I think a lot about my addled brain, with my addled brain.
No surprise, I guess. I’m a writer. We’re good at it, or if not good, relentless.
What I mean is that I think a lot about my mental health, since staving off depression and PTSD is a daily effort that’ll likely last as long as I’m still breathing. And since 1999, when I first sought help, I’ve had 20 years of false starts, smooth patches, hard stumbles, and one black-bleak multi-year crisis—like field study for what worked and what didn’t in my own personal pursuit of serenity. Or, lacking that, adequately functioning enough to leave my apartment.
And what I’ve learned over time is that I’m a complicated fuck. As in, it takes a fuck ton of village to raise this dawg.
Good mental health, for me, resembles one of those Dr Seuss-like flying contraptions with wings, wheels, gears, and cranks, all of which play a vital part in the pursuit of flight, and all of which require a tremendous amount of sweat to get rolling.
Once it’s airborne and coasting, the contraption stays aloft with minor adjustments—one or two fingers resting lightly on the steering wheel as the wind gently rustles through my receding hair.
It took about 18 of those 20 years to figure out the blueprint and hunt down the parts, and I’m constantly losing or forgetting the manual, which I should know by heart. My own personal contraption requires:
Antidepressants prescribed by a qualified shrink. This took a long time to figure out, and has required extensive experimentation, and many shrinks as I pinballed around the country.
Solitude saves my skin. If I have to go two or more days without alone time, I recommend you keep your distance.
Health insurance—much of the rest of this list depends upon this part, which is criminally hard to maintain, especially as I pinballed. I was one of the Americans saved more than once by Obamacare. (Miss you, dude.)
Weekly therapist. This is separate from the shrink, since modern shrinks give you 15 minutes tops to discuss meds, without talk therapy.
Sobriety. Meds without sobriety mean nothing. Sobriety without meds means nothing. That’s just been my hard-won experience. I go to traditional 12-step meetings and also recovery meetings from a Buddhist perspective, where I can be happily full of doubt about the existence of any god.
A good day of good writing is like…I can’t even put it into words. Like, I’m failing at doing the thing to describe the thing. It makes me feel like I’ve fulfilled my purpose on earth, or something dorky like that.
Full time work. I’ve yearned for more free time, and I’ve had more free time. I didn’t spend it wisely.
I lift weights several days a week. I should do more cardio. I don’t do more cardio. Somehow I live.
Friends. I need people I can say anything to. I need at least one who makes me laugh until I puke.
Meditation, when my monkey brain swings through the branches of my fears, lusts, dreams, and udon cravings.
One eight-pound chihuahua.
One or two go missing and I can skate by. Three or four and the contraption sputters and falls to the ground, where the laws of physics dictate that it’ll stay at rest, and I’ll end up with a sluggish head, barren heart, and a kitchen cluttered with empty containers of Chubby Hubby.
Massive effort is required again to get it back up in the clouds.
There’s no real order to this list. They all sort of depend upon and thrive off each other. A rickety, rusty, synergistic contraption that I continue to fuck with, depending on my current taste for enlightenment or self-sabotage.
Pretty sure this list disqualifies me as “low-maintenance.” I should just slap a warning label on my forehead. It would help weed out the idiots.
Some people have been thanking me for talking about shit some people don’t talk about. I appreciate the feedback, and I do wonder, often, if I’m ever gonna pay a serious price for this blog. Like, from prospective employers or boyfriends. Actually, no—just employers. A prospective boyfriend who backs out after reading this blog is not really a prospect. For anything.
As my rusty flying machine carries me toward the age of 50, out there on the rapidly-approaching horizon, I think a lot about acceptance—my failures and shortcomings, my minor accomplishments. My friends. My evolving dreams. If a couple of people feel a little less alone, after reading this, with their own ramshackle machines, then I’ve done something. A small job completed for a few seconds of satisfaction.
Set the tripod in your living room and slip your phone within its grip. Click the power button and open the camera app. Bluetooth the remote. Step back into the frame and gauge the lighting. Flick on a third light.
Strip off your shirt and step into the frame. Try an angle. Try another. Move the tripod. Flip on the overhead light. Move the tripod again. Drop to the floor and do 20 push-ups. Stand, flushed, and flex. Drop your arms to your sides. Smile. Cock your head and offer a second smile. Click the remote that’s hidden in your fist. Drop the smile. Tighten your abs. Click the remote. Try a half-smirk. Click. Click. Move a potted plant into the frame. Turn in profile. Click.
Open the blinds. Side light is flattering. Smooth a hand over your chest hair: 225 likes.
Delete the 23 loser shots. Try to forget the dumb, empty look on your face in most of them. Open Photoshop. Brush out the dark circles under your eyes and accentuate the curve of your bicep. Outside the window, replace the parking lot view with a glimpse of Barcelona at night. Add a man with impressive traps, cooking at the stove behind you, wearing nothing but an apron: 678 likes.
