Six Feet Under

July 21, 2015 by Joseph Jordan

Haircut

I was trying to grow my hair out, really, I was. There was a brief period when I was in my early 20s when I let my hair grow out to nearly shoulder length. It was darker then, and redder, and it was just about the only thing about me that I thought looked good in those days. It’s now become distinctly salt-and-pepper in quality, and it sometimes seems to me that all the red has washed out, though medical science assures me that all hair colors turn gray equally, so who knows. Anyway, I wanted to know what I looked like with what I thought might be a distinguished gray mane, especially given that I probably have a limited time left with a reasonably full head of hair. But God damn if it didn’t just end up looking like a mullet. I know that’s the famous “awkward phase” that all out-growing hair goes through, and I had resolved to wait it out, but I just couldn’t. I went into the barber about an hour ago and had her shave it off. What length? she said. I dunno, short. A three? I don’t know numbers, short. So she did it. As the clippers slid across my head and my graying hair was prised away from my scalp, I had a momentary flash of regret — that’s my hair! Give it back! But it was too late. When she finished, I put my glasses back on and looked at myself in the mirror. A crazy side-effect of going gray is that it makes you look balder than you are when your hair is really short, I guess because gray hair is in fact somewhat translucent, and the light filters down to your scalp and renders it visible. Is that still me in the mirror there? When did I come over all angular and gray? Who is that guy?

Weight

Last Wednesday I came back from running and weighed myself and passed a happy milestone — I was back under 200 pounds for the first time in almost two years. It’s a meaningless thing, really, but I still think of 175 as my “fighting weight” — I’ve been 15 pounds lighter and don’t feel too gross at 5 pounds heavier — and getting under 200, after having been as high as 214, felt important. So I was unprepared for what happened when I got on the scale today. I went through my regular ritual of bracing myself for the worst — 205, surely, would be the worst, now that I’d got back below two bills — and then the number came up: 206.6. I had somehow managed to gain 6.6 pounds in just six days! Six days during which I went running three times, including once 12 miles! I know that it has to be almost entirely water weight, which will probably slough off over the next couple of days as my body chemistry fluctuates, but holy shit. I literally yelled, “What?!” Nobody there to hear me, just me howling into the void because I’m fat. I swear to God, every other human on Earth could die and I would go around feeling shitty about the birds and insects seeing me overweight.

Station Eleven

That’s a reasonable transition to Station Eleven, the post-apocalyptic book I’ve been reading. Does it seem to you that we’re overrun with these books anymore? The Road, The Bone Clocks, Seveneves, The Leftovers, Station Eleven. That’s not even to mention the ones I haven’t read (or don’t remember reading), or the horde of mostly zombie-themed movies and video games that take place in a poetically empty post-human space. I think there are probably a lot of reasons for this, but the one that interests me is the idea of story-as-periapt: by writing these books, we believe we can prevent their events from coming to pass. Nearly every subsection of Western culture has an eschatology that seems to be on the wax, be it the bomb, global warming, or literal, religious apocalypse. I guess it’s an old thing, naming the thing you fear in hopes of preventing it from coming to pass. Maybe it’s a product of too much information, and the fact that people who live in media-producing societies have no practical receptacle for the primal fear that we evolved in order to keep from being eaten by lions. THE WORLD IS ENDING, we’re thinking. And so we write stories about it to ward off this end.

Six Feet Under

I’ve been rewatching the first season of HBO’s sex-and-death drama Six Feet Under, and a few things have struck me about it. First among these is how cheap it looks. Six Feet Under premiered in 2001, when this “golden age of television” we’ve all been talking about for a while was just dawning — The West Wing was duking it out with The Sopranos for the title of #1 prestige drama on TV; many people trace this era’s roots to those two shows, though of course the harbingers of this era, shows like Buffy the Vampire Slayer and The Larry Sanders Show, debuted before that. I remember at the time being impressed by Six Feet Under’s production values, but watching it now you can see the liberal use of green screen, the weakness of the picture, and the absence of big-name stars. These things stand out when you’re used to seeing Vince Vaughan stalking mopily through artfully composed location shots as he mealy-mouth mumbles lines of shitty dialogue in a second-tier prestige show like True Detective. (That’s to say nothing of the outdoor fuck-romps in the public spaces of Malta and Croatia and other outposts of the ancient and beautiful that you see in Game of Thrones.) Does the show suffer for it? Not really. Its cast is stocked with highly able stage vets like Richard Jenkins and Frances Conroy. Like Breaking Bad many years after, it understood that actors often considered comedians often possess more than enough power to hold a drama together, and found Peter Krause and Jeremy Sisto hanging out in that ghetto. It even pioneered the import of Antipodean accent experts with Rachel Griffiths. These days, at least one of these roles would be played by John Malkovich. Not back then.

