James Hazlett Foreman

Category: Feelings

  • Feelings

    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.

  • Routines

    Author’s note: I really enjoy this opportunity to share my thoughts with you. I have a journal (that I’m not very good at keeping, to be honest) but this is a good outlet for me. Thank you for reading it.

    I am unemployed. A day job provides a reliable routine, around which one can construct a life that suits them, and I have decided that I am one of those people who needs a routine. Without it, I am set adrift. My mind becomes a Raft of the Medusa, which is terrifying to consider but also startlingly accurate: my thoughts feel like they’re eating each other and I am paralyzed.

    This is leading me to a tangent so skip to the part where I say it’s over if you just want to read about me.

    This is a tangent about art

    The image I used, above, is not a photograph of the famous painting by Théodore Géricault, which would have been the obvious choice. Instead, I used a photograph of people re-enacting the photograph for a video project in 2009. Rather than restate what is on the artist’s website I’m just going to paste it:

    In late 2008 Adad Hannah received a telephone call from an old friend in British Columbia. Gus Horn, a rancher, community activist, and art collector, wanted to stage a version of Théodore Géricault’s monumental painting The Raft of the Medusa (1818-1819) in 100 Mile House, a community of 2000 people in central BC. Although Hannah initially tried to talk Horn out of pursuing the project, explaining that it would be difficult and expensive, the details for remounting this tragic scene were finally worked out in early 2009 and Hannah flew to BC to get started on the project.

    The full details are at the above link, but it boils down to this: the whole dang community got together to make sure this project happened. It sounds like a Christopher Guest movie. They posed in front of an audience, in front of a painted backdrop, with props they all created, staying mostly still for up to ten minutes at a time. Snippets of the video are at the link.

    The original painting was a representation of an actual event: the tragedy of a ship called the Medusa. 150 survivors from the wrecked ship piled onto a raft and, two weeks later, 15 people were left. Cannibalism happened, along with other assorted horrors.

    Géricault painted the Raft of the Medusa right after the actual event, and he did a ton of research, even going as far as viewing bodies of dead people to get the colors right and interviewing two of the survivors. Although the work has been interpreted as a contemporary critique of the people in charge (the wreck of the Medusa was likely the fault of the captain of the vessel, who was a political appointee and apparently incompetent), I’m more inclined to see it as the 19th century version of a True Crime podcast.

    Here’s why: Géricault painted it at the age of 27, and it is enormous, clocking in at 16 by 23 feet. He debuted it at the Paris Salon, a vastly popular show of art where every inch of wall space at the Louvre was covered with art. Young Géricault intentionally painted a well-known and salacious tragedy in an unconventional style as big as he could make it in the biggest art show in the world, to attract the most attention possible. He knew exactly what he was doing, and it worked. The painting was a smashing success for Géricault, who nevertheless died only a few years later of tuberculosis. The story of the painting of the Raft of the Medusa is a saga itself, involving insane asylums, severed heads stored on roofs, rotting limbs nicked from hospitals, and other assorted misadventures.

    How is Géricault painting the Raft of the Medusa like a true crime podcast? Ask Sarah Koenig.

    Back to the image of the video of the recreation of the painting of the Raft of the Medusa: I have no idea why they did it, but that’s the great thing about art. Who needs a reason? The point of art is only itself. It doesn’t serve a purpose, though it can. It doesn’t have to be useful, but sometimes it is. It doesn’t even have to be pretty.

    End of digression

    I have developed a roughshod routine that serves me well, most of the time. It is vulnerable to the joyful vicissitudes of life with a kindergartener and his mother, the love of my life, but it serves me nonetheless.

    I begin each morning in the morning, which is important. As a person who lives with depression, I could easily spend an entire morning and most of an afternoon in bed, should the mood strike me. Part of the purpose of this routine is to keep such moods as far away as possible, and routines are good for that.

    What time I get out of bed differs, but it’s always around 9, which is the best possible time for me to get out of bed. Being unemployed means I’m not making any money, but it also means I get to stay in bed exactly as long as I want.

