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.

Zero to Sixty

    Turns out family is complicated. I want to say, “the bigger it is, the more complicated a family is,” but I’m not sure that’s always true, really — some of the most-complicated families I’ve known have been relatively small. I also don’t think the Anna Karenina principle is all that accurate, either: even happy families are complicated and weird. I know mine is.

    My mom’s younger brother died yesterday. We weren’t close. In fact, we were about as un-close as it was possible for two guys who lived 20 miles apart and shared a lot of ancestors to be. This morning, I was on the phone with my mom, and we were trying to suss out when the last time we saw him was. She said she’d seen him three years ago, at a funeral. It was his birthday. The encounter was brief. Me? I think the last time I saw him was at a wedding, in about 2003 or ’04. We were both a little drunk.

    Why weren’t we close? Part of it is that I’m just not close with people, really. Part of it is that he teased me when I was a kid, I think because he noticed I was extremely suceptible to teasing and the whole galaxy of older-male behaviors that it lives in; I would turn red, and yell, and eventually come to the point of tears. I still don’t like it very much; when people feel like they have the right to fuck with me it pisses me off. I’m not completely sure on the chain of causality there, but the waters run swift and deep on that one. And then, beyond my own borderline sociopathy and our fraught relationship as young people (he was still in high school when I was born), there was some very heavy business between him and the rest of his siblings, business I’ve never quite understood. I’m not going to go too deeply into that, because it feels disrespectful to plumb those depths so soon after his death, but suffice it to say that I was not unique in being largely estranged from him.

    When I was young, and he still lived at my grandparents’ house, my uncle had a cat he’d named Cookie. Cookie is also my mom’s name (well, nickname, really, but it’s what everybody calls her). This was no mere synchronicity. In the way of many big families, the older kids in my mom’s generation were tasked with stewardship over younger ones, and my uncle came under my mom’s care. They enjoyed one another’s company so much that when a stray cat wandered up to the back door, my uncle named her in tribute to my mom. I’ve been told that when she came home from college, the first thing she would do was huddle with her little brother and exchange all the important news of their lives. Maybe that’s why he teased me so relentlessly — I took his place. Or maybe that’s reading to deeply into the business. I don’t know. Anyhow, I’ve tried to put myself in my mom’s shoes, and in my uncle’s shoes, to understand what it would be like to have a relationship that was once so close go poof one day. And then to have the possibility of ever getting it back foreclosed. I have the good fortune to have difficulty imagining that.

    This is all by way of saying that I can’t properly eulogize the man, because I didn’t really know him anymore. When he was young he was famously devil-may-care about everything — money, time, goals, girls, you name it. In pictures he has a big shock of wavy, reddish-blonde hair, and is usually in some surreptitious way having a joke: in the one I remember best, he’s riding shotgun in my dad’s convertible VW Bug, smiling along with the rest of the crew . . . with his right hand dangling down below the door, so that only the camera can see his middle finger proudly extended. I always thought that picture was funny. There was an aspect of the lovable scamp about him in those days. He was often grinning in a way that indicated he knew something you didn’t.

    I can’t imagine that being a fun-loving rebel was the easiest thing to do in the house he grew up in; he was the only son of a big, tough, difficult, and very successful father, who was known to have little time for bullshit and time-wasting. In that kind of an environment, actively pursuing bullshit and time-wasting becomes something noble, I think. There actually is value in letting older people know that you don’t care about their rules and refuse to live by their standards. Even if you eventually become one of them, as my uncle did, as I am doing, as we all should be so lucky to do.

    Funny how I asserted at the beginning that Tolstoy was wrong about happy families, and then went on to detail the ways in which my family, which I think of as mostly a happy one, was in some ways not happy at all. I don’t know. I guess don’t think happiness is binary, or something.

    But anyway, today I’m remembering my uncle, who died yesterday, aged just 53. He was an imp and a joker, the son of a tough father, the younger brother of five sisters, the father of two daughters. I always believed that our estrangement would end one day; today I mourn the fact that it didn’t. Super perfundo, RWC. You are missed.

Some Losses

1. Grief as Paranoia

    I flew down to Bend for my cousin’s wedding over the weekend. Flying to Bend is always a bit of an odd experience — the flight, which only covers 120 miles or so, usually takes about 25 minutes, so that getting to and from the airport is a bigger ordeal than being in the air. When I got down there, nobody was there to pick me up. Not a big deal — the Redmond-Bend airport is not much more than a glorified bus station, so there’s nothing arduous about getting in and out — but I wondered, sort of, if I’d been forgotten, so I called my mom to see if someone was on the way. She said my dad was, but he was running a little late.

    Then a weird thing happened. A couple of minutes later, I was still waiting, and she called me back. When I saw her name on the caller ID, I became convinced that she was calling to tell me that my dad had been in a wreck on the way to pick me up, and was dead. This is a completely ridiculous, irrational fear, but it was so strong that I almost didn’t answer the phone. When I did, she just wanted to say that she’d talked to him and he would be there any minute. Even as she did, I spotted his car pulling up to the curb. Everything was fine. Nobody had died. Of course nobody had died.

