Wrote my post yesterday about going in for an upper G.I. endoscopy, hit “publish,” then watched as my entire blog disappeared.

“You ready to go?” asked the Manly Fireplug.

“Um…”

“Um what?

“My blog is gone.”

“You have surgery.”

“But my blog is gone.”

He talked me into the car, though I brought my laptop and attempted to find my blog again in the waiting room. Also in the surgery prep room. No luck. I woke up about an hour later with a two-page print-out:

You have mild inflammation in the stomach, the esophagus (where you swallow) looked very inflamed and there was a small ulcer at the bottom of the esophagus as well.  You have a hiatal hernia, a benign condition that may predispose to reflux disease.  A biopsy was taken.  I will notify you of the result in 4-10 days.

I waited around for someone to wheel me down to the lobby to meet the Fireplug, but eventually I got bored and walked down on my own.

“Are you in pain?” the Fireplug asked in the car.

“No. But my blog is still gone.”

Back home I ate for the first time in 20 hours and attempted to find my blog. Chalk this up to another consequence of depression: hackers will infiltrate your site via old plugins and third-party software that you just don’t have the energy to update.

16 tedious, screen-squinting hours later, I got my blog back. Hi!

Also I was right about an upper G.I. endoscopy having nothing to do with Channing Tatum.

So what do you when your father, who molested you and your brother when you were both little boys, spends the last three years writing stories that promote incest to the internet, stories that attract thousands of fans and that he wants to share with you? What do you do next?

I mean, aside from therapy.

Yeah, I don’t really have a good answer for that one.

I can tell you that in the weeks following New Year’s Eve (when I found the stories) I spent a lot of time trying to figure out if my father was a psychopath. I didn’t come up with an answer there, either.

Then I started thinking about those common bits of wisdom, you know, like “blood is thicker than water,” or “everyone turns into their parents eventually.”  Sometimes, riding the train home through the tunnel, I’d look at my reflection in the darkened windows and catch sight of him looking back at me, through my own face.

I knew that there was something missing in him, something human, and because I’d felt myself grow cold and shut down as the years went by, I wondered how much of him was in me. But I’d like to think the coldness was a reaction against what he did, not some genetic bit of wiring guaranteed to short me out before I hit 50.

I’m not driven by the need to prosecute my father in a court of law. Maybe because I’ve already done the worst thing imaginable to him – I fucking told the internet everything. And though maybe I changed a few facts about him (not to protect him so much as to make it easier for me to “see” him, and write about him, with less of the obligational baggage I’d been carrying around), anyone who knows the two of us and who reads this thing, will now know what he did.

I’ve gone back over most of our correspondence in the past year and what I found was a man whose ultimate concern was not for his sons, but for himself. He was terrified of people knowing him for who he really was. So writing my 3-part-story shut something off between us. We can’t go back now. I haven’t heard from him, and I hope I never will.

I think a lot about the line between sanity and madness, where I spend most of my time now. And I wonder who gets to decide where that line goes.

What I’m left with is a tremendous sadness, which was never safe to feel, growing up in a family where me and my brother were never wanted, by either parent. Where we couldn’t trust either of them.

My parental figures are gone. My brother and I are trying to figure out how to trust each other. And I know I’ll keep writing, to keep myself a couple of inches this side of madness, and ’cause I hope this fucked-up story will be of use to someone else.

(Part 1) (Part 2)

The little boy stayed up too late one night in front of the TV, transfixed by a movie about pod people –  emotionless replicants taking over the planet. Humans could only escape detection by walking around, stiff and flat and drained of emotion. This terrified the boy, who’d always been one big ball of emotion – sensitive, they said. Thin-skinned. How could one survive a world stripped of feeling? Where the hint of emotion made you a target? Where someone you loved could be replaced by an alien hostile to love or tears? Every night for the next month, and for years afterward, he had nightmares about replicants coming for him.

***

The man now leaves the train, his entire body shuddering from feelings he can neither name nor control, and the center he’s trying so hard to maintain breaks open as he drifts up San Jose Avenue, and noises come out of him, animal, primitive sounds of a very old pain.

In the safety of his house his dogs, alarmed by his noises, climb all over him, pushing him to the ground, where they lick the hot, stupid tears from his face.

* * *

The next night he and his husband drive to their regular 12-step meeting. The man sits hunched over in a metal folding chair in the back row, silent, a dull, brutish anger pulsing within him. It moves through him like a virus, infecting every organ, every nerve ending, every cell. The meeting is meant to keep him steady and sober and true, but he’s no longer there. He’s infected with a rage, and to protect his husband and the friends around them, he leaves his metal folding chair and tries to cool his flat, hot skin outside, in a courtyard, sitting in the dark on a bench.

He feels the full deep sickness of his family. He comes from sickness, and he sits, sick, in the church courtyard, scared of himself. He needs to throw a punch.

The man pulls out his phone and texts Hank the Blank.