Post an ad on Craigslist for several bearded, muscular men and, after winnowing down to the five winners, put them on friendship retainer. Pay them with an early 401(k) withdrawal that cost you a 10% fee. Collect their signed contracts and file for safekeeping.
With your remaining cash, purchase six Speedos of complementary colors at volume discount. Also, sunglasses. Coordinate your new friends together through a group text. Meet the hired photographer at your neighborhood indoor pool and instruct him to make the group shots feel “candid.”
Practice all your smiles. The wry grin. The smirk. The head tossed back in laughter. The men splash. Drops of water glisten on their delts. Confused children cling to the sides of the pool.
Back home, remove the children, their annoyed parents, and the pool’s background on your laptop. Replace with the backyard of a Palm Springs mid-century modern. Tinker with the word “amazing” in the photo’s caption. Amazing weekend, amazing new friends. Play with it. Have fun: 843 likes.
Is that enough? Have you earned the right to rest? To breathe, unbothered, for the remainder of the night?
Peer at the photo. The man to your left has bigger biceps. Examine the bulge in his swimsuit. Does the eye go there first, before your own bulge? Your hairline is receding.
Look up his online profile. Scan with sinking stomach through the kaleidoscope of his charmed life. Click on pics crowded with beautiful men. Examine the particular shade of his blinding white teeth. Smile at yourself in the mirror, then turn away from what you see.
Go back to his profile and check the last pic—the man and his square-chinned husband, decorating a massive Christmas tree in their matching pajamas. Overhead, a 30-foot vaulted ceiling.
2453 likes—do the math.
Gaze at his home’s tasteful interiors. Memorize what you can see of its layout. Check his friendship retainer contract in your files, and note his home address.
Your mother calls and you let her go to voicemail. As you pull on an outfit of black clothing, listen as she tells you that the nurses in the chemo ward brought in holiday treats and packed her a plate of seven sugar cookies and three squares of fudge to bring home. Wait until two a.m., then slip in silence from your apartment.
Drive through the cold winter town, past the brilliant lights of a 24/7 convenience mart, the grim faces of closed banks, and a man slipping on the ice outside an Irish pub, his breath trailing up into the night. Stop at a lonesome station for $2.25 of gas. Check your phone while you pump. Your contracted friend just posted a pic of his square-chinned husband, sleeping on a plush California King, wearing nothing but white briefs: 3267 likes.
Pull up to the curb of the man’s home address. The house looks different. Smaller, with rusted gutters. Kill the engine. Grab the emergency pack of smokes from the glove compartment and light one as your sister calls from rehab. Turn the phone and take nine pics of your face, cocking your head in different directions in the dim streetlight, the ember of your cigarette flaring in the dark. You listen to your sister for 23 minutes as you delete the eight loser shots and filter the remaining pic, chain-smoking four cigarettes, watching the dark house, tipping the ash through the cracked window. “Uh huh,” you say. “I get it.” You wait for her to ask you a question but eventually she just hangs up.
Slip from the car and crush the smoke in the slush under your heel. Stand for a second, measuring the silence. Count 10 breaths. At the end of the narrow street, a hooded figure of indeterminate gender pushes a shopping cart over clumps of icy snow.
Circle the small house. Note with quiet alarm the absence of the pool you’d seen multiple times on his online profile. Skulk along till you find, with both relief and panic, an unlocked bathroom window. Your feet scrape against the stucco as you squeeze your head into the warmth inside. Move a collection of generic-brand toiletries across the top of a tiny cabinet to clear a place for your feet.
Drop in to the bathroom with held breath. Crouch and listen. Count 78 thundering heartbeats. Blood rushes in your ears. No voices, televisions, or ticking clocks. Nothing but your own soft noises.
Creep down the dark hallway. Detect the sound of a snoring man and slowly, gradually, crack open the door to see one man sleeping on his back on a narrow mattress, on the floor in the far corner of the room. Endure 12 seconds of confusion as you scan the room for a square chin. Nothing but the man on a twin mattress and piles of dirty clothing The man snorts, rolls to his side, and you back away from the door.
Slip through the dark house, taking inventory of its meager possessions. The claustrophobic square footage. The pedestrian design. The empty craft beer bottles on the coffee table. Wonder if you’ve broken into the wrong house, but catch sight of a pic taped to the fridge of your contracted friend standing beside an old woman huddled in a wheelchair. Neither smile. She clutches two shawls around her neck.
You find his office and rifle quietly through his desk. You pull open his file cabinet, paw through bank statements. You scan for his biweekly automatic deposit from his job at an insurance agency and blink at the number. It’s five cents more than your own salary, which is 21% below the national median household income. You blink again and squint at the number to confirm that it’s real, then gaze out the back door, empty-headed, at a black stand of trees.
A floorboard in the hallway creaks.
You rush over to a closet in the corner, hiding in its darkness, piles of boxes around you threatening to topple. You stare out through the cracked door as the vein in your temple throbs.