Another thing that’s obvious is just how different the sexual politics were when the show was released, a mere 14 years ago. Peter Krause’s character, Nate, is one I can identify with — a highly intelligent, self-involved, 35-year-old chronic fuckup from a big coastal city — but when his younger brother, David (a highly intelligent, self-involved, 31-year-old goody-two-shoes from a big coastal city), starts getting ready to come out of the closet, there’s a lot of anxiety about how Nate will take it. Nate’s largely mellow response, one which would be pretty much assumed in any person of similar background these days, is played with a weird tension that reads mostly as uncomfortable humor. He spends a lot of the first season assuring David that yes, really, it truly is cool with him if he’s gay. Not that the element of anxiety has been removed from the life of even affluent, educated, white gays these days, but the storyline feels very of its time. If it weren’t for the fact that David is devoutly Catholic, a similar character remaining in the closet into his 30s would read as a total anachronism in 2015. Jesus, David’s sex-and-gender life is fairly vanilla, by modern standards: he’s uncomplicatedly male, spends most of the show in a committed (if not always monogamous) relationship, and on the whole lives a conservative life that qualifies him as one of those “establishment gays” I was reading about the other day.*

*Writing these sentences, it suddenly dawns on me that Six Feet Under was probably a huge influence on my own writing, as the main character of my novel is very much a personally conservative “establishment gay” who mostly seeks to live a life that’s conventional outside the gender of his partner: he wants commitment, security, and stability, and is embarrassed by people who exaggerate or flaunt their difference. Hrm.

What was the last thing? I spent more time on the first two things than I thought I was going to. I guess I could say some stuff about its portrayal of bipolar disorder (Jeremy Sisto’s character is bipolar, and later a character played by James Cromwell displays several symptoms of the disorder as well), but I’m not sure that I know enough about it — despite a fair amount of direct experience — to have anything that worthwhile to say. The Jeremy Sisto character, Billy, is simultaneously true to my experience of the disease, and a bit of a wild cliché: oh, yes, the disease of creativity, the disease of van Gogh and Hemingway; Billy is a bit of a van Gogh, a self-destructive visual artist who mutilates himself with a knife. The depiction of the paranoia, the fits of hypergraphia and creativity, and the long periods of tenuous stability, usually mediated through meds: this, Six Feet Under gets right. But the idea that every manic-depressive is a creative genius? That’s a myth. My foster brother, who was bipolar and committed suicide a little more than a year ago, was a man of parts, but his artistic impulses distinctly lacked in genius: when he was running a million miles a minute, firing off new ideas with a speed and obsessiveness that could be shocking and bizarre, he was also at his most trite and predictable: the alleged genius of the bipolar mind came out mostly as incoherent rantings about God and physics, tempered with bad poetry and terrifying glimpses of his impending death.

I guess I’m objecting to this portrayal (tentatively) for a couple of reasons, one altruistic, and one totally selfish. The altruistic one: the myth of bipolar-as-medium-of-genius is what feeds a lot of bipolar people and their enablers, allows them to remain ill, because people insist that this is how they find their highest expression, this is how they touch the supernatural, this is where Starry Night and “Hills like White Elephants” come from. The selfish one: making art is fucking work, and you don’t just get to be a great artist because you’re mentally ill. This feels weak and venal and gross to say, but it’s also true. Van Gogh and Hemingway weren’t geniuses because they were bipolar, or at least not only. These were people whose fires were stoked with hours upon hours of careful study and practice. That never shows up on the screen, not in Six Feet Under.