I read your stories. Fathers and sons having sex?? Barbers?? Why the fuck would you think that I would want to read that shit? You are not human. You are the most selfish man I have ever known. You are sick. You will never be my father. We’re done. I am through keeping your secrets. I am through paying the price for your actions.

He hits “send,” and feels the rage within him dim, leaving him heavy and sad and cold on the bench. His husband finds him and together they drive home.

The next day on the train after work he reads the email his father has sent him:

1.  I accept the fact that my stories are not your cup of tea, but they have been widely praised by thousands of readers in the past three years, including many well-educated, well-adjusted people whom I’ve come to know and admire, including other more experienced writers.  Far less than 1% of the feedback I’ve gotten has been negative, and certainly none as vicious as yours.  It was uncalled for.

 2.  They are fiction.  In 12 stories there is only one instance of actual father-son sex, which I don’t endorse and which had nothing remotely to do with you.  Even famous authors write about things they would never personally engage in (murder comes to mind as one obvious example).

 3.  Yes, some of my earlier stories lacked maturity and the best of taste, but there’s long been a noticeable shift to ones that now focus on adult relationships, feelings, and upbeat endings.  Yes, there is sex, but sex is a normal human function.

 4.  I think you are a  first-class hypocrite for complaining about my little web stories, for which I get no compensation and write only for adults who choose to come to that site.  For years now you’ve been immersed in writing a non-fiction account about the foibles of the people who raised you and expecting someday to get money and adulation for it.  Maybe it was cathartic for you to write it, but it’s hurtful to many of those you have written about, including your mother who isn’t even around to agree to it or defend herself from your less-than-gracious portrayal of her.  And you have the nerve to call ME sick!  If you’re such a great writer (and you are), why don’t you write a novel instead and leave your family out of it?

 Your beef with me feels like something much bigger than my stories.  Talk to your counselor about it, but keep the above points in your mind when you do, because there are always two sides to any story.  Then I would ask that you take a few months to think it over before burning any bridges or inflicting unnecessary pain on anyone.  I can take anything you throw at me, but I’m not taking sole responsibility for this.  It takes two to make a relationship work, and I don’t think you’ve done your share.

Rage again possesses him. He flies off the train and up the hill, blowing through the front door like a bullet. His husband is there. The man calls Hank the Blank and puts him on speaker, because even now, with hundreds of miles between them, he fears his father, and right now, he fears himself even more.

And what comes out is a primal scream. He loses his mind. He screams the things the nine-year-old boy never could. He screams for every wasted year of his life, every twisted, balled-up feeling he shoved into every back corner of every internal organ.

The house rings with his screams. The dogs cower. He bawls, “Inward focused? Non-fiction? That was how I survived, you idiot. You made me that way. I’m your fucking Frankenstein.” The man is nine years old. He is 16. 28. He swings between demon and man.

“Stop screaming. You’re being irrational.”

“You’re a fucking psychopath.” The man has never, in his life, swore at his father.

“What do you want from me?” Hank says.

“I..I don’t…those stories…”

“They’re fiction. They’re fantasy.”

“THEY REALLY HAPPENED!”

“I wasn’t writing about you.”

“Are you fucking kidding me? A father and son naked in a fucking bathroom? You’re in so much fucking denial you don’t even know who the fuck you are!”

“I repeat, I wasn’t thinking about you…”

“I was your fucking son! You were supposed to fucking protect me!”

“…and the story about the barber – I wasn’t thinking about your husband -”

“Shut the fuck up!”

“I don’t know why you are so upset. The incident when you were nine years old. I didn’t plan it, it just happened. And it only took up an hour of your life.”

The man turns to his husband, who sits, crying quietly, on the couch beside him. “He doesn’t get it,” his husband says.

“What do you want from me?” Hank says.

“Nothing,” the man replies. “I don’t want anything from you.”

“Are you going to take this to a public forum?”

“Have a nice life,” the man says, then presses “End.” He sets his phone on the coffee table. Its screen is flecked with layers of dried spit. His clothes hang from him wetly. He’s hunched like a burned-out bulb.

“I’m so sorry,” his husband says.

***

Hank the Blank goes into damage control mode the next day, pulling his stories off the internet, and calling family members to corral their support. The man’s brother calls him that night. “I just talked to Hank. I’ve never told you this, but he did it to me, too.”

They talk long into the night.

***

The man searches and, after some trial and error, locates assistance. Once a week, after work, he sits on a couch in an office of a stranger, above Castro Street, staring at the Chagall print hanging on the opposite wall, and talks to this stranger. A figure in the Chagall floats near the top of the frame. Chagall liked floating figures.

The man tells the stranger that he feels like an astronaut. He tells him that his father, Hank the Blank, comes from another planet, and that the man feels at home neither here nor there. He’s floating, drifting, untethered, with a dwindling tank of air, hovering over a planet that talks about karaoke and Frappuccinos. He’s an alien.

The stranger calls the Minneapolis Police Department, and a detective there tells him that the statute of limitations has long passed, and there is nothing they can do about what happened to the man when he was nine years old.

