Author: jim

I have more to say about introverts and extroverts, below, but I wanted to start this newsletter on a high note rather than a skeptical one. Here’s the high note: I’m still here! Here’s an actual image of me trying to write this. My new apartment is a basement and it’s always chilly, even when it’s 70 degrees outside, and Emmitt is a cat. You can do the math.

There are a bunch of new terms that we use now that weren’t lexiconically noteworthy until this year: social distancing, abundance of caution, COVID-19, novel virus. I am doing my part by staying inside, which is easy for me because I like being indoors and I like solitude. I also have an unfortunate tendency to masticate, and this indoor solitude makes it much easier.

Masticate is verb that means “to chew” and I prefer it to the other metaphor for the activity, woolgathering, which sounds whimsical and harmless. Mastication is neither of those things. The activity is also more commonly known as “worrying” which is a word that also means “to chew.” It has teeth. When you do it right, it feels like gnawing on gristle, and it has about the same utility, which is to say, it’s pointless.

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No amount of anxiety makes any difference to anything that is going to happen. – Alan Watts

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After years of practice, I’ve gotten very good at it. For instance, I can focus my worries, laser-like, on an extremely specific subject that actually has some small chance of coming true. I tend to materialism (as in the philosophy), and I only worry about things have some possibility to occur. My worries are based on facts.

One great aspect of fact-based worrying is that it is also vulnerable to the application of data. If worry is a balloon blown up by thoughts of what might happen, facts are the needle that pops it. Facts don’t supply the air, they simply get the process started. A pile of worrisome facts is a crisis, and worries are often based on the fear of a crisis. The difference between a worry and a crisis is that a crisis can be managed. A crisis can be overcome, dealt with, surpassed. If I scatter a deck of cards all over the floor, I’ve created a crisis. All I have to do is pick them up, and I’ve solved that crisis. A worry can’t be managed. It slips between your fingers when you think you’ve got a handle on it. A worry is what happens when you think about how terrible it would be if someone threw a deck of cards on the floor, and somebody slipped on it and hurt themselves. That would be terrible! But it’s not real. It didn’t happen. The cards are fine. If they scatter all over the place, I can just pick them up before anybody slips on them. Even better, I can put the cards away in a drawer, which makes it even more unlikely to happen. Even if someone else comes along, opens the drawer, and throws the cards on the ground, and somebody slips on it and hurts themselves before I can get around to picking them up, that is a crisis we can deal with. But none of that happened! It’s a worry. It’s something to chew on, pointlessly.

The universe has been kind enough to offer me plenty to worry about, little facts that get the balloon inflating. You know the one I mean. It’s very easy to worry about a virus, because it’s invisible and deadly and lurking around everywhere. Anybody could have it! It might even be living on things that I touch. I can take precautions and mitigate my risk, putting the cards away in a drawer, and that will probably be enough. I have slightly high blood pressure (it’s high normal, but I take medicine for it because I’d prefer it to be normal normal, which is another way for me to put the cards away), but I’m not statistically more likely to die from it if I get it.

No, I have something even better to worry about, and I’m writing about it because I’ve learned that writing about my worries crystalizes them and gives them form, and once formed can be examined. I usually do this privately, in a notebook that nobody sees, because I don’t think anybody would care, and it can sometimes be embarrassing. Yes, believe it or not, I have worried about some things that, when analyzed, shows itself to be as ridiculous as a spider with roller skates on.

I’m writing this and sharing it with you, my readers, because it’s What I’m Going Through at the moment, and you might find solace in watching someone crystallize a worry and then smash it. Anyway, here goes:

A lot of bad things have happened to me this year, and while I still have the things that matter most, and my blessings are many, there was a lot of bad stuff! I won’t make a list for you, but I’m single and living alone during a pandemic now. That sucked! So what would be an additional thing that could suck really bad? I could get COVID! Yes, I could. But I put those cards away, so it’s not likely. But, and here’s the worry, what if my tumor grew back.

I have an MRI every year, in June, to make sure that hasn’t happened. The internet says that tumors like mine grow back, but experts I’ve talked to say it’s actually unlikely. Me getting the kind of tumor I had was incredibly unlikely, and they did a great job getting rid of it, so it’s highly unlikely for it to grow back. Those cards have been put away. When oncologists are really worried about tumors growing back, they do scans more often than yearly, so that should be a pretty good indication of what my medical team is worried about.

But even if it has grown back, that becomes a crisis, and a crisis can be managed. It’s already happened once, and it was an awful experience, but I’ve done it before. Brain surgery sucks, but I already did it twice. What’s once more?

I always start to spin up my cancer worries around now, because the day of my yearly MRI approaches, but my run of bad luck lately has me worried about this MRI, as if it will be different from the last two. But this is something I don’t remind myself of often enough: the tumor crisis happened in the middle of a great run of luck — I was in a relationship I liked, I had a job I loved, and everything was going great. Therefore, how lucky I currently feel I am has nothing to do with whether I will get a brain tumor.

There is data on both sides of a worry. As I said before, the worry wouldn’t exist without some facts to get it started, but the two items on the Pro side are thus: I had a tumor once and it sometimes grows back, and I’ve had a run of bad luck lately.

The evidence on the other side is piled so high that it casts a shadow on the two points of data on the Pro side. One of them is a neurologist saying “your tumor won’t grow back.” Another one is a total lack of any symptoms. It reminds me of when I was afraid I had diabetes and a friend of mine who has diabetes said “what are your symptoms” and I said “I don’t have any” and that was the end of that. Also, luck isn’t a thing. Luck is a series of patterns taken personally, and it’s never a good idea to take things personally.

And with that, my worries are allayed. In fact, I’m so embarrassed by my worrying that I am rethinking sending this newsletter out! Here goes Jim again, talking about his brain tumor. “We get it, you had a tumor.” Yeah, well that one thing you do that’s annoying is annoying, too, so stop doing it!

I promised some words about introverts and extroverts so I’ll finish this up with that. I don’t believe that people are only one or the other. I know people who read a lot and don’t go out very often that turn into social butterflies in specific circumstances (like when they’re talking about something that interests them). I know self-described extroverts who read and write a lot and spend a lot of time alone! As with most things in the human experience, I think it’s more of a spectrum. Some people are very solidly on one side of the spectrum than the other, but it’s reductive and unrealistic to limit oneself to just one side.

The debate is particularly active currently, as the title of this newsletter alludes to — many people are talking about how great this pandemic is for introverts. I, myself, said that I probably wouldn’t mind being quarantined. I was right, I didn’t mind it, for about a day. Now, more than a few days into the lockdown, I am ready for it to be over. I miss drinking a beer at a bar with my favorite DJ. I miss going to movies. I’d love to go to NYC and see David Byrne’s show. I miss people watching and buying furniture at IKEA, especially now that I have some space to fill up. I’m glad that fewer people are dying than we anticipated, and I’m happy that my putting the cards away has probably kept a few people safe. That’s good. But I’ll be happy when we can hug our friends again.

Now I’m going to recommend some things!

I mentioned Simon Stålenhag in the last newsletter, and I had no idea that a tv show based on his paintings was imminent! It was and now it’s out and I love it. I’m biased toward liking it, of course, but I can also justify my liking it.

Every episode was written by the artist, and there is a definite choice to make the show resemble the emotional space of the paintings. There are long stretches of quiet contemplation. Every episode is about an hour long, but there’s a lot of empty space in them — lingering shots of landscapes, diversions that don’t really need to be explored. It takes a while for things to happen in each episode. The show is more interested in creating a mood than it is in telling a story, but I never found the stories lacking. Things happen and are never explained, but that appears to be the thesis of the show: life is defined by the choices we make in a random universe, but human beings, and our relationships, are what keep us moving forward. The show isn’t as interested in solving riddles as it is in watching people try to deal with them. That’s life! I can see that frustrating somebody who wants more plot than atmosphere, and usually that person is me! At one point, the last character you expect to cry goes on for a jag of weeping for an uncomfortable amount of time, and we have to watch him do so, and then collect himself and go inside the house. It’s powerful and hard to imagine in a different show.

Also, the visual choices of the show are very reminiscent of the illustrations, which are based on a premise of a more technologically advanced 1980s but without the strangling weight of nostalgia that chokes shows like Stranger Things. The show does not take place in Sweden but in Ohio, which is perfect — it looks exactly like the suburbs I grew up in, and the small town I pedaled my bike through. This is probably another reason why I like it. I’ve only watched half of the episodes, so maybe it takes a turn for the worse! I like to space these things out, because I also enjoy delayed gratification. That’s a matter for a different newsletter.

Anyway, the show is called Tales from the Loop and it’s on Amazon Prime.

My other recommendation is a podcast! I don’t listen to a lot of podcasts, but I used to. If I ever have a commute again, I expect I’ll listen to more. But one podcast that is particularly Of the Moment is called Stay F. Homekins, and it’s just Paul F. Tompkins and his wife, Janie Haddad Tompkins, talking to each other for 45 minutes. They’re both hilarious, and they make each other laugh a lot, and their conversations are fun. It’s low-stakes and low impact, just two people stuck in the house together, like the rest of us. Janie also happens to be from West Virginia, and I automatically like anything involving someone from West Virginia.

Stay distant, friends, and I’ll see you soon!

So, that was awkward!

When a noise woke me up the other night, I thought it was just my cat, Emmitt. But then I listened a little longer and the sounds you made while disconnecting my TV were much different from the sounds my tiny cat makes when he’s chasing a stuffed mouse. I confess you frightened me when you heard me coming from the bed room and dropped whatever you were doing. I saw you leave, but you were just a dark silhouette in winter clothes that passed my vision briefly. I don’t know why that feels like a confession, but I’m relieved that I didn’t try to chase you or say something. Frankly, I don’t know what I would have said.