Recipes for Despair & Joy

July 14, 2015 by Joseph Jordan

1. Wake up first thing and go into the bathroom. Feel a little bloated and think you should eat less salt. Wonder if you have a headache because you drank three beers last night or because you have cancer or what. Tap the scale with your toe. Its little digital screen lights up and flashes glyphs that mean nothing. Stare at it and try not to think about how your whole life is this, this same dumb drama playing over and over again on a stage in your mind. ACT I: I weigh too much. ACT II: I eat too much. ACT III: I drink too much. ACT IV: I’m wasting my life. ACT V: I weigh too much. The glyphs clear and flash zero. Step on the scale. Prepare yourself for disaster: it could be as high as 203 pounds, picking a number you’re sure is much more than you weigh. The screen goes blank. Hold your breath. The screen lights up again, with a real number: 202.9. Almost as bad as your worst case scenario.

2. Come home from running feeling shot but kind of good about yourself. Don’t drink any water right away, though you know you ought to. Lie down on the bed and feel yourself sweat for a while. Remember or forget to stretch, it doesn’t really matter. If you remember you will also remember how, six years ago, it wasn’t necessary, and wonder if this is because you weighed 40 pounds less then or if it’s because you were twenty-nine years old and totally invincible in a way you’ll never be again. If you forget you will simply forget. Eventually you stop sweating. Get off the bed and go into the bathroom. Make sure you urinate, even if what comes out is only a foul-smelling, orange-tinted trickle that means you’re dehydrated. Step in the shower with your running clothes on and turn the water on cold. Scream like a banshee. Frighten your neighbors. Feel the icy thrill of water on the places you’ve chafed. Slowly peel off the clothes and leave them in a wet pile on the floor of the bathtub. Later you will forget to hang them up to dry. Wash yourself off. Dry yourself down. Dry you hair especially; your hair might hold water, and water weighs a lot. Tap the scale with your toe. Its little digital screen lights up and flashes glyphs that mean nothing. Involuntarily remember a time several years ago when you were dumped and didn’t eat for a week, and how, through the haze of heartbreak and misery you felt kind of good when the scale told you that you weighed less than 160 pounds. The glyphs clear and flash zero. Step on the scale. Prepare yourself for disaster: it could be as high as 203 pounds. The screen goes blank. Hold your breath. The screen lights up again, with a real number: 199.5. Try to forget what you used to weigh, and feel good about this.

It Always Devolves into a Grumpy Rant Anyway

July 13, 2015 by Joseph Jordan

I think the technical name for this is "irony".

I sat down just now to write and found myself composing a list — not an interesting or fun list, just a list — of stuff I don’t like. I didn’t get too deep before I stopped myself, but still. I suppose it’s a sign of a grumpy mood that I was already down to “vocab-shaming on Reddit”, maybe six items deep, before I thought, Hey, this isn’t a recipe for a good afternoon.

I think I’m in a grumpy mood because I’ve overtaxed myself with exercise. I know this comes close to that most heinous of complaints, the humblebrag, but it really is what’s going on in my life lately, so it’s what’s on my mind. I ran 11 miles on Saturday. It was terrible. I mean, really, much more terrible than that kind of distance usually is; by the end I was, for all intents and purposes, walking, taking close to twelve minutes to push through mile after painful mile, and when I finished I found I hurt in all kinds of unexpected places: my armpits had chafed, as had my thighs; when I slumped dejectedly into the shower afterwards a searing pain went shooting up my buttcrack. Ah, the joys of endurance athletics.

I think this is happening because I’m fatter than I was the last time I did this sort of thing. My first year of graduate school (just four years ago), I was tipping the scales anywhere from 159-165 pounds, and a men’s medium shirt billowed out around my midsection and flapped like a sail in the wind. I’m not going to tell you what I weigh now, but it’s a lot more than that. A lot. And that’s even after I managed to peel off about fifteen pounds in the last few months.

The upshot is that I feel like I’m running around hauling a backpack full of bowling balls sometimes, as I did on Saturday. It’s a conundrum, because the only way I have ever been able to lose weight and keep it off has been sustained, massive amounts of exercise. I know people who would take a diet every day of the week and twice on Sunday over exercise, but that’s not how it works for me, for whatever reason. It’s not as though I have no will — I wouldn’t be able to haul my fat ass eleven miles, even at a slow clip, if I didn’t — but that will doesn’t extend to abstemiousness. I can manage a diet for a week or two, but it always falls apart. For a long time this meant that I was just doomed to obesity. Then I discovered exercise.

