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.

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.

On Writer's Block / On Bad Writing Advice / Breakthroughs

1. On Writer’s Block

    For a long time I was the sort of person who said he didn’t believe in writer’s block. I know that I’m prone to saying provocative things mostly for the purpose of getting a rise out of people — one that always gets a doubletake from people is when I say that I don’t believe in authenticity — but this actually wasn’t that. From the age of maybe twelve until I graduated college, I never once had difficulty writing. I filled notebook upon notebook — all of them mercifully lost, now — with song lyrics, poems, personal observations. It wasn’t journaling. I don’t find journaling to be a very useful activity most of the time (it usually just devolves into complaining). I said I was emulating the poet William Stafford, who got up every morning and wrote a poem before starting the day, but I don’t think that was really accurate. On some level, I think it was just that I was a kid and was fairly sure most of my thoughts were really important, revolutionary thoughts that should be written down. It was also incredibly good practice. Though I can go through things I’ve written and find the style refining, warping based on the venue or the subject matter, a lot of the fundaments of how I write were formed long ago, in the crucible of little spiral notebooks that I spent hours and hours scribbling in. The discursiveness, the use (overuse?) of the M-dash, the high-low balancing act of poetry and dialect — those have all been there for a long time. I’m glad I wrote like that for all those years, just as I am glad I lost most of the shit I wrote back then. But it gave me unrealistic expectations.

    The poems dried up right after I graduated, when I was living in a little house with a couple of old friends from college. I wrote almost nothing at all for several years. I didn’t think of this as writer’s block at the time (in fact I thought of it as being a total failure), but I think that’s what it was. I tried to write a couple of novels, but I didn’t really have an idea for one. I tried submitting my poetry for publication, but after a while that started to seem phony and I quit. I didn’t really get back in the swing of things until the summer of 2005, when I finished Harry Potter & the Half-Blood Prince and then began penning a fanfic version of the seventh book that eventually sprawled to 90 pages. That uncorked something, and soon I was writing a novel of my own. It wasn’t very good, but it was writing. Within a few years I was publishing stories. After a while I got to grad school, and really developed what I think of as my adult style. I had a couple of realizations: I don’t have much interest in writing Literary Fiction of the sort that I was raised on — formless, muted stuff about people never quite saying what they mean. I don’t mind reading it (sometimes), but the fact is that writing it makes me sleepy. And so there will always be an element of science fiction, or crime, or weird adventure, to everything I write. I’m happy about that. I don’t want to be Raymond Carver anymore.

    But the bouts of block have come and gone ever since. I’ll go months in which the only things I write are blog posts and emails. (I am known as a sender of long emails. I dated a woman for a while who thought my long emails were an enormous pain in the ass, and frankly stated that she didn’t read them. No wonder we didn’t last.) Sometimes, I don’t even write that much. (To wit: the last month on this blog.) I’ve been trying to convince myself that these periods of not-writing are actually useful. There’s a sort of subconscious cognition going on, I think. After I finished the disastrous second draft of my second novel, I spent an entire summer mostly worrying that I wasn’t a writer anymore. Then, in two months, I vomited out about 50,000 words, and finished the thing. I had no sense during the long, uncertain summer that I was actually cutting the gordian knot of my novel. But not even an old bloviator like me can just make up the second half of a book he’s been working on for almost seven years on the spot. Something subconscious must have happened.

    So maybe I still don’t believe in writer’s block, now that I think about it. Maybe I’m always writing, in one sense. It’d be nice if I could avoid losing all confidence in myself and feeling like a fraud during the periods when I’m not actually putting pen to paper, though.