I also don’t know what I would have done if I had gotten close enough to touch you. Tackle you? Push you into the unopened packing boxes piled up in my living room? Hit you? No, you were leaving empty-handed, and there isn’t much in my apartment I’d hurt someone for trying to take. Those items that mean the most to me, like a bulb from a string of lights or a framed fish skull, are not things you would have been likely to take.

I guess you were trying to take my TV, which is the only thing in this apartment that cost a lot of money, but it’s old and you broke it when you unplugged it, so it’s not worth even the vanishingly little it was worth when it worked perfectly. Consumer electronics are like that — quick to obsolesce and surprisingly fragile. My phone is worth more than the tv, but even it has a cracked screen, and it’s usually pretty close to me. You would have had to come into my bedroom to get it and that probably would have awakened me, which you definitely didn’t want to happen, because you left when I got out of bed.

I didn’t know you left empty handed until after I confirmed you hadn’t taken anything, so that’s another thing for me to confess. My initial concern was not to apprehend or stop you, but to calculate my losses. See, I’ve been robbed before, but that was much more traumatic. My ex fiancee’s child was there and spoke to that burglar, who told him not to say anything. That guy got away with a lot of stuff, but I got most of it back. The only thing I didn’t get back was my laptop, which would have been the other valuable thing in this apartment you could have taken. But even that MacBook Pro, expensive when I bought it, was getting old, too. Not only that, but it somehow survived being half-submerged in Cornwall, when a water bottle in my bag popped open and soaked everything in it. I was standing on the pier in St. Ives, holding a dripping computer, while seagulls swarmed the people around me eating french fries. I valued that computer for the memories of that trip, not for its utility (though it was a pretty good computer).

I’m not sorry you didn’t take anything, but I will confess to something else and I’m not proud of it: I feel sorry for you. Pity is a terrible feeling, and it’s almost never a good reflection of the person feeling it, or the person being pitied. Pity feels like mercy but it isn’t. Pity is motionless, selfish. Pity is an opinion, not an act. I’m sorry that I feel sorry for you.

I feel sorry for you because you broke into my apartment to take something valuable, probably to sell, but you didn’t find anything except a big, old, heavy TV set. You probably need the money for drugs, which is what people like me say when criminals do things that we wouldn’t do. I don’t understand being desperate enough to steal something, but my tiny experience with addiction, as a cigarette smoker in my 20s, makes me understand a bit of what drug dependence feels like. I also know, intellectually, how powerful addiction can be and how it can make you do things you wouldn’t otherwise do. When I look at your unwelcome appearance in my apartment, I see a desperate person motivated by a racist and uncaring culture into an addiction he can’t escape, and maybe cut off from his usual source of money by the pandemic.

Oh, I can’t forget that part of this whole thing, the deadly virus that is keeping everybody home, because that’s what makes this whole situation even stranger. Common wisdom among non-burglars like me is that you don’t want to break in to a house with somebody in it. If there’s ever been a time that we can be pretty sure everybody’s home, it’s now. Like I said, I feel sorry for you because if you’re going to break into my home, while I’m probably in it, you must be pretty desperate for money. This pandemic has made money scarce for a lot of people, and scarcity makes us more likely to act selfishly.

I’m sure we live very different lives. I made choices that led me here, just like you made choices that led you here. I don’t doubt that my life is, generally speaking, easier than yours. This is not entirely because of the choices I made. In fact, my choice probably had very little to do with it at all. But yours did. And I’m sorry you felt like you had to take some of my stuff.

I guess I should be thankful that you didn’t hurt me, which is another thing people like me say when people like you break into our houses. I bet it annoys you, because maybe you’re just as avoidant of violence as me.

What happens to people like me when somebody breaks into their house is that they are suddenly, inescapably confronted with hard, cruel reality. We are so removed from the daily indignities of crime and violence that when they happen to us, we’re sent reeling. We find that we have to deal with what happened to us, and to deal with the realization that the line between an easy life and a hard life is terrifyingly thin. It reminds me that my proximity to violence and suffering is bound by a thin fabric of laws and agreements and luxuries. All it takes for this illusion of safety to fall is for one person to have a bad night and try to take some guy’s tv.

I’m sorry you are in whatever bad place you’re in that makes you take someone’s stuff. I hope you get out of it, and your life gets easier. I hope you make the right choices that I’ll never have to make, that I can’t even imagine ever having to make. I got all new locks and a fresh reminder of how I still need to use them.

So, thanks for that.

Man, I love art. It’s one of the best parts of being alive in the western world in 2020. We get to enjoy all kinds of art and we can ignore the kinds we don’t like. It’s great!

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What Is It?

I don’t know! One workable definition of art is this: a thing that doesn’t have a purpose except to exist. It usually has some aesthetic appeal, but not always. Duchamp’s Fountain (a urinal with something written on it) is not exactly beautiful, but it’s definitely art. The obvious things that nobody would debate, like the Mona Lisa or Girl With the Pearl Earring, or Donatello’s David, don’t need to be defended. They’re obviously art.

What was the first art? We have no idea! The artifact most widely believed to be the oldest art in the history of the world is this:
It’s a bunch of red lines drawn on a piece of rock approximately 73,000 years ago. Its incredible age, 30,000 years older than the previous record-holder, is one reason why not everybody thinks it’s art. This skepticism is consistent with debates that go on even today about contemporary creations that, some decide, is not art.

Roger Ebert

I always enjoyed Roger Ebert’s writing and I was sad when he died. One unfortunate thing he’s remembered for is saying, repeatedly, that video games were not art. He mounted a major defense of his point, which I won’t get into here. That made me sad, too, but not because he didn’t think video games were art. What made me sad was that he felt justified declaring that anything isn’t art.

A game of baseball isn’t art, but if I take a photo of it and put it in a frame, it is. If I get a bunch of my friends together and dress one side up like German philosophers and the other like Greek philosophers and have them play soccer and film it, that is art. Even hard rules, like “sports aren’t art,” are flexible.

So what is art? Art is anything we say it is. We can therefore debate the merits of a certain piece of art (“how artistic is this art?” Or “what is this art saying?”) but its existence as art is undeniable. It might not be pretty but we should not be willing to say anything isn’t art. When someone says “this is art,” we should never say “no it’s not.”

Performance Art

It’s hard for a lot of people to appreciate performance art. I confess to once being one of those people. It wasn’t my experience of performance art that changed my mind (in fact, I once saw some performance art that simply reinforced my opinion, at the time, that it was not art). What made me come around was the the slow erosion of my preconceived notions, a process that naturally happens as we age. I got older and more appreciative of things that I had at one time dismissed. This is an ongoing theme of this newsletter because it is an ongoing theme of me. I am, broadly speaking, more apt to accept things and appreciate them, than I was when I was younger. I am less certain that my opinions are correct, so they take on a certain plasticity. This is supposed to be the opposite of what happens when you get older. Your opinions are supposed to calcify as your biases are reinforced. I feel lucky to have this experience of wonder rather than skepticism. I was extremely skeptical as a younger man, and I am less so now.

But enough about me, how about that Marina Abramović!

This TED talk is a good summary of her work, in her own words. The difference between performance art and theater, according to Abramović, is the participation and complicity of the audience. She talks about one of her most famous performances, Rhythm 0, which she performed in 1974.

Rhythm 0

I’d call this piece emblematic of what performance art is to me, even though it’s an outlier and not representative of how most performances are constructed. Abramović is, herself, an outlier, and calls herself the Grandmother of Performance Art. I think it’s a good representation both because of how it was constructed (echoed by her most famous performance, Artist is Present) and some unsettling realizations about the audience. The setup was simple: Abramović stood completely motionless near a table with 72 items. The audience was encouraged to use them on her in any way they liked. One of those items was a knife. One was also a loaded gun. The acts performed on her grew progressively more brutal and dehumanizing as the six hours went on. This outcome was not entirely unexpected, but even the artist was surprised by how it all went. In her own words:

I felt really violated: they cut up my clothes, stuck rose thorns in my stomach, one person aimed the gun at my head, and another took it away. It created an aggressive atmosphere. After exactly 6 hours, as planned, I stood up and started walking toward the audience. Everyone ran away, to escape an actual confrontation.

While all art engages the audience in some way, even just as a passive viewer (as in the painting Las Meninas, in which the viewer takes the perspective of the King and Queen of Spain, whose portrait Velázquez is painting — they can be seen in a mirror reflection in the background), performance art often includes the audience in some way. Indeed, without an audience to perform various acts on her during the performance, there is no Rhythm 0, which would be a powerful statement of its own. Am I suggesting that an unobserved person standing alone in a room with a table covered in objects for six hours is art? Yes, it could be!

My Favorite Art

First of all, my favorite artist is my mother. I own a few of her paintings, and it warms my heart to look at them. Not only are they good paintings, but she’s my mom and she made them and I love her. I particularly love her watercolors. The attic of her house is a mini-gallery of her watercolors, specifically of dogs, and I adore each and every one of them. I also love the art made by my friends, who are my second-through-seventeenth favorite artists (you know who you are).
“Dolores”

One artist I love is an artist I’ve never met, Simon Stålenhag, from Sweden. Sure, he paints giant robots and unnatural creatures, but they’re only part of what I love about his work. My favorite of his paintings are the ones that turn the fantastic into the mundane. I love the cognitive dissonance of a person encountering something unimaginable with a sigh of familiarity.

Here are two of his paintings that I love, and what I love about them.