The man shuffles into the office in rumpled pajamas. You recognize them from the Christmas tree pic—the one in the living room with the 30-foot ceiling. At his desk, his back to you, he clicks the space bar on his laptop three, four, five times and a screen saver pic of him and the square-chinned husband appears—they’re skydiving together, a distant red canyon far below . They give the camera thumbs-ups. Behind them, three falcons spin through the thin, blue sky.
He sits at the desk, scratches his shoulder, and opens Photoshop. He plugs in his phone, and pulls up a pic on his laptop. He appears within its frame, shirtless, standing before the bathroom mirror that you glimpsed when you broke into his house. The cold hunger you’d caught in your own reflection. You watch as he trims and distorts and supplements the image on the screen of his laptop, painting layers of confidence, companionship, and bright, heartbreaking colors. From your cramped vantage point, you grudgingly admire his skills
He emails the altered pic to his phone, where he posts it online. He stands, pulls a pack of Camels from a desk drawer, and opens the back door to the patio a good three inches. He leans against the door frame and smokes. You still haven’t seen his face, but you know the slope of his delts.
Snow has begun to fall—fat, wet flakes you can hear hit the branches of the pine trees out back. Tears spring to your eyes and you realize you’re still clutching his bank statement. Cold air seeps into the room and curls around your ankles in the back of the closet as you watch him watching his phone, checking the likes piling up in the last hour before dawn.
I’ve been crying some lately. I cry, mostly, for about 30 seconds, and it’s always kicked off by something, a song usually, often at the gym when I’m plugged into my headphones and surrounded by swaggering, grunting hetero bros. Some song or thought that contains equal parts pain and straight-up gratitude. It’s the second ingredient that gets the tears going.
Like, this is embarrassing, but this whole fucking blog is embarrassing, so I’m just going to say it. I don’t listen to a lot of pop songs on my own generally. At the gym I listen to house music from about 1997-2002, mostly, though I’ll sprinkle in a couple of more recent tunes that caught my attention. One of them is Rihanna’s remix of We Found Love, and I like it because her voice scales these crazy octaves in a truly beautiful fashion, and because, of course, of the refrain: we found love in a hopeless place. And because it’s still, despite that refrain, a song about loss.
Which I love, because, well, duh. I know that place. I live there. Or lived there. My love life still lives there, but most of me no longer does. And I listen to it and tears spring to my eyes because I knew that place so well that it was home. I feel like, in the past few years, I really believed that life had turned its back on me, and after months and months of just batshit bad news and hard turns, I thought, oh, so this is it. This is my life, forever.
I know how that sounds. But it’s what I felt, and I thought I had the evidence to back it up. Maybe I did.
And the tears come from this mixed-up combo of gratitude and continued lonesomeness, and wanting to believe that I could still find love in such a place, and relief that I’m not dead and that, as long as I’m breathing, pretty much anything is possible.
I’ve been sober again now for just a few months. Since I once had 15 years, it’s humbling to say those words: just a few months. And it took me about four years to get those few months. And it’s a little crazy how much bigger my life got in those months, and recently I gradually woke up to the fact that I have my center back—that quiet place inside me that I go to for strength, that protects me and is worth protecting. That place inside me used to be just desolate and about as comforting as a frozen tomb.
Now it’s refuge. I built it with a bunch of odd materials—sobriety, writing a slew of stories, good work at a hard job, Buddhism and meditation, bench presses and squats, true crime podcasts, house music, poetry, new friends, thirsty shirtless selfies, and a Chihuahua.
I think it mostly came from my actions. Like, shit I’m proud I’ve done. I have a life again that I don’t want to sabotage.
Life is all change and I don’t know what the fuck is coming next. But in my center I can withstand racist Trump-voters in my local life, money problems, rocky human connections, and bouts of romantic lonesomeness. It’s mine again, I can go there when I want, it’s built for one, built for me, and for that I think I’ll cry here at my desk for another 10 seconds.
Got two more close-call rejections from lit mags over the weekend. One telling me my story made it to the “final round,” but couldn’t Rocky Balboa its way to victory. And the second, which arrived at 9:36 pm on Sunday night:
We regret that we are unable to publish your manuscript, but we like your work and would like to see more of it.
This was from the editors of The Paris Review, which hovers somewhere just below The New Yorker in terms of “prestige,” but since I no longer have any grasp of what makes a literary publication prestigious in our current publishing environment, my estimation should be taken with a shaker of salt.
I’m grateful that they like my work, but that was pretty much the best story I had to send them (it’s not on this blog). And a near miss is still a miss, and after 17 near misses in a row I’m discouraged.
I try to remember my years in grad school, researching Flannery O’Connor for an established author who was writing her biography, and I slipped into the shadowy rare manuscripts room at the New York Public Library and, paging through The New Yorker’s archives of typed letters, read rejections aimed at Flannery, Vladimir Nabokov, and pretty much every other writer you could think of from the 50s.