Most of the time, massive amounts of exercise also have the perhipheral benefit of improving my mood massively, keeping me out of the black doldrums and cycles of self-recrimination and doubt that sometimes prevent me from moving forward with my life. Or is that the primary benefit? Maybe it is. Anyway, the point is — sometimes you can overdo it. I took a day off after the long run, but I tried to go out on a leisurely, very short bike ride this morning, and it instead turned into a grim, grueling slog over low hills that felt like mountains, into a light breeze that might as well have been a hurricane-force gale. I got home and promptly went to sleep — for two hours. I didn’t really have two hours to spare; I have two radio projects and a novel to finish. But then there I was, waking up with half the day gone and composing a mental list of things I don’t like.

Including: The radical misapproproation of adjectives in Oregon’s food culture (I’m sorry, food doesn’t have “integrity”, it’s just not possible); people who don’t leash their dogs in urban settings and then act as though you’re weird when said dogs come tearing after you hell-for-leather and this upsets you; people who assume you agree with them politically and talk as though you do, making it too awkward to vocally disagree; Orphan Black and Dr Who, which are both awful shows for different reasons but which it sometimes feels like you’re not allowed to criticize without being called an old stuffed shirt; superheroes, which, ditto; people who say “thank you” when you agree with them, as though this were some sort of personal service to them and their identity that you have performed for their benefit; golf on television; vets who refer to me as my cat’s “dad” (gross); people under 40 who listen exclusively to classic rock; most classic rock; acquisitive hippies; people who stand outside the 7-11 smoking and mean-mugging everybody who walks by; big families including many children too young for school who come to brewpubs and treat them like their rumpus room; assholes in big trucks — it’s always assholes in big trucks — who don’t make any room at all for cyclists even on completely open highway; people who define themselves by their hobbies; clueless liberals who believe that Bernie Sanders is going to be anything other than another far-left stalking horse who gets sloughed off like a bad haircut when the general election comes around; clueless conservatives who think Ted Cruz is anything other than a crazytown bananapants nobody; Donald Trump; people who bitch about immigrants; people who reflexively rally to the side of cops who shoot black people; the MLB All Star Game; people who think golf visors make acceptable everyday headwear; people who run sprinklers that mostly water the sidewalk; climate change deniers, anti-vaxxers, gluten fearers, and other people who mistake being stupid for “thinking outside the box”; and, of course, giraffes.

The Loneliness of the Middle-Distance Cyclist / Oh Yes, You Waited with Baited Breath for Me to Speak of the Tennis

July 06, 2015 by Joseph Jordan

1. The Loneliness of the Middle-Distance Cyclist

I started getting fat right out of college because I had no idea how to take care of myself. In school my friends and I played basketball and soccer — not well, but competitively — and the food was at best fair in the cafeterias.* I’ve always tended to portly, especially as a kid, but puberty had done a pretty good job of leaving my body issues mostly in my mind by the time I graduated. Then, suddenly, I was underemployed, drinking too much, and expected to feed myself. I ate a lot of burritos. I ate a lot of pizza. I sat on my ass a lot. I think I must have gained sixty pounds in just three years. I do know I quit weighing myself when I saw 240 on the scale. (I’m 5’9”, for reference.)

* Jesus, we complained about that food a lot. Sometimes I remember the things I used to say or think when I was in college and I kind of shiver. To bitch that the free, twice-daily buffet didn’t taste good enough? I was Marie Antoinette’s spiritual heir. I’m lucky nobody chopped my head off.

I was a 24-year-old kid whose knees creaked and popped when he crouched down to pick something up off the floor. I got winded walking up the one flight of stairs to my studio apartment. I had the sort of back pain that usually plagues men in their 50s. It was a bad scene, man. Pretty pathetic.

There was never a moment when I decided, I am no longer going to be a fat sack of crap. At some point, I acquired a recumbent exercise bike and would ride it, very slowly, deep into the night — sometimes while drinking beer at the same time. Then, one day in the late spring of 2004 or 2005 (I no longer remember), I tipped my fat ass onto a bicycle, and rode it down my driveway, out through Little John Lane (my neighborhood was, for reasons that still escape me, Robin Hood-themed, as though I lived not in Oregon but at Disneyland), and fifteen miles over the rolling scrubgrass of the high desert. I stopped at a little market in an unincorporated town — really just a house, a church, and a gas station — called Alfalfa.** I bought a Payday bar. Then I rode home. Three or four times a week, all through that summer, I would ride this same route, so often that I came to know intimately everything about it. I knew the good spots to stop and pee. I knew the blind corners. I knew which hills were murder in the summer heat.

