ever going to come back. I’ve decided to (try to) employ that trick and see if I can’t force a spark through ceiling that Lexapro has put on my creativity. What I’m trying to say is that I’m going to try to update this blog more often, at least until such a time as other commitments make that impossible. I’m shooting for at least a couple of times a week. We’ll see.

I realize now that it sounds like I’m promising a lot of boring, uninspired blog entries over the next few months. Well, shit. I guess maybe I am. But hell, nobody’s forcing you to read them. I’m just forcing myself to write them. Until then, I’ll catch you on the flip-flop.

Proust Questionnaire, August 2017

About five years ago, when this blog was still a grad student's tumblr page consisting mostly of his marginalia in novels he'd read, I filled out the famous Proust Questionnaire and posted it. I can't find that post right now (because I'm lazy), but if you want to dig around in the archives from 2011 or 2012, you might find it.

Anyway, I found that on my hard drive today while doing some digital upkeep, and thought, in the spirit of indulging a lazy, warm Friday afternoon, I'd do it again. Some of my answers haven't changed at all (favorite color, greatest misfortune), but others have changed a lot. Without further ado . . .

1. Your most marked characteristic? Verbosity
2. The quality you most like in a man? Thoughtfulness
3. The quality you most like in a woman? Humor
4. What do you most value in your friends? Tolerance
5. What is your principle defect? Self-loathing
6. What is your favorite occupation? Writing
7. What is your dream of happiness? The endless summers of childhood.
8. What to your mind would be the greatest of misfortunes? To die trapped in my body, like my grandmother did.
9. What would you like to be? Fulfilled
10. In what country would you like to live? Canada sounds better every day.
11. What is your favorite color? Blue
12. What is your favorite flower? I don’t know flowers.
13. What is your favorite bird? Hummingbird
14. Who are your favorite prose writers? Margaret Atwood, James Joyce, Edward P Jones, Neal Stephenson
15. Who are your favorite poets? WH Auden, Anne Carson, William Stafford
16. Who is your favorite hero of fiction? Arthur Dent, Hitch-Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy
17. Who are your favorite heroines of fiction? Eliza, The Baroque Cycle
18. Who are your favorite composers? David Byrne
19. Who are your favorite painters? I’m not a paintings kind of guy. Prefer photography.
20. Who are your heroes in real life? Barack Obama, Jackie Robinson, my dad
21. Who are your favorite heroines of history? Caroline of Ansbach, Clara Barton
22. What are your favorite names? Mathilde, Siobhan, August
23. What is it you most dislike? Feeling tired when I need to work.
24. What historical figures do you most despise? Hitler, I suppose. Stalin. Others of their ilk.
25. What event in military history do you most admire? The way the civilian population of London weathered the Blitz.
26. What reform do you most admire? Medicare & Medicaid come to mind, lately.
27. What natural gift would you most like to possess? I would love to be able to sing soul songs credibly.
28. How would you like to die? Floating on a raft in a lake on a sunny day when I am very old
29. What is your present state of mind? Pleasant
30. To what faults do you feel most indulgent? Gluttony
31. What is your motto? A man can cut whatever corners he likes, but it’s wise to splurge on pillows and toilet paper.

Red Team

In the course of my recent researches, I’ve come across a term that I rather like: red teaming. It refers to a practice in US wargames and intelligence, whereby a group of experts and spies will be broken into a blue team and a red team, with the blue team taking on the role of the US military and apparatuses of state, and the red team takes on the role of the enemy. Some of this is about trying to estimate enemy tactics, but its most vital function, from what I’ve read, is to highlight flaws in your own. Red teamers have to be creative thinkers, highly knowledgable, and willing to detach themselves from classic my-side biases they usually operate under. Most of the greatest intelligence failures in US history — notably 9/11 and Pearl Harbor — were, in some sense, a failure of red teaming: we didn’t know where the weaknesses in our defenses were, or inasmuch as we did we weren’t worrying about them.*

*Another classic red team activity is that of the white hat hacker, who breaks through the defenses of a company or government department in an attempt to highlight their weaknesses. At the beginning of the Robert Redford classic Sneakers, Redford’s ragtag crew of techies are performing this kind of function for banks.

This term spoke to me because — if you’ll forgive the impertinence — I sometimes think I’m a born red-teamer, which can be frustrating in an age of curated information silos, unchecked motivated reasoning, and rampant confirmation bias. I’ve long thought of this as a form of contrarianism, though it’s really not that: I hold fairly standard lefty views on things like the welfare state, social justice, and the value of a polyethnic, polyphonous society. It’s that my instinct, when presented with people I agree with, is to ferret out the hypocrisies and weaknesses of their arguments — arguments which are, after all, often my own arguments. I realize that this might sound like a kind of bragging, and maybe it is; but in reality, this is not something I did, exactly. It’s just a habit of mind. I could spend a lot of time analyzing where it came from, psychologically, but it’s not that interesting, even to me. Suffice it to say that my brothers are both natural red-teamers, too, so it probably comes from our childhood and/or genetics, somehow.

Maybe this is just self-flattery, but I’ve come to believe that a lack of red-teaming is really plaguing liberal (or progressive, ugh, what a shitty word) thought these days. Everybody from the campus speech police to the activist base of the Democratic Party is suffering from a problem where their ideas aren’t trouble-shot by smart people; in an environment where political ideas have become conflated with cultural identities, it seems to me that it’s really hard to have the kind of cross-political discussion that results in understanding where your arguments fall apart. This leads to an assumption that our ideas are inevitable, or obvious, or incontrovertible. (And before you get on the they’re-worse-than-us-about-this horse, I’m sure the right has this problem, too. But I’m not a conservative red-teamer, I’m a liberal red-teamer, so I don’t care about that.) It feeds self-righteousness, and I honestly think it’s part of the vicious cycle whereby politics and identity became conflated in the first place.

Let’s take, for example, the concept of privilege. I’m not going to sit here and tell you that the variety of behaviors, incentives, and cultural forces that currently go by the name of privilege on the left, and in academia, don’t exist; that strikes me as patently absurd. Of course they do. The problem is that the term privilege is completely destructive. The word was loaded long before it became a byword of the social justice movement; being told that you were privileged was tantamount to being told that you were weak, you had never earned a thing, that you were, in short, the bad guy in the story. That was before it got larded up with a bunch of complex stuff about race and gender. The word is judgmental; the word is mean. It makes people feel attacked. And that’s why going on and on about privilege is of extremely little value.

I can just hear your voice, dear blue-teamer, as you groan. I understand that instinct. There’s some blend of I don’t really care about hurting a bunch of white people’s feelings and Of course you think that, you’re a white dude in there. I’m not here to plead for the left to be nicer to white men, or at least not chiefly. I’m here to ask you what the term privilege achieves. Because I would posit that what it very distinctly does not achieve is an erosion of privilege, or the conversion of the privileged to liberal ideals. Instead, it (A) increases factionalism, and (B) alienates those who could be allies. This is about what it does in the mind of the person who wields the term, as well as the mind of the person at whom it is wielded.

As a for-instance, think about the reaction among some people on the left to the tragic case of Otto Warmbier, the American college student who was detained in North Korea, and recently died shortly after being released from that nation’s custody. Inasmuch as people were paying attention (I’ll confess that I wasn’t, really, and wouldn’t have been able to remember his name until he was released last week), most people expressed shock, and horror, along with incredulity about the North Korean government’s explanation for why Warmbier was detained (that he had stolen a government propaganda poster). But there was a distinct strain of thought among the insufferably woke segment of the left that basically said this: Warmbier’s white male privilege had led him to believe he could get away with anything, and this was his just deserts. (See Alyssa Rosenberg’s roundupfor a decent compendium of a few of those reactions. And before you start attacking Rosenberg’s politics, dear blue-teamer, remember that she was an early product of that notorious incubator of reactionary politics known as . . . ThinkProgress.) This is the use of the privilege frame to reinforce the ugly politics of identity and difference. People who gloried in Warmbier’s arrest and sentence could not have known much more about him than that he was white, male, American, a member of a fraternity, and a student at the University of Virginia — one of America’s best public universities, no doubt, but also a classic stronghold of segregation and patriarchy. But to weaponize the idea of privilege in this way is, in fact, unfair, stupid, destructive, and ugly. Whether or not Warmbier was a member of a fraternity at a conservative school, the truth is that the only thing that matters is that he’s a person, and whether or not it was his privilege that caused him to feel empowered to pull down a poster (and I’d argue that [A] we have no idea if he actually did that, and [B] teenagers of all races and genders are prone to doing things like that), it is unacceptable to dehumanize him using the privilege frame. And yet this kind of of thing happens a lot. It’s rarely this egregious, but because privilege is a word that was so loaded to begin with, it often ends up as a tool of dehumanization.

The other idea is a little squidgier, and if your instinctive feeling is that you don’t care about offending a few white dudes, then you won’t cotton to it. But as a member of the red team, I have to tell you that there are a lot of intelligent people who could be made into allies, except for the fact that they feel attacked, and ultimately alienated, when the word privilege starts getting thrown around. The word feels like an attack. Hell, the word often is an attack, dressed in a posture of defense. And there are (at least) two things to be remembered here: (1) that human behavior is ruled by cognitive experience, not objective fact, and so if someone is told they’re privileged when they feel like they’re they’re the opposite, they’re almost certainly going to react with hostility; and (2) that, shifting demographics aside, there are an awful lot of white men in this country, and if you call yourself progressive, ie, what you seek is progress, you will get farther by describing the truths behind the concept of privilege without making white men feel under siege. I’m not trying to blackmail anyone into conceding to the will of the majority, or the historically powerful; I’m not asking people to kowtow to historical elites — I’m asking people to think about gains and losses, allies and enemies, and basic humanity. You should not willfully make enemies of those who might be allies. To do so by swinging around the club of privilege willy-nilly is just dumb. Sorry, blue team. This is one of your weaknesses.

Anyway, I hope you see what I’m saying. I am in no way contending that men, or white people, have not been systematically advantaged by cultural, social, and legal forces, more or less since the founding of the republic. I’m not here to tell you that affirmative action is evil or that we should stop putting people of color in action movies or positions of power or any of that stuff. I’m red-teaming this idea. I’m trying to see where its weak spots are, so we can make our arguments better.

There are a lot of ideas on the left that could use a little constructive red-teaming, by the way. I hadn’t actually intended to make this whole post about privilege, as a term, but as usual I got away from myself. I’d say that the idea that mounting more “progressive” candidates in house races, as a way to appeal to “the base”, is the way forward for Congressional Democrats, isdefinitely one of them. A nationwide $15 minimum wage is another. Allergy to globalism and free trade is yet another. The assumption that the implementation of a social welfare state would be win-win, if only we could get greedy Republicans to leave office. That the white working class is the key to the future of the Democratic Party. (That one, in particular, strikes me as not only deserving of a little red-teaming, but of total destruction.) The list goes on.

Ugh. Now I’m tired. I wrote this whole thing in less than an hour. ZZZzzzzzzZZZzzzzzz . . . sorry. I don’t have the energy for an artful conclusion.

On Quitting Facebook

I suppose, if you have followed me on this blog or my various social media accounts, you know that I have a complicated relationship with Facebook. I’m not alone in this; it feels like nearly every podcast I listen to, at least the ones populated by Serious People talking about Serious Things, has intermittent discussion of Facebook, its vicissitudes, and its costs. I think a lot of this most directly inspired by a certain queasiness that Serious People have come to feel about the role of social media in the spread of misinformation, propaganda, conspiracy theories, and lies in the wake of an election that was ugly, demoralizing, and ended disastrously. But I think, indirectly, there’s something else that’s generating all this, and that the worry about #fakenews is really just window dressing on that something else: our generalized sensation that social media is, in a word, terrible.