    Shyloh, the previously mentioned love of my life, has usually already risen and made coffee. Sometimes she is still there, sometimes she is not. Sometimes her son is there, sometimes he is not. What I do next is wholly predictable and is unaffected by who might still be around: I drink coffee.

    The joy I derive from coffee cannot be overstated. I like my roasts light and my coffee black. I relish each of the two or three mugs I drink over the course of the remainder of the morning. It clears my mind and gets it moving, so I can do the next things as well as possible, because they are important.

    I spend a portion of each morning on the job hunt, usually while drinking coffee. Sometimes this can take the whole day, sometimes it only takes a few minutes — it depends entirely on the opportunities available to apply to. A good opportunity isn’t posted every day, but I’m highly prepared for ones that are. This is a task that historically generates the most anxiety of anything else in my experience, so I address it each day immediately and with verve.

    Let me be clear: applying to a job I am perfectly appropriate for is the most stressful activity in my life. This is not a sensible thing to be anxious about! I have spent hours dissecting this anxiety with my therapist, so I have a pretty good idea where it comes from. As such, I know how to navigate it. What’s funny about this process is that the actual things that make people the most anxious in job searches generates little to no anxiety in me at all. Interviews are fun! I love talking to people. I love being the center of attention. I love talking about things that interest me (and, luckily, what I do for work is extremely interesting to me). In fact, the ease with which I slide into interview mode is a hard point upon which I attach a rare piton of self-confidence (navigating anxiety is often as simple as finding enough things to attach good feelings to and using them to swing through the hard parts).

    What happens after the coffee and job search activity is highly variable (see vicissitudes, above). Some days, I drive somewhere to get things or to get people, or take things to people, or take people to things. There are destinations and objects and people and they are always configured in different and exciting ways. This makes me feel that I have purpose, which is also good for staving off the unwanted moods.

    Usually before or after the above, I use the energy derived from successfully conquering my anxiety by completing job search activities and drinking two to three mugs of coffee to do house work. This can be laundry, dishes, dusting, cleaning up after the cat, cleaning up after the kindergartener, cleaning up after myself, etc. It is work that must be done and it, like the transportation I provide, makes me feel useful, and without a job to give me the daily affirmation of purpose, I like doing it. That’s not true. I don’t enjoy doing the laundry, but I very much enjoy having done the laundry.

    As the day draws to a close, I usually make dinner. We have been using services like Sun Basket, which ship a week’s worth of ingredients and instructions and I do the requisite tasks to turn them into edible food. I also find myself enjoying this far more than I ever expected, though I also equally enjoy not having done it, so it’s not like I would, given the choice, cook a meal every day instead of having the meal made for me. I am not insane! I like cooking, but I also like it when someone else cooks. On days that nobody quite feels like making food, we order food from a place that will, with unpredictable levels of accuracy, bring ready-made food of our choice to our door.

    above: an actual photo of food being cooked by me

    One thing missing from the above list that might jump out at you is this: writing. I gotta do it, and I do it every day. Sometimes I do it at great length, sometimes I only have time for a little. Sometimes I don’t feel like writing at all, which is when I make sure to write something, even if it’s just a few sentences. I don’t know if my favorite things to write, book-length things, will ever be read or distributed to wide audiences, but I’m trying! That’s all I can ever do.

    If you read the last issue, you know that’s a step in the right direction for me!

    A final digression about writers

    Writers are a good source of historical information because they tend to write things down. Writers are people just like any other, so it’s a good bet that their favorite subject will be themselves. Because of this, there’s a lot of information about their routines, just as I’ve provided information about my own.

    One commonality in nearly all of them is that they spend some portion of their day writing. Another one is the ungodly early hour that they ply their trade (writing). I mean, it’s ridiculous. Hemmingway always started “before dawn” so that’s kind of a moving target. Maya Angelou began around 7. W.H. Auden started at 6am. Kurt Vonnegut started writing at 5:30am. Haruki Murakami and Barbara Kingsolver start at 4! FOUR! What insanity!