    When I was a kid, my dad hated answering the phone, and the explanation given was always that he associated unexpected phone calls with answering the call that informed him that my half-sister, his oldest child, had been killed in a car wreck. I sort of pretended to understand that — it made sense in an abstract way — but I never really did. It wasn’t until I got a similar call a couple of years ago that I started to understand. Now — now, my grief over that event has largely subsided to a background noise, something that’s always there but rarely all-consuming. It has, however, manifested as this very specific form of paranoia. If there’s a way for my brain to line up events in such a way that someone has died, it’ll do it. And though I know it’s ridiculous, I can’t help it. Every phone call is a disaster in the making.

2. Grief as Public Rite

    When David Bowie died, I was as surprised as anybody, I suppose. But what really surprised me, far more than the actual fact of his death, was the response to it. My Facebook feed erupted in a collective cri de coeur, one which roared for a full day but still hasn’t really petered out. Links to his videos, teary-sounding tributes, lots of agreeing, head shaking, and digital hugging went around. The rending of garments was elaborate.

    This surprised me because David Bowie meant exactly nothing to me. I don’t begrudge anybody else their fandom or their grief — God knows, most of them will all be mystified when a small minority of us are totally crushed by the inevitable death of, say, Stephen Fry — I just don’t understand it. I always found Bowie’s music to be a little bland; it always seemed to me that the theatrical aspect of his art rendered the music qua music not very interesting, much of the time. My favorite Bowie record is probably an Iggy Pop record. (The Idiot, btw.) My favorite Bowie song is probably a Queen song. (“Under Pressure”.) The only time I ever saw Bowie live, it was because he was touring with Nine Inch Nails, and I spent most of his set (he was in Thin White Duke mode that night) idly wondering when Trent Reznor was going to come out.

    And it’s funny, because in many ways Bowie seems to have stood foursquare against a lot of the things I despise: rote fetishization of the authentic; reflexive privileging of emotion over intellect; the idea of perfection in art. Bowie was weird and daring and sometimes sloppy. He took risks that didn’t always pay off. This is the kind of artist I usually love; it’s the kind I try to be. He stands with Neal Stephenson and Richard Linklater and Margaret Atwood in this way. And yet, somehow, I just never locked in with him. My failure to lock in caused me to have a blind spot as to his massive cultural significance.

    It’s weird to be reminded so viscerally of the ways in which you’re out-of-step with the zeitgeist. If Bob Dylan or Mick Jagger had died and this been the response, I would have been as all in as everybody else. But the death of David Bowie, even at the relatively young age of 69, did not rock my world. I kind of wish now that it had. I’m obviously missing out on something.

    The night Bowie died, I was walking up Clinton Street in the dark, and I saw a big crowd gathered around a firetruck and an ambulance. My first instinct was to take out my radio gear and see what was going on. But as I approached, I heard a boombox playing “Under Pressure”, and then “Rebel Rebel”, and I realized something public, important, but not necessarily newsworthy was going on here. It had something to do with David Bowie, though I couldn’t tell what. I never did figure out what the firetruck and ambulance were there for — nobody was hurt — and eventually I moved on. Really, I probably should have taken out my gear anyway and started asking around. I’m sure there was a story there. Maybe, though, I was not the person to tell it.

3. Grief as Public Rite 2: The Re-griefening

    But then Alan Rickman died. Rickman and Bowie were both English, both 69 years old, both died of cancer. I was actually shocked to find that Rickman was the same age as Bowie — his rise to fame came 15 years later, with his iconic performance as Hans Gruber in Die Hard. I think I would have pegged him at about 55, if you’d asked, though I don’t know why you’d ask me how old Alan Rickman was when you could just Google the guy. But it gave me a window into what other people were feeling about Bowie. A reminder, really; I’ve been getting bummed out by celebrity deaths since the suicide of Kurt Cobain at least. I don’t know that I’m gutted, the way some people seemed to be by Bowie’s death. But I’m not happy about it. It scares me — not least because Rickman was younger than my father and not much older than my mother. And it feels completely not real. Like, how is it possible that Alan Fucking Rickman is dead? Hans Gruber sure isn’t dead, even if he is. Severus Snape isn’t dead, even if he is. (Spoiler alert, Potter newbies.) How can the man who brought them to life be dead?

    A few years ago, I was poking through some website looking for an Adventure Time t-shirt, when I ran across something far better: a baseball undershirt with blue sleeves and, positioned smack in the middle, an airbrushed glamour shot of a young Alan Rickman, sandy-haired and, in his weird, beaky way, very handsome. I knew immediately that I had just found the greatest item of clothing ever made. I will admit that some of that was the seriously WTF nature of the person on its front — Rickman was famous (very, after his turn as Snape), and seriously talented, but he wasn’t a celebrity in the way that the people who get their faces on t-shirts usually are. His dalliances didn’t make the pages of People magazine. I have no idea where he lived. I’m actually not entirely sure whether he was straight or gay. Until he took the role of Snape, he had been a slightly-more-handsome-than-average character actor. Even after he took the role of Snape, he was still a character actor — it was just that he was probably the single most famous character actor in the world. Why was he on this shirt?