The eye is immediately drawn to the giant robot, of course. And there’s a kid with a gun! Where did he get that? Is it real? Probably his dad’s, because semi-rural Sweden is a lot like semi-rural West Virginia, where I grew up, and this kid is up to no good. His sister, or neighborhood friend, is bored, and doesn’t care about the gun or the giant robot, she just wants to do something else. The fantastic and the familiar collide and we see it in the girl’s body language and her expression. (Here’s a bigger version where you can get a good look at the details)
I also love the body language in this painting, which is also the cover of his book, The Electric State, which is a series of paintings like this one tied together by the story of a woman, Michelle, and a childlike robot traveling across the country. It’s America, not Sweden, but one that’s been ravaged by a virtual reality simulation that replaced real reality for so many people that civilization appears to have collapsed around it. What I love about this painting is the familiarity of the parking garage and the cars and the (again, bored) expression of the woman. I know that pose, hand out, waiting for a curious kid to stop staring at whatever captured his attention and come along already. (Here’s a closer look at the detail)

Charlie White

When I was doing data entry at a big company, it was my first Real Job. I was so comfortable there that I stayed for 8 years. I tend to get very comfortable in my comfortableness, even in bad situations, which is also something that happens to me less and less often as I get older. The Me of 2020 would never have stayed there for that long, because I’m less and less inclined to let my comfort command my better judgment. A little discomfort is good when it leads to a better place.

One thing that I carried with me at every cubicle (they shuffle you around a lot in big companies like that) was a photograph from an issue of Wired magazine. It was a feature story about an artist named Charlie White and his work immediately grabbed me. In particular, I loved Fleming House, and kept a two-page spread of this work thumbtacked to the wall of my cubicle.
This photograph is another clash of the fantastic with the mundane. Reading that article again I see that he was influenced by The Raft of the Medusa and Saturn Devouring His Son by Goya, which are paintings that loom large in my mind, also. I love the reactions, the capture of a moment in time that could never happen in reality (luckily for us), and the fact that there’s a giant monster about to eat some college students.

I freely admit that I am drawn to these works because of the robots and monsters, and that without these fantasy elements, I probably wouldn’t have taken a second look.

I have a fondness for the extraordinary. Maybe it’s childish, or escapist, and a sign of arrested emotional development, but I don’t think so. I won’t turn this into some wide-ranging defense of science fiction and fantasy, as much as I’m tempted to. I can’t explain precisely why space ships and dragons make me happy, they just do!

But Not Everything I Love is Science Fictiony or Whatever

I love those things, and I love Stålenhag’s work for those elements, but I love plenty of things that don’t have anything weird or fantastic or magical in them. I’ve written before about the Raft of the Medusa and the amazing story behind it, and a video project made about the painting, in my newsletter about Routines. I confess that something needs to have a hook to keep my attention, but that hook can take many forms. Even when the hook is science fiction, like Star Wars, my favorite moments from movies like that are the human ones. My favorite scene in all of Star Wars has nothing to do with space ships or laser swords — it’s two people having an argument in a hallway.

I Feel Like I’ve Used This Example Before

I like to write, as you might have noticed. I enjoy the process of converting thoughts into words and communicating and telling stories. I love doing it! I also love it when people read what I’ve written (so, you know, tell your friends).

What I tend to write tends to have a tendency toward the fantastic. That’s not to say that it’s all space ships and dinosaurs, but the hook that interests me enough to propel my fingers to write a piece of fiction is usually in the category of what is largely referred to as “speculative,” which combines science fiction and fantasy and all that other associated weirdness. I need some level of weirdness to make me want to write something, but I make sure that not everything I write has weirdness or speculative elements.

The example I referenced above is from the Young Indiana Jones Chronicles, so stop me if you’ve heard this before. The show was fun and disappointing at the same time, and I rarely watched it. I was a kid, and didn’t appreciate that George Lucas was using a young Indiana Jones to explore the history of the early 20th century. Lots of stuff happened in that era, including the invention of the blues.

Young Indiana Jones often encountered some famous person and, from them, learned some valuable lesson. In this episode, he learned how to play jazz, but he only practiced improvisation. One musician plays the Saints Go Marching In on the piano, and plays it perfectly, much to Indy’s amazement. The lesson imparted to our hero is one imparted to me, too: you have to know how to do it right before you can start improvising it. You must master the mundane before you can start messing with the fantastic.

I lurk on a few message boards for writerly types, and I see a lot of people asking questions about their magic systems, or the power levels of their characters, or what they should name their character’s sword. My advice to them all is the same: who cares? They’re almost always new writers who have never really tried anything before and, influenced by something they’ve watched or read, have lassoed their imaginations and are expressing themselves. This is good! I’m glad they chose to write. But unless there’s something meaty on those bones, it doesn’t matter.

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Post Script

In researching Charlie White, I discovered that he very recently joined the faculty of Carnegie Mellon University, which is mere minutes from where I live. I’d love to meet him sometime, but I’m content to enjoy his work. I don’t think I’ve ever met anyone I know only from their art (but I wrote about that, too) and I’m not sure I’d know what to do.

“‘And what would humans be without love?’”
‘RARE,’ said Death.”
— Terry Pratchett

Death is a character in Pratchett’s work, and he always speaks in all-caps. He is a tender-hearted being who likes cats, but is very serious about his job, which is to help the dead get to their final destinations. He tends to be blunt. People who die in Pratchett’s work often encounter Death, who is usually sympathetic, but being a personification of a concept, can’t really relate.

Terry Pratchett himself died recently, of Alzheimer’s. He got it much earlier than most people, and it finally killed him at age 66. That’s 24 years older than me. I have a history of dementia in my family. Alzheimer’s is part of that terrifying constellation of diseases that slowly, inexorably rob you of your ability to think. Many people think this is a worse fate than slowly losing your physical faculties and dying, infirm but aware of your surroundings. Having seen both processes of aging up close, I cannot say that I prefer one to the other. The looming, large, intractable similarity they share is that they only happen if you get old. We cannot overlook this.

“Hard times? I’m used to them,
Speeding planet burns? I’m used to that,
My life’s so common it disappears.”
— Paul Simon, The Cool, Cool River.

Everybody knows someone who died young. Everybody knows lots of people who died young. It’s so common and tragic that most of us won’t traverse our childhoods without losing someone. But you can’t build an identity around it. It’s sad and it’s terrible. That’s not what this is about. This is about me.

At the age of 42, I have succeeded in not dying young.

I don’t think about dying very much. I don’t fear death. This is not a result of any experience I had. I’ve been ambivalent about death for most of my life. At some point I realized that dying is, at worst, going to sleep and never waking up. As someone who enjoys sleep, I am not bothered by this.

A new wrinkle in my worldview has been the grudging acceptance that I might be wrong. Wrong about what? All of it. For most of my life (let’s say 13 to 35), I was convinced of the impermanence of the physical universe, that human beings are all happenstance conglomerations of matter that get to live for a few decades of interrupted nonexistence, after which we return to a state of not existing. The more time you get, the better. But, fundamentally, we are all animals. We are (mostly) hairless apes who managed to live long enough to receive the genes of our successful ancestors. Consciousness, rather than some kind of end goal of evolution, is a bizarre side effect of the combination of beneficial cognitive variables. Consciousness, sentience, self-awareness, is just a byproduct of the adaptations we developed to survive the conditions of the African savannah. We aren’t even the only ones — Neanderthals and Devonians were pre-human (or protohuman, if you’re feeling deterministic) that emerged around the same time we did, and likely had the same existential questions we do. The actual qualities of being Homo sapiens that made us the dominant hairless ape on this planet are lost to history and are far beyond the scope of the point I’m making which is this:

I’m not so sure about that stuff anymore

I don’t mean I question evolution, only that the physical universe is all there is to it and we hairless apes have the vast mystery of the universe all figured out. I don’t know what caused the spark of doubt in my own certainty. It wasn’t sudden, and it wasn’t the result of any singular moment. I experienced a slow skepticism of orthodoxy, all kinds of orthodoxies, that I could no longer ignore. My thirties were a decade of big changes for me, none of them very visible to someone on the outside, and none of them were spurred by astounding revelations. I just kind of thought about things more and found I was less certain of the old certainties.

I learned more about Zen Buddhism

It feels like a cliche but I was a white man in his mid thirties who got really into eastern philosophy. My doorway into this world was Alan Watts. I happened to be looking at videos on the internet somewhere and happened upon a video somebody made using a bit of one of his lectures. He talks about the fundamental Buddhist concept of existence as a function of being, and the nature of choice.

Watts says this (emphasis mine):

You do not know where your decisions come from. They pop up like hiccups.

And when you make a decision, people have a great deal of anxiety about making decisions. “Did I think this over long enough? Did I take enough data into consideration?” And if you think it through, you find you never could take enough data into consideration. The data for a decision for any given situation is infinite.

So what you do is, you go through the motions of thinking out what you will do about this. Choice is the act of hesitation that we make before making a decision. It is a mental wobble. And so we are always in a dither of doubt as to whether we are behaving the right way or doing the right thing, and so on and so forth.

You have to regard yourself as a cloud, in the flesh. Because you see, clouds never make mistakes. Did you ever see a cloud that is misshapen? Did you ever see a badly designed wave? No, they always do the right thing. But if you would treat yourself for a while as a cloud or wave, and realize you can’t make a mistake, whatever you do, cause even if you do something that seems to be totally disastrous, it will all come out in the wash somehow or other.

For someone who deals with anxiety and indecision as frequently as he breathes, this is a shattering concept. This is a shaking of the foundations. This is a tectonic shift.

This is a revelation

I hate to mix my religions, but I will anyway. The concept of the revelation is integral to Abrahamic theology. Sometimes the revelations are personal, and God speaks directly to the stunned listener (the listener, I imagine, is always stunned; nobody receives a communique from the divine and thinks “yes, this is exactly what should be happening”). More often, they are second-hand: an Angel, a messenger, comes down to earth and speaks to them for God. Even more potent, and I think more effective, is the public revelation, a kind of celestial music festival where the main stage is, for example, a guy handing out commandments.