    I need my sleep, man. I don’t think I have it in me to get up at 4. Neither did Hunter S. Thompson, who woke up at 3 and immediately started doing cocaine, drinking Chivas, and wrote for 8 hours starting around midnight. I don’t like drugs, so that’s out. I guess I’ll stick to my own routine of writing when I can, as often as I can.

    This is the last digression, I’m serious

    My friend Elicia died between me starting this and now, over the weekend. It was sudden and unexpected and accidental. I hate it when people post about somebody dying and don’t mention how they died, but in this case it’s very boring and medical, so it doesn’t merit details. Everybody is still stunned. It’s a weird thing that happens when someone young dies suddenly. You know that scene where Obi-Wan has to sit down because Alderaan exploded and he felt it through the force? It’s like that. You get whacked by the news and and then you keep going and rescue the princess anyway because life is like that. Life keeps going and that person is back from where you just came from. If time is a river, they dropped anchor and waved goodbye as you went around the bend. She’s gone, now. She’s back there.

    I’m only mentioning her here because she was a big fan of this dumb little newsletter, and she would have hated me mentioning her. She was always encouraging me to write in general and this specifically. Steinbeck’s writing advice included the encouragement that I’ve taken to heart for years: you can’t write for everyone — that is a paralyzing thought. Instead, imagine one person and write to them. Elicia is the person I wrote for. This one’s for her.

    Elicia Parkinson was the best of us. She will live forever in my heart, and I will always be thankful that I got to know her.

    Here’s proof that she would also hate me sharing:



    That’s it. I’m done for now. Thank you for reading!

  • That Was a Close One!

    How I almost stopped writing. Forever!

    I tweeted this:

    I have invented many ways to torture myself. I am an expert at destroying my own self worth. In the span of one short afternoon, I can go from stellar mood to debilitating self-criticism. I am my own worst everything (enemy, critic, etc.).

    THE PARAGRAPH THAT WASN’T

    I nearly began writing the list all of the things I am punishing myself for, but I deleted the first sentence and thought better of it, and wrote this paragraph instead. I was excited that I was able to work in a reference to Pushing Daisies, too — I started it with “The facts were these,” which is a line the narrator would deliver at the beginning of every murder mystery. This paragraph is better than the one I was going to write because it is not a list of everything I haven’t accomplished, which is what this paragraph was going to be when I started writing it. This one turned out better. That paragraph-that-never-was began with a Pushing Daisies reference, a show about solving murders, and would have contained all the ways in which I was going to murder my self esteem. It would have been a bloodbath!

    THE LIST OF THINGS I HAVE NOT ACCOMPLISHED IS INFINITE

    …so what’s the point in picking out a few and hitting myself with them?

    This is true for everyone who has accomplished anything, even those who have accomplished the things I want to have accomplished, also. The feeling that There Is More I Could Do haunts all creative people. I remember an interview with Chris Rock, the comedian. He is incredibly successful and influential, admired by his peers, loved by his fans. And yet he is not immune to this Ghost of Feeling Like a Failure — he looks up from his palatial estate and sees Eddie Murphy’s. He’s Chris Rock, but he’s no Eddie Murphy. The Ghost haunts even him.

    My list of things I want to accomplish is very small.

    I WANT TO PUBLISH A BOOK

    More specifically, I want to publish a book of fiction. I’ve already written one, and I have sent it to agents for their consideration, which is what one does with a novel and one does not have representation. I also want to publish an essay, or even a book, about my experience with brain tumors. If I accomplish these two things (or even just one of them), I would be very happy. Note that I did not say “I would be rich” or “I would be famous” or “I would have no more problems” because none of those are true. All I would have accomplished is that I would have written a book that was published. There are also a million other little, tiny things I could accomplish that would make me feel like I had accomplished something. I am not hard to please.

    I had an appointment today with my therapist, who told me to recall my most important writing teacher. That person was Miss Hofreuter, my junior high English teacher. Before her encouragement, I had never considered writing. It was something I had to do, and I never really enjoyed it. I’m not sure I enjoy it now! I feel like it’s something I should do, because I am good at it.

    BUT IS HE REALLY?