I’ve been thinking a lot about something that the self-help author Cal Newport calls “deep work”: the ability to focus for long periods of time on a difficult intellectual task. I’m not usually much of one for self-help books, but the thing that Newport is writing about in his latest book is so manifestly important that it resonated with me deeply. I can’t tell you all the people I know who have professed an inability to read books or write well or concentrate on their coding projects over the last few years. We all have the sense that it has something to do with social media — the constantly-pinging tornado of meaningless bullshit that is somehow always pulling at our consciousness, the little rush of adrenaline you get when some old friend from high school clicks that up-thrust thumb beneath that picture of your cat, or your baby, or the view from your window. I’ve grown increasingly aware of this over the last year or so, as the intensity and frequency of disastrous news has led me deeper into the labyrinth of media updates than I ever had been before. Now, I can’t walk to the store without pulling my phone out to see if anybody has had anything to say about my last Facebook update. And, after reading 30-50 books a year for many years, I have now completed just two in the first five months of 2017, because I’m constantly refreshing internet windows, waiting for the next flash of endorphin I get when Donald Trump sticks his foot in his mouth again. I can’t concentrate for more than twenty minutes at a time on reading. This all feels related.

I used to be very proud of my ability to do deep work, and I spent time around people who were proud of it, too. I could perform heroic tasks of academia by locking myself in my dormroom with 500 pages of reading for a day or two; I could pump out a five-page essay in a sweaty hour chained to my desk; I could write an entire novella, 50, 60 pages long, in an ecstatic weekend. This remained true until fairly recently; I still remember a weekend spent standing at my desk in Minneapolis, firing off page after page of a story about a trip I took to Nebraska with my dad, as Daft Punk pulsed through my stereo. That would have been . . . four years ago? I can’t fathom how I used to do that, let alone do it with regularity. Once bleedingly prolific, I now struggle to write more than a sentence or two without checking the internet. This is doubly true of a lot of the people I hung out with in college, who were computer programmers — a culture of deep work so pervasive it was memorialized in David Fincher’s film The Social Network, as a house full of young white and Asian guys coding all night with an almost amphetamized mania. And I’ve had conversations with these people too, in which we all lament the loss of our youthful attention spans. I don’t think this is normal. When I was a kid, it was presumed that the young were feckless and it was the adults who could buckle down and get things done. Now, as adults, none of us can do a damned thing.

I say that my relationship with Facebook is “complicated” rather than purely negative because there’s a reason beyond the purely limbic that I’m drawn to it. The life of a writer can be a lonely and isolated one, and when you live alone, it can become oppressive after a while. I have been drawn to online interaction from a young age (at least for my generation); I first got a reliable internet connection when I was a sophomore in college, and within weeks I had found my way onto a message board about baseball, whereat I argued with strangers about the merits of Ken Griffey, Jr vs Barry Bonds (on the wrong side, it turns out). By the time college was over I was a regular at Baseball Think Factory, a place where, fifteen years later, I’m still chewing over the minutiae of the sport with guys I’ve never met. I found my way a few years later to Northern Attack, a now-defunct fansite for the US version of The Office; I became so close with these people that now I count many of them among my better friends, even though I don’t think I’ve ever met any of them face-to-face. These are people I like and care about, whose jokes make me laugh and whose kids I have watched grow up — and I’ve done it almost entirely on Facebook. Over time, as the nature of social media changed and people got more comfortable sharing their real names and lives on the internet, I got to know a lot of people solely through the means of Facebook. Some of the very best conversations I’ve had about art and aesthetics and politics have been had on my friend Isaac Butler’s carefully-curated Facebook page. These are all things I would lose if I were to quit Facebook entirely.

This is as opposed to Twitter, which I have heard is where the cool kids hang out, but with which I have had almost entirely negative experiences. For many years I just couldn’t figure out how it worked — but then, again powered by my election mal de mer and its voracious need for information, I began piecing it together, following journalists and baseball writers and comedians and friends, chiming in from time to time, feeling a rush of endorphins when I got retweeted by Ira Glass. But it was also an unfiltered venue for vitriol, and the truth is that I, personally, was the source of a lot of that. I have spent thirty years honing my way with words, to the point now that I don’t know anybody (personally, anyway) who is a better pure stylist than I am. This means that when I get to insulting people on the internet, the insults come out scathing and red-hot, a pure window into my raging id. Combine that with alcohol, and you have a real recipe for toxic, quasi-anonymous communication. At one point I told somebody that my kids would be graduating from college while his were dying from heroin overdoses. It’s a cruel thing to say, and usually I would keep it inside — but Twitter, by allowing me to wander into a conversation being had in public by someone I disagreed with, and affording me the necessary alienation from the other that I couldn’t quite feel their humanity, empowered me to say it. The next morning I shut down my account, and I’ve never really been tempted to go back. Twitter = bad. Facebook = complicated.

The idea behind using real names on Facebook was, I think, an attempt to hold users accountable and make sure we didn’t get into these kinds of deracinating verbal battles, which have been a staple of online interaction going back to the dawn of internet-time. (I wonder sometimes if the first message on the old ARPAnet wasn’t JCR Licklider calling Douglas Englebert a twat.) A noble idea, but the problem with communicating via these silent screens isn’t that we don’t know one another’s names — it’s that we don’t know one another’s voices, and faces, and bodies, and states of mind. Especially when the discussion runs red-hot with politics, it is possible to completely lose track of another person’s humanity, and take the whole conversation down in flames. Hell, I have family members, sisters to one another, who have fallen out in meatspace because of flame wars they had on Facebook about (naturally) Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump. That’s nothing to do with #fakenews — the accusations of perfidy and propaganda were merely weapons in a war fought between alienated humans. It’s not totally dissimilar to asking a young army sergeant to drop bombs on foreigners from the convenience of a computer screen somewhere in Nevada.

Yesterday morning the novelist Marlon James wrote a post that “went viral on the internet” (to use the preposterous jargon of Facebook’s AI news aggregator) that was, mostly, about the ways in which the fractious left has continued to crack along lines of identity and race. You should read it; James is absolutely right about that part, and the fact that I sort of feel like I (a white male liberal with an expensive and baroque education) am not allowed to make the point unless I am parroting someone like James (a black Jamaican-American liberal who now provides such expensive and baroque education and what one can only assume is a hefty salary at Macalester College) is proof of his argument. But that aside, the thing he says at the top — the thing that neither he nor I dreamed up first, but which bears repeating — is what obtains here:

[T]his weekend, more than any other, I came to realize that of its many flaws, Facebook’s worst was that it is an inept medium for disagreement, a shitty one for argument, a hostile one for any kind of confrontation, and yet a frightfully efficient way to instantly end friendships and alliances. This might be because liberals give themselves credit for something they actually suck at, which is to have a constructive argument.

I realize that this post has become jumbled, that it’s come to be about two related but different things — Facebook’s intrusion on my cognitive processes, and the alienating aspects of social media — but that’s because they’re about my sort of ambient unease with the whole thing. I really do enjoy Facebook, the way it has got me back in touch with old friends I probably would never have seen again, the way it lets me be involved in the lives of far-flung people, and the way it gives me a venue for showing off. But I really, really hate it, too. I hate what it’s done to my attention span and work habits; I hate how it allows me to access and display my worst qualities. I hate most of all that it’s so hard to step away from. After the election, blaming Facebook for its gross abdication of responsibility as a media company, I tried to quit. I think I lasted about ten days. About a year ago, I managed a month — a blissful month of reading books and working on my novel and playing guitar — before getting sucked back in. So this post is entitled “On Quitting Facebook”, but it’s not really about that, because I’ve come to believe that quitting Facebook altogether will probably be almost as hard, and equally as fitful, as quitting drinking has been. Right now I’m struggling with one addiction. Maybe best not to add another on top.

That said, I think I’m about ready for my annual social media rage-quit. I’m moving into research mode for my second book now, and I have to familiarize myself with a lot of information that is both historical and analog in nature — meaning, the less time I spend dicking around on the internet, the better. I’m still thinking about when it’s going to happen. Perhaps when I move to Bend. I’m not going to pretend I’ll be gone forever, of course; but I am shooting to take a month or two off over the summer and remember what it’s like to get back into the habit of doing deep work. Here’s hoping.

—>Building on Fire

I didn’t sleep well last night, and I didn’t realize until this morning why that might have been. I stayed up into the wee hours of the morning, watching Fringe and reading Wikipedia articles about serial killers and suicides — morbid, I know, but it’s what I do sometimes — and it wasn’t until I saw the first few fingers of the sun nudging into the sky that I realized what day it was: it’s the third anniversary of the Bad Day, the day my foster brother killed himself and his daughter in a fit of drunken madness that capped a several-months descent into insanity that we who loved him had watched, helpless to do anything about it. For that reason I can remember everything I was doing on this day three years ago. It was the worst day of my life.

I’m not going to subject you to those scenes, though they haunt me. In part it’s because I’ve written about them before and don’t wish to bore my loyal reader — but in truth, with the passage of time, it’s because I’ve come to believe that there is such a thing as a private experience, an experience that can be lived without having been told afterwards, over and over, in language artful and halting. I’m not embarrassed, and I’m not trying to avoid reliving the pain — I relive the pain no matter what I say. I’m just not going to write about it now.

I’m thinking about the risks involved in being human. It seems to me you’re born prepared to be open and whole, and as time goes on life kicks you around and you come to be closed and broken. If you’re lucky, the bruises and dents don’t really accumulate until you’re old enough to handle them, until your parents have herded you carefully through the fragile stages of your childhood and released you onto your own recognizance, trusting you’re strong enough now to take it. If you’re unlucky, like Jesse was, life begins to kick you when you’re small, and continues to kick and to kick until you’re shattered. It’s a risky business, this. If there were other options — not death, but something less permanent and also safer than being alive — I might take one. I think, in fact, it could be argued that I’ve tried very hard to do that through substance abuse, over the years. Being a drunken loner with a novelist’s eye for detail and no compunction about receiving sexual gratification without emotional commitment is, in fact, very much like being not-quite-alive, the riskless version of humanity writ large.

I was a drunk before Jesse killed himself, but the apocalypse in which he disintegrated is illustrative of the risks involved in being human that I have long been trying to avoid. When you consent to love someone, you expose yourself to enormous opportunities to be hurt: they may be unreciporicative, or they made be the sort person incapable of friendship, or they may love you back for a long time and then abandon you, they may take advantage of your affection for their own gain, they may persuade you to do things you shouldn’t do. Or they may commit suicide, suddenly, just when you thought they were getting better, and leave behind a scarred landscape of confused and broken people who can do nothing but compulsively, destructively mourn. They may kill someone else you love, because they have gone insane.

A few months ago, someone asked me, “You you ever wish you never met Jesse?” And I gave the honest answer: every fucking day of the last three years I have wished, at one point or another, that I had never exposed myself to the risk of caring about him. His final act doesn’t nullify the many pleasant hours he and I spent together, the nights he listened to my secrets and told me his in turn, but even three years after the fact I can’t help but feel, right now, that the pain has outweighed the pleasure, the bad outweighs the good. The scale tips only one way, in the end. Do I know which way it is yet?

But at the same time, every time you opt to love someone, to let them in, it is entirely possible that many years from now this kind of thing may happen. Not even Jesse knew he was bipolar when he and I became friends, twenty-two years ago. Life kicks you around, and it’s your responsibility to kick back, or you end up living the anesthetized half-life I’ve been living for a long time, and I have to tell you — whether or not having been friends with Jesse for most of our lives was worth it, never taking the risk of caring about someone is far worse. It’s the difficult calculus of armor and wounds. I’m no good at it. I’m not sure anybody is, really.