The stranger asks the man if he believes that Hank is an immediate danger to anyone else. To other children?

“I don’t know,” the man says. “He’s a fucking replicant.”

After a few weeks the stranger has gained his trust.

I call him Ground Control.

I tell Ground Control that I don’t understand the things that are happening to me. I’m afraid all the time. I don’t trust anyone. I panic on BART. “I bought a knife,” I say. “For self-protection.”

“Your father is in Arizona.”

“I’m not scared of him,” I say. “But I ignored my gut and I trusted him, for the last ten years, and look what he did. If he could do that, what are strangers capable of?”

I’m terrified of Facebook, where psychopaths can more easily disguise themselves.

After work I return to the house I bought with Joe – I return to my haven. I close the bedroom door, shut the blinds, swallow my evening meds, and I lie in bed with the dogs breathing beside me. I watch Netflix streaming. I watch documentaries about soldiers coming home from Iraq. Soldiers hiding in their bedrooms with their guns cocked.

I am deeply fucked.

I find an online forum for men who endured childhoods like mine. I talk to other grown men whose lives have narrowed as they aged. Men who can no longer hold a job. Deeply fucked men. Some of them are all alone, in their houses, in their rooms. Talking, at least, to each other, typing on their keyboards and hitting “Send.”

Joe comes home and sees the closed blinds and says, “Bad day?”

I tell Joe that I know that I’m lucky to have him, that someday soon I hope to be a partner to him again.

In addition to the Ke$ha songs and the knife-wielding clowns filling my head, a courtroom trial runs there, and every day I flip between prosecution and defense, running down the list of evidence against my father, trying to determine if breaking off contact was the right thing. How will I feel when he’s on his death bed?

I don’t know why he wanted me to read those stories. Even if I wanted to ask him, I couldn’t trust his answer. I can’t trust that he knows even his clearest motives.

I think about fiction, and fantasy, and memoir, and how Hank and I’d hurt each other with our stories. Hank the Blank had feared my nonfiction, for good reason, and Hank’s fiction had been anything but, at least to me. I try to inch down the hall of mirrors, puzzling over fiction and nonfiction, but my head quickly grows weary and confused.

They have power, don’t they? Stories still have power.

The truth has a current, and I’ve spent eight years and nineteen drafts rowing upstream. I wrote a book that was lighter than the truth, wanting something madcap and funny, wanting to entertain with a story about a Modern Family full of same-sex love. I’d set out to write the truth, but I’d left out one crucial bit, to protect Hank, ending up with a book that I couldn’t, in good conscience, release into the world. I’d written the wrong book, and it had nearly killed me.

Eight years and nineteen drafts later, I give up. I throw my paddle into the water and let this boat drift with the current.

Fuck it, I say. I’ll write a book about a deeply fucked family –  to give comfort to the deeply fucked reader.

(Part 1) (Part 2)

(Part 1) (Part 3)

A few days after his visit to the emergency room, the man and his husband decide to go through with their honeymoon plans, and they spend a week in a small, popular seaside town on the East Coast.

The man’s hoping the trip will distract him from the 3-week wait for his first psychiatric appointment at Kaiser, but by the second day, he and his husband are counting the minutes till home. It rains every day, which the man doesn’t mind, because he can’t leave the cottage for more than a few minutes at a time. He finds the town, even now in the off-season, claustrophobic. The glut of tourists exists solely to scrape his skin down to the bone, and the shops and the restaurants are gaudy and noisy and he returns to the cottage with snatches of songs stuck in his head, so that for the next 24 hours, every waking moment features a running loop of Ke$ha:

Ain’t got a care in the world but got plenty of beer…

“My brain is eating itself,” he tells his husband. He offers this in a quiet monotone, the most words he’s mustered all day. He’s grown thick-headed and stupid, his voice trailing off as he searches for common words, so that what actually comes out is, “My brain is eating…” Eating what? What was that word?  Over the past year his head has felt like an abandoned carnival taken over by knife-wielding clowns.

Ain’t got no money in my pocket but I’m already here!

His husband grows restless in the cottage and decides to brave the rain for an hour or two. The cottage is charming and adorable, an A-frame with skylights and exposed rafters just a few feet from the beach. Every time he shuts the door behind him, the husband hopes he won’t come back to find the man hanging from the rafters.

The man has the same thought when he looks up at the rafters, though he and his husband don’t discuss it at the time. The man thinks about one of his favorite writers, who ended his life in that exact way just a few years before. The man has brought that writer’s biography with him on the trip, a gesture that even he, in his present state, admits might seem foolish.

But for a few days the man is able to read about the writer’s life-long struggle with an illness the writer called the Bad Thing, a name that acknowledges the impossibility of articulating its utter horrors. When he reads the writer’s biography, the man feels a little less alone in his insanity, though the end of the book is, of course, devastating, and reminds the man of the handful of times over the course of his life that he’s been this close to the Bad Thing.