Moments of revelation are a reliable narrative device that gives me endless pleasure. I love when a character realizes something that alters the course of his life and, thus, the story. The music swells, the camera zooms slowly in, and the neurotransmitters for pleasure hit me like a brick. God, I love it so much. Here are two of my favorites:

Luke Skywalker is a kid in over his head. A plucky rebellion short on able pilots gives him a rickety old star fighter because an old friend and one of their own can vouch for him. He is just one among an entire fleet, doing his best. He’s given the fifth position in a squadron of five, tasked with defending far more experienced bomber pilots who have to land the football directly into the arms of a receiver so far away and so small that even otherwise hopeful rebels can’t imagine hitting such a small target. Luke watches in horror as every other experienced pilot is put out of action and he, alone, can save the rebels from certain death. He can’t do it. How could he do it? He just watched veteran pilots try and fail. It’s hopeless. He squints into the unfamiliar bomb viewfinder. The galaxy is doomed to fall as the rebellion’s secret base is blown to pieces by the Death Star.

Until a voice pops into Luke’s head. It’s the Jedi who just died at the business end of the sword of the guy who’s also blowing up all of Luke’s friends. We watched Obi-Wan Kenobi give Luke some rudimentary lessons on the true nature of the universe. It’s nothing very complicated. Use the Force. Luke knows what that means: reach out with his feelings, and don’t rely on what his machines tell him. Kenobi even tells him not to trust his own eyes, to trust his instincts, his connection to the universe, the energy field surrounding everything. It’s ridiculous, but it suddenly makes sense. It’s a counter factual, unmoored and against everything he was previously led to believe. So he turns off his targeting computer and trusts his feelings. [1]

Watch it with me, won’t you? https://youtu.be/zR7CeC-rqiE

That’s the first one. The second one is much more recent and not nearly as famous. It’s a revelation in a very religious sense, because it’s happening to a pastor who has lost of faith after witnessing the death of his wife. She lived just long enough after being struck by a vehicle to unleash a string of nonsense non sequiturs. The pastor interpreted them as the meaningless words of a woman dying a meaningless death in a meaningless universe and abandoned his faith. But the universe of the movie Signs is anything but meaningless.

It’s not until the pastor’s remaining family is threatened by an intractable, deadly creature from another planet (!) that his wife’s revelation is revealed to him. They spend a terrible night in the basement, menaced by these beings who try over and over again to get to them. The pastor calms his terrified daughter with the story of her birth, the first of every person’s revelations, as the monsters close in. The morning brings hope that they lived through it, until the shocking reveal where we finally see one of these creatures in full view, in stark daylight, cradling the body of the pastor’s asthmatic son. Here comes the second revelation, as the Pastor flashes back to the meaningless babble of his dying wife, which now suddenly has context. One of her utterances was “swing away, Merrill.” The pastor looks over at Merrill and sees him standing below the mounted trophy he got for hitting a ball extremely hard for the longest recorded home run. We know from earlier conversations that Merrill was an unparalleled talent, but struck out more than he hit. “It felt wrong not to swing,” he explains in an earlier scene, unapologetically. The pastor repeats her words to him, and suddenly that night she seemed to speak nonsense makes perfect sense after all. These are three revelations in one scene. It’s like this movie was made for me. [2]

Watch it with me, won’t you? https://youtu.be/bjv7CVhZXNs

My own revelations

I do most of my best work when I’m thinking, and thinking about Alan Watts‘s words was, I suppose, a kind of personal revelation for me. I had never heard what he was saying before. It made sense. It was an explanation of the universe that, to use a word heard most in creative writing classes, resonated. It’s tempting to use the word “resonate” because it has an attractive physicality. It’s an accurate description of the way a revelation bounces around inside you like an echoing musical tone bounces around inside the body of a violin.

Alan Watts has a nice, English-accented voice with the bristly edge of a tobacco habit. A quick perusal of his biography shows a man of many dimensions, just like any of us. He died young (58, only 16 years older than me), of complications from alcoholism. Even a man who spoke so eloquently of the freedom from the chains of a mortal existence was bound by them. He addressed this in many of his lectures, so it’s not much of a revelation — we are all creatures of the universe, and that sometimes includes destructive habits. His choice to drink his heart to death (he died of heart disease, technically) was spurred by an addiction, but he made his choices. It is the rare person with a drinking problem who does not suspect that they have a drinking problem.

Alan Watts, warts and all, gave me an excuse to not worry about things. He gave me a reason to stop the spinning brain cycles I spent worrying about things I could control and things I couldn’t. The solution to indecision is to decide. The cure for anxiety is information. Even more startlingly, the enemy of worry is action.

Don’t sit and stew, plan and do

The above is a quote from my therapist, who might have gotten it from somewhere else, but I learned it from him. It’s a nice summation of cognitive behavioral therapy. Rather than baste in our own juices, or masticate the gristle of our worries, devise a solution to your problems and execute it. When I learned this, when I really absorbed this lesson, it was likely the first of many revelations I would have in that office. This is how it works: you’re worried about that mole on your arm, the one that looks funny. You can sit in misery and worry about having cancer, or you can go to a doctor. This won’t prevent you from getting cancer, but it will eliminate the worry. It might lead you to additional worrying that you might die from the cancer you might have, but there’s a long way between a diagnosis and death. The point is nicely summarized by this quote from Alan Watts: “No amount of anxiety makes any difference to anything that is going to happen.”

If I dig a bit deeper in my own biases, I can see a tendency toward Zen Buddhism specifically for its similarity to the cognitive therapy that has been responsible for so much of my personal growth. They both speak to the importance of reason and clear thinking. My life got measurably better when I started internalizing those concepts.

Thank you for reading, dear reader. This is the longest one yet, and I hope I didn’t bore you.

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1. What we don’t see is another revelation — Han Solo changes his mind about the Rebellion and comes back to rescue Luke. He, too, trusted his feelings.

2. People like to criticize this movie for the apparent plot hole that aliens vulnerable to water decided to invade a planet covered in it. I take issue with those who take issue with this because they’re missing the entire point of the movie: there are no coincidences. They picked a planet with water so they could be defeated by clever humans who noticed they were vulnerable to it. The Pastor’s wife had a dying revelation that her husband had to “see” and that Merrill needed to swing. Their daughter left glasses of water around the house specifically so Merrill had a ready supply of ammunition. Her brother had asthma specifically so his lungs would be closed when the alien unleashed its poisonous gas into his face. The unlikely coincidences of the final act of the movie are entirely the point the movie is making: there are no coincidences, and the universe might actually have some meaning behind it after all.

I am old.

Too often, this phrase is thrown around by people who are demonstrably young, when faced with circumstances that make them feel older than people who are demonstrably younger than they are. Sometimes, these judgements can come from external sources: I was at a party, had just turned 30, and a 23 year old said “I hope I never get that old!”

I don’t think she knew what she was saying, and I think she’s probably happy that she made it to 35, if she did. Not everybody does.

With that in mind, I will amend my statement about my oldness by saying what I really mean, instead: I am not a product of this era, I am the product of a previous era.

Because things change, it can be difficult to adjust to some aspects of the era in which we find ourselves, which is what caused me to have this thought (that I am old). For instance, I grew up being able to watch tv shows on one device (a television) and I had to either watch the show while it was on or hope that my VCR recorded it when I wasn’t there. Where I am typing this newsletter, from where I am sitting, I can count five devices on which I can watch a tv show, and only one of those is a television.

As a lifelong fan of science fiction, I am excited by the offerings of this era. I don’t just mean the technological ones, but the social ones, too. I believe that we are continually advancing as a culture, too, and correcting some of the things that we wish previous eras hadn’t done. I know I have evolved, personally, and an acknowledgment of this evolution is what prompted my thesis (that I am old).

GENDERS

I have heard people even older than me say things like “there weren’t so many genders when I was a kid.” Sometimes, they are simply making an observation without judgment, and I prefer to think that most of the people who I hear say that are saying it without malice. I’m happy that I don’t know many malicious people, and almost nobody I know has expressed malice toward people who eschew the relative simplicity of the two genders assigned at birth that those of us of previous eras experienced.

People like me, those who are lucky enough to live long enough to experience new eras, sometimes have difficulty with the features of the new eras. That’s what causes them to say things like “I’m too old to understand instagram” or, sometimes, “there weren’t any trans people when I was young.”

One kind of transition is the root word for those who identify as trans. It is factually incorrect to assert that trans people didn’t exist before our current era. This is like a person living in 1770 saying that there was nothing to breathe when they were kids, because oxygen had not been discovered yet. It was always there. They just didn’t have a name for it.

I am very sad that people who were gay, or non-binary, or trans, before our current era, were treated badly for it. I’m also sad for the way they are often treated in our current era. We have not yet arrived at a point in our cultural evolution where these humans are universally treated with the same dignity and respect that all humans deserve. This is true about a depressingly large segment of humans all over the world, but I am heartened by the tendency for our culture to become more accepting over time rather than less. There are bumps in the road, but the destination remains the same. I don’t know if we will ever arrive at perfect parity among all humans with the same dignity and humanity everywhere, but we keep aiming for it. This is a good thing for all humans, but it is a process that particularly suits me. I evolve. But it’s not always easy.

BARNACLES

I’m going to use a boat analogy. I’ve only ever been on a few boats, and generally avoid them, but I think I’ve read enough books and watched enough movies to have an idea about how they work. Wish me luck:

We all move into the future at the same pace, but we don’t control the winds or the waters. I went through a lot of changes in 2019, and not all of them were good. Some of them were neutral. Some of them were terrible. Some of them were fantastically great. Most of these things that happened to me were out of my control, and those are the kinds of things that are my chief concern here.