Rejection is the writer’s life. So either take the punches or hang it up. I guess, mostly, I feel like Balboa at the 45-minute mark, downing raw eggs and running up stairs in Philly. I’m often down. Never out.
Been thinking a lot about the early days of this blog, probably because, in the course of its resuscitation, I had to restore a bunch of lost early posts. Which meant reading old memories with maybe some fatal nostalgia, as times when I connected with a whole bunch of queer bloggers engaged in similar online experimentation, and getting together sometimes in the real world, which led to some real friendships.
Blogs have faded and, 18 years later, I’m a more guarded man. Unwilling to write about my new job, where I’m killing it in a way I’ve never killed it before, for any job (probably because I’m finally writing), but also where the political waters have risen up around me and submerged huge chunks of my mental real estate, about which I’d love to say more, but the precarious nature of paychecks keeps me muted.
And my experiences with family and others in the recent past have left me gun-shy about real-life humans, scanning for hidden agendas and personal blind spots in myself and others that make every real-life relationship a total piece of work. Some days, when it comes to people, I feel like my barometer is broken.
I guess what I’m trying to say is that I’m stumbling along here, trying to figure out what I can write about freely, which feels less than what I could write about back at the dawn of blogging, when I was young and invulnerable. I’ve got a couple of posts I’m tinkering with that’ll take some time to form, but until then I wanted to say hey and make you look at my dog.
Thanks for the opportunity to read… I’m sorry to say…
My fourth this week. I count a couple of blessings—I used to rack up form rejections from every literary journal , but now I often get personal rejections from the most “prestigious” journals (prestigious a slippery category, made slippier by the rise of the Internets) telling me that they loved my work but that this particular piece wasn’t right for them. The Near-Miss Champ, I’ve become.
But this rejection was more like a total miss. I blinked at my phone in the dark, rubbed my eyes, shifted in bed. My feet had yet to touch the floor.
…that after review by the editorial staff, we came to a decision not to…
Who the fuck, I thought, sends rejections at 3 a.m.?
Other nightcrawling writers.
Delete. Stumble. Coffee.
2.
I spent part of that day cobbling together a character description of a good friend, to be added to a story on my blog. It’s treacherous to write about the living. To summarize in a few words the whole of a man made of too many parts to mention. I constantly misjudge. I say too much or too little. I trample or neglect.
I aimed to honor him honestly, to capture something of his growing importance to me, but without sentiment. Raw but respectful. After an hour or two of word-wrestling, it said what I meant it to say. I clicked “publish” feeling fine, flying high at the altitude and speed I only gain after a day of good writing.
3.
Prestigious literary journals? my co-worker asked. Who reads those?
4.
Massive failure.
In a measured but respectful voice, my good friend listed the ways in which my words had caused him pain. The ways in which he felt misheard. Misunderstood. His complexities, reduced.
I’d made assumptions. Said too much. Exposed him online for an audience whose motives he could only imagine. Assigned him nakedness when he preferred to stay clothed.
To confront me, he’d had to rehearse. He’d picked his words carefully, to protect my feelings. He saw my motives and stated his appreciation, repeatedly.
We’d be fine, probably. Soon.
But tonight I’m a shit friend. That was my thought.
I don’t know what he thought, beyond what he’d already told me. I knew he’d left some things unsaid. The extent, maybe, of his doubt in me. The new, tighter limits of his trust.
To endure as friends, he’d left some words unspoken.
5.
In Boston I worked for a major online retailer on a voiced virtual assistant that I’ll call Amanda. Hired to a ragtag team of language deconstructionists—linguists and English majors fracturing the sentences that consumers spoke to Amanda in the privacy of their homes. We broke down each line, annotated phrases, categorized each word. Our data was then handed to modelers who worked some kind of technical magic—mystifying to my English-major brain—that supposedly helped Amanda learn how to respond more accurately over time.
A young transgender man, whip-smart and wiry, worked on my team. A dozen of us clicking away on laptops in a conference room, in the weeks before I was made permanent and assigned a desk. Once, right in front of the young man, I slipped and referred to him as “she.” His friend corrected me, and I stammered an apology, mortified at my mistake, a spotlight thrown on my decrepit age, on my generation’s clumsy handling of the new rules for pronouns.
“It’s okay,” he told me, but his face said otherwise. He turned away and looked out the conference room window.
6.
Unlike other relationships that have a purpose beyond themselves and are clearly delineated as such (dentist-patient, lawyer-client, teacher-student), the writer-subject relationship seems to depend for its life on a kind of fuzziness and murkiness, if not utter covertness, of purpose. If everybody put his cards on the table, the game would be over. The journalist must do his work in a kind of deliberately induced state of moral anarchy.”
– Janet Malcolm, The Journalist and the Murderer
7.
I reacted like an asshole.
I snapped at my good friend and walked away, paced, returned, walked away and paced some more. I pulled out my laptop and de-posted the blog. The faulty description of his persona, now hidden from view.