The Bad Thing – accompanied all day by Ke$ha – tells him that his husband would be better off without him. His husband could mourn a little, then find himself a sane and confident new companion, preferably one with a well-paying job that includes dental and maybe even vision. His husband has told him that he couldn’t go on without him, and though the man doesn’t believe this, he acknowledges to himself that the Bad Thing can’t be trusted. So he turns on Playstation 3, which quiets Ke$ha, and allows him to make objective progress, racking up experience points as he rids a distant planet of evil.

* * *

A few weeks later, now more thoroughly medicated, the man feels the fog clearing. Every day he goes to work behind a capable facade, and having barely escaped death, he grows irritated with the Bad Thing, which has dogged him for so many years, and which has nearly cost his husband some happiness. The man is eager now to eradicate the Bad Thing, to dig out its roots, pile it up, and set the whole thing on fire.

The man keeps thinking about his father.

How can he describe to you his father? If his mother – dead now ten years – had been more than the sum of her parts, his father was less. How can he describe him? Take a man – now subtract something. That was his father. That was Hank.

Hank is a retired IRS auditor, living now in the Arizona desert with his gay lover. The man has always described Hank as the most practical person he’s ever met.  The man’s brother often has a better way with words:

“He’s got the personality of a calculator.”

Hank the Blank, the man called him privately, the blankness not only a reference to his father’s flat personality, but to the void that the man feels within himself whenever he sees him.

The man has never in his 42 years reconciled in any sustainable way the things Hank the Blank had done to him when he was still a boy. Ten years ago he’d made a veiled reference to it on his brand-new blog, which Hank the Blank found quite easily a few months later. Hank the Blank had fired off an email from his computer at the Internal Revenue Service in Washington, D.C., demanding to know just what the man meant by the veiled reference.

“Okay,” the man thought, “Let’s do this.” In clear language the man set down, in his reply, a detailed account of his memories.

Hank the Blank wrote back: “I’d like to continue this discussion from my personal email account at home.”

Over the next several days, in a dozen emails, they discussed what Hank the Blank had done to him. And after the man had backed Hank the Blank into a kind of virtual corner, his father kind of, sort of, apologized.

The man, a member of both contemporary culture and a 12-step alcohol/drug recovery program, felt enormous pressure to cave into prevailing and conventional notions of forgiveness. The man felt that he could not be a good, spiritual, evolved person unless he forgave Hank the Blank. So he did. Or rather, he thought he did. And for the sake of their improving relationship, the man ignored a great many things inside himself, such as the overwhelming urge to punch his father in the face every time he saw him.

* * *

And now, ten years later and more heavily medicated, the man keeps thinking about the last time he saw Hank the Blank, when Hank had told him that he’d spent some time following his recent retirement from the IRS (30 years, of course, with full pension) writing stories and posting them on the Internet, and that these stories had garnered Hank the Blank thousands of fans, who wrote him tens of thousands of emails full of praise. Hank the Blank told his son that he’d like to share these stories with him now, adding that the stories were posted on an erotic stories website, but that, “They were really about the emotional connections between the characters.”

Despite this emphasis on the emotional connection between the characters, Hank the Blank could see a kind of reluctance on his son’s face, and despite the fact that he’d always been rather creepy and clueless when it came to proper notions of sex and family, appeared now to hesitate, questioning – maybe – the wisdom of sharing erotic stories with his grown son.

“Perhaps another time,” said Hank.

The son, who’d been fighting the urge to punch his father and flee the state of Arizona for good, exhaled for the first time in ten minutes, and nodded his head in a show of compassionate understanding.

* * *

But during his most recent Battle of the Bad Thing, the man had dropped out of contact with everyone, including Hank the Blank. And Hank had begun to send him worried emails from a new account, the one he used to post the erotic stories to the Internet, the one he used to correspond with his thousands of fans. “You can write me here,” Hank the Blank assured him, in case there was something the man needed to say to him alone, something that Hank’s gay lover wouldn’t read.

Which meant that the man now has everything he needs to find the stories himself, which he knows he probably shouldn’t do, and yet which he can’t help but doing, one evening at work, after everyone has gone home for the day. And after a 6-second search on Google, the man finds what he’s looking for.

For the past three years, Hank the Blank has been writing dozens of stories for his thousands of fans, and the man begins to click and scroll through each one. The stories are all about incest. Father/son, uncle/nephew, brother/brother. Each story with a dozen or more chapters. Stories in which the boys are all eager participants in their own “awakenings.” Stories where a tender coming-out talk between father and son morphs, two pages later, into a steamy encounter in the shower. Stories that mirror what Hank the Blank had done to him. There are stories about a barber. There are stories about a character with the man’s own name, a character described as a “hot, hunky stud.”

Ain’t got a care in the world, but got plenty of beer…

The trembling begins in his head.  He shuts down the computer and drifts through the building and out onto the streets of downtown San Francisco, amid the rush of commuters, seeing everything around him in a great blur of color and noise, heightened and unreal, as if he were encased in a game on a distant planet, everything just out of reach. He is an astronaut, sucking down his last tank of oxygen as the aliens close in.