    There is no objective measure of good writing. I can find out if I’m a good runner. I can find out if I’m a good golfer. I can find out if I’m a good cook. The proof is in the running, golfing, or pudding. There are benchmarks. What is the benchmark for good writing?

    This might surprise you, but it’s not “getting published.” If bad writing never got published, I would never have considered writing anything longer than a to-do list. A great book gets me excited about good writing, but a bad book gets me excited about MY writing. I don’t know if I’m a good writer, but I know I’m better than a lot of the stuff I read from the science fiction and fantasy shelves. If you were to look at my Amazon book purchase history and compare it to my Goodreads (which lists the books I actually read), you would see that I only actually finish 1/4 of the books I start. I simply can’t finish a bad book. I don’t read very fast, so it’s a decision that reverberates down through my life for weeks. Why waste those precious weeks on bad writing?

    A SMALL VICTORY

    When Twitter recently used a tweet of mine in its ad campaign at the Union Square subway station, in New York City, I didn’t get a lot of followers. A couple of people tweeted to tell me it was there, or that they agreed with the sentiment, but that was the extent of my exposure. I didn’t expect more than that. I’ve had tweets go somewhat viral before. I’ve had people more famous than me encourage other people to follow me. None of it has ever really translated into anything substantial. I say that with zero regret or surprise. I never used Twitter as anything but a place for me to write little things. I met a bunch of people I’m happy to call my friends (good ones!) but after 12 years on the service, I’m pretty comfortable in my place. My enjoyment of twitter is not diminished or enhanced by the number of followers I have or how many likes or retweets I get. All you must do is look at the popular twitterers to know that popularity is not the reward for quality.

    But it was still pretty awesome to see one of my tweets printed out to super size and glued to a wall. Somebody at Twitter read what I wrote and liked it enough to make it part of their ad campaign. That’s a very long way from having a book published, but it’s a benchmark. I have to collect my benchmarks.

    MY NEMESIS

    My partner, Shyloh, says that everybody needs a nemesis. A nemesis is not an enemy, per se, but somebody who is doing what you want to be doing. You can even be friends with your nemesis, and you probably have more than one. Who is your nemesis? Mine is a writer named Dana Schwartz.

    First of all, she’s a great writer. I don’t know if my writing is any good (it depends on the day), but hers is great. She’s a journalist, a fiction writer, memoirist and podcaster. Her new podcast about royal scandals is already hugely popular. She’s written three books: a novel, a memoir, and a nonfiction. She’s also 27 years old.

    I have not accomplished those things, but I would like to hit at least one of those milestones. Again, and I cannot say this often enough, the list of things I have not accomplished is infinite.

    THIS IS NOT GOING TO BE UPLIFTING

    Some people would end this with a hopeful wink. Some people would list all of the people who accomplished great things in their middle age (like Susanna Clarke, who published one of my favorite books when she was 45). Some people would reassure themselves, by reassuring their audience, that life is about more than accomplishments or meeting career goals or reaching some arbitrary pinnacle. Maybe I’ll publish a book. Maybe I won’t. It doesn’t matter.

    What matters is the friends we make along the way. I want to live a life I’m proud of, and create good things, and make the lives around me better. That’s all that matters. That’s all I want.

    That’s not true.

    I want to publish a fucking book.

  • BROADSIDE: "An Anniversary of Being Born"

    ⚡️Mr. Foreman’s Amazing Electric Ephemera⚡️

    “Guaranteed to take no longer to be read than takes a single cup of coffee to be drunk.”

    BROADSIDE: AN ANNIVERSARY OF BEING BORN


    The term “broadside,” in the context of printing, comes from the pre-newspaper method of delivering information to the public. News was printed on a single side of a thin piece of paper. A common use for them was to attack rivals or to make the case for a political point, which is why the word is often used to describe the same tactic in modern times. This is a BROADSIDE because its only concern is a single topic, and not because its content is inflammatory or political (because it isn’t).


    This weekend — the first weekend after Martin Luther King Jr. Day — is a momentous one. It’s when I discarded an old life for a new one. Eleven years ago, my marriage ended. I can’t believe it’s been that long, until I look in a mirror. I don’t mind getting older, but it’s not easy to watch it happen.