My high-altitude flight had smacked into a brick wall. I could see myself from outside myself, but I couldn’t pull out of this nosedive. Worse, I’d been caught in the emperor’s new clothes. Thinking I’d done an honorable thing, instead I’d caused him harm.
“No,” he said. “You didn’t hurt me. That would be deliberate. Your words caused me pain.”
How had I gotten it so wrong? How had I failed so badly, at something I was supposedly good at?
l took it the worst way possible. Personally. My words were me. Their failure was me.
8.
The strangest people assume that you’ll write about them. Usually the newest, most casually superficial acquaintances half-joke that their “crazy” hi-jinks will end up in your prose. You give an awkward smile, because the thought had never occurred to you, and now, stubborn, you secretly vow to thwart them with zero written words.
9.
The ninth of AA’s 12 steps states that we make direct amends to the people we’ve harmed, “unless to do so would injure them or others.”
Knowing when the truth will cause more harm than good takes time and a half dose of maturity to develop. The point isn’t to unburden yourself at the expense of others.
Addicts aren’t gifted in this direction. That’s why it’s not the first step.
10.
Amanda records her conversations with her owners and stores them in the cloud. Over the course of a year I heard pretty much everything one could say to her, a glimpse—I’m tipping here into melodrama—into the troubled soul of a country.
Top oven, 350 degrees. Turn off irrigation, zone one. Amanda, do I need an umbrella tomorrow? I know you heard me you piece of shit. Thermostat 68. Magic Eight Ball. Amanda, will I be rich and famous? Find me Red Lobster. Amanda, how did Whitney Houston die? How did Prince die? Amanda, play “Rehab.” Repeat. Amanda, will Antonio ever look at me? Will anyone ever love me? Do you love me? Say, “I love you Allison.” Say, “I will never leave you.” Tell us a joke. No, tell us a fag joke. Tell us a Muslim joke.
11.
Is anyone reading this? If not, do I exist?
12.
Once, after interviewing a family member, I showed him a rough draft of the chapter he appeared in. With his permission, I’d written honestly about his marriage and divorce, his affairs, the feelings he’d crushed.
Scrawny? he said in disbelief. You described me as scrawny?
In nonfiction, character is a form of murder. To create one, you must kill off half a human. To be honest is to cause harm. And you’ll never know which words cut too close, till the wounded come back around to your doorstep. Pulling from their wound the one word you’d assumed was the safest.
13.
Ouisa: And we turn him into an anecdote to dine out on, like we’re doing right now! But it was an experience. I will not turn him into an anecdote. How do we keep what happens to us? How do we fit it into life without turning it into an anecdote? With no teeth, and a sad punch line you’ll mouth over and over for years. “Oh, that reminds me of that impostor. Oh, tell the one about that boy.” And we become these human jukeboxes, spilling out these anecdotes. But it was an experience. How do we keep the experience?”
—John Guare, Six Degrees of Separation
14.
Hushed-tone praise of flawless humans is like cotton candy—sweet, cloying, and dissolvable upon touch, leaving the reader empty and alone.
You think the dead are safe. But you’re wrong. Free from the consequences of their reaction, you write an honest portrait. Later, an email in your inbox from a relative:
How could you betray her memory? You’re an ungrateful son.
15.
self-absorbed
adjective : usually disapproving
so involved with yourself that you do not think about anyone else; self-centered
16.
How do you make a White Russian? Amanda, text Jen: “I can’t pick you up from work I’m too drunk.” Where is the Middle East? Amanda, are you a lesbo? Can you get AIDS from kissing? Can you die of loneliness? Am I gonna get laid tonight? Why won’t my wife have sex with me? Why don’t you come over here and blow me? Weather, please. Weather. I said weather, Amanda. Fucking robot.
17.
I wanted my good friend, whom I’d described so painfully, to leave my house. I wanted to withdraw and bandage my ego in peace. I drove him home. He waved good-bye to me as he went up his front walk. Soon, we’d be fine. But just then, right there, all I wanted to do was to go home and write about it. To figure out how I felt. To salvage with words what my words had marred.
18.
What does “agnostic” mean? Give me rent. Amanda say “vagina.’ Add donuts to the grocery list. Amanda, help me snort this line it’s fucking EPIC. Amanda, who’s your daddy? I love you, Amanda. What is date rape? Amanda, what is consent? Amanda, shuffle. Amanda, skip. Skip. Tell me something funny. Amanda, that didn’t help at all. You’re a shit. You’re a slut. You’re the only person that listens to me.
“Let me ask you a dick question,” I said to my friend Smooth Operator. “As in, a question about your dick.”
“My particular dick?”
“Yes, your unique, individual dick.”
In the little FaceTime screen, he gave a quick go-ahead nod.
“I’m just curious,” I said. “Do you ever, you know, say to yourself…like, after a really rough day when nothing is going your way…do you ever say to yourself, ‘Well, at least I have a big dick‘?”
“My dick’s not massive.”
“It’s big,” I said, with a tone confirming its basic and objective truth.