    But there was more to it for me. Rickman had always been one of those guys that I felt a little bit of ownership of. One of the things I used to do, back when I had a membership to a fabulous brick-and-mortar PDX movie rental shop called Movie Madness, was fall in love with an actor or actress and make a project of plowing through every movie on their IMDB page. The whims that took me could be capricious, weird — I watched every terrible movie that the terrible actress Jennifer Morrison (of the terrible TV show House) made, for instance. But one of the more rewarding ones of these projects was Rickman. I never finished — he’d been in over 40 movies and TV shows by the time I took it up, some of them quite hard to lay hands on (I never managed to find a copy of a BBC miniseries called The Barchester Chronicles, in which Rickman plays a reportedly very minor role, for instance). But you’d find Rickman doing solid work in the weirdest corners of cinema and television — as the title character in an HBO movie called Rasputin: Dark Servant of Destiny, for instance; or as the nasty Outback imperlalist Elliot Marston in the dopey Quigley Down Under. Though he was often typecast as the heavy, he could do just about anything, as attested by his comic turn as The Metatron in Kevin Smith’s Dogma, or his unexpectedly heart-throbbing Colonel Brandon in Sense and Sensibility. When finally he was tapped to play the role that would make him a worldwide icon — Severus Snape in the Harry Potter franchise — it felt like there was no other actor on Earth who could breathe life into JK Rowling’s most complex, dangerous, and magnetic character.

    He was probably too old to play Snape, really; the Severus of the books is still a relatively young man (some rudimentary math would suggest that he’s in his early 30s by the time Harry and the gang show up at Hogwarts), but Rickman was 55 — old enough to be the father of the character he was playing, if you think about it. But still he seemed perfect. Rickman’s specialty was the character who was supercilious, hyper-intelligent, malevolent. Snape was all of those things. He was scary and mean and cruel. The thing is, a lot of people could do that. But the part called for someone who could play all of those things, and then make it convincing when he finally displayed something many never expected him to have — vulnerability. When the moment came, Rickman was more than up to the task. By that point, seven-and-a-half movies in, the Harry Potter franchise was not really featuring the acting skills of its players very much; the books were far too long and complex to be adapted into movies, especially when the movies made the mistake of concentrating on the action at the expense of the things that truly made the books special — the characters and the humor. Rickman was just about the only adult with a big moment to play in either of the final two films. Many other very fine actors — Ralph Fiennes, Helena Bonham Carter, Michael Gambon, etc — were reduced to little more than cackling villains or noble godheads by that point. But Rickman nailed it. Inasmuch as the bloated, overstuffed behemoths that were the last few Harry Potter movies had a heart, Rickman’s Snape was it. He pumped hot blood through a cold franchise almost single-handed.

    I still kind of can’t believe he’s gone. I no longer follow movies as avidly as once I did, but the idea that the upcoming flicks Eye in the Sky (a star-studded techno-thriller in which Rickman stars opposite Helen Mirren) and the certain-to-be-dreadful Alice in Wonderland sequel, in which he’ll voice the Catarpillar, will be his last? That just seems wrong. I re-watched Harry Potter & the Prisoner of Azkaban, and every time he was on the screen, I tried to convince myself that he was really dead. I never got there. Somehow it just doesn’t make sense.

We Could Be Heroes

    The holidays can be a rough time if someone you love has recently died. I don’t think this insight is really going to blow anybody’s mind, but I’d never really experienced it first-hand until last year, when Christmas marked the one year anniversary of the moment when I realized my foster brother, Jesse, was in the midst of a manic episode — a manic episode that was followed by a bottomless depression that resulted in his dying in a murder-suicide, in which he killed his five-year-old daughter, as well. Now, two years later, I’ve hashed through the events that followed so many times that I can type them without really feeling the whooosh that I’m sure you just felt when you saw the words “murder-suicide” on the page. It’s not okay — it will never be okay — but it has become normal, in its way. How I feel about it changes from day to day. Lately it’s been rage. The rage is omnidirectional and it’s been destructive to my personal relationships. I think it’s made me a harder, less forgiving person, which I don’t like but can’t change.

    Lately, I was deposed as part of a lawsuit stemming from Jesse’s death. I suppose I probably shouldn’t talk too, too much about that, because it’s still pending. But it was a destabilizing experience. To have a stranger ask you, again and again, for details about a friendship that you can barely bring yourself to think about (or stop thinking about), is disorienting. I said things aloud that I’d barely allowed myself to think before. I was legally required to say those things out loud, in a room full of people I neither knew nor trusted. Afterwards, I managed to contain my tears almost until I got on the elevator. For some reason it seemed really important that I not let any of the lawyers see me cry.

    I guess because it’s the holidays, and because of the deposition, I’ve been thinking about Jesse a lot lately. His final months have tended to color my memories of everything about him with a tinge of nihilism. I think about driving him home from school one day nineteen years ago, a gray Portland afternoon, the day we became friends, and it feels meaningless, ugly. I think about making a ceremonial bonfire of his old notebooks on a bridge over the Clackamas River, and then stomping it out in fits of laughter, and it feels meaningless, ugly. I think about his wedding day, the first Christmas after he moved into our house, and especially the day his daughter was born — meaningless, ugly. This is where the rage comes from, I think. I no longer feel sad, I no longer see the tragedy. I just see the pointlessness of our whole friendship, of the love I poured on him and his daughter, of the time we spent together, and it pisses me off.

    And so, because I do not wish to feel this way, I’m going to tell you a story about the two of us that, no matter what happened after, mattered. It’s not a big story, but it’s a true story. This is a Christmas gift to myself, to remember this.