He makes his way to the train, and though he holds onto the handrail as tight as he can, willing his center to hold, his body betrays him, and the tremors now shake through every part of him, and the commuters around him begin to move away in fear.

(Part 1) (Part 3)

(Part 2) (Part 3)

In the fall of his 41st year and five pages from the end of the book he is writing, a man walks into the emergency room at Kaiser-Permanente hospital on Geary Boulevard in San Francisco and tells the woman sitting behind the bulletproof glass that he can’t stop thinking about killing himself.

In that moment he’s less concerned with whatever pain he’d been enduring than with the woman’s reaction. He blushes when her eyes widen at his words, but she recovers quickly, consults his insurance card, and tells him to take a seat.

He assumes it’s bulletproof glass. Emergency rooms probably attract a high percentage of the insane. He takes a seat beside his husband. If the definition of insane means the absence of sanity, then he, too, was a member of the club.

Certainly the song in his head is driving him crazy. Every waking moment of every day for the last year he’s had a song stuck in his head. Different songs on different days. A radio station he can’t switch off. Today it’s Lionel Ritchie.

Oh what a feeling, when we’re dancing on the ceiling!

Not a whole song. Five seconds of a song repeating on an endless loop:

Oh what a feeling…

He pictures everyone in the emergency waiting room dancing on the ceiling, a multicultural conga line of the wounded..oh what a…the image, like everything else these days, exhausts him.

The doctor who examines him gives him two options. One, the man could voluntarily commit himself to the mental ward of San Francisco General. The doctor assures him that this would not be a pleasant destination. Two, the man could wait for the next available appointment with a staff psychiatrist, three weeks from today.

…dancing on the ceiling!

Three weeks in his condition feels like three years. But what choice does he have?

He’s been writing the book, a memoir about his childhood and family, for eight and a half years. For eight and a half years he’s been climbing this mountain. With each page the trail ahead grew steeper.

Twenty pages from the end, wiped out, he rested for a week. Fifteen pages, he rested a month. Ten pages, three months. He gripped onto small stones jutting from the face of the mountain, his face pressed flat against the crumbling dirt, holding tight against the howling wind. Songs played in his head.

There goes my hero, watch him as he goes…

The songs interfere with the writing. They crowd out the voice in the back of his head that loves nothing more than to wrestle a good sentence onto the page.

There goes my hero, he’s ordinary…

Five pages from the end, his strength depleted, he comes to a wide gap in the trail, a deep crevice plunging a mile down the middle of the mountain. There goes…

Vertigo grips him, pulls him an inch or two over the edge. He can’t see the bottom. He pushes back and puts his head down in the dirt. He must go on. He can’t go on.

Watch him as he goes…

It’s only now, clutching at the edge of the crevice, that the man recognizes the weight he’s been hefting up the side of this mountain. He’s been carrying, on his back, his own father.

There goes my hero…

He can see now at the edge of the gap that only one of them can make it across. If he sets his father down the man will make it. If he stops protecting his father. If he tells the whole truth, he alone will make it.

Watch him as he…

But how can he leave his own father behind? How can he abandon him to the wind and the rocks and the plunging abyss? He fears the truth will kill his father. But if he stays here, the son will die. This is the choice he must make.

And it’s only now – there goes my – 32 years since his father molested him, eight and a half years since he started his book, crouched at the edge of a deep crevice that pulls at him, the wide blank void that wants to swallow him, it’s only here, with his own life at stake, that he makes the choice.

He sets his father down, and he jumps.

(Part 2) (Part 3)

A couple of weeks ago I lost my mind. A long unraveling – I trace it back about a year, when my personal finances collapsed in a single day, and I went from a fairly comfortable existence to trolling the Craig’s List job ads on an increasingly desperate mission to pay my rent. The coming days would be familiar to anyone looking for work during a recession: the endless resumes and cover letters sent into a black void, the gradual lowering of expectations, the mounting dread.

Finally a law firm offered me a temp job, each of my three interviewers pointing out helpfully that I was clearly overqualified, to which I replied, “I’m not above anything.” Words I sometimes regretted over the coming months (most often while elbow-deep in dirty dishes) but which I never took back.

The temp job led to a permanent, if low-paying, part-time position three months later. At the same time I found another low-paying part-time position managing content and social media for a small company. In between I wrote low-paying movie recaps for a porn company. Between the three jobs I had a little hope that I’d be ok.

But none of the jobs qualifed me for benefits. I was paying several hundred dollars a month for health insurance (which I was lucky to have), and any day I took off was a day without pay. The Manly Fireplug and I had a couple of weddings to pay for, and we wanted to live together. We’d managed to get through five years in separate places, but the back-and-forth was wearing on me. San Francisco, a beautiful city of cruel real estate, wasn’t making it easy. To live together, I’d need to make more money.