*

On the anniversary of her death, I’m going to tell you a story about Maribella, who would be almost eight by now, and probably ten feet tall. Maribella was a willowy mophead who had her father’s leanness and grace but really looked much like her mother — sometimes it’s hard for me to spend time with Maribella’s mother, because an expression will cross her face that’s so familiar I’m sent cascading down into a pit of despair. She was the girliest girl who ever girled, a devotee of all things pink and purple, anything to do with a princess or a unicorn, and everything to do with getting dressed up in dresses and heels and makeup she didn’t know how to apply. She was bright and funny, and devious in a way that — and I mean this fondly — I think she must have got from her father.

One day when she was probably three, I found myself babysitting her. I had expected to be completely up to this task, the task of entertaining and safeguarding a three-year-old, as I had been three years old once and felt sure I remembered what it was like. But she mastered me quickly, and soon understand that she could easily manipulate me because I found her funny and cute. The first thing she did was steal my glasses off my face, which I thought was quite amusing until she dashed off up the stairs with them in her sticky little hand. By the time I understood what was happening, she had disappeared into her bedroom. When I came huffing and puffing in after her, I found her standing at the foot of the bed, her empty hands clasped primly at her waist, a thin smile just preparing to burst into a laugh.

“What did you do with them?”

And that provoked the laugh. She threw back her head and laughed, a garrulous, fried-out laughter, the laughter of a cartoon villain, and I realized that I was going to have to find some other way of getting my glasses back than just demanding them. I tried searching, but the room was overflowing with stuffed animals and clothes and — you may have spotted this already — I couldn’t really see. Finally, after several fruitless minutes pawing through drawers and under furniture, Bells laughing behind me the whole time, I realized that I was going to have to bribe her. Or rather, give in to her blackmail. Ever since that day I’ve wondered if that was premeditated or not, and which would be the more impressive — artful planning, or spontaneous criminal genius?

I was made to play with a procession of little felt dolls that I couldn’t really see, and then to play “store” — a game in which I offered to buy Bells’ toys for escalating prices and she declined until such a point as I was offering her real money — and then to give her several “plane rides”, which involved lying on my back, putting my feet in the air, and letting her lie prone on my feet as I pushed her up off the ground. Finally, I heard the car doors slam out in the driveway and knew her parents were home, and stood up.

“Okay, kiddo, for real. I need my glasses so I can go talk to your dad.”

She flung herself against the door, arms spread across it, and looked at me with all the seriousness her round little face could muster.

“You can never leave,” she said, and I believe she meant it.

And though I scooped her up right then and carried her downstairs to meet with her parents’ scolding, she was more right than she could possibly have known. Years later, now that she’s dead, I find myself back in that room with Maribella often, playing dolls and giving her airplanes, and forever my image of her will be the little girl in the purple sundress, her strawberry blonde curls wild from several consecutive minutes dangling in the air, telling me I’m never allowed to leave her room. And I never really will.

*

This entry is called “—>Building on Fire”, not because the actual lyrics of that song are particularly relevant to Jesse & Maribella’s lives and deaths, but because of how I sometimes feel about all the love that I poured on the two of them. On this date in 2014, that love transformed into a building on fire, and the fire still burns. It consumed Maribella’s mother, it consumed me, it consumed Maribella’s half-sister, it consumed what remains of Jesse’s biological family, and it consumed the way in which we all related to each other. I, personally, have done bad things, hurt people I care about, because of how consumed I was by the fire Jesse lit that day. Let me tell you: this is not a story with a happy ending. There isn’t any uplift here. I’m not going to give you a heaping bowl of redemption. Suicide and murder fill the lives of those who survive with grief, shame, suspicion, paranoia.

The calculus of armor and wounds. It may in fact be unsolvable.

Gallows Rumor

As my loyal reader has no doubt noticed, things have been a bit quiet in these here pages the last few weeks. There’s a very good reason for that: until last Friday, I was pushing hard to make a deadline, which had the twin effects of keeping me very busy and totally zeroing out my ability to write about anything else. Seriously, emails, text messages, everything fell by the wayside, as for the first time I could really feel the last big corrections being made on a book that I’ve been hammering away on for more than five years. As I approached the end, it dawned on me that the project was enormously ambitious, in a way that I’d never really understood before. Though the final manuscript is coming in at about 120,000 words — 450-ish pages, in print form, if the internet is to believed — I’ve written well over 200,000 words, all told, and thrown out nearly half of it. The book has long, highly technical stretches; it has 75 footnotes; it contains at least 27 named characters, almost none of whom can be removed from its plot without destroying the mechanism; it involves several real-world figures; it tracks with actual events in March and April of 2008 . . . I’ve got used to feeling a bit like a failure, because of how hard it was for me to write this book. I’m realizing now that the reason it was so hard was because it was an enormously difficult project to undertake. Holy crap. I really did all that?

In case you can’t tell, I’ve been working with my therapist on feeling better about myself, with interesting, if not perfect, results. I’m used to living in a constant haze of anxiety and self-loathing, a state of mind in which everything that fails to happen fails to happen because I’m a failure. For a long time, that was how I felt about this book. It had taken me so long to write because I wasn’t a real writer. I was struggling to end it because I was a dilettante. It wasn’t that it was an enormously ambitious novel about money and the American id — it was that I sucked. Now that I’ve finished it, I feel less that way. I still worry that it’s not good, but that’s a constant with me and my writings. I love them, I hate them, I cannot judge them.

But there’s another very good reason there hasn’t been much activity hereabouts for the last few weeks: I’m exhausted. I’m not exhausted from writing, though that’s also the case; I’m exhausted by the world, and its incessant spinning. I’ve had a lot of individual thoughts about what’s happening in the world right now over the last few weeks, most of them of the morbidly humorous variety, but things keep moving at such a pace that they get swarmed and dragged under by other events and other thoughts before I can even articulate them. And besides, I think I learned something from the late unpleasantness among the American electorate, and it’s not just that nobody gives a shit what I have to say: I’m wrong all the time. Not that I didn’t already know that. And not that I’m wrong about everything. But I had some unexamined assumptions — or, more like, semi-examined assumptions — that have proven to be untrue.

Chief among these is that I always assumed there were adults in the car who had their eyes on the road and their hands at ten and two on the wheel. I figured that Donald Trump, a fatuous gasbag, a transparent con-man, a villain of nearly comic book proportions, would be stopped. I thought that the unending torrent of scandal, the stern warnings of editorial pages, the uproar from mainstream politicians of both parties, the clear distain from every living President, and so on, would eventually dissuade enough people that he couldn’t win. I wasn’t optimistic about a Clinton presidency — though I do think she gets a bad rap, I think the political environment after a narrow political win in such a nasty election was going to be completely impossible for an old-school Democratic insider to navigate, especially one with so much baggage — but I was pretty sanguine about the Clinton campaign. And though it did take a spectacular confluence of events to beat her, she still lost, and by the lights I usually use to guide myself, that shouldn’t have been possible. I tried not to be one of the smug elites who sneered at Trump, especially given that I’m closely related to a fair number of people who voted for him. But it drove something home to me: the American experiment is fragile, and it may have shattered without my noticing.

I say that this assumption is semi-examined because the entire thesis of my book, and a lot of my political/economic thinking for many years, is exactly that there are no adults driving the car, just people, and even the smartest people are pretty dumb. How did I write 200,000 words on the themes of cognitive bias and rampant irresponsibility, and completely miss this? I don’t know. I wasn’t unaware of the history. Vietnam—>Watergate—>Iran-Contra—>Lewinsky—>9/11—>Iraq War—>Great Recession—>Tea Party—>Trump. That’s an unrelenting maelstrom of evidence that even the adults in the room aren’t really in control of anything, that they’re still making decisions based on self-interest, imperfect information, delusion, and group identity. And yet.

It’s left me shaken. By my lights, the first month of Trump’s Presidency have been just as ridiculous and troubling as I expected. From the spectacle of the President and aides examining documents related to a North Korean missile launch in the middle of a crowded restaurant with their smartphones on, to the blatant inhumanity and idiocy of his attempts to ban people from certain countries form the United States, it’s all exactly as bad as I thought it would be, and if I were still as sure of the roles that institutions and elites play in the society, I would be finding it hilarious. But Trump’s campaign was just as chaotic and ridiculous as his administration has been thus far. A huge chunk of the country either didn’t care, or didn’t care enough to abandon their political identity to guard against this. I realize now that one of my own biases, to which I was not previously totally insensitive but which it is difficult to police, is that I am exactly one of the elites that people were rebelling against by voting for Trump. My tribe is the tribe of the big city, the well-educated, the multicultural — the winners, more or less, of the last 40 years of American history. I’ve always been keenly aware of the privilege afforded to me by wealth, and I’ve grown increasingly aware of the privilege afforded me by my race over the last five years or so, but I think I missed the degree to which I was a part of an increasingly small class of people for whom the American story, the one white Americans have been telling themselves for a hundred years or more, continued to ring true. It’s true that liberals have lost a lot at the ballot box, and my own preferred political policies involve higher taxes and a more robust welfare state and slavery reparations and gun control and gay rights and so on and so forth — but every time taxes got cut, I benefitted; every time Hondas and Volvos got cheaper to buy, I benefitted; every time a new piece of technology emerged, I benefitted; every time urban renewal led to gentrification, I benefitted; every time a big city got more liberal, I benefitted. The practical effects of the national abdication of my agenda touched me, personally, very little, and so I think I came to believe that, in the end, the natural order was that life would march forward in more or less orderly fashion, and everybody would come to understand that the things that had made my life a richer, better place would eventually work for them. In short, I took my eye off the ball, and I feel like I just woke up to the reality that reason doesn’t win the day and the good manager model of bureaucracy and politics wasn’t the inevitable victor, in part because the good managers were almost all more or less like me. All of this despite the fact that I have no faith in humanity and a low opinion of people who have high opinions of themselves. Holy shit!

I’m meandering a bit now, but you should take this as evidence of how hard it has been to organize all my thoughts lately. That last, very long paragraph could be annotated in almost every sentence, and if I were writing this for something other than my blog I probably would be doing just that. Bleh.

One thing I want to be very clear about, however, is that, despite all the hand-wringing above, I have reached some conclusions, and they’re not all like, “I should empathize with Trump voters more.” In fact, as a person who has a tendency (to paraphrase baseball great Theo Epstein) to view the world from 30,000 feet, I actually see that set of gymnastics from people on the left as a self-defeating exercise in setting back their own agenda. It’s valuable to empathize with Trump voters more because they consistently vote against politicians and policies that will help them; but the point there is to get them to vote with you so you can implement your ideas. Going further than that would perpetuate the American story that most people of color have had to tell themselves for most of American history: what white people want, they get; if black and brown people benefit, it’s more or less by accident; and if white people want black and brown people to suffer, they will. Politics isn’t a game — it can be deadly — but it absolutely must be gamed.

This has got way longer than I meant for it to, so I’m just going to go into list mode now:

(1) I joined the Democratic Party. Despite being a liberal, I’ve never been a Democrat. I’m over that. The only power is in unity; the only unity is in party, at least in the American political context. Another semi-examined assumption: I have always preached that letting the perfect be the enemy of the good was ultimately destructive; and yet I’ve boycotted the Democrats because they were less liberal than I wanted.

(2) I re-registered to vote in OR-2, where the condo I own is. I spend a fair amount of my time there, and my vote matters more there. I own nothing in Portland; there’s a strong argument, actually, that almost all of my actual interests are in Bend — the family business, the family property, my own personal property, etc.