**Edited to correct the spelling. My mom texted to let me know I'd got it wrong.

It was an act of sheer will, done without planning or cunning. Often I rode through 95-degree heat, guzzling water, stopping in almost every shady spot to catch my breath. Sometimes I weathered the furious swoop of self-righteous truck drivers who took pleasure in terrorizing cyclists who had the temerity to ride out along that road. I saw some dead squirrels. I saw a stray cat kill a bird. I saw a dead steer, being consumed where it had fallen by a swarm of flies and a hopping, cawing flock of crows. A few days later I saw some young men hauling its torn carcass onto the back of a truck.

I don’t ride that route very often anymore, mostly because I moved away and only come back to visit my parents. When I do I find I still remember it. I also find, having lost the weight, I no longer have the will I once did. I rode that route — a version of it, anyway — this morning. I left early in the morning to avoid the heat. Onceago, as a fat young man pointed at fitness, there was something self-flagellating about riding through hot afternoons; there was a weird way in which I got off on the sunburn, the exhaustion, the near-delirium I experienced. Today, riding through the morning, with temperatures twenty degrees lower, I suffered, and I did not like it. Next time I get on my bike I won’t be going nearly as far. I saw some dead squirrels. I saw an osprey in a nest high upon a telephone pole. I did not see the body of a steer. I saw myself, ten years older, and I mourned the passing of the years.

2. Oh Yes, You Waited with Baited Breath for Me to Speak of the Tennis

I haven’t watched the Federer match yet, so nobody say anything!

I don’t have much in particular to say about the tennis — Serena won, Andy won, despite having a bit of a scare thrown into him by a seven-foot-tall scarecrow with a 135-mph serve. I will say that I don’t like watching tennis with people who obviously don’t care about it, who would like their television back so they can watch something — anything — else. I was watching the Murray-Karlovic match at my parents’ house and I could feel my mother’s boredom, to the point that it started to infect me. She would leave the room and come back and say, “What’s happening?” After a while, I couldn’t say. They were trading games. Karlovic was massive and awkward and just skilled enough to keep up. Andy was fast and dazzling and volatile and frustrating and frustrated and all the things that make him my favorite player and everybody else’s least favorite. (I have a sneaking suspicion that he and I have similar personalities. This is why I like him.) In the end, Andy’s brilliance proved too much for Karlovic’s plodding power-serve-and-volley game. One wonders, however, how a player reaches #3 in the world with such a terrible second serve. What the hell, Andy?

Throughout the proceedings I kept going out to the back yard to visit my father, who has developed another quixotic hobby. For years, he walked the streets of Bend and made it his mission to pick up as many empty bottles and cans as he could. These he would throw away or take back to his recycling bin; then he would mark them down in a notebook. Ask him and he’ll tell you how many he’s collected. It is many thousands.

Anyhoozy, now they’ve moved out to the country and there isn’t nearly so much litter available. Instead, he hunts animals that are called, locally, “scrub rats” — actually, two kinds of varmint, one of which is a vole and the other one of which is not a vole.*** They’re tearing up the yard out there, digging holes and leaving mounds all over, so that the place looks, to use my dad’s colorful comparison, “like Verdun”. So he spends his afternoons out on his back deck with a book and a high-powered pellet gun, waiting. The things are brazen, all right — I’ve seen him get within two or three yards before pulling the trigger, and they don't seem to care.

***This second animal looks exactly like a vole.

He is as yet to hit one. My mom is blaming the sights on the gun. This is possible, I suppose, but I suspect mostly it’s a lack of experience that impedes his aim. We were city mice, my family. It’s funny to go out to the middle of nowhere and find them doing country things. It seems to me that his bad aim is for the best. What happens the first time some tiny animal’s brains are spattered all over the lawn? I mean, who knows, maybe it’ll be fine — this is a man whose grandmother used to wring the heads off chickens’ necks and set their golem-bodies shivering around the backyard. But that was a long time ago. Mostly I’m glad I won’t be there to see it.