    I can’t remember the year anymore, or even the month, though my memory is that it was the kind of cool, gray, but dry day that you only really get in like October or maybe April. Jesse and I were driving down a road on the west side of town, out towards Beaverton — much more his part of town than mine; before his father died and he moved in with us, he’d lived out close to the Portland-Beaverton line, while I had spent nearly my whole life in urban Southeast Portland. That side of town is ribbed with high green hills, which are in turn lined with winding busy roads that stream down toward the basin where Portland proper lies gridded over the flats. I can’t remember anymore what we were doing over there. I can’t remember what we were talking about. I can’t even remember which one of us was driving. I can remember, with vivid acuity, gazing through the windshield as we approached a curve in the road. Car after car glided left, around the curve — but the car in front of us didn’t. It just kept going straight, as though its driver had decided to release the wheel and see what would happen. What happened was that it disappeared over the lip of the road. I remember thinking to myself that the most remarkable thing was how unremarkable it was — it happened soundlessly, slowly, almost as if it were the most natural thing in the world for every tenth car around that curve to slip into oblivion beyond its edge.

    We pulled over, along with many people both in front and behind us. As I got out of the car, I took in the situation below: beyond the lip of the road lay a steep, ivied slope studded with Douglas firs; the car that had gone over had slid sideways down this slope and smacked into one of these trees with its passenger door, pinning the car’s frame heavily against the trunk and leaving the wheels spinning ineffectually at ground upon which they couldn’t quite gain purchase. Just visible through the driver’s side window was an elderly woman, who appeared to be helpless to shove the door open against the pull of gravity.

    I remember Jesse peeling off his jacket and saying to me, “Dial 911.”

    “What are you going to do?” I had been busy coming up with excuses not to go down there — the one I’d landed on was that she might have done something to her spine and it probably wasn’t a good idea to move her.

    But Jesse was already gone, sliding down the uneven slope on his huge feet. I watched him for a second, and then pulled out the little flip phone I had in those days. For the first time in my life, I called 911. It made me unaccountably nervous. When the operator answered, my voice quaked. I told her an old lady was down in a gully in her car and might need rescue. The operator asked me where we were. I couldn’t quite remember. I think I told her we were at 17th and Taylors Ferry Road. Once we had hung up, I went back to the lip of the road to watch what was happening.

    Jesse had reached the old lady’s car, pulled open the driver’s side door, and stood against it, propping it open with his back as he heaved the woman out of her seat. Then he hoisted her over his shoulder, more or less like a sack of potatoes, and began climbing up the slope toward the road. I could hear him apologizing for the indignity of it even as he did it.

    Before he reached the top, a siren sounded, and a firetruck appeared up toward the top of the hill — but then, before reaching us, it veered off onto a side street. I realized, suddenly and with complete certainty, that I had given them the wrong location. It would be a few minutes before they realized it too and followed a daisy chain of other 911 calls back to the actual scene of the accident.

    Before they got there, Jesse had hauled the old woman up to street level and set her down on the hood of our car. He was asking her a series of questions that I suspect were meant to test her for concussion — though he was by profession an operations manager for a mortgage company, Jesse had always had the aspect of a cop or a military person, and cultivated many of the skills needed for those professions. These included hand-to-hand combat skills and a strong grasp of human anatomy.

    They also included the instinct to approach disaster in an attempt to help. I have long held a theory about human beings, one that is crude but, I think, true. This theory posits that there are basically three types of people: people who run towards a fire, people who run away from a fire, and people who stand and watch a fire. Most people, for sound evolutionary and psychological reasons, fall in the latter two categories. I am, I have discovered repeatedly, of the stand-and-watch school, often of the stand-and-watch-and-try-to-remember-how-I’m-going-to-phrase-it-later school. But Jesse wasn’t one of us. Jesse was the sort of person who ran towards a disaster, to see if he could rescue anybody from it. The truth is that a lot of the actions Jesse took in his life fall under an aegis that we name heroism. He was proud of that.

    On bad days, I let that taint how I feel about heroism. I’m already cynical about such concepts, and if Jesse hadn’t been such a regular example — this was not the only time I saw him do this sort of thing, though it is the most dramatic — I probably wouldn’t believe it was a real thing. I already have a tendency to think that our ascription of moral virtue to the performance of heroic acts is a bit . . . generous. But then maybe I’m just resolving the cognitive dissonance involved in the fact that I am the protagonist of my own life, but certainly not the hero.

    I’ve been reading Amanda Ripley’s The Unthinkable, about how people respond in various disasters and why. Toward the end of the book she starts digging around in a database of heroes — the sorts of people who run toward a fire in hopes of helping. They have some things in common: they tend to be male; they tend to come from small towns; they tend to have good relationships with their parents; they tend to have friends from all walks of life. Jesse and I each had two of these things: we were both male; he had friends from all walks of life, and I have a good relationship with my parents. But there’s another variable that he had and I don’t: he believed that he could control what happened to him. He had a romantic, almost mystical image of himself as a powerful person — powerful physically, mentally. His childhood had been traumatic, and I think his adulthood was largely about wresting control away from those who held him captive as a kid. Me? I’ve been riding the waves my whole life, just trying not to drown. No one really hurt me as a child. But I also don’t really believe I can change anything. I believe in basically immutable systems.

    There are several facile readings of those alleged insights that could lead one to explain the manner of Jesse’s death. But that would be reading life like a novel, and if there’s one thing I believe above all others, it’s that life is not art and attempts to make it so are destructive. This is just a story about two young men, one of whom is dead now.