(3) Marching is good, and I plan to do more of it, but it matters less than other actions. It is important to confront Republican members of congress with what they’re doing, and what they’re enabling. That’s one of the ways in which empathy can matter — it’s tempting to view them as inhuman monsters but they’re not. They do not like to be shamed, yelled at, annoyed, or whatever. I think one of the reasons that Republicans are in power in this country despite the fact that their voters are a minority is that a lot of us gave up on this kind of thing.

(4) Resist at every opportunity, and that even includes symbolic shit like buying from Nordstrom. It will remind you of what’s important.

(5) Be wary of our own versions of Fox News and Breitbart. This is empathy, too — conservatives are not necessarily less than liberals; we are all human animals. It stands to reason that we would be susceptible to the same forces, ie, confirmation bias and apophenia. In fact, you can already see it happening.

(6) Facebook is for organizing, venting, and animal videos. It is not where you should get your news.

(7) It’s time to understand that the boogeyman of the “Mainstream Media” is in fact one of the most important sinews that has held America together, and buckling to the right-wing idea that it is lying or impossibly biased against you is empowering the forces of conspiracy, mendacity, and chaos. Read the Washington Post. Read the New York Times. Read the Wall Street Journal. Don’t suspend disbelief, remain critical, but do not cocoon yourself in liberal propaganda.

(8) Recognize allies when you see them. Backbiting and infighting are stupid.

(9) Spend a few minutes every day unplugged. Go running, or for a walk. Read a book. Put a cowboy hat on your cat. Play checkers with your kid. Smoke a cigarette. Take a bath. Play the guitar. Write a note to your girlfriend and tape it to the refrigerator. Eat an apple on the back porch. Go swimming. Juggle. Go to a play. Lie in your bed with headphones on listening to Wilson Pickett. Drink coffee in the shower. Watch a black-and-white movie. Try to read something in French. Wander around the library trying to figure out which book you want to read. Mow the lawn without earbuds in. Meditate. Ride a train over a bridge and look at the scenery.

The Success Cycle

    Sometimes all I want to do is blow it all up and leave it all behind.

    When I was younger, less damaged, more sure of myself but also somehow less sure of myself, I never had thoughts like this. I never felt embarrassed to tell people I was a writer, even when I wasn’t doing much writing (as for the first three years after college, when mostly what I did was take drugs), even as I struggled to publish anything. I never wavered, never thought about doing anything else, and though I balked at journalism — something I’m fairly sure I’m going to have to get over, if I’m going to feed myself for the rest of my life — I had no inferiority complex or guilt or ambient weirdness about it. I had always wanted to be a writer, I was good at it, and if it wasn’t working out right at this second, that was fine. If I’d gone the route of the boy wonder — something I think I was probably capable of, had things bounced differently — I would have put a lot of work into the world that I wouldn’t be proud of anymore, and the work I would be doing now wouldn’t be as good.

    But for some reason, in my mid-30s, after attending a high-end graduate school and winning a couple of prizes and getting an agent and stuff — now, now I’m embarrassed to say it. Maybe some of that is just part of getting older and realizing how small and picayune your own enterprise is, how completely impossible it is to be the very greatest of all time at something. You witness the way other people go about something and it seems better than how you do it. There are all these people in the world whose whole lives revolve around art and literature and expression and film and everything; I vacillate between judging these people very harshly and feeling as though I should be more like that. But I’m just not. And I never will be. I never really wanted to be, you know? I find the instinct to read culture as though it were a novel to be pointless, possibly psychologically destructive. I think the “express yourself” model of art is dumb. Whenever I surround myself with other writers I find myself deeply annoyed after a while, by our tendency toward preciousness, by the way we can lose track of the real world when talking only to one another, by the degree to which people feel the need to get invested in the fucking politics of this shit. So many of the people I knew in graduate school were so pissed off all the time — about shit the professors said or did, about shit the other students said or did, about shit going on in the world at large. And oh my GOD, who gives a flying, farting fuck?

    But then sometimes I look at the way that makes me feel and I think — maybe that means I’m doing the wrong thing. Maybe I should find another line of work, something I can throw myself into and and exist in completely, something that will take me over and define me, let me know who I am. How is it that I struggled with identity hardly at all when I was young, but now at 36 have come to get so bungled up about the whole subject? Who the hell am I? Is this a midlife crisis? Is this what quitting drinking does to all drunks? Would anything be different if I hadn’t developed this sudden weird complex about calling myself a writer?

    Part of it is, in no uncertain terms, that I haven’t published anything significant in the realm of fiction in five years. You tell people you’re a writer and they say, “Oh, what have you written?” And you say, “Three short stories that got published, a whole bunch I never finished, and a 95% completed novel that I haven’t sold yet and have lost all faith in.” Is that what you say? Does that mean you’re a writer? Or does that mean you’re just another fucking dillettante who likes to arrogate to themselves the status of artist when what they really do is print logos on prefab American Apparel t-shirts? I sometimes think that if I hadn’t cultivated such an elaborate, bone-deep distain for that kind of thing, that might make me feel better, too. But the problem is that I just do have a bone-deep distain for the idea that everybody’s an artist just because they write Harry Potter fanfic or weave baskets or wrote a funny song for their kids. And then we’re right back around to the problem where I feel like I’m not committed enough, either.

    In no uncertain terms, some of this is about a fear of success. I have finally walked right up to the edge of finishing a book I’ve been working on for the better part of a decade. If I ever do finish it, then I have to let it be evaluated — first by publishers, then by editors, then by critics, then by readers. At each step, there’s a way for success to feel like failure. Like a bigger failure, because the stakes will be higher. And so I’m here, bleating about my fairly minor woes, rather than doing the last little bit of work on the book. Because if I finish the book, then people might actually read it, and that could be a calamity of epic proportions.

    Bah. I think I’m just tired.

Relapse, Part One

    I suppose if I’m going to be brave about all this shit, it means a certain amount of real-time honesty. So here we are. I gave total sobriety a go, and it lasted two weeks. Now I have to pick up and start again. Not that this is a game. That’s one thing I have to remind myself — I still was sober for those two weeks. Just because my resolve broke one night, that doesn’t mean I’ve lost all my points and am now behind. It doesn’t, does it?

    I don’t suppose it’s completely fair or accurate to say that I relapsed because my dad, white-bearded and discombobulated by oxycontin and valium, looked me straight in the eye the other night and said, “Can I ask you something? What kind of place is this?” He had been moved from a tiny hospital room crowded with machines, one of which beeped when his breathing got too shallow and prevented him from sleeping, to a much bigger, much quieter room. Having fallen on a patch of ice and broken seven ribs, he’d drifted in and out of delirium for days, wracked with pain, coughing blood, insomniac, drugged, and had indicated earlier in the day that he believed he was fighting in the Easter Uprising of 1916. The answer he expected to his question was this: “It’s a place where they take people to die.” When I told him it wasn’t that kind of place, he eyed me crossways and said, “Are you sure?” I said I was sure, but he didn’t believe me.

    But I also don’t know if that’s not why I relapsed. The two didn’t feel connected, but the truth is that I left the hospital, stopped at a liquor store, and bought a little shot-sized bottle of Grey Goose. As a rule, when I’m drinking vodka I’m doing serious drinking, drinking that isn’t about pleasure or sociability or fun; when I hit vodka, I do it because it’s flavorless, it’s cheaper than bourbon and less filling than beer, and it gets you drunk fast. I sucked down that shot in the front seat of my car as it idled in the garage, not even giving myself time to get out and go into my warm house to at least get comfortable before I got drunk. Within minutes I was on the express train to Drunkville, sitting in a bar down the block and poking around the internet, as I have spent so much of my life doing over the years. By dinnertime I was well and truly blasted. Though I had drunk less than I often did on a regular night in the old days, I was toweringly, hilariously drunk, my tolerance halved by my two weeks on the wagon. I couldn’t think to pay attention to the movies I was trying to watch, couldn’t keep a sentence on a page in focus, couldn’t play a video game to save my life. At one point I got it in mind that I needed more — but when I went outside to go get it, I fell over and bonked my head on the trunk of an old pine tree in my front yard. Just about the only reasonable thought I had all night was as follows: Maybe this means I don’t need anymore to drink. I went inside, barfed up my dinner, and fell asleep on the couch. It wasn’t even 7PM yet.

    The funny thing is, there was no intense craving involved in this relapse; I’m as yet to really experience those, though I’m told they’re common. Instead it happened in a sort of automatic way, my higher functions turned off as I went through the motions of getting righteously, tumbledown drunk. I left my dad ailing in the hospital — in additon to his troubling questions, I’d also seen the massive, flowering contusion that decorates his back in shades from sickly yellow to radiant violet — and bought the vodka without making any decisions. It didn’t feel like a choice. It didn’t even feel like an action. It just happened. Sobriety —> drunkenness. It probably took about half an hour.

    One of the difficulties I’ve always had in addressing my problems has been a stubborn unwillingness to try new approaches. I always thought that one day I would just have to gather the will to quit, like Mark Renton pinned to his bed in Trainspotting, and then I would be fine. I always thought that one day, one of the strangers I picked up in a bar would turn out to be much more than just another drunk out looking to get fucked, that our stumble out the front door and sloppy makeout in the cab and ill-coordinated writhing about in the bed would somehow turn out to be a kind of Meet Cute. I thought that applying for jobs that were beyond my basic qualification would one day land me a gig at NPR or Gimlet. All of these things were, of course, silly pipe dreams, designed to fail from the start, so that nothing ever changed and I got to get up each morning and repeat my comfortable routine of food, exercise, books, and booze. Having recognized their futility, I know I have to change. But what to do?

    How do I approach this problem again, and how do I do it differently? I guess I’m owning up to what happened and have decided to quit hiding it, which is one thing. But that obviously hasn’t been a magic trick that solved the problem; I need something else. I don’t know what that something else is, yet, if it’s a meeting or a new therapist or seeing my current therapist more or what. One thing that I’m fairly sure of, having read a couple of addiction memoirs in the last few days, is this — I don’t need detox. I don’t get the shakes when I don’t drink for a while, my head doesn’t hurt, I don’t get the sweats, and so on. About my only symptom of physical depenedence has been short-lived insomnia. So, if I’m not going to go into some facility and sweat it out with people whose problems make mine look like a hangnail, what to do? There has to be something.

    And I’m worried, too, that this is how I react to bad stimulus. My parents are getting old; this is my dad’s third serious bout with broken bones in the last nine years. These hospital trips are not going to get less frequent as time goes by. I have to find a way to cope with how that makes me feel that doesn’t involve pouring vodka down my throat until I can’t see straight. I just don’t know what it is, yet.

    Oh, also: I’m going to take the advice of one of the addiction memoirs I’ve read, David Carr’s The Night of the Gun: no more addiction memoirs. They appear to be triggering, even as they describe the great folly of getting drunk.

Day One

    I didn’t sleep well last night. I didn’t sleep well last night because I was sober, and I often have difficulty getting to sleep without the aid, at very least, of NyQuil. I’m told that this trouble will ease as time goes on, and in fact I did find, earlier this year, that as I got more practice at going to sleep without booze in my belly, it got easier. And the sleep itself was better, less likely to be interrupted, more refreshing. Now if only I could convince myself not to have Netflix running the whole time, I might be able to genuinely get a good night’s rest. But one thing at a time, right?