He conceded. “It’s big.” He opened the refrigerator in his Manhattan kitchen and scanned the contents, which to me always looked excessively ordered. “Look, in reference to your question, have you met me?”
He spoke our shorthand, informed by the entirety of our friendship. What I knew about him, and he about me, and how that made us well-suited as cronies. He meant our similar temperaments, quivering with neuroses, stumbling over ourselves to make life easier and more pleasant for other people, an exhausting and resentment-prone approach to life that provoked a mutual friend to say to us, in exasperation, You don’t have to set yourself on fire, you know, to make the other guy warm.
I try to avoid thinking about Smooth Operator’s dick. It had been a full year since he’d confirmed, following a brief, long-distance affair, that he did not have the same feelings for me that I had for him, something that 99% of me already sadly understood. But the 1% holdout was a wily, obsessive, fantasy-prone fuckwit that dragged us both through a too-long bout of my wistful denial.
So a year had passed since that excruciating, reality-based let-down talk, and during that year I’d tried to release my grip on those particular feelings while still clinging hard to the very real and crucial friendship that we’d built over near-nightly chats, a handful of visits, and one butt-cold winter weekend trip to Montreal. He’d propped me up during a rough stretch of road. Trying to be his friend while surrendering my more-than-friend feelings was like trying to separate two layers of paint in the middle of a hurricane.
What I’m trying to say is that reducing the frequency of times that I think about his penis is a beneficial plank in the construction of my overall mental health.
“Look,” he said, grabbing a blueberry yogurt from the fridge, “It doesn’t cheer me up on a bad day, but yeah, sometimes, if I fall into comparing myself unfavorably with another guy, sometimes, I’ll remind myself that at least I’m—
“—a top with a big cock,” we said in unison. A private joke he likes to trot out pretty much every week, mainly because he knows it contains a hint of bottom-shaming that he doesn’t actually buy into, but pokes me with, because he knows that it annoys me.
“Well,” he said. “You asked. Where’s this coming from, dawg?” (He calls me dawg. The D-A-W-G version, he’d once clarified.)
“I keep thinking about confidence,” I said.
“Is your finger covering your fucking speaker again?” he said.
“Oops.” I readjusted my grip. “I mean, we’ve talked about this. You know, when you see someone who exudes it and you find yourself wondering where it came from. When you see one of those people who act like they deserve to breathe the air they’re breathing and to take up every inch of space their body actually occupies on this earth.”
“Oh,” he said. “Those people.” Smooth Operator ate a spoonful of yogurt. “It’s okay that I eat in front of you, right?” he said with his mouth full. Rhetorical question, long ago approved.
I’d taken all those unrequited feelings to my shrink for months on end, complaining about the dull, stupid, ceaseless pain they put me through. “Why can’t I just reason my way out of this?” I asked him (rhetorically). “Why can’t I just decide not to like him?”
Then one day my shrink suggested that, instead of telling Smooth Operator every single thing about my daily life, I should start keeping some details to myself. Just a few. It sounded like a flyweight solution for a heavyweight heartache. And the strength of my friendship with S.O. felt fully informed by the all-access pass I’d given him to my internal life.
Still, I’d been so fucking desperate for relief that I’d given it a shot. Over the next couple of weeks I’d stopped talking to S.O. about a local dude I’d had a couple of dates with. And surprisingly, miraculously, within a few days I sensed a very small crack in the monument of my unrequited devotion widen just an inch, and then a few more. The obsession began to drain.
“You knew what you were talking about,” I told my shrink. I don’t often compliment him, but he refrained from pointing this out. I imagine he was close to crying from relief, that he didn’t have to hear about S.O. as often now.
“I’ve had a yogurt,” S.O. said. “Three tacos, Thai food, two smoothies, and a tuna fish sandwich already today. I’m still hungry.”
He was always hungry. A full-blooded sensualist, that one. Most nights, looking at his face, I do a little internal check to confirm that I’m no longer in love with the dude. Which I’m not. But his handsome mug on my FaceTime screen reminds me that I still do have “feelings” of an enduring and bittersweet flavor that soften my heart one or ten degrees in his favor.
I didn’t tell him that night that I kept thinking about another shrink. Hank the Blank’s personal shrink. Way back in 1980, Hank had told his shrink that he’d molested me, and instead of doing his legal and professional duty, instead of reporting Hank the Blank to the authorities, his shrink merely made Hank promise never to do it again. (Hank would do it again, later, to someone else. )
I don’t know why I didn’t mention it to S.O. that night. He knew that story. Maybe, as I felt my brain inch down that dark and crooked path, I could sense the futility of it all. Wasting time, wondering how I might have turned out, had I received intervention at the age of nine. Would I have been spared firsthand knowledge of suicidal depression?
It’s a nice thought, but given the terrain of my childhood, hard to believe. The atom-splitting, hostile environment of my family’s ongoing physics experiment, which tore us apart and threw us together in different places and configurations, had too many cracks for trained professionals to fall through. I would have missed those appointments.