    When I learned to embrace the things I can’t change, my life got a lot better. I’m a pathetic sucker for inspirational quotes, and my favorite inspirational quotes are about how we can’t change things:
    We cannot control the wind, but we can adjust our sails. – anonymous
    Weather, wind, time, gravity — there are so many things in this wild universe that can’t be altered by our actions, though sometimes we can nudge them around. We can’t avoid death, but we can hasten it. We can’t make time slow down, but we can enjoy the moment. We can make somebody hate us, but we sure can’t make them love us.

    Divorce is probably as painful as death. – William Shatner


    Yesterday: I knew when my marriage had ended, but not the year. I’ve used the same email address for years. When my memory stumbles, gmail is there to catch it. A quick search revealed that, shortly after the events that led up to the end of the marriage, I wrote a narrative of those events. It’s not easy to read. I won’t let you read it because it’s full of names, and I don’t name names. My memories of some of the events still make me wince, even if the wounds have healed.

    My marriage only lasted for 6 months. The relationship before it was only 3.5 years. When viewed objectively, my pain should not be as great as a person who was married for longer or had more to lose. Nobody has ever made me feel that way by comparing their divorce to mine — it’s shame, self-imposed, felt only by me.

    Allow me to contextualize:

    • She was my first love

    That’s all. That’s enough.
    Cameron has never been in love – at least, nobody’s ever been in love with him. If things don’t change for him, he’s gonna marry the first girl he lays, and she’s gonna treat him like shit, because she will have given him what he has built up in his mind as the end-all, be-all of human existence. She won’t respect him, ’cause you can’t respect somebody who kisses your ass. It just doesn’t work. – Ferris Bueller’s Day Off


    It is recommended that you make every effort not to accept animals that are in an injured or disabled condition. – Guide to Animal Handling


    Animals in pain will bite people trying to help them. Some people know that and touch them anyway. They know the danger. They see a creature in pain and they have to help. Some of those people reached out to me, and they stayed even after I bit them. The very least I can do is reach out to some wounded dogs. I can pass along that generosity of heart by helping people who need it, too. I’ve done that, and I’ve been bitten. It was always worth it.

    A wounded deer leaps the highest – Emily Dickinson


    Taken out of its context, the above quote appears inspirational: wounded people are better for having been wounded. But that wasn’t her point. The high leap of a wounded deer is a cover, a fake. “I’m fine. I’m not hurt at all. Sorry if I bleed on you. It’s nothing.” After my marriage was over, I jumped into dating again, and I jumped high. I wasn’t ready. A relationship can only succeed when the pieces match, if the positive parts of one person can fit into the negative spaces in the other. I had a big empty space that drank every ounce of emotional support poured into it, but I couldn’t give any of it back.

    In the same poem, Emily Dickinson wrote “Mirth is the mail of anguish.” I was extremely mirthful. I was brimming with mirth. I didn’t know I was setting a trap. That’s when I did most of my wounding.

    It’s called “wounded,” Peanut. “Injured” is when you fall out of a tree or something. – Band of Brothers


    A wound is inflicted, an injury is suffered. You can read a lot between the lines when I make an effort to use the words I choose. Let me be clear: the time for blame is long past and ridiculous anyway. The person who wounded me isn’t the same person she was when it happened. Like the enemy soldier who becomes a friend later in life, after the war and its reasons are long resolved, the historical facts are immutable. I healed a long time ago, but I can still contemplate the scars.

    My sun sets to rise again. – Robert Browning


    The slow upswing isn’t as interesting as the sudden drop. A shattered glass is more interesting than an intact one, which isn’t as interesting as watching it break. Would you rather watch a building implode or watch them build the new one? That’s why this section isn’t as long.

    I got better! I was reborn. The wounds made me stronger, better, faster. I had my heart broken and it took a while, but it healed up nicely, thanks to a lot of patience and work and therapy and help. I’m more consistently happy now than I was then. The memories that have lasted are the happy ones. We had a lot of fun and I learned a lot from her. My sun rose and it’s still rising. But there’s still work to be done.