I felt increasingly fractured, working on so many projects that I was doing none of them well. Working as much, or more, than everyone else I knew, but seemingly making far less. An acquaintance on Facebook (I assume he had health insurance) posted a rant about the “socialism” of “Obamacare” (I really, really do not understand gay Republicans). My car broke down, and the mechanic said it would take $1300 to fix. I parked it outside the Fireplug’s house and tried to save up the money. Each week I’d meet with the three separate guys I was mentoring in their sobriety, but I’d show up distracted and grumpy and short of patience. The thirty pages of revision between me and the end of my book felt insurmountable. Then my laptop died.

I felt trapped. I argued with the Fireplug more often than I’d like to admit. I was angry and put-upon, and embarrassed by my struggle to accept my circumstances, which were, I had to admit, mostly of my own making. Because a long time ago I’d decided to be a writer.

What this meant, to me at least, was a matter of focus. I could go the career route, finding a comfortable salaried position with room to grow, but risk ending up one of the countless people I knew who wanted to be a writer, but who never wrote. Or I could write, and for the time being,  sacrifice the money and security of a career. There are people who manage to do both. So far I haven’t been one of them. About a month ago I almost switched sides, interviewing three times for a position with a start-up that would have paid me more than twice the amount I’d ever earned in one year.

A week after the third interview, I emailed my contact at the start-up and asked for an update. “Oops!” she said. “Oh my God, we’ve been so busy. I forgot to tell you. We decided to go in a different direction. Best of luck!”

My point here isn’t that I had it worse than a lot of Americans. Only that I wasn’t handling “it” well. My short fuse shortened some more, and all I wanted, from the Fireplug, from my friends, from my co-workers, was to be left alone. Finally, a couple of weeks ago, the Fireplug asked me to help him with some minor chore.  I responded with childish exasperation. We had words. My volume grew, and then it happened. I just lost it. A year’s worth of bitterness and anger and resentment came out of me, through my lungs. I’ll leave out the details, but trust me, for a good five minutes I was insane. I scared both of us. And the neighbors.

Cue regret and embarrassment. And a lot of silent reflection.

Then, last week, my supervisor calls me into her office and offers me a full-time job, with benefits. My little behind-the-scenes campaign of dropping hints to co-workers about interviewing for jobs with benefits seemed to have worked. The partners wanted me to stay.

I’m not sure if I can articulate the relief I felt. It was – it is – immense. I immediately went back to my desk and ran a few calculations. With paid health insurance, and another day a week in pay, suddenly everything seemed possible. The car repairs. A savings account with more than four dollars. Best of all, a home together with my husband.

My mood lightened. My lungs no longer felt tight. “It’s good to see you smiling again,” the Fireplug told me. Last night I drove my car back from the garage, and when I greeted the Fireplug, just home from work, I could actually see him. His handsome face. All the worries and grudges I’d been carrying around, which I’d let hang in the air between us, had fallen away.

I wish I could say that I’d achieved this transformation through some kind of spiritual shift. But no. What had saved me was simply money.

My mother would have been sixty-four today. Her birthday, as you might expect, sometimes prompts a bit of soul-searching, usually about time and priorities and this short thing we call life. I’ll be holding on to all of my jobs, at least for now. The relief about money seems to have whipped off the blinders I’d been wearing, and a few days of reflection have made it clear that I had a bigger part in my year-long stress. I hadn’t exactly made the most of my fractured time. So a personal inventory, just in time for New Year’s resolutions, on how I spend my hours and days is in order. It’s time to get more done.

You can have your astrology. No, really, just keep it. I have yet to read a description of an Aries that fits me, and no, I don’t care what light my rising moon might shed on that discrepancy.

But as long as we’re talking categories (and who doesn’t love, deep down, categories?) I will admit a soft spot for the Myers-Briggs. I don’t care if it’s out of fashion, or disproven, or simplistic. It’s the only kind of categorization system in which I’ve ever recognized myself.

That’s because, according to Myers-Briggs, I am a very special person. My type, INFJ, is the “rarest of all the types.” Which makes my personality “intricately and deeply woven, mysterious, and highly complex, sometimes puzzling even themselves.” I am a freak of nature and you will never get to the bottom of me. Fortunately you are just as self-absorbed as I am, which means you will quickly tire of my infuriating defenses and return to mulling over your own problems.

I mention INFJs here because our supposed first line of defense has been on my mind. “Mute withdrawal,” it’s called, and any friend of mine, and anyone who’s been a regular reader here, knows that I tend to drop out of sight every few weeks. I stop posting because, usually, life has once again grabbed me by the gonads, reducing me to the kind of of pre-verbal vegetative state that makes activities like blogging and cocktail parties challenging at best.

A few weeks ago I was involved in a car accident, an accident that sent someone to the hospital and an accident for which I was eventually deemed “100% responsible.”  I hadn’t had an accident in 18 years; it happened as the Manly Fireplug and I were picking up a pizza, and though I was eventually able to eat a couple of slices, I spent the rest of the night throwing them up.

As the Fireplug kept trying to assure me, accidents are called accidents for a reason. But I have a habit of looking for meaning in everything, a habit common to writers and maybe to the INFJs of the world. And so, traumatized, I turned to this habit with full force.