Some Complaints

Physical

Ankle, dull consistent pain, as of a tendon

Foot, left, numbness when running in new shoes

Foot, right, purple toenails tending toward falling off

Back, left, soreness, as of a bruise, but no bruise visible

    Sub-complaint: absence of wings

Eyes, both, vision noticably worse than just a few years ago

Hair, too gray, too long

    Sub-complaint: I don’t like going to the barber but I met a cute girl the other day and she         told me she was a barber at one of the local hip places but I can’t remember which one              and I risk going to the barber and leaving with only a haircut

Weight, too high as always

Political

Congress, intractability of

    Sub-complaint: the inexorable tendency of national parties to radicalize

    Sub-complaint: the untenability of nationalized party system without a parliamentary                 system in which it can work

    Sub-complaint: the heavily Republican character of my congressional district

President, current, imperfectly liberal on foreign policy

    Sub-complaint: reflexive assumption of liberals that free trade is evil

    Sub-complaint: radical militarism of said President’s opponents

President, future, lack of interesting candidates for

    Sub-complaint: Hillary Clinton seems like a perfectly competent person who would probably     do a reasonably workmanlike job as President, but her visceral distaste for the campaign trail     will probably cost her any election in which her opponent is not Donald Trump or Ted Cruz

    Sub-complaint: Bernie Sanders is a classic lefty stalking horse but his internet fans seem             to think there’s a conspiracy against him

        Sub-sub-complaint: being President is not about having perfect ideas

    Sub-complaint: Worry that Marco Rubio will be the last man standing on the Republican side     and will trounce Hillary Clinton in the general

    Sub-complaint: Donald Trump’s ascendancy says worrying things about white people

    Sub-complaint: Ben Carson’s ascendancy says worrying things about white people

    Sub-complaint: etc, etc, etc about white people

Gen X, conservatism of

Baby Boomers, conservatism of

Internet, tendency of to exaggerate offense and privilege outrage

    Sub-complaint: tendency of young internet commentators to demand ideological orthodoxy     (see also: Aesthetic complaints)

Aesthetic

Novel, mine, lack of faith in ability to complete

Jonathan Franzen, continuing outsized fame

State of criticism, its consisting mostly of political fault-finding and condescending Stalinism         masquarading as liberalism

The Bugle Podcast, declining quality / possible cancellation

Harmontown, extreme decline in quality

The Americans, not currently airing

Superheroes, their vapidity and omnipresence

Geeks, their fetishization

Austism, its fetishization

Classic rock, its continuing domination of airwaves and restaurant playlists

Sporting

Oregon Ducks football, terribleness

Seattle Mariners, terribleness

    Sub-complaint: unwillingness of some M’s fans to admit this

Boston Red Sox, terribleness

    Sub-complaint: ditto

Tennis, no more majors until January

Tennis, domination of Novak Djokovic

    Sub-complaint: Andy Murray’s inability to break out completely

    Sub-complaint: Rafa’s injury woes

    Sub-complaint: Roger’s inability to beat the Djoker

Tennis, racism in

Cricket, my inability to buy a baggy green hat

Basketball, how much less interesting it is to watch than play

Arsenal, ongoing futility

Personal

Impermanence, insistent feeling of

Singleness, persistence of for the last few months

    Sub-complaint: Inability to stay with one person for more than a few months. I swear to             God, I am not your garden-variety committophobe. Or am I? I actually don’t know.

Boredom, consistent

    Sub-complaint: embarrassment over feeling bored

Social anxiety

Existential

I AM GOING TO DIE ONE DAY

Touched with Fire Podcast Episode 1: Seven Scenes from a Trip to California

Hey hurrbody -- As promised, the pilot of my podcast project. This is a personal essay called "Seven Scenes from a Trip to California".

It's my hope to release one of these a week until Thanksgiving. This would comprise Season 1 of Touched with Fire. We would then reset after the new year.

Hope you enjoy.

Music featured in this episode:

"Headphoneland", Mice Parade

"Girth Rides (A Horse)", The Dead Texan

"Leaving Home (Alternate Version)", Yo la Tengo

"Emily's Theme 2 (White Rabbit)", Nathan Johnson

Autumn

    A tall man in a dark jacket comes to take my grandmother to the doctor. Except he doesn’t.

    In reality, the man who takes my grandmother to the doctor is a small man in a colorful jacket — my dad. But when you ask her, she’ll tell you of the tall man in the dark jacket. It’s hard to say whether this is an hallucination or a failure of her brain to properly describe what she experiences, but either way, it’s troubling. Everything about her life lately has seemed troubling to me. I must admit that I haven’t been to see her in a while, because the last time I did, it was pretty obvious that she didn’t recognize me. I’m worried, sort of, about frightening her. But really it’s just convenient. Her misery is so palpable in the little house where she lives with my uncle Victor. It scares me a little.

    I think my grandmother was a better grandmother than a mother. I think that’s true of a lot of people, especially people who survived the Depression and the War and spent a lot of the 50s and 60s trying to sort themselves out. My dad was largely raised by his own grandmother, Ma Quigley. He was only a few years younger than his uncle Lanny, so when his mother turfed him there, he was easily folded into the brood. At times he would live with his mother, and at times not, but there was chaos there. His stepfather was an Air Force mechanic, and an irresponsible reprobate. They moved around a lot. He ended up back at Ma Quigley’s sometimes. He went to high school in a little logging town in southern Oregon, where he lived in an apartment with Ma Quigley, who slept in a walk-in closet. He didn’t talk to his mother very much, I don’t think. He had been with my own mother for years before he introduced them. It was a complicated relationship. My dad and my grandmother loved one another, but I’m not sure they liked one another very much.