    My thirties were a time of great abundance, but nothing stuck. I shouldn’t say nothing, because they were people, but, in the words of Taylor Swift, I couldn’t make ’em stay. Actually, it was more like I couldn’t make myself stay. In the eleven years since my first relationship ended, no relationship of mine has lasted more than a year. I’ve done most of the dumping, rather than having been dumped. Why? Did I run away when things got tough? Did I get bored when things got safe? Did I pick the wrong relationships?

    We are afraid to care too much, for fear that the other person does not care at all. – Eleanor Roosevelt


    Confession: in times like now, January of 2017, I’m not very hopeful for the future. Messages on dating websites go unanswered. My photos on dating apps go swiped in the wrong direction. Efforts to move acquaintances into dates bear no fruit. The signs we look for when somebody is interested in us are absent from every encounter. There’s nobody on my mind. I have no crushes, and there are no crushes on me. Is it a dry spell or a desert?

    My confidence is like a soldier without a war, and it starts fighting itself. Am I unlovable? Am I unbearable? Am I unattractive, unlikable? I’m too fat for anybody to be interested. I’m too ugly to catch a second look.

    The negative thoughts don’t stay forever, but they never really go away.

    The last wounds to heal are the ones I’ve inflicted on myself. I don’t think I’ll be completely better until I let those wounds heal, too.

  • Pamphlet 4: "Love"

    ⚡️Mr. Foreman’s Amazing Electric Ephemera⚡️

    “Guaranteed to take no longer to be read
    than takes a single cup of coffee to be drunk.”

    PAMPHLET NUMBER FOUR: “LOVE”

    The word “love” can mean a lot of things, but there’s not enough room in this little letter to cover more than a few, or even more than one: the feeling of great affection between two individuals. That’s my definition, not a dictionary’s.

    THE EXTEMPORANEUM

    Romantic love

    Love is a material event. It is the collusion of chemicals, neurons and glands. Its purpose is to drop a person’s emotional defenses and push that person toward a different person. Ideally, this target of affection experiences a concurrent material event in their bodies, and this shared experience makes them want to do things like rub their excretory organs together.

    If you can keep your hormones out of it, then you can imagine how objectively disgusting the act of sexual intercourse is. Just take a moment and imagine yourself as an alien observing humans having sex. It’s gross. It’s messy. In our western culture, where even the sight of a female nipple is off-putting, we are willing to take huge personal risks (social, cultural, physical) to toss all of that social conditioning aside and throw our naked bodies at each other.

    The many risks in allowing ourselves to be so vulnerable to another person are mitigated somewhat by a vetting process called “dating,” and it is terrible. Every human who has reached his 39th year, like your humble author, without a permanent partner has contemplated arranged marriages with the whimsy that people in arranged marriages probably have for the freedom to date anybody they like.

    First, you have to find somebody and then you have to impress them and then you have to keep impressing them until your neurotransmitters velcro together and it hurts more to lose each other than it does to keep the other around. If that reads as cynical to you, you’ve never dated in your late 30s, on the internet.

    Internet dating

    Back when I started internet dating, there weren’t many options. The big name was Match.com, but that’s where all the old people went. Savvy people like me had The Onion personal ads [archive.org], which didn’t have anything to do with the satirical news site but was part of a larger personal ad network with footprints on edgier websites like nerve.com. People my age who have been married and missed out on the joys of internet dating might not even be aware of the subtle rules and mores that have emerged from that ecosystem, so here are a couple:

    • Cultural norms are alive and well. Although there are many exceptions, the general rules of in-person dating are the same. One might imagine that the internet is the great equalizer, with men and women connecting in equal measure. This is not the case. Men cast wide nets and send messages to many women at once, and women have to pick through the morass and choose the men they’ll write back to. The onus is still on the man to make first moves. The result of this is the title of my future book on internet dating, You’re Not the One He Picked, You’re the One Who Said Yes. A real world equivalent would be a man going to every woman in a crowded bar and asking for her number until one of them says yes. Maybe he’ll get lucky and his first choice will express interest. This is very unlikely. He will then go down his list of most desirable women in the bar and ask for their numbers until one of them says yes. She wasn’t his first choice, she was the one who said yes.