I can’t say for sure why the accident felt like such a rebuke, only that I harbor low-lying feelings of guilt at most times, and the $500 deductible cast a glaring light on my personal finances, and so that’s where I began my atonement. Somehow, through a deeply intuitive process of association,  fueled by dimly-lit anxieties, I came to believe that my eyes had been closed for some time. To life, to reality, what have you. I’d been blind, and now I wanted to, well, you know…

I gave up a few monthly subscriptions to various non-essential (i.e. porn) websites. I cut down on Starbucks and protein shakes and stopped buying clothes. Most importantly, I gave up my office, a little rental in the Mission, since I had yet to break even with my writing and it felt like an ostentatious display of…something.

Naturally I expected, having made the smallest of sacrifices, to reap immediate karmic reward. But life had other plans.

Due to circumstances outside of my control, money got incredibly scary incredibly quickly, such that as of today I do not know how I will be paying rent. Long story short, I must now get a real job.

I know. It’s so unfair. And though you will want to shower me with pity, I ask for my own sake that you refrain.

With a bank balance that makes it rather difficult to be picky, I’ve started casting my net. And though I just began my search, today I heard back from two prospective employers who had posted on Craig’s List. Asking for my name, address, telephone, social security number, and perhaps my bank account routing number, too, you know, just to get the wheels in motion…

So yeah, for a few seconds here I will set aside this self-protective self-deprecation, and admit that as I fast close in on the age of forty, I am as confused as ever by life. I have spent several years putting all of my eggs into one basket, writing a book, an art form that any cursory glance at media will tell you is going the way of dinosaurs. I did what they say, Follow Your Bliss, though they decline to tell you what to do when the bottom drops out.

All month I’ve been hearing the voice of my father, the most practical man on the planet, whom I have put in severe psychic pain by my lifelong ambivalence towards Jobs That Come With 401ks.

Yes, Dad, I hear you now.

I have a new recovery sponsor, who asks me every time I come to him with a problem, “Have you prayed yet?”  Yes, I usually want to punch him first. And though none of my gauzy-lit visions of a higher power include an omniscient dude who sits up there pulling all the strings, I try to take this question seriously. Really what he means is, “Have you asked for help?”

I hereby argue against the American myth of the self-made man. The up-by-his-own-bootstraps guy. No such man exists. We are helped, all of us, some more than others, all along our lives. Parents, maybe, siblings, friends, coaches, the occasionally stellar English teacher. Someone gave us a break. Maybe our first, maybe every single one. Someone opened a door, someone gave us a job.

Which is not to say that we ourselves don’t need to do most of the work. Only that we can’t pretend to be the complete and total masters of our own destiny. And now as the Manly Fireplug and various friends begin to circle around and prop me up, I must once again face a fact I’ve tried often to ignore. Though I retreat into mute withdrawal, though I’m no good at parties, though I think of “networking” as a particularly insidious form of torture, though I find other people to be at times absolutely confounding and infuriating and disappointing, it turns out that I still need them.

Last week I had dinner with the God of Biscuits at the Delfina Pizzeria on 18th Street. I’d never been there, never been to a lot of the new places that had sprung up since the time I used to walk that block every day. Back in 2001 I broke up with my boyfriend and moved from the Upper Haight into a flat on South Van Ness, a stone’s throw from Whiz Burger, a place that looked like it should have been on the side of some lonesome desert highway, not that piss-stained block of the Mission neighborhood.

I’d moved in there out of desperation, the first place to take both me and my dog. A co-worker whom I had disliked on sight was the master tenant, and he took me in with an equal lack of enthusiasm. He moved through work, and the new flat, like a black hole, sucking up all the surrounding energy. He practiced for his role in an amateur opera company (emphasis on “amateur”) in his little bedroom across the hall, then would sit down in the living room, on the other side of the pocket doors from my room, and catch up on reruns of the Golden Girls. He rarely spoke to me, but every day he would cackle in front of that television.

He’d adopted two cats and two dogs from the animal shelter where we worked. His dogs were skittish and annoying, so the cats spent all their time in my room. My roommate rented out the third bedroom to a couple who also adopted a dog, this one with severe separation anxiety, who would howl and chew through their bedroom door every time they left it alone. The cats were old, and one night while the dog chewed on the door down the hall, one of the cats up and died while lying in my lap.

Sober all of six months, I was one raw boy. My mom was dying and in a couple of months I’d test positive. In the past three years I’d burned a lot of bridges and had little to show for my thirty years besides my dog and a case of undertreated depression. I didn’t have a car back then, and after work I’d walk the stretch of 18th Street, from the Mission to the Castro, South Van Ness Avenue to Diamond Street, eleven blocks, to the 12 step meetings I attended every single night. I went there as much to escape the apartment as I did for the solace of sobriety. To clear for a minute or two my cluttered head. Eleven blocks, from Spanish language billboards to billboards for Stop Meth campaigns. From check cashing stores to lube-and-porn joints, from Mexicans to white boys.