BARNACLES FOR REAL THIS TIME

Barnacles are little crustaceans that float around the ocean until they find the perfect spot. They secrete a really strong glue and then do some more secreting and surround themselves with a hard shell and a door that opens and closes depending on whether water is moving past it. Barnacles are hermaphrodites, and they reproduce basically by tickling their neighbors. This video is a good guide to how barnacles reproduce, but if the word “penis” makes you giggle, you might want to wait until you’re alone to watch it.

https://youtu.be/znlU8nR5hI8

One thing I learned from that video is that barnacles have the largest penis-to-body ratio in the world, bringing new gravitas to the name Long Dong Silver.

Barnacles need sea water full of plankton to pass through their feet in order to feed, so they like places with lots of moving water. Sure, that means tide pools but it also means things like boat hulls.

Boat hulls are great for barnacles but barnacles aren’t so great for boats. A boat moves through the water like an airplane moves through the air, which is to say that the smoother the surface, the better. The US Navy estimates that barnacles are responsible for 40% more fuel because of the drag they create in the smooth sailing of their ships. England’s use of copper on the hulls of their ships, which prevents barnacles from attaching, is one factor credited with that country’s domination of the sea during that period, but I won’t digress into naval history as much as it pains me to leave it.

Barnacles are also a pretty fun metaphor for the gunk we carry with us through life. They stick to us and make it harder to move cleanly through the water. The water in this analogy is time, or whatever you want it to be. In my version, it’s *life*. Water is life, yes, but water that our boats move through is also life. The water I move through comprises everything external to me, and it’s important to pass through it with as much ease as possible. This takes work.

THERAPY

Therapy is a way of getting rid of those barnacles. Luckily, time has a way of stripping them away, too, but there are usually more right behind them. It’s impossible to be an active participant in your own life and not accumulate emotional barnacles. Simply accepting that fact of life is an important step toward good emotional hygiene. Imagine the boater who refuses to acknowledge barnacles. It won’t be long before his boat can barely move.

This isn’t a blanket endorsement for therapy, because it’s not right for everyone. Sometimes people think therapy is just paying someone to listen to your problems (it isn’t) but even if that were true, what’s wrong with that? It’s better than burdening my friends and family with my barnacles. Therapy is also useful because it forces you to make an honest assessment of your state of mind. We all need to audit our internal lives once in a while and take a look under the surface. There might be barnacles there.

MY NAME

I wanted to keep this section as far from the section about transitions as possible to avoid any appearance of suggesting that using a new name for publishing purposes has any of the weight or importance of, say, a trans person’s name change. That’s not what this is!

I’ve explained before about my name. James Foreman is too common, and too much like other James Foremans who are more famous than me. If I want people to read my writing, and seek out more of it, then I want them to be able to find me quickly. The best way is to use a name that is completely unique.

Hazlett Foreman is the name under which I’m publishing everything new I do, from now on. It’s distinct from me, James Foreman, because he works and does marketing stuff and writes for money, and that guy is me and the stuff Hazlett Foreman publishes might not be the same stuff that James Foreman would publish. It’s something I should have done a long time ago, but I didn’t think of it until recently.

I remember when Google wasn’t as smart as it is now, and searching for me led to, well, me. It doesn’t anymore.

THE HISTORIES

If you subscribe to this newsletter, you already heard about the Hazlett Histories, so I won’t keep bothering you about it.

Except to encourage you to subscribe to it again. Don’t make me bat my eyelashes, because I will!

xxoo

Everyone gets to be a snob about something.* You can certainly be a snob about more than one thing, but it’s easier to limit yourself to one, and when we identify the One Thing in another person, we should accept it as part of their personality. Like the right to speak freely without worry of violence and the right to worship whatever gods you wish are enshrined as basic human rights inherent to all people, so, too, is Being a Snob About Something.

Before I get into what I’m a Snob About, I’ll discuss what I’m not a snob about. For one, music. My list of most-recently listened-to songs is made up of music I heard in commercials, on tv shows or in movie trailers. For instance, my most recent Favorite Song is Cosmo Sheldrake’s Come Along, which I first heard in an Apple commercial: https://youtu.be/d8LJXcQhD0k

I like Metal

A friend once asked me what music I was listening to lately and I said “metal,” and he, being a fan of the genre, interrogated this further. I listed mostly Megadeth and Metallica music over 20 years old, and he laughed at me. I don’t know if he’s a Snob about metal, but I’m definitely not. I know that there are people who would not consider the “metal” I like metal at all, or at least a very old and dusty version of it. I have listened to what metal fans listen to nowadays and I can affirm that what I heard is not for me.

I am also not a snob about food. When someone asks me where I want to eat, I rarely have an opinion. I have yet to encounter a restaurant where the menu did not include at least one dish that piqued my prandial curiosity, so I’m agnostic about, for instance, where we’re going to eat tonight. I don’t care. You pick. I really don’t care. I’m not being difficult. I won’t shoot down the first thing you suggest. My claim that I do not have an opinion is true. Pick a place and I will go there, with no complaints. I will not blame you afterward if I don’t like it, because by surrendering the decision to you, I have also surrendered my right to complain. I understand this is a fact of basic social arrangement. If I have a preference, I will state it. Tonight, for instance, I crave the fast casual Indian food of Choolaah, and stated that preference to my partner. It is up to her to state whether she wants it or not, and negotiations can progress forthwith.

Gimme the Garbage

More important than accepting what Someone is a Snob About is accepting what I will call accepting what Someone is Extremely Trashy About, though I don’t want anyone to think that I’m denigrating Trash. Trash is beautiful, wonderful, delicious, amazing. Artificially cultivated trashiness is often detestable, because many of the people who would do so also look down on actual trash as beneath them. I am here to say that trash is not beneath any of us and that we must think about our own visceral reactions to what we consider “trashy” and ask ourselves whether we’re missing something that somebody else might enjoy.

Here’s a for instance for you.

My friends were once enjoying the outside air of Pittsburgh and encountered a small family, obviously tourists, who asked where the closest Olive Garden was. They were told about the incredible delectable delights available at the International Food Festival occurring mere blocks away from their current location, full of authentic Italian food from families that probably still spoke Italian in their homes and definitely would never use a microwave or reheat frozen pasta, as Olive Garden does. But this family was completely disinterested in the Festival or authentic food. They wanted the Olive Garden. How trashy!

Indeed, I understand the instinct to reduce these people to hick tourists from across the rivers who probably lived in the suburbs, of all places, and had such unsophisticated palates that they could not enjoy the authenticity of actual Italians producing actual Italian food. That was my first instinct, also. But that interaction has stuck with me, much like the Rule of Snobbery, and thinking about it made me think about how snobbery and trash are simply social codes for how we relate to what we consume and the value we place on them.

Tell the man looking for Olive Garden that Toyota trucks and GMC trucks are basically the same (a perfectly valid opinion for someone who has no use for a truck), and you’ll probably find out that this person is actually capable of an informed, nuanced opinion about something. It just isn’t about Italian food, or maybe food of any kind.

The family looking for Olive Garden isn’t looking for a challenging dining experience. Their relationship to food is different from mine. They don’t really care about how authentic their dinner is, or how Actually Italian their Italian food is, they want a familiar experience. They’re traveling and are probably not in a comfortable emotional space, so the familiarity of an Olive Garden is an oasis of easy expectations. They don’t have to worry about choosing the wrong thing, or making some social faux pas, or accidentally being rude to a culture unfamiliar to them, or stress about navigating streets they don’t know. They just want some breadsticks and some soup and pasta that probably has a lot of butter in it. Can I really blame someone for seeking comfort when they need it? Never.

The unironic enjoyment of trash is a freeing step to take. Remove the idea of “guilty pleasures” from your mind and simply enjoy things without guilt.

Enjoyment is not binary.

Siskel and Ebert used such a scale for their movie reviews, and sites like Rotten Tomatoes continues a version of that tradition, but it does not work as well in practice. I propose a scale.

At the top of the scale of enjoyment is Snobbery, an indelicate term for an indelicate perspective. I am a snob about science fiction and fantasy. I have a high basic expectation of stories in those genres and I will judge harshly a story I find lacking. I can’t simply turn my mind off and enjoy a bad or unoriginal science fiction or fantasy story. It has to have something redeemable to me, as a snob, in order to enjoy it.

That does not mean I don’t enjoy trash in those genres, because I do! There is nothing original about the movie Soldier, but I still love it. It features mid-career Kurt Russell as an obsolete super soldier discarded to a planet of garbage, where he finds himself finding new purpose as a defender of a community of marginalized refugees. I love the movie with no shame and will happily defend it, but I freely accept its flaws. It’s probably Trash. There is nothing original about the story, but it is executed in lean, myth-like segments. The journey of the main character is telegraphed and predictable, and this is what I enjoy about it. I admire a good story told well, and Soldier fits the bill. https://youtu.be/4g2G5POuZCY

I had the opposite reaction to 2009’s Star Trek movie. While exciting and well-made, it had nothing of what I love about Star Trek while also emphasizing aspects of Star Trek that never belonged in it. Star Wars is about fathers and their legacies, but Star Trek is not. The 2009 movie included James Kirk’s father, and had a character lament that he was not more like his father. The biological destiny implied by My Father Was a Great Such and Such So Therefore I Must Also Be is a sad remnant of feudal, middle-age thinking that has no place in the optimistic, egalitarian futurism of Star Trek. That is just one of its many sins that I won’t bore you by writing about.

These themes, as I said, are perfectly apt in Star Wars, which is steeped in fairy tales and Arthurian myth. I liked the second movie in the new trilogy, The Last Jedi, because it subverted and deemphasized familial legacy so common in fantasy stories and added a little note of the much more exciting and modern idea that Anyone Can Be Great. Both ideas can coexist in Star Wars, and that movie was full of new ideas for Star Wars while also rhyming with bits and bobs from the movies that preceded it.