2. On Bad Writing Advice

    There’s a lot of bad writing advice in the world, but I think my least favorite was the kind I heard on the podcast A Way with Words this Monday. The hosts kept going on and on about how writing should be kept simple, and how they tell their kids that they should be aiming below the top of their register most of the time, blah blah blah, and I gotta say — this is bad advice. I mean, here on the bloggy pages, we’re mostly chatting, so I’m not digging about for my most complex sentences and recondite vocabulary. But I think that the emphasis on simplicity can be oppressive, and make a lot of writing dull and flat — in short, Strunk & White were not right. Their reign of terror must end. Unsheathe your semicolons, young writers of America. Be aware that the passive voice has uses on occasion. And, for the love of God, have some fucking fun. Writing should not feel like the act of pulling against a leash.

3. Breakthroughs

    I have felt for a while now that I was on the verge of turning into a new, better person than I’ve been for most of my adult life. This isn’t really in evidence in my actual life — I still get depressed, I still drink more than I probably should, I’m still short-tempered and confrontational sometimes, and I still flee from relationships the instant they threaten to turn complicated or serious — but I’ve had this feeling, like a stone in my stomach, that I was about to break through some kind of imaginary wall and find myself in a sunnier, warmer, more sweet-smelling world. I can’t tell you why. I think that part of it is just feeling prepared to actually do things differently. Try the metacognition necessary to understand why I have been the way I’ve been, what steps I can take to change the things that can actually be changed, and what I’m just going to have to accept about myself.

    This blog has been a part of that project, at least sometimes. One of the reasons I decided to lean into some of the uncomfortable stuff — especially the stuff about race that I was writing about over the summer — was that I had a sense that being honest about it was the only way to get it sorted out. I’ve had the experience of really stepping in shit on this front, almost entirely out of the cluelessness that’s born of growing up white in a mostly-white place like Portland. I felt like the only way to sort out my embarrassment, and try to move forward as a smarter, more mindful person, was to write about it. And in public. Because embarrassment and shame sometimes metastasizes into something altogether worse. Though I didn’t think I was in danger of turning into a reactionary, I wanted to see if talking about it out loud would somehow inoculate me against that. (Answer: the only way that’s going to work is to keep writing about it, whenever it comes up. There’s never a time when you’ve “cured” yourself of racism and bias.)

    But there are other ways in which it hasn’t been, not in the way I had hoped it would be. There are good reasons for some of that — I learned the hard way that you shouldn’t write about people you date casually in a place where they might find it — but a lot of it has been the old fear: of being known. I don’t want anybody to know me too well, because then they would understand just how awful I really am. I’ve already confessed to being entitled and motivated by fear and full of rage and judgement and sometimes pointlessly cruel. I wouldn’t want anybody to know the really bad stuff. And I wouldn’t want anybody to have a store of examples.

    But the breakthrough, if it’s going to happen, will have to be a process of becoming. I’m never actually going to bust down that wall and come over all rosy one night. And so here, at the bottom of this post, I’m going to start a new tradition: I will keep myself accountable, and in public. Maybe that will help.

Goals, short-term

Limit myself to two beers, except on special occasions

No smoking. Period. (I’ve been pretty good about this the last few weeks.)

Read for at least an hour every day.

Never have a day on which I don’t leave my apartment.

Goals, long-term

No more dating women I don’t really like.

Try not to feel like I’m too broken to stay with women I do like.

Try to monetize my writing better.

On Seeing a Shrink / The Problem of Over-Reading Television, Pt 2: The Leftovers and the Lost Effect

1. On Seeing a Shrink

    The first time I can remember going to a psychiatrist was sometime in my late teens. I had been fighting with my mom a lot, over stuff that now seems so picayune as to be obscure, and my parents (rightly) suspected that there was more to my attitude problems than being a teenager. I, of course, resented it. I don’t really remember what I would have been “right” about in those fights, but I was sure that I was right about whatever I was fighting with my mom about, and it felt to me that my parents were responding to my perfectly reasonable objections to their opinions and actions by trying to get me bunged up in the loony bin.