    A curious thing happened yesterday, which I had decided was to be my first day of trying out prolonged abstinence. For the first time since I don’t know when, I found myself with the urge to smoke a cigarette while completely, stone sober. It was the strangest thing. For years now I’ve smoked 5-10 cigarettes a week, and never, ever when not intoxicated — I found, as a rule, that they held no interest for me anymore when I was sober. The problem was that I drank 6 or 7 nights a week, so I still managed to get a few of them into my system. As I’ve been rehearsing sobriety for the last year or so, one of the refreshing things I discovered was that, if I didn’t drink, the urge to smoke didn’t come crawling around after dinnertime. The cigarettes stayed in the cupboard over the refrigerator, which is where I hide them from myself. I had hoped — expected, really — that if I managed to quit drinking, the smoking would just go along with it. I hate smoking. I wish I’d never started it. It smells bad and is inconvenient and makes my lungs feel crusty and dry the next day. Sometimes it seemed like I wanted to quit drinking explicitly so I could finally quit smoking, after 18 years.

    I figured, operating on the theory that if I tried to just cancel out all my vices at once I was liable to fail and cancel out none of them, that I ought to give in. So I smoked a cigarette at about 11 o’clock yesterday morning, the first time I’ve had a cigarette while sober since maybe 2004. I haven’t had the desire to have another one, but writing about them now has got me thinking about it. What’s that about?

    In some degree I think it’s about pleasure-seeking, though the truth is that I get almost no pleasure out of cigarettes. Some part of me is worried that I’ll never really enjoy myself again if I succeed in quitting drinking, and is trying to find a substitute. It’s an illogical, almost subconscious thought process, but I can kind of feel it happen. I know — because people have told me — that quitting drinking isn’t easy, and a lot of people have difficulty having fun or feeling joy or other positive emotions after quitting, but that eventually you sort of figure it out, or remember how, or whatever it is that you’re doing. I’m trying not to worry about it too much, because it seems like there’s a lot of other stuff to be done first. And worrying about whether or not I’ll ever feel good again seems like a pretty good recipe for ending up back in a bar, taking the first shortcut to happiness I can find.

    In the meantime, I have to get to work on my book, I have to clean my house, I have to finally suck it up and start looking for a job. For a couple of years now I’ve been taking pie-in-the-sky potshots at jobs I probably wasn’t really qualified for, and either getting no response or getting interviews that I bombed. In reality I think this is good — with my drinking the way it has been, an actual, career-track-type job in radio or print journalism was likely to result in spectacular, possibly future-wrecking failure. Graduate school almost did. So what I’m looking for now is something low-stakes. My low-stakes employment record is mostly in the field of bookstores. Who knows if any are hiring; it often seems like nobody is hiring for anything in Portland, though people tell me that’s gotten better. I worry about having a boss, though. I’ve always hated having a boss, as perhaps my least favorite thing in the world is to feel like somebody else has power over me, can tell me what to do. (This is why I’ve always been suspicious of cops, despite the fact that I almost never break the law anymore.) I guess the truth is that being an adult, and getting your shit together, just involves doing some stuff you don’t really want to do very much. And I would much rather take the guaranteed time out of the house, and the money, of some menial retail employment, than I would falling off the wagon and spiraling downward because I’m bored and lonely.

    Anybody know anyone who’s hiring? I haven’t had to apply for work since 2009, which I’m realizing is a long time ago. I worked at a bookstore then. Then I was in graduate school and teaching. Then I was writing my novel and drinking and moping. It feels alien and scary. But then all of this does.

    Now I’m going to try really hard not to have a cigarette.

Addictions, Part 5

    I have a lot of worries about quitting. The truth is that I haven’t gone more than a few weeks without a drink since graduating college, and those spans of a few weeks have always been confined to fruitless efforts to quit through sheer force of will. I don’t know what’s around the corner, really, because I have no direct experience of consistently sober adulthood. The only thing that really makes me think that I might be able to make this stick this time is that I’m not trying to do it alone. Writing these blog entries has caused a lot of people to reach out with offers of help, advice, and an open ear, which I hadn’t expected when I started. I’m in therapy and taking it seriously — there’s probably a whole entry to be written about the ways in which I’ve tricked, or failed to engage with, my various therapists in the past — and I’ve got a real plan. Meetings, new activities to fill the time that I spend drinking, a host of new writing projects.

    But I’m scared, too, because I’ve never tried to do any of those things sober. When I started doing drugs I was just 19, a bundle of anxieties, insecurities, doubts, and inhibitions; part of what I liked about drugs were the ways they alleviated those things — get stoned and I could tune out the world; get drunk and I could have a conversation; take speed and my doubts and insecurities vanished. How do I make friends if I have to sit there, silently feeling my fears and inhibitions, while I try to do it? Jesus, how do you date sober? I know almost nobody, and that includes many people who don’t have any particular problem with alcohol, who feels comfortable making the first move without a couple of sips of wine in their stomach first.

    The dating thing is one of the things I’ve thought most about, because it really worries me. I’m 36 and I haven’t been in what you’d call a serious, committed relationship since I was 28 — at least not one that I was serious about and committed to. Part of the reason the last one I was in broke down was because I drank too much — she never put it exactly like that, but I can recognize so many of her complaints about my behavior, the things that caused her to leave me, as actually being symptoms of an addiction that neither of us was really prepared to admit that I had. I always intended, for as long as I can remember, to have a family — you know, partner, kids, dog, cat — and I am dead certain that a primary cause of my failure to come anywhere close to that in the last many, many years is my alcohol and drug use. I’ve come to feel I’m dangerous. Nobody deserves to be in a relationship with an alcoholic. Especially not the kinds of people I would like enough to get into a relationship with.

    But how do you find partners without booze? Notwithstanding the occasional person I’ve staggered home from a bar with — those never last more than a night — all the relationships I’ve been in have been aided by the disinhibition and celebratory spirit found in a drink. You chat with a girl on OK Cupid, and you meet for a beer, and after two or three you’re able to flirt, and after three or four you’re able to kiss her on the stoop of her building. How do you flirt, how do you make the first move, without having had a drink? These are genuinely practical matters. I feel I’m in a bind: to build a relationship, I have to get clean; to meet a girl, I have to get drunk. Maybe I should start hitting up dating websites and then quit the instant I’ve had a promising date. That’s not crazy, is it? Is it? IS IT?

    Of course it’s crazy. But the way I’ve lived my entire life to this point has been crazy, in one way or another. Sometimes I’ve lost my mind and been quite literally crazy — like, should-be-in-a-mental-hospital deranged. But most of the time it’s just that the volume and consistency of my consumption has been nuts. When I really sat down and began to evaluate my behavior — really, when I began to write these things — I found myself shocked. I drank what? How much of it? And every day? For how long? Of course my life is a wreck. Of course the first two drafts of my novel were a complete mess. Of course the last person I dated was just more than half my age and used to sell me pot before they legalized it. Of course I take a two hour nap every afternoon. Of course I failed to file my tax returns my last year of graduate school. Of course I only see my friends when they almost physically drag me out of my house. Of course I haven’t published anything in five years.

    I’m impatient for change, and terrified of it. Because living this way, while not all that fun, has two chief advantages:

    (1) It’s easy. Though there’s a lot of anxiety, depression, physical pain, spiritual malaise, sadness, and boredom involved in living the way I have for the last 15 years, there’s very little challenge. It’s not hard to wander down to a dark little bar that has soul music on the stereo and sit there drinking Knob Creek and Boneyard with a book in your hand. It’s not hard at all to live a quiet life where you mostly keep to yourself. It isn’t even hard to keep your house clean and your car insured and stuff like that, so long as you don’t have too much else to take care of. What’s hard is making friends, getting a good job, editing your novel, caring about people, and engaging with life in all its unpredictability.

    (2) It’s reliable. Though I may wake up in the morning with a headache, though I may take three trips to the bathroom every night, though I may look in the mirror and think, “You fat, ugly sack of shit,” so long as I trundle down to the bar at 6 PM every night, I will be guaranteed to have a few hours of pleasant, loose-limbed, uninhibited pleasure in my life. The guilt and shame about doing something that’s hurting me will be gone by the time that first beer is polished off. Then you can just go home and eat crap and watch Parks & Rec for the 7th time, and it will all be fine. A lot of things can happen when you’re drunk, but I can never once remember thinking, “I’m bored. This sucks.” I’ve been sick, injured, sad, angry, whatever — but never bored, and never anxious. That’s the magic of it.

    Anyway, I’ve made a decision. One of the things I’ve been dithering about for the last few weeks, since realizing I had to quit, was setting an end date for myself. I felt like there was preparation work to be done, including trying to understand better why I started getting fucked up in the first place. I’m sure there’s still a lot of that work yet to be done, but I really do think I’ve come understand something about myself that I never knew before in the last few weeks. So my decision is this: tomorrow is my last day. I can’t run this race anymore. I know it won’t be simple and I know I might relapse and I know there’s still a lot to be done, but as of Monday I’m getting clean, by hook or by crook. I’m ready. I’m worried, I’m doubtful, but I’m ready.

    There are a bunch of things, very simple, practical things, I need to do in the coming days and weeks. I need to find a meeting — I’m not going to do AA, because they emphasize powerlessness, and feeling powerless is a large part of why I started taking drugs in the first place. There are other groups, other ways, and I think I’ve found one.

    I’ve decided to take up a martial art. I don’t care about MMA or boxing or anything like that, but I have long been interested in physical fitness — the one addiction I didn’t detail here was exercise — and I think the discipline might be good for me. (That, and having something to do in the evenings, when I would usually be drinking.) I’ve been researching, and there’s a jiu jitsu place in North Portland that I’m going to check out this week.

    And I’ve been thinking, thinking, thinking, about something strange: I think part of the way I ended up like this was a lack of community. Not that you can’t be a member of a community and fall through the cracks, but the fact of the matter is that most of our lives take place online these days, and while I genuinely enjoy and love the people I’ve known either only or mostly through the internet, there’s a need to see people face-to-face that isn’t getting fulfilled. I think this is true for a lot of people these days. We don’t live where we grew up, we don’t know our neighbors, we don’t leave our houses and jobs. And so I’ve been thinking: I might start going to a religious service of some kind. This is weird for me because I am, in no uncertain terms, an atheist. I’m not even one of those people who says they’re not religious but spiritual. I’m a materialist. I am convinced. But churches and synagogues and mosques have long held communities together and given people a sense of loyalty to one another. I think I need that. I don’t know how to negotiate it, really. I’m drawn in some ways to Catholicism, but I don’t really care for the authoritarianism and social stances of the Church, even under Pope Cool Uncle — er, Francis. There’s a gay-friendly Unitarian church down the street from me, which seems a natural fit, but I know more about the early Christians of the southern Europe and the Near East than I do about mainline, Protestant Christianity as it’s currently practiced. I’ve thought about Judaism, but really — no shit — one of the things that discourages me is that the synagogues in Portland are all very far from where I live.

    Anyway, that last one is one I’m still thinking about. I might never pull the trigger on it, because it would feel dishonest to walk into a church and treat it like a social club. But it might also be the most important of all of these — who knows.

Addictions, Part 4

    I love to drink. Looooooove it. If one were to sit down and evaluate my behavior over the course of my adult life, there’s some evidence that I love drinking more than I have loved any woman I’ve ever been with, any book I’ve ever read, any friend I’ve ever made, any work I’ve ever done, my grandmother, my nieces, and my brothers. I love the taste, the smell, the way it makes you feel (up to a point); I love bars, especially small dark ones with good music playing and no food menu; I love the long, rambly conversations you get into when you’re drinking; I love the way it lowers my inhibitions and makes talking to good-looking women easier; I love the way it turns off the part of my brain that is constantly worrying about everything; I love how it makes it possible to tolerate idiots and boors, which in my experience make up about 80% of the world’s population; I love the unhinged story ideas I get while drinking. Just about the only things I don’t love about it are the hangovers and the fact that it makes you fat. Well, that, and the growing sense I’ve had for a while now that it’s taken over my life.