Would a different childhood have made a different man? A man with less self-doubt?
No doubt.
What about a bigger dick swinging between my legs?
“It’s a waste of time,” I told S.O., “all these what-ifs.”
“Admit it,” he said.
“Admit what?”
“You wouldn’t trade it. You wouldn’t be one of those clueless, confident douchebags for all the money in the world.”
“Well, I said. “Maybe for all the money.”
But he was right, of course. I’d worked too hard and paid too many dues to build the lens through which I look at everything. The glass—warped in spots, crystal-clear in others—that gave me my particular view.
I think about confidence, and the confident, but never for long. It’s like staring through the bars at caged zoo animals. A nice place to visit, but nowhere you’d want to live.
My pal Tiny Dancer drove up from Providence and stayed the weekend. Saturday morning, after corrupting him with the best breakfast sandwich on the planet from Small Oven (dangerously close to my apartment in the Pioneer aka Genocide Valley), Agnes hovering at our feet for the inevitable rain of crumbs, we cruised up 91 and over 2 on our way to MASS MoCA. October leaf peeping and cultural field trip—two bugs, one windshield.
He played some 80s tunes with his Sirius subscription. We’d met three years ago when I’d crashed for a few months in my sister’s basement in Boston—he was my first New England friend, and we’d regularly drive the 90 miles between my town and Providence for weekend visits. We shared a love of dogs and Saturday night episodes of Dateline.
I told him that my first concert, back in Minneapolis, was Thompson Twins with opening act Orchestral Maneuvers in the Dark, circa 1985. That year I grew long blond bangs over one eye, and wore grungy, black, thrift-store clothes that didn’t meld with the overall Benetton ad of my high school, so I spent lunch hours hiding away from the Darwinian cafeteria tribes, till sophomore year, when some cool chicks in leather jackets and torn black leggings rescued me. We called ourselves, only half-facetiously, the Rebel Posse.
Tiny Dancer snapped this shot at a hairpin turn on route 2. I think I look old, but I guess I am old, and people seem to like the pic, or they “like” the pic, and the colors are pretty cool, so here.
Wikipedia calls MASS MoCA the largest contemporary art museum in the country, a rusted, renovated factory complex, a postmodern outpost in the Berkshire hills, near the Vermont border. I spent some formative years working at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis (even won my first poetry slam there, ha ha), so common museum elements—flickering video in dark exhibits, somnambulant security guards, gift shop t-shirts, catalogs heavy with artworld jargon—made the whole trip feel kind of homey.
The Boiler House
And fuck, I love October. I wish it would last six months. But I guess its brevity is what sharpens its bittersweet taste. I fell in love with October as a lonely, skinny kid in the suburbs of St Paul, a melancholiac drifting home solo from grade school, shuffling through leaves, smelling wood smoke, and finding a comforting warmth in preteen sadness. Shut up, I had my reasons.
The museum road trip was a bit of a symbolic gesture on my part. I’d landed in this valley at the long-sputtering tail end of a very long tailspin, and couldn’t quite pull myself out of the wreckage.
Instead, smoldering in its ashes, I’d taken daily inventory of all the ways I suffered here, compared to San Francisco.
Guys, I didn’t get cruised here for A WHOLE YEAR. I was an actual ghost. Humans walked through me. And when a guy on campus at UMass (where I worked for awhile) held my gaze and turned to watch me walk past, I was so startled that I smacked face-first into a door.
Jenny Holzer, Truisms
Between that, and the alienating, Christian-heavy leanings of local 12-step groups, and the long winters, and my inability to find work that would lift me above paycheck-to-paycheck existence, I resisted Genocide Valley. Like, picture me being dragged across the ground with my heels dug in.
Things began to shift when, instead of dropping local AA entirely, I supplemented it with a dose of Refuge Recovery, a program based on Buddhist principles. It’s currently caught up in some Me Too Movement fallout, and is quietly getting swapped throughout the country with other frameworks, but my long curiosity in Buddhism, and my increasing disbelief in an external, omnipotent god, found some solace and much food for thought there, as well as a place to practice some monkey-brained meditation every week in a room full of quiet, breathing, shoe-less folks.
I met a dude there I’ll call the Sinful Saint, a well-read, well-lived, intellectually voracious man who’d sit with me at meetings, drink coffee in Northampton, tea on my living room couch, and dig with me into our pasts, sitting in my car in his driveway as the frogs of the valley began to sing at night.
I told him the nickname was because he’d read through my blog and had texted me a line from a poem I’d forgotten I’d written:
The scattered collection of men have all had their hopes,
and, left alone, they have called themselves fools. Is that so
uncommon? Even saints dream of sin.
(In other words, I kind of made his nickname all about me. This is a recurring trait that is dawning uncomfortably on the horizon of my recent thoughts. I’m self-centered. Isn’t that what my father, Hank the Blank, once said? He could be both a narcissist and correct. That’s an entirely possible combination. In fact, they are probably connected. My excessive, self-referential introspection, which he hates, was my childhood strategy for survival. “Hello, Frankenstein,” I told him, once. “I’m your monster.” He was not amused.)