Finally, Here is the scale I propose:

• I’m a Snob About This

• I Love and Defend This But I’m Flexible

• I Have No Strong Opinion About This, But I Usually Like It

• This is Fine, I Guess

• I Have No Appreciation For This But That’s Fine If You Do and I’m Interested in Hearing You Talk About It

• I Don’t Like This At All But I’m Glad You Do and Please Don’t Try to Get Me To Like It, I Already Know I Don’t and I Don’t Enjoy Hearing Anyone Talk About it, But Please Don’t Take it Personally

• This is Terrible and I Hate It

This scale is not intended to be exhaustive. There are many thin layers between these discrete levels, and some of these layers might be different for different people. For instance, one layer I could add to the above would be “Talking About This Around My Sister Will Make Her Leave the Room,” and “I Like This a Lot But Please Don’t Tell My Cool Friends.”

Also note that this is not meant to cover political opinions or things that matter to you on a different level from what you consume for entertainment. Those values might factor into what you’re a Snob about, but this scale isn’t meant to cover anything you might vote about.

Relationships

I touched upon this briefly earlier, but I think it bears further examination. An additional aspect of the scale of snobbery is the idea of one’s relationship to the object in question. It’s important to acknowledge these tendencies in ourselves so we can see them in others and, I think, gain a better understanding of why someone might like something we consider Trash. For instance, my relationship to Marvel comic book superheroes goes beyond whatever surface qualities might exist.

I began reading about those characters as a child, and carried a love of their stories into adulthood. My relationship to a character like Captain America goes beyond the simple, escapist enjoyment of his adventures. They were my companions through the most difficult and the most joyful times of my life, and some of some of them helped me process aspects of my life that were too complicated or nuanced to wholly encompass with my little mind. Captain America, for instance: while you might see a goofy ultra-patriot with an A on his head, I see the best parts of my dad and the values important to him: honesty, honor, truth. It’s not as simple as “me like when man punch other man.” I’m bringing my own beer to the party.

When people ask me my opinion of something like the newest Marvel movie, I give my most objective opinion possible, but with the caveat: I cannot judge these movies objectively. I’m going to enjoy watching Spider-Man fight Mysterio, full stop, so don’t rely too much on my opinion to figure out whether or not you’re going to like the new Spider-Man movie. My relationship to these superheroes is such that movies about them can commit many crimes that I will happily overlook because there is a loud, boisterous child in me that can’t stop bouncing up and down in his seat just at the sight of Spider-Man fighting Mysterio. I have a childish glee about the Marvel superhero movies, but I’m not a mindless consumer. I can excuse a lot of Trashy aspects of the things I love, but only if the soul of it is intact. The 2009 Star Trek movie was Trash, but it also showed a lack of understanding the very things I love about it.

Finally,

Writing these newsletters is always very illuminating to me. I learn more about myself when I write each one. Self-analysis is an important part of being a functioning human in our society, I believe. It’s important to check our biases and preconceptions. Sometimes we need to stamp them out, sometimes we need to embrace them, but we always have to give ourselves permission to have them.

This is the first newsletter I’m publishing in the new year, but I wrote most of it piecemeal over the last few days. I’ve always been skeptical of traditions based around arbitrary dates, but I have also come to the conclusion that everything, in the end, is arbitrary, so why not celebrate one? So while I still eschew the New Year’s Resolution, I will happily celebrate the end of 2019 and the beginning of 2020. My fondest wish for you and for myself is peace, joy, beauty and understanding.

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Footnotes:

1. When I was much dumber, I used to read Penny Arcade a lot. It also used to listen to ICP. Enjoyment of either one was not ironic in any way, and I’ll defend my liking them both at the times I liked them as Better Than You Think but definitely emblematic of my headspace when I liked them. I feel an intense need to defend my liking the things I like, which is a sideways way to approach the topic at hand: being a snob. My theory is based on the idea I first read about in something Penny Arcade wrote or drew, but I can’t find it anywhere. Anyway, I wanted to make sure that they were sufficiently cited as first tossing the idea into my head, where it has rattled around for years and I am only now examining.

The title is stolen from Stephen King, and I am shameless in my theft. I have a pet theory that he stole The Green Mile from an episode of Amazing Stories (a man on death row heals people is not exactly a common trope), so I have zero shame. It is also title of the only book Stephen King wrote that I enjoyed. This is not a controversial opinion among people who write, though I know a few who adore his work. I don’t hold that against them. Opinions change over time.

But some of them don’t. They attach themselves to us and never leave, while some interests flit in and then out of our minds. This seems to happen with more frequency in the young, when everything is more flexible, wits are fast, these things come and go. A year ago a child was obsessed with garbage trucks, but now he can’t be bothered. Is there a time when these interests calcify and define our lives thereafter?

I would say that writing is a phase that I never grew out of, an interest I never gave up, a distraction that captured me completely and became a vocation. I did not wish to become a writer. That life, or whatever vision I had of it, never appealed to me. It still does not, as I write this on an iPad in the same coffee shop I’ve been visiting semi-regularly for the last six years, unemployed and drinking coffee in the afternoon, looking exactly like the person I never wanted to be. Having said that, I like the person I am. I’m happy with the choices I made that led me here. I don’t regret anything. Given the same life to lead again, I would have done everything the same. I made choices that were inevitable for me to having made them. I know me. I was always going to do those things.

Writing is one of those things that everybody thinks they can do, because literacy is a requirement for participation in modern society (though a few seem to somehow get by without it). To me, this is as senseless a summation of one’s abilities as would thinking that learning algebra made one able to solve the Riemann hypothesis.

But life is not that simple, and human endeavor is not that simple, and “making it” is not that simple. One likes to think that good work will be recognized, eventually. But this is not the case. Well-connected work will be recognized while unconnected work can easily be lost in slush piles. The role of privilege and the circumstances of one’s birth play a part here.

Great work goes unrecognized constantly. The greatest living writer could be in this very coffee shop, writing words nobody will ever read. I don’t know how people find out about these podcasts they listen to that I have never heard of, but random chance seems unlikely. The world is not a meritocracy.

We are so often told to reach for our dreams. People accepting awards love to tell anybody watching to pursue their dreams, because they, too, were once watching an award show and some celebrity made some similar declaration. It might be true that nobody who never makes it ever did so by not trying. Effort is an assumed factor. Perhaps less assumed is privilege.

I was at Target the other day, and I saw a children’s book by BJ Novak. I know he had other publications, but this was the one in front of me. I know who BJ Novak is, because I used to watch him on The Office. BJ Novak was a literature major at Harvard, so he has at least a passing familiarity with written words. I don’t know if his writing is good. I will never read a single word BJ Novak has written. He got his start as a stand-up comedian in Los Angeles, and was cast based on the act that producer Greg Daniels saw him perform. Greg Daniels also went to Harvard.

It’s entirely possible that BJ Novak could have produced great literature and would have been widely published had he not appeared on the Office. We will never know.

I got mildly angry at the sight of seeing BJ Novak’s name on a book at Target. It was not the kind of anger that makes its mark, but if you had been there you would have heard me say “blech.” I moved on and went to look at humidifiers. Our apartment is very dry.

Publishing a book is a dream of mine. BJ Novak is a rich, award-winning television writer. Publishing a book might have been his dream, too, and I can imagine a scenario in which he worries whether he is actually worthy of having books published, had he not been on the Office. I have no ill feelings toward BJ Novak. His success takes nothing away from me.

I used the p-word, so I should address it more clearly. I enjoy a certain amount of privilege. My mother has three signers of the Declaration of Independence in her heritage, and an august name respected and admired by many people in Wheeling, West Virginia, where she and I grew up. Some of that admiration comes from who she is related to, but she also made a mark herself. The previous generation of Wheelingites would ask me if I was related to James Hazlett, who was a physician and treated many of them (he was my grandfather). This current generation asks if I’m related to Anne Foreman, my mother. They know her for her art, for her charity, for her kindness, generosity. I do not materially benefit from those famous signers, but my mother’s journey through life has eased the way for us, her children. There is a certain privilege in having a great mom, and that defies class or wealth.

I am blessed with many advantages. But I did not go to Harvard. My father was the first member of his family to go to college, and then to law school. A lean Christmas for our family was fewer presents under the tree, but there were always a few. If I don’t get a job soon, I will not starve or lose a place to live. My worst case scenario was never destitution but temporary reliance on the charity of my family to get me through — a wound to my pride, but just a glancing one.

Jealousy is a disgusting thing. It’s slimy and cancerous and it makes us miserable. There is never a reason for jealousy. I envy BJ Novak having published books, because I want to publish books, but that feeling, that emotional weight, is without purpose or benefit. I banish that feeling when I feel it, sometimes with a “yech” or an “ugh,” or a brief rant, but I get it out of me as soon as I feel it. We have a finite amount of energy. My true love, Shyloh, has worked for a singular goal since before I met her, and recently achieved it. No amount of privilege led her to that achievement — she worked, very hard, and very smartly, for that goal. She is an inspiration to me, and for creative people anywhere. Her art form is hair, but she’s a writer, too. She understands the struggle. She also understands that it takes struggle to make a dream come true.

Because our stores of energy are finite, the sensible thing to do is use them to pursue the dreams we have our own way. I wrote a novel, and I’m proud of it. I still think it’s good. Here’s what I say about it when I send a sample to prospective agents (which is how one publishes books the way I want to publish mine). This was written for me by my brother, Rob, who has a newsletter, too, and a thriving career as a writer. That’s another layer of privilege to acknowledge: a helpful brother who writes better than I do.