    One of the things that addicts on TV rarely say is how enjoyable our addictions can be, at least for a while — especially if, as they did for me, the stakes start off very low. I’m always kind of dancing around this fact when I talk to people, but the truth is that the reason I’ve been able to spend the two years since graduate school working on my novel — much as I’ve been able to survive partial-to-unemployment at other times in my life — is that I was born into affluence. I’m not ultra-rich, and I won’t be able to go about my life doing nothing to earn money forever, but there’s always been a floor for me, so that when I fuck up the consequences aren’t that awful, or at least they don’t seem that way. When I was in my early 20s, this was a real recipe for hedonism. I bounced around from California to Portland to DC to Bend, catching up with old companions and getting fat (among other things, I had no idea how to feed myself properly until I was about 27 or 28). My only constant companion was that old friend, booze.

    The first time I can remember worrying about how much I drank was very early on, at a point where it was barely legal for me to do so: I can see myself pouring beer down the sink at the house in Palo Alto where I lived after graduation, so I can have been no older than 23 when it first dawned on me that I was doing this too much. Already, a lot of the sense of the party had gone out of drinking for me. My daily life was a boring, depressing grind, as without the structure of school or the supervision of an interested adult, I floundered. I had a job at a newspaper and discovered that I was an exceptionally poor fit for the kind of work I had always half-believed I was going to end up doing one day (it’s the family business, after all). It filled me with anxiety and fear, which lead to procrastination and poor performance: I could write, but writing is a tiny fraction of the job of a reporter for a daily paper. Most of it is about cultivating personal relationships, calling person after person out of the blue, chasing down people who are too busy to talk to you — all stuff that pressed exactly my sorest spot, the feeling that other people didn’t want me around, that I didn’t understand their motives, that merely being in a person’s presence was a form of asking them for a favor and that if I didn’t put on some kind of entertaining show I was wasting their time. (This feeling persists to this day. It’s why I perform onstage.)

    Outside of work, I could barely handle anything. The insurance lapsed on my car, and after one attempt to get it fixed that went nowhere, I left it parked in the driveway for several months, where all it did was cause me to worry. I was eating too much, burritos for lunch, spaghetti for dinner, and didn’t even quite realize I was doing it; too, the daily routine of basketball and soccer that had left me relatively svelte in college had vanished, and the result was a rapidly-ballooning waistline, again pressing one of my particular buttons: I had been a fat kid (or that’s what other kids told me — looking at pictures now I don’t see it), and my body image has always been very poor. I bought a computer; it broke, and I didn’t get it repaired. The poems I had been so proud of writing dried up, and I had yet to reinvent myself as a fiction writer. Meanwhile, the political situation was a raging nightmare, as the Bush Administration, capitalizing on the blind rage in the country after 9/11, was lying and bluffing its way into a dumbassed war in Iraq that I sometimes felt like the only person in opposition to. There was very, very little pleasure in my sober life, even after I quit the job that taxed me so much. So I turned to drinking on basically a daily basis to get myself through it.

    I came to think of this as maintenance drinking, and the funny thing is, it did the trick. As long as I was drunk, I was relatively happy. I could tune out and play video games or whang on my guitar, and get to feel some of that pleasure that was so hard to come by in my daily life. I learned to like the taste of bourbon, I think because drinking bourbon seemed tough and cool, the kind of thing a writer would do, and left a trail of empty bourbon bottles behind me wherever I went. I cultivated an image as a hard-partying artist type, though the fact was that I wasn’t making any art and the kind of drinking I did when other people were partying was the same kind of drinking I did when sitting at home watching television. If anybody worried about me, I didn’t know it. I worried about myself, though. Grinding worry about my drinking habits has followed me almost as long as the drinking itself, and eventually it would overwhelm the pleasure I got out of it, so that practically all I did was drink, and worry about drinking.

    It didn’t help that nearly everyone I knew had a substance abuse problem of one kind or another in those days. My roommates in Palo Alto were unrepentant potheads who were either stoned or at work every waking hour (and sometimes stoned while at work). In Portland the roommates were drunks and potheads and opiate abusers. In Washington my best friend was a functioning alcoholic who drank himself to sleep every night because his job caused him such stress that otherwise he would lie awake with his mind racing until morning. These were all people I had grown up with, gone to college with, known before any of us developed these habits, and somehow we all turned out miserable and had to self-medicate. I realize now that the year or two right after college is just a scary, unpleasant time, when people work bad jobs for low pay, and nearly everybody feels terror and anxiety about their future — I can remember describing my recurring dream that I was on a crashing airplane to one friend, and she said, I have that dream, too! At the time, though, it just seemed like I was born into an unhappy generation.

    The difference is that most of these other people reformed, eventually, and I didn’t. My pothead roommates from Palo Alto are now a lawyer and a college professor, just as people who graduate from Pomona College are supposed to be. My friend from Washington is a thoroughly domesticated husband and father who no more drinks himself to sleep than he goes out clubbing on weeknights. One of the guys from the house in Portland works for Google. Meanwhile, I lurched around, kept doing desperate and beside-the-point things like moving from city to city, in hopes that somehow, in the transfer from Portland to Washington, or Bend to New York, or New York to Minneapolis, or Minneapolis back to Bend, I would lose my addictions in the same way one might lose a saucepan. As the years ground on, the addictions enabled, and were enabled by, another problem: social isolation. My peripatetic lifestyle meant that I was often in a new place, where I knew nobody, spending a lot of time alone. Doing that sober is boring, and makes me feel like a real loser. I don’t know when I developed this obsession with the fact that I’m an uncool dweeb — I certainly never had it as a kid, when cluelessness about social hierarchy prevented me from ever realizing what a space cadet and a nerd I was — but now it’s one of the things that really, really drives the drinking. Sober up, and I have to look at my life for what it is, which is pretty fucking depressing. Go down to the bar, and I can have a conversation with the bartender, screw around on the internet, and return home to watch reruns of Gilmore Girls without examining just how sad and lonely an existence I lead.

    This quitting thing — which I’m not doing perfectly, by the by; I’m a little hungover as I write this — has been coming down the pike for a long time. When I had a mental breakdown in graduate school, I nearly drank myself out of the program, especially in the last year when I was living alone and didn’t have much structure. For the first time in my life I began drinking in the daytime, would spend days on end intoxicated, bought things two and three times because I’d forgotten I’d already purchased them, tried to write drunk, picked up strange men and women in bars and would wake up next to them the next morning without knowing their names, hurt myself falling on ice because I’d gotten drunk and then realized there was no food in the house and had to walk to the store in blizzard conditions. Just about the only things I didn’t do were go to work drunk, and drive drunk. All the time I knew I had to quit. I had reached a state of emergency I’d been headed toward for a long time. I didn’t have any idea how one might go about doing it, but I knew I had to figure it out.

    The process has been gradual, which came as a surprise to me, though I suppose it shouldn’t have. So much of what you learn about addiction comes from television and other media, in which the story is always, Was a drunk, hit rock bottom, went to rehab, now I’m a recovering addict and I touch nothing. That’s a dramatic story, but it doesn’t feel especially accurate to me, in any of its aspects. First of all, there was never a moment when I, personally, realized I’d hit rock bottom and I had to quit immediately — the election of Donald Trump was close to that, but I’d been working very hard for more than a year at that point on cleaning up my act, including by keeping track of, and moderating, my booze intake. That wasn’t rock bottom, because I was already on the way up. Second of all, quitting all at once — why would that work? It’s like sticking a five-year-old on a bike and saying, Go for it, kid, I know you can win the Tour de France. I’ve been rehearsing sobriety for months now, forcing myself to tolerate the boredom and occasional mind-fuck of not drinking for a few days at a time, so that when the day comes next month and I try to go clean for good, I’ll be familiar with what it’s like. And there’s all this preparation to do — my shrink calls it building a life worth living. I know that if I don’t repopulate my life, if I don’t find people to spend time with and useful things to do, I just won’t be able to hang. One day I’ll be feeling lonely and purposeless and I’ll just find myself back in a bar. I’m a little uncertain about this stuff, but I know it’s necessary.

    And so I don’t have any grand conclusion. This might be the last of these or it might not. I’ll keep you updated on my progress, anyway.

Addictions, Parts 3(a) and 3(b)

A.

    Before I go into this part of the story, I want to lay out two caveats. The first one is this: the other main character in this entry is in no way a pusher or a dealer or any other kind of villain; he was just the person most conveniently available to facilitate a decision I had already made: that I was going to take a lot of drugs in college. I made this decision for a lot of reasons, but mainly it was because taking drugs sounded fun. In the tales of woe spun out by addicts, it should never be forgotten that at the root for many of us is that we were chasing pleasure, once upon a time, and many of us continue to pursue pleasure until it kills us. The question of why we do that is probably as varied as our physical appearances are. The second caveat is this: I’ve disguised the identity of that person, largely because we’re not in contact anymore, and so there’s no way for him to represent himself in the story. If you went to Pomona with me, I encourage you not to try to guess who he is, for the following reasons: (1) the character represented here is a bit of a composite, and (2) you’d probably be wrong, anyway. Please keep your guesses to yourselves.

    On that note: The first person to get me into any drug stronger than your standard college kid regimen of bad beer and overpriced marijuana was a friend of mine who was also, kind of, my boyfriend. I say “kind of” because the entire time our arrangement went on, we were both pursuing other people, he actively (including other straight-ish guys, I suppose egged on by his success with me), and me somewhat-less-actively (as was my wont). But we only ever had sex with each other, in part because our teenaged awkwardness made it hard for us to make other connections. It was very much an any-port-in-a-storm situation for both of us, and though I’d long found myself attracted to the occasional person of the male persuasion, I continued to think of myself as straight even after I’d formed a relationship with another boy. (And let’s be clear here, though we were legally men, we were boys, both of us.) This sort of thing — mostly sex, little companionship or mutual understanding — has been typical of my relationships ever since, and almost all of those have been with women. Just for the record.

    This boy and I simulated intimacy through the use, mostly, of ecstasy, though we also took mushrooms, acid, speed, and just about anything else we could lay our hands on. I found I loved them all, but especially the uppers, because they had the quality of taking my scattered, unfocussed depressive’s personality and turning it into something finely honed and outgoing; coked up, I could chat up girls endlessly, dance to house music endlessly, write endlessly — I loved writing on stimulants, and still kind of do —, drink endlessly, fuck endlessly. The only problem was the crash, the scraped-out, heart-whamming, too-tired-to-sleep bottom that one inevitably reached after a couple of days of this kind of thing. Well, that, and being broke and in college, it wasn’t always easy to lay your hands on the stuff. I can remember buying candy with my flex account, then re-selling it to other people at a discount, just so I could scrape together enough cash to buy a couple of E’s (in Southern California, ecstasy was known, not as X, but as E).

    Eventually, perhaps not surprisingly, the boy disappeared, wandered off into the land of true eccentrics and druggies, and I have no idea where he is today. I didn’t miss him that much, once I got over the absence of regular sexual stimulation. He left behind mostly a real taste for uppers. The other stuff — the hallucinogens, even the ecstasy — I found I could take or leave. No, what I really loved was the rush of blood in my veins, my heart beating so hard that my wrists, neck, feet, and eardrums thumped with it. I loved the feats of concentration I could pull, reading 300 pages of original-source history material in a day or two, firing off a five page essay about Jews in Medieval Spain in a night, the focus and false brilliance that comes along with amphetamines. I loved smoking my throat raw while I wrote bad poetry in emulation of Paul Celan and other terribly serious literary figures. If I could have found a way to live permanently in that state, I would have done it.