    By the time I was born, much had been settled, I think. The stepfather was long gone, wandered into the United States of Alcohol on the back of drunken horse, and my grandmother lived a short drive away from us. I don’t know how they related to one another, but she and I had a fine old time together. We ate popcorn with butter on it, which wasn’t freely available at my house, where my mom was often on a diet. We would go out behind her house and climb Pilot Butte, the big cinder cone that used to mark Bend’s eastern edge, and she would listen to me speculate about the possibility that we would end up in the newspaper for this feat of endurance and strength. She never pushed religion on me, which had been one of the sticking points in her relationship with my father. If I had a nightmare, she would sing me to sleep, in a high, trembling voice that made me feel safe.

    When I got older, we had less to talk about. We didn’t really have a lot in common other than our genes: she was religious, conservative, constitutionally inclined toward small towns and environments with as many people as much like her as possible. I was atheistical, liberal, from a city and always looking for a bigger one. For a while we bonded over a mutual suspicion of George W Bush and a mutual love of cats. When I lived in Bend in my mid-20s, I would go to her house once a week to visit, and that’s what we would talk about — her cat, Gus, a gigantic Maine Coon who had wandered into her yard one day and taken up residence; my cat, Phoebe, a less-gigantic Maine Coon who had been my companion off and on for ten years.

    Last winter, she caught the flu and almost died.  She hallucinated then, too, including mistaking me for the pastor of her church at one point. But the signature feature of my grandmother’s life has been a complete refusal to be crushed by forces larger than she. She survived the Depression. She weathered the home front in California during WWII. She endured after her first husband, my grandfather, vanished. She didn’t give in when her second husband turned out to be a drunk. When her oldest son didn’t speak to her for years, when her oldest grandchild was killed by a drunk driver, when her youngest son returned to live with her in adulthood, when her favorite brother crashed his Cessna on Christmas Day 1996, when her older sister withered with Alzheimer’s, when another brother wasted away from emphysema — she bore up. Often she performed heroic work. She was always good in a crisis. In the crisis of her own influenza, she refused to die.

    And now, though she believes that a tall man in a dark coat comes each week to take her to the doctor, when in fact it’s a small man in a colorful coat? I don’t know. Eventually one of these things will mean her end. In the long run, you always take the field. But any individual thing — I have no doubt she’ll outlast those. The tall man in the dark coat may take her to the doctor for another ten years.

    It is the autumn of her ninety-fourth year. Today I noticed the tree in the courtyard next to my building has flushed pink, as though embarassed by the spinning of the globe. I will have to go see her, and trust that she will deal with the crisis of my presence as well as she has dealt with every other crisis so far.

Boomerang

    There comes a point at which being tired boomerangs and turns into insomnia. I’m so familiar with this experience that it’s come to be an expected part of my night, something I think about as I face my bed: when will I find myself lying there, awake, unable to cross the barrier between that condition and tiredness? Because it’s coming. It’s always coming

    Imagine, if you will, the way you feel when you’re ready for bed. You’re in your living room, sitting on the couch, and you become aware that your eyelids are heavy. Maybe your head almost hurts, though not quite. Whatever you were doing to keep yourself entertained is starting to annoy you instead. It feels as though you could just click off the light and be asleep before you were even prostrate.

    I get that. Every night there comes a point at which I feel that. So I get up, and I go into the bedroom — this is a trick, by the way, which I had to be taught; for years I was an inveterate couch-sleeper, the sort of person who could be found waking up at sunrise in whatever room he had been in at midnight the night before, regardless of its purpose. Anyhoozy, I get into the bedrrom and I peel off my clothes and I lie down on the bed. And the tiredness begins to leak away. I’m not usually aware of it at first, though I am wondering when I’m going to realize it has happened. Then, after half an hour, or an hour, or however long, I realize that I’m just lying in my bed, staring at the ceiling, and that physical sensation of sleepiness, the one that drove me into the bedroom in the first place, is gone.

    I try to read in these moments, but the funny thing is that I actually am tired enough that it’s hard to concentrate on things. Usually I default to an audiobook, probably one I’ve heard a half-dozen times before: A Short History of Nearly Everything, for instance, or The Restaurant at the End of the Universe. There is a list of voices — nearly all male (almost all audibook readers are male, for reasons that could probably be fruitfully explored but which I’m not going to write about now) — that have slowly lulled me to sleep almost every night of my life. Bill Bryson, Martin Freeman, Stephen Fry, Simon Prebble: the men who read the books I try to sleep to.

    Sometimes it works. Sometimes I lie there with an audiobook burbling in my ear and I drift off and wake up five hours later and three hundred pages further on in the story. But often as not I lie there and think bad thoughts. I worry, or I self-criticize. I squeeze the extra fat around my midsection. I get up to pee a lot. I feel guilty about how I’m not reading. I read, but I absorb nothing. I become paranoid that the cat’s stuck outside. Increasingly, I worry about death. Mine, other people’s, it doesn’t really matter.

    I don’t have a very good perspective on death. I know I’m not going to heaven or hell or anything like that. I’m just going  to blink out of existence and cease to be and I won’t know the difference. But what the hell does that mean? And how can it be that that’s going to happen, and happen so soon, when I can’t even make myself go to sleep when I’m tired? Maybe insomnia is a form of death-denial. Maybe it’s my subconscious trying to get me to live forever.