Edolphus Pierpont is a luckless smuggler who has been living in one of the Only Worlds, an interlocking complex of simulations of the major eras of human culture and society. To escape a threat on his life, he goes to Vegas, an Only World full of vice and folly where a man called Peachy has taken his stolen family heirloom, as well as his stolen girlfriend. His journey there propels him on a voyage to more Only Worlds than he knew existed. Events escalate until he is faced with a truth long since hidden from him: that he himself may be the creator of these artificial worlds, gone so deeply undercover that he has been made to forget his identity. As Pierpont peels back layers of the truth, he recognizes a cataclysm faced by the Only Worlds, and does everything he can to try to save them. At 90,000 words, THE WALLS OF THE WORLD is a fast, witty science-fiction adventure in a carefully imagined, high-concept universe.

So far, no agents have wanted to represent me and this book, so I have taken to writing other things. Another book is in me, and I work on that. I have also given myself until the middle of January to finish a story I have only recently begun. The story is called The First (And Least) Erotic Story Ever Written, and it is about how heaven handles good people who enjoy a little suffering. There are some scandalized, pearl-clutching celestial beings and some leering ones, too, and I enjoy the premise so much that I can’t wait to make a story out of it.

This is the moral of the story I’ve spun for you today: I write because I love it. I get an enormous burst of joy from having written, even if the process of writing is not always very fun. It is work, and it often feels like it. I don’t write to become famous or to become rich but because I am compelled to tell stories, even if nobody ever reads them.

But it’s even better when they do.

Well, that happened.

As I write this, there are still a few days left in the year, but I’m calling it now. 2019 was awful. But it was also amazing. Despite some setbacks, I would overall say that 2019 was a good year. How is this possible? The truth is, most years fit this paradigm. The only major exception to this would be the year of one’s death, providing a handy guide to whether or not you had a good year or a bad one. Ask yourself at the end of the year, or close to it, “did I die?” If the answer is no, then it was a good year. Full stop. End of sentence. Congratulations. You made it. Pop the sparkling beverage of your choice.

ENDINGS

I’ll start with the endings, because those are at the top of my mind today, because yesterday was the memorial for my friend Elicia, a friend whose value to me I did not fully appreciate until she was gone. This is true for most people we lose, even the ones we know we appreciate, like our parents or spouses. People travel across our lives and leaves grooves in the landscape where they traveled the most, and sometimes we stumble across one of those grooves where we didn’t expect it to be. “I need to tell Elicia about this,” is one of those stumbles. Oh, right. I forgot we shared that particular interest.

Those grooves wear down over time, but never completely, at least not for me. I still think of my nephew Miles when I encounter anything involving photography or skateboarding, and he died five years ago. My Aunt Posy, gone now for ten years, is, daily, on my mind. These memories are sad, and they can stop me in my tracks when I least expect them. For instance, I cannot listen to Into the West, from the Lord of the Rings movies, without feeling like I might cry (which is good, because I like having the option), because it reminds me of everyone I loved who died. It’s a song about death, and being okay with it, so it’s a good one to have on hand when you need a cry.

My job at Carlow also ended, and that was also a thing that happened. It was both good and bad, as so many things are. I’m sad to not see the people I like every day, but I’m happy that I get to try something new now. The best endings are the ones that make us change ourselves for the better.

ENGAGEMENT

The origin story of my relationship with Shyloh has been shared elsewhere many times, but I’ll return to a brief version of it here: she slid into my DMs, I answered her, and we’re perfect for each other. She has a son named Shark, who is a whole person I get to watch grow up. He’s hilarious and loving, like his mom. I asked her to marry me and she said yes. Shyloh hates surprises, so I gave her plenty of warning. I have never met anyone who I feel like I completely understand yet who is always delighting me in ways I don’t expect. She is fun in all the best ways. She likes many of the same things I do, but we tease each other about the interests we don’t share. She is blunt and honest and takes care of me. I try to take care of her. I am excited to spend the rest of my life with her.

PROZAC

I tried two new brain medicines this year, and the first one was good but the second one has stabilized my mind in ways I did not expect, or think was possible. I have spent most of my adulthood on Zoloft, then Lexapro, but I branched out this year. I tried Viibryd, a drug that was great for depression but not so good for anxiety. My psychiatrist and I settled on Prozac as a good one to try, and it has allowed me to interface with my feelings in exciting new ways.

The point of good brain drugs is that they don’t change you, they help you be a better version of the person you already are. Lots of people are afraid to take drugs to help with their depression or anxiety because they’re afraid the drugs might attenuate their creativity, or transform them into a person who is unlike the person they are now. This is an understandable fear, but ultimately foolish. After all, how can an amelioration of suffering hurt you more than the suffering does? Imagine what a man like Abraham Lincoln could have accomplished if he had drugs like Prozac or Zoloft. If Isaac Newton could have taken a few milligrams of Lexapro, maybe he wouldn’t have spent ten years alone and closed up in his room instead of publishing his discovery of calculus. What genius has mental illness robbed us of? It hurts to consider.

Anxiety, my lifelong companion, has become a thing I can grasp. This is as radical an announcement about myself I could make as if I said “I can breathe underwater.” I feel like I have been given superpowers. This is a feeling I have not had since I first started taking brain drugs, twenty years ago, or when I first started wearing glasses in fifth grade. I have the upper hand, now. I seize my anxiety by the throat, push it up against a wall, and demand it identify itself. Where do you come from? Who sent you? Why did you come here?

The biggest, worst bully I have ever encountered, and who has battered and abused me my whole life, is finally under my power. I can yell and stab it in the head, like Eowyn before the Witch King. I’m in control.
It’s not just the Prozac, though it has smoothed the way. I can also deploy the support of my loved ones, and the skills I learn in therapy. I would never claim to have fully mastered my anxiety. The war is still being waged. 2019 tested my anxiety and mental health in ways I could have never predicted, so I will sidestep the implied hubris of claiming I have conquered my demons. They’re caged, for now, and that’s something.

OTHER BODY THINGS

If you’re one of the lucky ones who gets to have a good year often enough (see above), then eventually you’ll get to the point where your body will change. Our bodies go through one major change when we move from childhood to reproductive vigor (this is called puberty, and nobody enjoys it). The end of a woman’s reproductivity comes via menopause, which has the word “pause” in it, as if reproduction will some day resume. Men have no such signifier or end of their reproductivity, which might be some kind of half-baked consolation for not being able to literally create new life inside them.

It is this year that I have discovered exciting, new ways my body can change. Like an old house, the plumbing starts to show wear and tear. The simple things like reading, micturating, even eating are no longer as simple as they once were. New factors have to be considered. Timetables have to be adjusted, often without warning. Activities once enjoyed as simple pleasures, like tying one’s shoes, can cause a debilitating pulled muscle in one’s back so one has to miss one of his favorite bands for which he bought tickets, damn it.

Aging reminds us that our bodies are just pumps and pipes. Millions of years of evolution have created these bodies we stumble around in, with big heads and big brains bobbling around on our shoulders. The lucky ones manage to make it long enough for the machinery to break down after an acceptable amount of time, not too early. One way to make the body last longer is to exercise it, which is a ridiculous concept that would have baffled our ancestors. I have increased how much I do this, but I’m still struggling with a consistent schedule for it. The evidence, below, speaks for itself.

As I age I also watch Shark, who is almost 6, and Ollie, who is already 6, reach thrilling milestones in their respective cognitive development. They are old enough to understand some things extremely well, while other things simply bounce off their brains and they shrug and go back to the familiar boing of a ball or click of a LEGO. If you listen closely, you can practically hear the brain cells dividing and the dendrites growing. No, wait, that’s just Teen Titans.

I WAS ENTERTAINED

Speaking of superheroes, I enjoyed watching them fight and run around and talk and stuff. Our entertainment seems to be dominated by these characters lately, as noted by people who also seem to have a problem with them. It’s just a phase. I’ll enjoy it while I can, but it won’t last forever. We’ll get tired of this eventually. The characters of the Jersey Shore were ubiquitous not long ago, but I challenge anyone reading this to name more than two who aren’t Snooki.

A fun game to try this holiday season, as you spend time with family members you might not see very often, is to ask anyone younger than 20 to name the Beatles. The next-hardest level of this game is to name any of the Rolling Stones (Mick Jagger is only half credit). Ask them if they’ve ever seen a movie with Gene Hackman in it. Try not to cry when they ask you who he is.

Here’s my favorites from the year. They all tickled me in all the ways I like the most, but I refuse to give more details than this [all links go to wikipedia, except the last one]:

TV SHOW: Season 3 of Legion

GAME: Untitled Goose Game

MOVIE: John Wick 3

BOOK: My Age of Anxiety by Scott Stossel

SONG: Life on Earth by Snow Patrol

NEXT YEAR

2020 is coming! It’s a new decade. It’s a new year. It’s bursting with opportunities. I have plans, but they will unveil themselves over time. I leave you with this song, which makes me very happy:

First, a list of things I am not anxious about. This is not comprehensive, but it is illustrative.

Flying

Snakes

Spiders

Strangers

Heights

Public Speaking

Some of these things are because I’m a white, heterosexual, cisgendered, male. I am largely free from the social fears that plague many members of our society. I acknowledge that privilege.

Mood is a weird word that carries a morose weight — simple, short, with the long double o. It’s a word derived from Old English. Fittingly, it sounds like it oozed out of a bog. It’s hard to associate the word “mood” with a positive feeling, and it’s even harder to use it in the first person. How often does one say “I’m in a good mood?” Usually we use it to describe somebody else. Is this because it’s easier to gauge another’s state of feeling than it is our own? It feels that way.

Feelings. Why do we have them? They never did anybody any good. They just lead to broken hearts and bad days. How many crimes would simply cease to exist if feelings were taken out of the equation? Crimes of passion would disappear entirely! Road rage would be a thing of past times. Nobody would ever have their feelings hurt again, so comedians could stop complaining about how sensitive everyone is, and nobody would be sensitive about anything anymore anyway. Cold, clean, clear logic would rule our lives, and everybody would be better off.