    At a place like Pomona, where most people worked themselves to the bone four days a week and partied till they dropped the rest of the time, it was easy to feel that a lot of my behavior was normal. Almost all of my friends drank to excess a few times a week, a lot of them were stoned nearly every waking hour, and many people’s study habits consisted of hoarding the adderall and ritalin that doctors used to hand out like candy to any kid who got bored in school, and then binging on the stuff when tests and papers came up. Because school was easy for me, I was able to go harder for longer than most people, and sometimes did an entire semester’s worth of work in the final week of term — especially in economics classes, which had no attendance policy and were often laughably simple. I felt camouflaged, invincible. I wasn’t even aware, really, that there was a problem, though I can now remember friends expressing concern that I was getting stoned in my room alone. We took pride in our tolerance for booze and drugs and thought of ourselves, for the most part, as sowing our oats: Pomona was full of the future bankers, lawyers, screenwriters, VC speculators, and professors of America; we had worked hard in high school, scored well on tests, and did more reading and writing in a semester than a lot of college students do in four years. We deserved to cut loose. But we — or I, anyway — was trained that the only true pleasure came from the systematic derangement of the senses, and work was something you mostly did so you could reward yourself by taking drugs. Though I didn’t know it, I came out of Pomona an addict, ready to plunge into a life of randomness, denial, shallow relationships, and failure.

B.

    I recently read a book by a journalist named Sam Quinones called Dreamland, in which he lays out in detail — sometimes too much detail, for my tastes — the way in which the opiate epidemic snuck into the backwaters of America, when for years heroin use had been confined to big cities, where gangs were willing to hazard the risks involved in distributing it. I read it with a shudder of recognition, especially when he reported something I realized I already knew: oxycontin reached Portland in late 2003 and took up residence among the young and feckless of the city’s middle- and upper-middle-classes.

    I’m going to skip most of my mid-20s in this accounting, because the most important person involved in that part of the story has made it clear that she doesn’t want me writing about her anymore, and is uncomfortable with the amount I’ve already shared about her in the past. But in 2003 we hadn’t yet met, and I was living in a crappy little ranch house with three other people, in a part of Portland charmingly known as Felony Flats. (I think its actual, official name is Brentwood-Darlington, and it has proven to be one of the few parts of the city immune to gentrification, at least so far.) All four of us were unhappy with the lives we were leading, which consisted mostly of watching television, overeating, smoking pot, drinking, and masturbating. Only one of us had a job; none of us had a romantic partner of any kind; three of us had serious chemical imbalances for which we were not medicated. The dishwasher backed up into the bathtub sometimes. The clothes dryer dried nothing and if you forgot your clothes in there they sat, warm and damp, a breeding ground for fungi. Flies infested the living room. We were in pretty dire straits when one of our number (not me) reconnected with an old childhood friend who ran a sideline in peddling vicodin and other opiate-laden pills.

    Unlike my ex-boyfriend, this old friend was a pusher and a bit of a villain; I was never clear on where he got his gear, but I suspect he stole a lot of it from elderly relatives. By the time we got rid of him he’d reinvented himself as a petty con man and extortioneer, the kind of guy who was always moving from city to city because he kept wearing out his welcome by burning the people he got to know there. Under normal circumstances I’m sure we all would have shunned him. But he had drugs. In addition to vicodin, he had a connect for cocaine, he could lay hands on tabs of LSD, and he introduced us to oxycontin, the powerful opiate that is sometimes called “Hillbilly Heroin” because bored teenagers in the countryside could get it easily from quasi-legal pill mills in neglected small towns, and use it to tune out their stultified lives. In fact, it basically was synthetic heroin. It was dangerous stuff. I liked it a lot.

    For a kid who had been trying to distract himself from a world he felt totally alienated from basically since the day he was old enough to think, oxy was the real solution. Pop a pill, or grind it up and snort it, and your whole being melts into something warm and fuzzy. It’s impossible to worry about anything on oxy; your every concern boils down to the simple pleasures of the body: it is immensely fun to scratch yourself when high on oxy, or to manipulate your testicles in a non-sexual way (I can’t imagine giving enough of a shit to have sex on opiates), or to feel the bright tingle of soda washing down your gullet. Who gives a shit if you’re sixty pounds overweight, unemployed, and you haven’t read a book in a year? Rub your feet on the carpet and nod out.

    We did dumb shit to get opiates. One of the roommates had sciatica, and we figured out that emergency clinics handed out vicodin for sciatica almost as though it were no more harmful than cough drops; we would drive from clinic to clinic, scamming drugs off bored and incurious doctors who wrote the scripts without hardly checking our charts. Once, when I had a root canal, I made sure to combine the percoset they proscribed me with beer, so I could get a real kick out of it; vicodin or percoset and beer, a dangerous combo, left one pleasantly swimmy in the head and warm in the body. I was fortunate never to have over-done that one.

    I believed, or at least I thought I did, that the combination of opiates and alcohol was allowing me to tolerate the world with some measure of enjoyment. But right here I have a song I wrote in that time, called “Opiates”, in which the bridge goes: “You don’t believe me / you can’t relieve me / so why do you seek me / through my haze? / My drunken days / poppy-eyed, dissipate / into opiate.” There are other, more pointed lyrics, mostly about pain, but these are the only ones that aren’t so bad that I’d rather curl up and die than let anybody ever see them. Clearly, whatever I was doing with drugs and booze was not actually making me feel better.

    I believe a few things saved me from turning into one of America’s now-countless number of middle-class heroin addicts. One was that the opiates were very hard to come by in our corner of the world; if, like so many of the kids in Quinones’ book, I had sustained a serious injury and been proscribed oxycontin for the pain, I have little doubt that I would have been hooked by the time I finished the first bottle. Another one is one that stops a lot of people, or so I’ve been told by recovering heroin addicts I’ve met — fear of the needle. I just couldn’t imagine sticking myself with something on purpose, especially given everything I’d heard about the dangers of dirty needles and the constant assault of AIDS news I’d endured during my adolescence. The last was an impulsive lunge I took across the country to try to rejoin my old life with my friends from college, who were all living in Washington, DC, trying to change the world. Despite that I’m often quite cynical about politics, and possessed even then a Foucaultian skepticism that change is really possible, I was young enough that I still wanted to make the world a better place. And, really, I think that part of me was a little worried about what I was getting into. It was the last gasp of the self-preservative instinct that had kept me from drinking and drugging a lot in high school.

    My track record with opiates since then is mixed. I am aware that I like them rather too much, meaning that I’m careful not to go on long binges, and I’ve said no both times I’ve been offered heroin to sniff, aware that what life I have could easily disappear down that particular rabbit hole in a matter of months. But if I have dental work or minor surgery, you can bet I’m going to maximize the pleasure I get out of those little pills. Because, remember, drugs are fun. At least they are until they hollow you out, and wear you down to a little nib, like a raw bone exposed from a severed leg.

Addictions, Part Two

    One of the features of my mental illness — one of the ones that makes it difficult to properly name — is what is known, clinically, as the mixed episode. In a mixed episode, I am in a form of mental agony that cannot properly be called sadness or depression; my mind races, I am compelled to pace, I cannot concentrate on a single course of thought for more than a flashing moment, and yet I am often obsessively thinking, unproductively, about the same thing. I’m also prone to rages, paranoia, and delusional thinking, and I cannot sleep. Sometimes, trying to release my mind from its trap, I will claw at my own skin, pull strands of my hair and beard out, eject audible exclamations in the vein of shut up! or you’re an idiot! The reason this feature of my mental illness has made it difficult for my doctors to nail down a diagnosis is that it used to be that such episodes, lasting at least a week, were part of the differential diagnosis for bipolar I disorder — the most severe form of bipolar, the kind that plagued and ultimately took the life of my foster brother, Jesse. The problem was that, unlike Jesse, I’ve never been prone to the massive highs associated with bipolar; the fact is, you can’t be a manic depressive if you’ve never felt mania. These days, the DSM-V is perfectly willing to treat with the idea that mixed episodes can be a feature of unipolar depression, though it cautions strongly that, if you’ve had them, you’re probably bipolar, you just haven’t had your mania yet. But it’s just not that way for me. Like most artists, I’ve had fits of inspiration, and like most people I have days when I feel much better than others. But I’ve never lost track of reality when feeling good. It’s only when feeling bad that I’ve been truly, plainly out of my mind.

    The reason I’m describing this in a post called “Addictions” is that, not unlike a lot of the other problems in my life, one of the easiest cures for a mixed episode is a good stiff drink or three, and one of the easiest ways to bring one on is to abstain from alcohol for very long. It’s a bizarre and vicious state of affairs whereby my brain seeks refuge in poison, and that poisonous refuge wards off illness better than any talisman or vaccine. I’ll get into the early roots of my drinking at another time. This is about how it can end up feeling necessary.

    The last time I tried to quit drinking was last February, for Lent, in a possibly-ill-advised attempt to simply will myself out of my bad habits and become, magically, a healthier, happier person. It worked for about a week — not an easy week, mind you, not a fun week, but one during which the main symptom of sobriety was intense boredom. But then, one night, it all came flying apart, as my mind, untreated either by the medical arts or the distillative ones, turned inward and began to rip itself apart like an animal cursed to forever try to eat its own heart. I’ve described what happened on this blog before, but to make a long story short, I didn’t sleep for nearly two days and then became delusionally obsessed with my own loneliness and social isolation. Not to say that these things aren’t a problem for me — they are, one that booze both exacerbates and alleviates — but I’m not exactly in solitary confinement or locked inside a secret garden with no other children around. I just don’t call my friends very often, and I’m a little frustrated by my inability to sustain a relationship for more than a few weeks at a time, that’s all. In that mental state, though, pacing around my house, I came to see myself as the loneliest man in the world, completely adrift on the sea of my life, alone in the little raft that was my apartment. Strangely, my only real tether to reality was a series of comic pratfalls — a collapsing bed, a loony Facebook post — that I stumbled into over the course of a few days.

    By the next afternoon, I’d bought a bottle of wine, and though I knew I was doing the wrong thing, the thing I had been struggling not to do, once I had a couple of belts in me the madness was gone. It’s hard to explain, but the alcohol singing through my veins tamed the monster of my mind. The obsessions left, and behind them crackled the pleasant electricity of being a bit tipsy. Though the next day I would feel guilt and shame about drinking when I had sworn I wasn’t going to, at least I didn’t feel frankly, possibly dangerously, insane. It was the bottle or the mental hospital, and I didn’t have the strength to choose the latter.

    Not that these mixed episodes only come on as a result of abstinence; then they would be a clear symptom of withdrawal — and though I drink a lot, most of my life it has not been enough to cause physical dependence of that kind. The most prolonged episode like this came in early January of 2012, when, faced with the long Minnesota winter, a romantic disappointment that now seems minor but at the time felt shattering, the pressures of my first year in graduate school, and the roiling of my unmedicated brain chemistry, I lost touch with reality for more than a week and spent several days obsessively writing the worst short story I’ve ever written, a story so scattershot and nonsensical that I can’t bring myself even to look at it anymore — if anyone tells you that madness makes great art, I encourage you to squint hard at them and sneer. But the only way I could get to sleep in those days was to bundle myself in every scrap of clothing I could lay my hands on and tumble against the wind down to the liquor store, returning home with a four-pack of Surly IPA, which I would administer in quick succession. Then, and only then, would my attention wander from my story and the blaring, channel-skipping radio in my brain, and finally I could tumble into sleep on the couch. I believe it was after this incident that my drinking went from heavy to troubling, though it may have been before or after — that’s the problem with the addict’s memory; it can be unclear.