    I so often wish I could just put a halt to the passage of time, so that I could stop worrying about how quickly and constantly it’s going by, and about how everybody I know is going to die and then I’m going to die and by the time that’s happening it will seem as though no time has passed at all. And sometimes, when I’m wishing that, I get up in the middle of the night, and write it down.

    Am I going to be able to sleep now? Will the boomerang whip back around towards me? Or have I just got myself pointlessly worked up again? We’ll find out.

    Good night, I hope.

The Mortal Winter.

1. On Winter.

The days are short here. It’s hard to believe that we’ve already passed a month since the solstice, because the sun still fades in the afternoon, and it’s hard not to walk around the city feeling absent, as though your winter clothing has insulated your very being from the world. Thin. When I was a kid, that was the word I used to apply to these dark midwinter days, and I believe I found le mot juste way back then: Portland in winter is thin. Day upon day of it and you starve.

I missed a plane this weekend, and have had to spend a couple of extra days, stolen days, here in my hometown, in its thin afternoons. I don’t mean to complain: there is often no place I’d rather be than here, and at the very least the sun has not spent its time hiding behind an impenetrable sheet of clouds for the last few days. But it has been strange, the way it has affected my mood. I feel slightly hungover all the time. I realized just now that I haven’t spoken a word aloud since yesterday. I kind of like it that way.

2.  On Phoebe.

They tumbled over one another in a wood crate outside the neighborhood market, a half-dozen kittens who had been born of a surprise litter. Gray, with phantom black stripes down their haunches, white jaws and chests: to look at, indistinguishable. A basket full of kittens is almost certainly the most adorable thing in the world, and of course we wanted to take home all six of them, but my parents were just regular cat people, not Cat People. We could take one home.

My brother Andy squatted down to play with them, and one immediately latched onto his arm. He gnawed harmlessly on his fingers, and then climbed his way up towards his shoulder. The others were cute and friendly, but this one: this one was obviously special.

“I like him,” Andy said. “He’s feisty.”

So we took this kitten away from his brothers and sisters and named him Archimedes. It was a dumb choice — nobody could pronounce it, and there was no convenient diminunitve form to help people out — but I liked the idea of naming a pet after a scientist, I think because I had watched Back to the Future too many times. Archimedes spent his first night in my bedroom, prowling. He was unafraid. He also didn’t have much interest in letting me go to sleep.

When finally we took “him” in to be neutered, we discovered that “he” was, in fact, a she. Cats, in this sense, are both complicated and simple: it’s hard for the layman to tell what their gender is, meaning that a lot of cats get misidentified and some live years of their lives as boys until one day they turn up hugely pregnant; but they also don’t carry with them the gender complexities that people do, I guess because they can’t talk — your female cat can’t tell you if she feels like a tomcat in the wrong body, or what have you. Anyway, Andy, who was eight, decreed that we couldn’t have a female cat with a boy’s name. We tried out a few different things, but finally landed on Phoebe, after Holden Caulfield’s younger sister in Catcher in the Rye. It fit her. It’s hard to say why: it just did.

Phoebe, in her youth, was beautiful, regal, majestic. One of her parents had been a Maine Coon, which is just about the largest domesticated breed of feline there is, and she grew to be quite long and tall. Her favorite way to get attention was to wait until I was doing my math homework, and then wander into my bedroom and stretch her body across my calculus book and gaze up into my face as if to say, Who are you to deny me? She ruled over our other pets with the ferocity of a warrior queen, and her combination of size and quickness made her dangerous to my mother’s dog as much as she was to my dad’s cat. Suffice it to say, I loved her immoderately, and though in theory she was a family cat, she belonged to me much more than everybody else. She slept in my bed at night, after all.

3. On Mortality.

An aleatory collection of things I remember about Phoebe:

-

One night I snuck out of my parents’ house and went for a walk with a girl. Phoebe snuck out of the house with me, and then tagged along on my date, as though chaperoning us: she owned me much more than I owned her, that’s for sure. She was the adult in our relationship. Eventually, however, we got separated, and when I snuck back into the house having failed to pluck up the courage and kiss the girl, Phoebe didn’t come with me.

She was gone for days. We thought she was dead. In a panic, my brother Mickey and I ran off a thousand fliers with a photograph of her and my parents’ phone number on it, and stuck them up all over the neighborhood. I’ve never been a good sleeper, but I don’t think I slept at all for those few days. I stayed up all night, staring out the open window of my bedroom, hoping she’d jump through it soon.

Then one day I came home to find a message on the machine: someone had found a cat that looked an awful lot like the one of the fliers I had been putting up, but much, much skinnier. I called her back, and it soon became clear that this was, indeed, Phoebe. Mickey and I drove over to the woman’s house — all of three blocks from home — and collected Phoebe, who looked like a detail from a danse macabre painting: bony, gray, strange.

A lot of things have happened to me in my life that have made me happy. Athletic triumph, academic accomplishment, even falling in love. I still think I’ve never been happier than the day I got to take my skinny cat home and feed her for the first time in a week.