    I realize now that this wasn’t what was going on at all. Not to blow up anybody’s spot, but mental illness clearly runs in both sides of my family, to varying degrees. The family tree is liberally strewn with little black decorations: people who drank the pain away, others who grew known for being caustic and difficult, still more prone to black moods in which they saw conspiracy in every corner. My parents saw in me what they had seen in other people that they loved. But at the time it just pissed me off. I believe this period was the first time when I had a major depressive episode.

    I’ve always been chronically prone to dissatisfaction, and occasionally given over to dark moods, but it’s only happened two or three times that I became so depressed that I lost touch with reality. When I’m in these periods, they seem all-consuming, and obsessively, totally real. It’s not “sadness” — I can’t think of a less accurate word, actually; I’m very rarely sad — it’s something else. I am, quite literally, disturbed. I sink into paranoia and obsession, I have difficulty sleeping at night and difficulty doing anything else in the day. Total anhedonia is also a problem, which tends to lead to excessive drinking, which doesn’t help with the not-in-touch-with-reality thing. Now, when I’m just run-of-the-mill anxious and restless, I have a hard time getting inside that feeling. I can describe it for you, but it’s so faraway that I can’t conceptualize what it’s like any better than you can, probably.

    Anyway, I’ve covered that territory before. What I was going to say was that, when my parents sent me to that shink, I resented it. (Didn’t help that he was technically a child psychologist.) So I went to the library and looked up the symptoms of a disease I knew I didn’t have, and tricked the psychiatrist into thinking I had it. This was all part of a very shitty, adolescent superiority complex I had (which is in slightly — slightly — better check now), which largely manifested as a need to prove that I was smarter than everybody, mostly as a means of humilating them and making myself feel better. This shrink prescribed me some drugs, which I was smart enough not to take, thank God. Later, I went to another shrink, ostensibly to treat the mental illness I had convinced the first shrink I had, the mental illness which is not the mental illness I do have, and I decided to fool her, too. She was a little wilier, but after a few months I had proved to my own satisfaction that psychiatry was a scam and that these psychiatrists in particular were idiots. I took Zoloft for a while, but I never noticed it did anything other than make my dick malfunction. So I quit that.

    The next shrink I saw was a clinical psychiatrist who practiced in a big old building in one of the fanciest parts of Portland; I seem to remember sessions with him were outrageously expensive. Because I was young and chronically irresponsible, I (A) did not have health insurance, (B) tended to skip sessions, and (C) had a hard time remembering to pay the bills. Combine this with the fact that the guy I was seeing seemed to talk to me about basketball a lot, and my ongoing suspicion that the whole thing was some kind of confidence game, and not a lot got done in those sessions. I was put back on anti-depressants, this time Celexa, and again I didn’t notice much change — I was sweating more, that was basically it. At least he had correctly diagnosed me with clinical depression, instead of an array of things I didn’t have. Shortly after I moved out of town and quit seeing him, he lost his license because he’d been prescribing pills to his patients and then buying them back off of them. I don’t even remember his name. If you look up the archives of Willamette Week from 2003 or ’04, you’ll find a story about him. He was on the cover.

    Since then, I’ve kept psychiatry at arm’s length. When I was in graduate school I had another one of the really serious episodes, the ones where I lost track of reality and quit sleeping for a few months. I went to see a staff psychiatrist at the University of Minnesota. She put me on Zoloft again. Again, I gained weight and my sex life got screwed up. It was either a solution to a problem I didn’t have, or the wrong solution to a problem I did have. I’ve never really figured it out.

    The major difference is that by then I had a stronger sense that there was something wrong with me. I mean, I had always had a faint idea that I didn’t fit in, I wasn’t a real person, I wasn’t functioning how other people did. Things had been developing, however, and I’d come to feel genuinely broken. But when I tangled with the mental health system, it didn’t offer me what I needed — what, probably, those shrinks I had manipulated and fooled back when I was in college had been offering. I didn’t need a pill to stop me feeling bummed out. I needed help changing my habits. I needed to drink less, figure out how to sustain a real relationship, and quit feeling like a fraud at every adult endeavor I undertook. There’s no pill for that.