    And then there are the depressions, the numbing, soul-killing absences that have periodically washed over me, often for what seems like no reason at all. Drinking is good for that, too, though in a different way — instead of slowing my mind down, it speeds it up, slices through the anhedonia like a buzzsaw, makes it possible to laugh or have a conversation or read a book (at least until the swimmy vision sets in). Keep in mind that when I say drinking is “good” for this sort of thing, I don’t mean it in the sense that I recommend the use of alcohol for the treatment of whatever mental illness it is that I have, be it unipolar depression or bipolar disorder or something altogether different; I heartily recommend against it, because the toll it takes, as I suppose I’ll explore at a later date, can be drastic. But in the short-term, it does the trick, and I’m not the only crazy person to have noticed this — practically everybody I know has self-medicated with booze to one degree or another, and I’ve noticed that the more likely it is that someone drinks a lot, the more likely they are to show clear signs of a similar kind of mental illness to my own. The correlation isn’t one-to-one, but alcohol has the wonderful quality of being both numbing and activating, exciting and drowsing, social and solitary. Thus, it’s an easy treatment for a lot of symptoms. You can even, with practice, learn to like the taste.

    Look, I’m not trying to make excuses for myself here. I’m trying to lay out, as much for myself as anybody else, a story, about how it is that I came to be the person that I am in my late 30s. And I’m trying, for once in my life, not to be too hard on myself, because being hard on myself is a large part of how I got here in the first place. It’s become clearer and clearer to me over the last few years that one of the things that I am — a core part of my identity — is an addict; I’m trying to understand why, with it in mind that I might get better that way. I’ll keep writing these until . . . I don’t know, until I understand something I didn’t understand before.

    I’ve set a date for myself, by the way. I’m going clean by the day a certain orange-haired, red-faced pig-man is inaugurated President. I don’t think I can face the challenges that lie ahead if I don’t. So that’s why I’m doing this. I feel a little like I’m in rehearsal right now — I haven’t ingested anything stronger than coffee in a few days now — but the big show is still in the future. This writing is part of that preparation. It feels necessary. It also scares the ever-loving shit out of me. But making big changes requires taking big risks, sometimes.

Addictions, Part One

    The first thing I can remember being addicted to was fantasy. Not Game of Thrones-style fantasy, with magic and swordfights and all that; I’ve always found that stuff a little tedious, notwithstanding the fact that I have watched the TV show and made a run at the books. No, what I was addicted to was the dreamy state of pretend, a world where I was a hero or a great writer (most often) a baseball star. For hours and hours on many a summer day, I would stand out in the front yard of our house on 28th Avenue, a bat in my hands, slowly enacting an entire career that inevitably involved being the youngest major league player ever, breaking every hitting record in the book, winning several World Series, and ultimately being inducted into the Hall of Fame on a unanimous vote, acclaimed generally as the greatest player ever — far, far better than mere mortals like Ruth, Mays, or Cobb.

    I continued to indulge in this fantasy for a long, long time, long after the age at which most people cease so intensely to pretend. As I got older my sense of narrative improved, so often I was drafted by some out-of-the-way team like the Brewers or the Reds, who underestimated my talent until it became so overwhelmingly obvious they could no longer hold me back. I continued in it, in fact, after I was cut from my high school baseball team at age 15, after I passed the draftable age of 18, and even after college, where the closest thing I had done to actually playing baseball was hurt my elbow trying to throw an apple over a dorm while drunk. I did it in much the same way, too, standing in the yard of my parents’ house with a bat or a glove in my hand, acting out the games, inventing the heroics, making myself quite thoroughly a legend, if only in my mind.

    There are a lot of reasons I call this an addiction, but the main one is that the role that these fantasies played in my youth and adolescence was not entirely unlike the role that other, much more harmful addictions would come to play in my adult life: they were a way to check out of a world in which I felt strange, alienated, fearful, bored, fat, ugly, unlovable, awkward, and (increasingly) guilty. In a pretend game of baseball, one that ended with me twirling the final strike or clubbing the final homer, I could be in a world in which what I did was not just good, but unambiguously so. This was also true in a world in which I became a famous director and married Kerri Russell, or won a Nobel Prize for literature and was lauded as the greatest since Shakespeare, or found secret messages from the government under a rock and then rode to the rescue of people in distress. Fantasy had the ability to numb the anxiety and pain of being human, something at which I have never been good. Can you think of anything else that does that?

    Too, this kind of fantasy and my earliest stages of serious drug use are intricately linked. I smoked pot and got drunk a few times in high school, and even then I had an intuition that maybe I liked doing these things too much. The thing is, when you’re a 16-year-old who’s trying to prove he’s smarter than everybody else by getting straight A’s, it’s a little bit easier to just say, “Okay, I like this too much, maybe let’s not fuck around with it.” So for the most part I didn’t. It wasn’t until my sophomore year of college, when I was experiencing my first real breakup from my first serious girlfriend, that the incentives switched. I was so miserable, and so inexplicably — we’d broken up because we lived hundreds of miles apart, we’d been drifting from each other for months, and I’d wanted to do it, and yet still I felt sad about it all the time — that when I got stoned for the first time in years and it put me in a dreamy, otherworldly state not unlike the one I’d once accessed with a bat in my hands in my parents’ yard, I thought, Aha, this is the thing for me.

    And so I think it’s probably not surprising that one of my favorite activities, back when I was a pothead, was to pick up my old baseball bat, and go out in field behind my dorm — at Pomona College, these fields were rather preciously called “beaches” — to construct yet another in an endless string of triumphant baseball careers. People must have thought I was strange, a 20-year-old kid in his bare feet and a sleeveless t-shirt, silently, slowly swinging a bat and then staring into the distance, but I didn’t really care that much. That was part of what I loved about pot, back then; I could retreat into the little world of one where I didn’t feel judged or even noticed, where I could forget the times I’d been rejected or done something awful to someone who didn’t deserve it, and just space out. It was such a relief, especially in college, where my feeling of alienation grew more complex and harder to solve as the issues of sex and sexuality became increasingly present and important. Those were the areas where I was most confused, most likely to have been rejected, and most likely to have done something awful to someone who didn’t deserve it. After that first relationship, I began a pattern I have perpetuated ever since, becoming serially involved with people I didn’t care about much because there was little risk involved and I was (for lack of a better word) horny, and then affecting to be complexly traumatized by people I did care about because I freighted our interactions with such intense, often imaginary baggage. (This was before I had added the real jackpot to the mix, getting involved with people I did care about but didn’t really want to be with, thus adding the double whammy of having done something awful to someone who didn’t deserve it and finding that our friendship had become a veritable No Man’s Land, pocked with emotional landmines and artillery craters.)

    Eventually the pot sort of turned on me, and began to cause an intense self-loathing every time I smoked it — which I continued to do, to diminishing returns, until I was about 23 or 24. With it went my access to that fantasy world, the relatively harmless addiction that, I think, also had its uses: I don’t think I would be a writer today if I hadn’t spent so much of my early life lost in a world of my own construction, if I hadn’t come to feel the power of narrative and a built universe. I’m no longer able to stand in a field of grass with a baseball bat and really effectively pretend that I am a great hero of the diamond, a man whose feats elicit the adulation — and, ultimately, acceptance — of millions. Instead I’ve had to find other ways to numb the pain. But that’s for a later date, I suppose, this has already got longer than I meant for it to.

America Agonistes

    You’ll be glad to hear (I assume) that I am no longer depressed, not in the all-consuming way I was a couple of weeks ago — in fact, as a matter of brain chemistry I’m more or less fine, and am having a bit of a hard time conceptualizing the headspace I was in the last time we talked to one another on this blog. I have finally resolved myself to the fact that I’m going to have to be medicated for the rest of my life. One too many close calls and eventually you get in a wreck. Should probably put that seatbelt on, if you see what I’m saying.

    But. But this morning I sat in the bathtub for an hour and worried about Donald Trump. Then I got out of the bathtub and sat down at my desk to work and worried about Donald Trump. Restless, unable to get anything done, I finally went to the supermarket, where I worried about Donald Trump. I was so wrapped up in my worry about Donald Trump, in fact, that at one point I rounded the corner into the produce section and discovered I couldn’t decide what to buy. I mean, I knew what I needed — a vegetable to go with dinner tonight. This is an easy decision. There are three vegetables I know how to cook. But I stood in front of them and just stared, and stared, and stared. Finally I put some apples in my bag and just wandered off. Later I came back and grabbed the first thing I walked by — asparagus. I don’t even like asparagus very much, but there you have it.

    As I left the store, I found myself doing a curious thing: I was reminding myself of the things that are not in Donald Trump’s power to change, that will remain good, no matter what happens next Tuesday. In no particular order, some of these things follow.

1. Apples will still grow, and taste clean, tart and bright when you bite into them. A fresh ripe one will still resist just enough when you bite to crunch when it gives way. Its juice will still get on your chin and your hand will still be sticky after you eat it.

2. Sharp cheddar cheese will still cause that pleasant tightening in your jaw, the unbidden rush of saliva to your mouth, will still smell pungently of itself and taste lovely on bread with thick slices of ripe tomatoes.

3. When you wake up in the morning just as the sun is coming up, its light will still fall quietly on trees and streets of your neighborhood, and you will still think that this is a good place, this place you’ve found yourself in.

4. One day you will find yourself running — to catch a bus, or your kid, or a hat blown on the wind — and you will remember being a child, and running for no reason, with no destination in mind, just because it brought you joy to be in and move your body, and you will feel a little bit that way again, if only for a second.

5. You will still, if you wish, be able to put tiny pieces of rubber in your ears and from them will pour the music of James Brown, or Claude Debussy, or the Ronettes, or Beyoncé.

6. You will still come to the end of a really good book, close the cover on the last page, and lie back on your couch and stare at the ceiling in a state of wistful ennui, wishing a little bit that you could go back and read it all over again without any memory of how it unfolded in your hands.

7. There will still be a cute Australian woman who works at your cat’s vet, and every time you go there you’ll look at her wedding ring and think idly about a different world in which that ring wasn’t there and you asked her to go to coffee with you after her shift, and you will still smile at the thought every time.

8. There will still be hot days in summer when the sun stays up till nearly ten, and you will still hear the neighbor kids playing soccer in their front yard. There will still be diamond-like winter days when the sun strikes the snow in just the right way, and you will see a thousand tiny crystals of ice, each its own unique size and shape, glinting. You will still go walking on a foggy autumn morning and smell the sweetness of fallen leaves mulching. There will still be a day each spring when you see the first purple crocuses turning their faces to the weak and distant sun.

9. You will still fall in love, or not. You will still have children, or not. You will still meet people and learn new things about the human race that surprise you, and some of them will be good things. You will still say something funny to the woman in the checkout line at the supermarket, and she will still laugh. You will still stick your tongue out at toddlers when their dads aren’t looking. You will still pet friendly cats that approach you on the street. You will still have strange dreams and tell them to someone who only half-listens and goes, “huh,” when you’re finished. You will still see that guy around the neighborhood who goes shirtless and wears American flag swim trunks all summer. You will still go down to Waterfront Park and wonder why the teenagers there don’t try to sell you pot until you remember you can just buy it in a store now. You will still think wistfully of the days when you could eat pineapple without getting heartburn, and then eat some anyway. It will still be worth it. All of these things will still happen, every day, to someone, and sometimes it will even be you.