Of course I’m a Star Trek fan, and I’m describing Vulcans. They’re an entire race that, as an entire race, decided, after a period of strife and war, that feelings were doing more harm than good and it was time to get rid of them. They developed a whole big philosophy and it rocketed their society into a many-thousand-year golden age. Nothing illustrates the crappy influence of emotions better than this episode of Star Trek, when Kirk has a transporter accident and it pretty much sucks for everyone. Watch this sequence.

Spock is trying to be helpful but he acknowledges his privilege as an emotionless being. He can solve the problem at hand (Kirk has been split into two complimentary but opposite emotional beings) but he can’t really relate to what it FEELS like. Spock understands what Kirk is going through only theoretically, but he’s been around humans long enough to know when they might get angry at him that he isn’t more sympathetic: “If I seem insensitive to what you’re going through, Captain, understand – it’s the way I am.” Poor Spock, we’re meant to think. He can’t feel the feelings that everyone around him is feeling. Not me. Lucky Spock, I say! He’s not missing anything!

I have a severe allergy to evolutionary psychology, but even that broken clock is right once in a while. It’s in that treacherous morass that we find some of the reasons why we feel the way we feel.

SIDEBAR: why don’t I like evolutionary psychology? Because it’s reductive and easy to manipulate. I know it helps people to imagine that their feelings or thoughts or behaviors are endorsed by Mother Nature, but it’s too often used to abuse people who are already marginalized and to excuse intolerable behavior by the people in power.

The human internal experience can be broken into three simple states that start big and get smaller: personality, mood, and feelings. Personality stays pretty consistent throughout a person’s life, mood changes with some occasional but reliable regularity, and feelings can vary from moment to moment.

The one objective fact we can hang our hats on is that the experience of an emotion is universal: anger in one person, no matter what culture they come from, is the same anger in another person. This anger might be expressed differently but the experience of feeling angry is the same for all humans.

SIDEBAR: Not everybody agrees about this, of course, but not everybody agrees that the earth is flat, either. We have to draw some lines, and for the purposes of this discussion, I’m prepared to draw a line around this.

SIDEBAR TO THE SIDEBAR: I do not mean to say that the scientists who disagree with the objective quality of emotions are intellectually equal to flat-earthers. They are not.

We have six distinct emotions, a nice, simple number that is the closest to consensus we’ll get. It’s so common, here’s a graphic for it:

In 2017, there was a new study that suggested that there are actually 27 different emotions. They aren’t really new discoveries, just more granular segments of the 6 we already have words for.

This whole thing reminds of me of light. See, there’s just one kind of light, and we call it “white.” It’s a byproduct of lots of important chemical reactions, like the nuclear fusion happening at the center of our solar system. We evolved eyes that can see all that light bouncing around, though we can only see a certain slice of segments with the eyes we’ve got. Other animals evolved ways to detect some of the segments we can’t see. For instance, reindeer evolved the ability see in the ultraviolet spectrum, because the lichen that sustain them in the frigid north glow like rave kids in ultraviolet. If a reindeer could talk, it wouldn’t say “yeah, I see in ultraviolet,” it would just include ultraviolet stuff in the list of its own visible spectrum.

Feelings are like light. We’ve always been feeling these feelings, but only recently have we come up with names for the segments. For many years, six segments was enough. The 27 “new” feelings are just segments of the same feelings we’ve always felt.

Wouldn’t it be neat if it turned out there were a whole bunch of feelings we had no access to, yet still existed in the experiences of other creatures? Some scientists think this is exactly what happens among humans and some of us just aren’t capable of feeling some of the things that other humans feel. Our list of 27 (or 6) feelings is just the broadest human approximation of the roughly 276,000 reactions they collected (read more about the experiment at this link https://www.forbes.com/sites/brucelee/2017/09/09/here-are-the-27-different-human-emotions-according-to-a-study/#595a22a13359 ).

I still haven’t answered my question, bellowed into the sky during a bad day: why do I have feelings?

We’re pretty sure we know why we evolved feelings: to survive. That’s the easy answer. Not everything we’ve evolved was to increase the likelihood of us living long enough to have sex and raise our offspring, but it’s safe to say that feelings are, since they dominate so much of our lives.

For something like anxiety, I’m prepared to accept that explanation. There is a huge physiological component to anxiety. Play the anxiety home game: give yourself a panic attack by taking 30 deep breaths in rapid succession. It’s guaranteed to work! That simulates the sudden stress of being chased by a hungry tiger. The blood rushes from your extremities to your internal organs. Your bowels release. You might vomit, too. Your pupils dilate, letting in more light. Your body turns off everything that won’t help you survive the next few minutes, from reproduction to digestion.

Imagine feeling that all day. You know how allergies are your immune system behaving on false information? That’s what anxiety disorder is. It’s your entire body acting like a tiger is going to jump out at any moment, despite the lack of tigers or tiger-like creatures in the vicinity. I have it, so I take medicine that helps regulate it.

We’re not entirely sure how these medications work, and some of them work better than others on some people and don’t work the same way in everyone. That’s a maddening fact that is crushingly familiar to anyone who has experienced chronic illness (which, if we’re being honest, is most people). If you’ve ever taken an antidepressant or anti-anxiety medication (and if you’re an American, chances are pretty high you have), then you know the experience well. The first one you try probably won’t work, or it will kind of work in some ways but not in others, so the doctor tries another medicine that does more of the stuff you like and less of the stuff you don’t like. My own experience with these medications is common and nonlinear, and supplemented with drugs like benzodiazepines and beta blockers. Clonazepam is the chemical throat-punch that stops anxiety before it gets out of hand, while fluoxetine is the long-term levy that I use to keep the flood of bad feelings in control. I mixed my metaphors there, but you can follow along.

When I lament the burden of feelings, anxiety is my primary target. I highly recommend the book My Age of Anxiety, by Scott Stossel, if you’re interested in learning more about anxiety in general and Stossel’s anxiety in particular (he has it, too). There are two lessons from this book that I want to share with you.

The first: anxiety as a disorder is very new, and, like ultraviolet light to a reindeer, was probably always there but we didn’t have a word for it, and using what we know about how anxiety was treated over the years, we can see how many people probably had it.

The second: one story of anxiety that sticks out to me, personally, is that of an anonymous World War 2 veteran. He was so fearful of his panic attacks that he told his therapist that he would gladly trade them in for the experience of storming Omaha Beach again.

First, the second lesson: this man’s anxiety about his anxiety was so great that he would happily exchange it for the experience of traversing a beach while an enemy army tried to kill him. Anxiety, as a force in this man’s mind, was stronger than the German army, stronger than bullets and mortars. If you’ve ever seen the Normandy scene from Saving Private Ryan, imagine two doors: one leads to a panic attack, but you choose this door instead https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hdBEyitJ7Qc [warning: graphic!].

The other lesson Stossel teaches us is that anxiety existed for all of human history, but without a name that encompassed all of its fun iterations. Of the many physical effects of anxiety, a common one is diarrhea and general gastrointestinal distress (see voiding bowels as survival tactic, above).

Here are some famous historical figures who suffered from anxiety:

Charles Darwin. By Stossel’s estimate, based on Darwin’s copious notes and letters, spent roughly a third of his adult life “either vomiting or in bed.” He suffered terribly during the voyage of the Beagle, but eventually published his discovery.

Isaac Newton. One of the greatest geniuses the world has ever seen (if you didn’t know already). He discovered calculus but didn’t tell anyone for ten years because he was so anxious and depressed.

Mahatma Gandhi. While working as a lawyer, froze during his first case and fled from the courtroom in terror.

Emily Dickinson. She barely left her room after age 40 or so.

Samuel Johnson. Britain’s greatest academic. He was crippled by anxiety and found it especially difficult to get out of bed at a reasonable time.

Imagine what these people could have accomplished without anxiety hampering them? Look at what they accomplished despite it!

So what’s my excuse?

Again, it comes back to me, like a spotlight at a stage in a dark amphitheater full of people judging me. Or, even worse, struggling in silence with incessant feelings of low self-worth and stupidity to an empty hall. I’m a bad writer. I’m not good at anything. Even my skills at competitive first person shooter video games have been surpassed by younger people with faster reflexes. I don’t even have a job! Woe is me, etc.

I am a modern day Ælfric, the commander of English forces in a battle with the Danes whose anxious vomiting led to the slaughter of his leaderless forces in 1003 AD.

I wonder what scenario Ælfric would pick, given the choice between his anxiety and reliving the battle that he so decisively lost. What would he had been able to accomplish if he had been able to pop a couple of Xannies as the screaming, blonde, Danish invaders came over the hill and hacked his men to pieces?

I am again faced with my original premise, unswayed from the finality implied by it. Feelings are the worst.

My own age of anxiety began when I was in grade school. I was so terrified of the social pressures of 4th grade that I refused to go. My father promised me anything I could dream of from Toys R Us if I went to school, but I could not. It would be many years after this that I would start therapy and medication that turned my life completely around, but the intervening years were marked by almost constant panic attacks at the prospect of intimate social activities. For instance, I did not learn to greet people by name when I saw them until practicing that very activity with my therapist at the age of 27. I’m still reluctant to do so, to avoid the horror of calling someone by the wrong name.

Fatefully entwined with feelings of social anxiety are feelings of inadequacy and worthlessness. Socially anxious people are more acutely aware of nonverbal signals but are much more likely to misinterpret them as negative. People like me are hyper aware of the moods of the people around us because we’re absolutely certain that they hate us, or think we’re pathetic, and would rather we weren’t there.

There are some signs of hope, however. Anxiety often falls apart when confronted with facts. It’s simply a matter of reminding ourselves of those facts, and letting ourselves believe them, that give us victory over anxiety.

The lesson we can all learn, one that echoes down the ages from Ælfric: don’t be so goddamn hard on yourself.