    • One photo is all that matters. You can write a bunch of paragraphs about how great you are, but nobody will read them. Okay, somebody might read them, but not until they’ve looked at your photo and decided that you’re attractive enough to investigate more. You’ve probably heard of Tinder — it’s the mainstay of modern internet dating. It only gives you one photograph of a person, a name, an age, and a snippet of information. Rejecting or accepting a person is as easy as swiping their photographs in one direction or the other (left for no, right for yes). Imagine swiping right on every person you see and having no matches. That means nobody swiped right on you. For an already fragile self-image, Tinder is an unforgiving wasteland.

    There are innumerable factors that go into whether people are attracted to each other. With higher cognition comes higher awareness comes higher standards. Women are fully aware of the risks of allowing a man into their intimate areas (both emotional and physical), so they have to be picky. One species that doesn’t have to worry about so many variables in their desirability has a different romantic burden: they have to be good artists.

    Bowerbirds

    Birds are weird, man. Science fiction has speculated (it must have been a person making those speculations, but I can’t remember his or her name) that birds could develop human-like intelligence if given free evolutionary reign and a dozen or so more million more years. They’re constantly surprising us with their intelligence and guile, two traits that would likely increase as the pressures of natural selection winnowed the dumb from the less-dumb. The ascendence of humans are evidence enough of this evolutionary preference. See, also: birds are bipedal, dextrous, and already show a penchant for tool use. Evolution has made stranger things than smart birds, it also made birds that do this:

    That’s a male bowerbird’s bower, constructed for only one purpose: to attract females. Everything you see there was picked by the bird who built it and not one of those choices was random. Lest you think every bower looks the same, look at this diversity:

    Each item is placed with intent and precision and every single bower is unique. Different species of bowerbird make different kinds of bowers. The dome-type, above, and the “avenue” type, below:

    Each species prefers different kinds and colors of objects, but some have been observed tailoring their bowers to the preferences of the females they’re trying to attract.

    This isn’t just a mating ritual, this is art.

    There is no concrete consensus about why bowerbirds do this, but some speculate that it’s an externalization of display plumage. While peacocks, for instance, use their massive, colorful feathers to attract mates, bowerbirds evolved the same predilection to attract females using colorful displays but build them instead of grow them.

    Not all art has a purpose. Some definitions of art include its inherent lack of functional usefulness, but maybe we can learn something from the bowerbirds. Some artists are in it for the sex (this is especially true if we include musicians), but self-expression is a way of displaying plumage we make rather than plumage we grow. There’s no point to making art that nobody sees. We make art to announce ourselves, to plant our flag into the ground and claim this space, this time, for us. I made this, now look at it.

    Bowerbirds don’t just make bowers to attract females. Some species just use the bower as an enticement for the real act: a dance [youtube.com]. Dancing is something humans do, too, and it sucks.

    THE ANECDOTUS

    I don’t dance but I still go to a dancing-based party every month called In Bed By Ten [facebook.com], which is run by my friends Matt and Kelly. It’s a great time, even though I don’t dance. I get to hang out with other people who aren’t dancing, and lots of my friends go. It’s a chance to see them and socialize. I also can’t go without getting flak about my not dancing. People try to get me to dance, and have been trying to get me to dance for my entire life, but it just isn’t going to happen. It’s not some game I play to get attention (which is a fair accusation). It’s not really even a choice. I don’t dance because I’m terrified of looking ridiculous and let’s face it, everybody looks ridiculous when they’re dancing (except maybe the professionals).

    This fear of looking ridiculous has manifested itself my whole life in lots of unpleasant ways. Social anxiety is, ultimately, a fear of ridicule, and I’ve struggled with that since I was very young. I’m happy that I’ve been able to conquer most of my social anxiety, but the dancing thing remains. I just can’t let go of myself enough to dance.

    THE RECOMMENDATAE

    I don’t know what to recommend with this issue, so instead I’ll give you a link to my internet dating profile, which you can read at your own risk. Warning: sincerity.

    Thank you for reading, my loves.