    So I’ve started seeing a shrink again. I’m hoping that coming at it honestly, really hoping to change some stuff, will make the process work better. Who knows, right?

2. The Problem of Over-Reading TV, pt 2: The Leftovers and the Lost Effect

    The other day I was on some internet forum on which people were talking about Damon Lindelhof & Tom Perotta’s televisual adaptation of Perotta’s Rapture-fest novel, The Leftovers. (See here for part one of this post.) Much of the discussion consisted of one of two things: people complaining about how the show was just going to fail to deliver on its promises, like Lost did; and people dissecting its alleged “mysteries” for clues as to how they would be resolved.

    Far be it from me to tell people how to enjoy the media they consume, but — holy shit, all of these people are watching the show wrong. The Leftovers is a show with some things in common with Lost: a head writer; an ensemble cast; an interesting mix of science fiction and naturalistic drama; a willingness to do weird shit largely for the purpose of fucking with its viewers’ heads. But The Leftovers also illustrates, at least to me, what Lindelhof appears to have learned from the Lost experience — how to use an air of portent and mystery without promising answers that are bound to be disappointing.

    I mean, the first clue here is right there at the heart of the show. I said in the last post that the premise of Lost was a question: “What is this island, and how did these people come to be on it?” That’s just not true of The Leftovers. The newer show does center around a troubling, mysterious event: one autumn evening, 2% of the world’s population vanishes — not dies, but vanishes, leaving behind no bodies or explanations. The thing is, The Leftovers only rarely asks the question, “Who were those people, and how did they disappear?” It only ever comes up when it’s organic that one of the characters or institutions involved in the show might be asking the quesiton. The show itself does not seem interested in that question. That’s the big difference between Lost and The Leftovers. It’s why The Leftovers is a more finely-crafted show. It may also be why the show lacks a little of its antecedent’s manic inventiveness, but these are the tradeoffs one makes in art.

    Illustrative of this is a character from The Leftovers’ first season: a bald, middle-aged guy who goes around killing dogs (Michael Gaston). The series’ protagonist, Kevin (Justin Thoreaux), keeps encountering him out at night. Sometimes they have offscreen encounters when Kevin is sleepwalking. The character is freaky and weird. There is also never any implication that he knows more or better than the viewer does. He’s somebody who has observed a phenomenon: after the Departure (the series’ name for the Rapture-like event at its start), some dogs appear to have become irretrievably feral. They’re dangerous, they need to be disposed of. Watching whatever happened drove them insane. Maybe most people don’t recognize it, but these dogs need to be gotten rid of. This is the kind of thing that the viewer, if she lived in the world of the show, could deduce for herself, if she had the bravery to.

    And that’s what’s really important: the character matters more as an allegory than as a mystery, and his mystery never really drives the story. He stands in for the understanding that a lot of people share, that it’s sometimes impossible to surpress — that disorder is a flinch away, and the only way to maintain a society and a coherent reality is to battle disorder with disorder. Kevin is a police chief; this man is a vigilante. Kevin has a choice: does he combat disorder with the tools provided to him by the law, or does he do it by any means necessary? This mirrors a choice he has to make about a cult called the Guilty Remnant, a cult which has absorbed his wife and is threatening order in the little town in which he is police chief. That he encounters the dog-killer character while sleepwalking is not a mystery, but instead a profoundly troubling question about the human psyche: are we who we are when we think, and make choices, or are we who we are when living out the unfiltered processes of our brains?

    On Lost, the dog-killer character would probably perform a much different role. The dogs would drive a couple of episodes. We’d worry about his motivations. He would still be functioning as an allegory — part of Lost’s genius was its ability to ask big, sometimes ugly questions about the nature of society — but he’d also be a plot point, in a way that he’s just not in The Leftovers.