After the meetings I’d walk home, slower this time. Around Guerrero Street my mood would darken again. I’d pass Linda, a tiny side-street where my meth dealer had once lived, always with my breath held, my dread building until I hit South Van Ness again, slid my key home, and opened the door into my little corner of hell. (I was a tad melodramatic back then.)

A few months after I moved in I started this blog. Two months later my mom died. I lived there for a year and three months, when a room opened in a friend’s place in Corona Heights, on the hill above the Castro, a room I still rent. My 12 step sponsor said that I started beaming the day I moved in, and didn’t stop beaming for another six weeks. When my opera star roommate found out that I was moving, he left a note for me demanding that I vacate his place within 30 days. Kind of a you-can’t-quit-I-fire-you situation.

This month marks nine years that I first moved into that little nightmare on South Van Ness, a fact I only just realized, writing this. Since then I got the depression treated, worked a few different jobs, went to grad school, got a degree, wrote a book, fell in love with two very different men.

In those nine years 18th Street changed too, as most city blocks do. In 2002 the Tartine bakery opened on Guerrero. Delfina opened their pizzeria in 2005, a couple of doors down from their main restaurant. In 2007 the Farina restaurant opened after gutting the old danish bakery. Bi-Rite opened their ice cream shop and the weekend crowds at Dolores Park increased tenfold. Bread shops and tea shops and nail salons opened around Sanchez.

Sometimes the Manly Fireplug and I would ruin a good work-out by hitting Whiz Burger after the gym for their damn good hot dogs. We’d sit at one of the picnic tables out front, and I’d look down the street, to the auto shop across from my old apartment, with hub caps hanging from its chain link fence. As we ate I’d tell him the story of when, nine years ago, I’d been sitting on the back steps when a young Latino boy poked his head over the neighboring fence and scanned our yard. When he spotted me he said, “Hey mister, have you seen a chicken?”

I told the Fireplug that story every time because it made us both laugh, and I guess I wanted to dispel the ghosts. I didn’t like sitting there for very long. Some streets, no mater how much they change, stick in your blood. The ghosts linger but weaken. They help me measure the distance I put down between me and that time.  I moved in there a scared kid but after a while I’d grown up, walking those eleven blocks.

Of course it’s hard to stay stuck in a tar pit when you have a little niece who looks like this. The first child of my only brother, Mallory and family are in town visiting, and I brought them in to see the Manly Fireplug at his hot new barbershop on Market Street. You can see she kinda digs him.

But what’s not to like?

I’m proud of the Fireplug and his new shop. He went from four chairs to eleven, and I now call him Big Daddy Barber Mogul. If you live in the city and need a haircut, stop on by. More barbers mean more walk-ins available, and I want him to make lots of money. So that he can bring it all home to me.

He’s having an opening party:

Saturday, February 21st
8 to 11 pm
2150 Market Street
(between Church and Sanchez)

I don’t care much for the term “depression,” as by now it’s been thrown around so often and so carelessly that it’s lost all its meaning. And for a long time I preferred Tennessee Williams’ term for that which ailed him, the “blue devils.” But even that term implies a sort of mischievous energy, and at least when I fall prey to it, there’s nothing energetic about it. This state blunts my mental faculties as well, so finding the right phrase may be beyond my reach right now, but it’s more akin to a tar pit, something I fall down into, something that slowly constricts me to the point where every movement becomes labor. And it’s only movement that saves me. But the things that would help me the most, when down in the pit, are also the hardest to do. Writing. Reading. Hitting the gym. Talking with friends. Inside the tar pit my compulsive tendencies escalate, and seize upon activities which don’t feed my spirit or my brain; they merely open a window wide enough through which I can escape for a few hours. Like Playstation 3.

I fall into the pit with frustrating regularity, though with the help of modern medicine, and with more thorough experience with its contours, the times I spend down there grow fewer and farther between. Which is progress. I used to live down there. I spent my whole adolescence and college years, and pretty much all of my twenties, down there. So I have a little gratitude.

Before the Manly Fireplug came into my life I’d been single for over five years. So I’d forgotten how much the tar pit affects not only me but those close to me as well, and it was his frustration, coupled with my own, with my absence, which led me a few days ago to start clawing my way to the surface. To be a tad melodramatic.

So my apologies to you, in case you’d missed me.

Another factor that led me to fight my way back to the surface was the simple desire for self-promotion. A while back I was asked to take part in another public literary reading next Thursday, here in San Francisco. The reading series is called Inside Story Time, and the curators do well at bringing in some great writers, so it could be a good one. This month’s theme is “What to Want, or the Lineaments of Gratified Desire.” The other writers will be Rodes Fishburne, Holly Shumas, Andrea Drugay, and Justin Chin.

Looks like they have a full bar, too, in case you need a little more motivation.

Inside Story Time
Thursday, February 19, 2009
Cafe Royale
800 Post Street (at Leavenworth)
6:30 – 8:30 pm
$3 to $5 cover