I’ve said here before that, following my split from the Manly Fireplug and my exile from San Francisco, my brain and body rife with fear, that the one thing I needed was the one thing I couldn’t sustain—human connection.
I’m a dude who wants to see himself as strong and solitary, but who desperately needs others to survive. It turns out that to endure Genocide Valley, I needed a pal.
The Sinful Saint took me to the top of a mountain. The mountain was next to my apartment. I’d lived in that apartment for three years, but that was my first journey to the summit. He began to chip away at my resistance to my locale, not through instructions but through companionship.
I left one job because it was a dead-end nightmare of bigoted dysfunction. I took a new job, my first job as a full-time professional writer, one that pays me a few dollars above paycheck-to-paycheck. Maybe someday I’ll have enough saved, for my vague plans to escape to an undecided city. Being a single gay dude here is like trekking with an empty stomach across a bleak and forlorn field to a hut built for one, leaning back in the howling wind.
Yeah, sue me—I’d like to be loved again.
But for now I have work—to squirm out of the wreckage and brush the ashes from my Adidas. To take a chihuahua for walks. To bench press steel plates. To calm the swinging monkey. To slip the armor of resistance and take scenic road trips to rural museums with good pals. To make the most of Genocide Valley, while I’m here.
Management at your new job holds an all-staff meeting to discuss office culture, and they ask everyone to write words on Post-its describing the culture anonymously.
So on one Post-it you write “homogeneous,” since the office is 100% white, and the surrounding small, regional city is not.
Everyone turns in their Post-its face-down, and Kimberly reads them one at a time, and your colleagues have written words like “fun” and “hardworking,” and she gets to yours and squints and says, “humongous?” and then Dwayne looks at it but also squints in confusion.
And there’s no way you’re going to draw attention to yourself — after six weeks on the job — by being the only one to describe the office as homogeneous, especially after your last job (your first real job in this valley) where Betsy — who once said that she could never vote for someone with the same genitalia as her own — sent texts about you to other co-workers, saying that she was sick of your bitchy gay shit.
Which stung because nobody in your entire life had ever described you as bitchy (though they’d sometimes described you as gay), and in a huff of indignation you went to HR, who launched an exhaustive investigation that led nowhere, and the weird thing is that when you look back on that job you feel guilty, which shouldn’t be right but is true, about going to HR, and now you think you never should have gone to HR, you should have just kept your mouth shut.
But now in the office culture meeting they’re trying to decipher your vocabulary and you think maybe Betsy was right, maybe you really are bitchy — after six weeks at a new job you’ve climb up on your perch of judgment to render verdict on organizational demographics.
“Homogenized?” asks Dwayne. Then he and Kimberly toss the Post-it aside and move on to the next one.
Because it hasn’t been that long since your own personal series of objective failures (divorce lawyers, zero balances, cheap whiskey) and you have the sinking feeling that yes, you’re the bitch, just pissed that you got yourself stuck in a valley where an entire company could be white and you could pass, on your morning commute, a deer who’d been hit by a truck, lying crumpled on the ground, and you’re still seeing the deer in the conference room with the Post-its cluttering the wall, the sides of its bloodied chest still rising and falling, gasping for breath, and you wish that as you’d driven past you’d looked the other way.
Attention, fractured: modern condition. Default setting. After eight hours of copywriting/essay scrawling/texts/blogs/hookup apps my head’s swimming with words.
Red flags pop with the coupled rush of dopamine: someone’s thinking of/admiring/remarking on/updating/hating on/lusting after me. Little ol’ me.
Stop life, check phone.
In the balance of my happiness, what’s the ratio of external to internal validation? No wonder we Netflix and kill. Heads, deadened. End the night of a long hard day with a couch and a chihuahua.
I’m reminded, restoring those posts, of my long-held practice. Those close to me get nicknamed here. I can think of three who need immediate naming and the naming seems impossible. How do I sum up the whole of a multilayered pal? How do I top the Manly Fireplug? Truly inspired, that one.
Take several steps back to acknowledge one fact: three pals are good. Three pals are gifts. Three years ago when I came to this valley I had….not three.
One pal headed here for a weekend stay. A tour of autumn leaves (how middle-aged) and maybe a first visit, at last, to MASS MoCA. Jenny Holzer on exhibit! We are guileless in our dreams, she once wrote. I first found her in college in the library stacks. Abuse of power comes as no surprise.
Well, yes. Kurds now being killed, left swinging in the wind. Thanks, stable genius. Must be more of that 3D chess.
And my biggest problems? Vacuuming my apartment tonight and picking up hazelnut creamer for my unnamed pal.
Playing indoor fetch with Agnes. She has her pick of nicknamed pals: Mr. Monkeypants, Funny Bunny, Flatty Patty, and Chuckie Duckie. My home’s not aflame. Just a zoo.