    But some people will persist in reading The Leftovers as though it were Lost. I can’t tell you why, but I have some guesses. Probably chief among them is that Lindelhof himself is attached. It’s natural to expect his next show to be similar to his last show. (It is, actually, just not in this specific way.) And it’s true that strange things happen on The Leftovers. But I also think that part of what has happened is that the infinite combination of the internet and science fiction television has destroyed some people’s ability to appreciate TV as anything other than a series of of clues that lead to a solution: not just, What are the whispers in the jungle?, but Will Lorelai choose Christopher or Luke? And I’m just not sure that’s a very good way to watch most shows, even if it’s kinda Damon Lindlhof’s own damn fault that you’re watching The Leftovers in this way.

    So what does it mean that the country of Australia keeps coming up in The Leftovers? (Kevin’s father claims to be interested in moving there; a nutty prophet-type who lives on top of a pillar in the show’s second season appears to be corrosponding with someone there.) I saw a certain amount of dissection of this question on the above-mentioned internet message board. You know what I think it means? I think it means two things:

    (1) Damon Lindelhof is having a little fun with his fans, who remember that Oceanic Flight 815 departed from Sydney, Australia before crashing on the Island.

    (2) There is somewhere very far away, and though it, too, has been affected by the same disaster, it seems like a clean slate to people who have never been there before. It is clean, and unmarked by the memories of the departed here in America. It’s about a common grief fantasy: escape.

    Anyhow, what I’m saying is that reading The Leftovers for clues and mysteries is a boring, and liable to be unrewarding, exercise. It’s a show that really does reward close reading in a different way: the characters and themes that course through it. What does it mean that a woman who lost her whole family might hire a prostitute to shoot her while she wears Kevlar? What happens to teenage culture when its already foreshoretened view of consequences is complicated by an event that emphasizes mass mortality? How do you love after loss? Raise children? Move on? That’s the stuff you should read closely.

    (Note: the first season of The Leftovers is very grim stuff. That’s probably a different post, if I get around to writing it. The second season is brighter and more colorful, in more ways than one.)

Some Failures

    I probably ought to be seeing a shrink. This has been apparent to me for a long time, but the fact of the matter is that I’ve had bad experiences with shrinks over the years and I’m not deeply motivated to repeat those. I also don’t want to go on antidepressants, because in the past they’ve made me fat, caused trouble with my sleep, and screwed up my sex life — all without seeming to do much for my mood. Three different times I’ve been put on one SSRI or another, each for about a year, and the only thing I have to show for any of those experiences was weight gain.

    But I’ve got habits that need modification, and I’ve come to the conclusion that trying to do it on my own, having not worked yet, is not likely to suddenly start working now. These habits include (but are not limited to): eating too much, drinking too much, never quite quitting smoking, talking myself out of pitching radio stories, getting angry in the supermarket, and being a dick to people on the internet. I’m told that this new-fangled cognitive behavioral therapy can be useful for these sorts of things. I’d like to give it a shot.

    But part of the problem with having difficulty with motivation, social anxiety, and depression is that these things make it hard to take the necessary steps to get help. I just really, really don’t want to call a shrink to make an appointment, to the point that I will put such a thing on a to do list, and eventually hide the to do list so that I don’t have to see that item on the list.

    That’s it. I would go on, but you’ve heard it — and probably felt it — before. Plus I might have exhausted my writerly gas tank by pushing through that too-long tangent I was talking about the other day. It’s finally done, at about 10,000 words, which is about 8500 words longer than it should be. But the only way out was through; now we’re through. Now I have to go back to writing the real book. Which I’m feeling a little bummed out by.

    My feet hurt in a really specifically familiar way. I’m worried I’m not going to be able to run this marathon.

    I’ve been obsessing about things that make me unhappy.

    I just remembered that I was going to write about Livewire in this post. Oh, well. Maybe I’ll remember tomorrow.