-

She grew quite enormously fat after that incident, and though she retained her queenly air, there was more privilege than power in it. I don’t know if she grew fat because we overfed her in guilt or if she just ceased to believe that there would be food around all the time, but either way, she came to resemble the middle-aged Henry VIII, corpulent, happy, dangerous: she could still beat up any cat on our block, even if she couldn’t climb to the top of the dogwood tree in our backyard anymore.

-

Another time, I thought she was lost again, this time on the coldest night that Portland had seen in a decade. By the standards of other places I’ve lived, this was nothing, but it was all I knew at the time. I wandered the neighborhood, snapping my fingers and making the strange clicking sound with my mouth that she liked, but she never responded. I remember finally getting home and sitting down on the back porch, freezing cold, and imagining her out there somewhere. I cried. I was eighteen years old, and crying wasn’t the done thing at the time, but nobody could see me and my cat, as far as I knew, was out in the winter night, dying.

The next morning, I got up to get dressed, and when I opened my closet she came sprinting out and immediately headed for her box. While I was being maudlin in the back yard, she was just wishing that she could find a place to take a leak.

-

Her knees went bad. We put her on a diet, and she lost the weight. Her knees never recovered.

-

When I moved to New York, I had to let her move in with my brother. She had always been, and would always be, a cat who lived for her time outside. As she aged, her personality softened, and she came to love people — all of them, really — a great deal, but she was never happier than when perched in a shadow, surveying her domain. She was a cat who owned the world, even as she began to limp and complain, and her life was incomplete without lording it over her serfs.

-

I used to call her Gimpstein.

-

She used her feces as a form of protest sometimes. When I had the house we were living in together remodeled, every morning she very carefully found her way right into the middle of the construction area and relieved herself. For this reason, I began to call her Turd Bucket.

-

She loved to be carried around.

-

She slept under the covers with you, and when she wanted to be fed in the morning, she politely poked your nose with her paw.

-

If you talked to her, she talked back.

-

In the end, she lost control of her bladder, as cats do. I was 2000 miles away, and she was living with Mickey.

The night she died, I was at a concert with my girlfriend, and I received a text message. It was from Mickey. It read, “It’s done.”

I excused myself, and went outside. I didn’t really know what to do with myself. It was hard to imagine a world without Phoebe in it. After a few minutes I sat on a bench and allowed myself to break down. There’s a difference between thinking someone is dead, and knowing it. Here it is: one encompasses hope, and the other destroys it.

4. Ashes, Ashes.

Mickey had her cremated, which is good. She lives inside a little oaken box now. The box is tiny, given how big she was. This afternoon I sat in the car with the box in my lap, and tried to imagine her in there. I didn’t know whether to be terrified, amused, or devastated.

It had been a long day. A thin one. I spent most of it in search of an Andre Dubus III book: I had walked up to Powell’s on Hawthorne, but they didn’t have it; I drove down to Wallace Books in Sellwood, my old neighborhood, but they didn’t either. My last-ditch effort was to involve going up to the old Looking Glass Bookstore, a few blocks from where Phoebe & I lived together for years. I moved away from Portland four years ago, and I’ve found that I have difficulty remembering how to get around it sometimes these days. Too much has changed.

The Looking Glass Bookstore was housed in an old caboose, painted candy red and planted in a little urban shopping district between a sandwich shop and a Thai restaurant. It used to be that I could walk there with a blindfold on, but as I tried to find it this time, I found myself peering at the streetsigns and businesses, trying to remember where it was. I kept passing things I thought I knew, only to find that they weren’t where I thought I remembered them being. Memory — mine, at least — isn’t a map: it’s a dream.

Finally, I saw it, the little red caboose, and I pulled over and plugged in my headphones. I mounted the steps, thinking idly about how the day had been strange and melancholy and how disconnected I felt from my actual life at the moment. I didn’t really look at the caboose other than to see that it was there. When I opened the door and stepped inside, the first thing I noticed was the smell: not paper and ink, not dust, but curry, and tea. Alarmed, I looked around to find nary a book: the Looking Glass had become some tea shop. People sat at tables and tapped at laptops. I wanted to say: What are you doing here? How could you possibly be here? What’s wrong with you people?

They weren’t sitting in the carcass of a bookshop, but I was standing in one. It was a little bit hard to fathom. I walked back outside, vividly feeling that thing that we all become more familiar with as we age: death, tripping along beside me, slowly wiping the slate of my life clean, one bookshop at a time.

When I got into the car, I found the box with Phoebe’s ashes in it sitting on the passenger seat, and, being in my old neighborhood, I thought: Let’s scatter these fuckers. It’s hard to explain. Did I, or didn’t I, believe that Phoebe was in there? Was I angry or sad or what? I can’t say. I do know that I drove back to the house where she & I had lived for years, parked the car, and examined the yard for changes.

There was a tricycle on the lawn, and an SUV in the driveway. Some of my vegetables had been ripped out of the garden and been replaced with flowers. And Phoebe wasn’t parked in the shadow of the rosebush, in total possession her surroundings. I held the box in my lap, and tried to yank off the top.

It tuns out that they don’t just cremate a cat and put her in a little box with a removeable lid on it: that thing was screwed shut. I yanked, pulled, cajoled, but I didn’t have a screwdriver and there wasn’t going to be any way to get it open. So I set it in my lap, and put my fingertips on the lid: she was in there. Is there an inflection point at which something becomes so sad it can’t be funny anymore?

Aw, fuck. Things change. Pets die. People die. The days are thin, and my life is a million miles away.