If someone were to ask me how I felt about my life, I’d say that I’m getting everything out of it that I put into it. Whatever I’ve wanted to do or acquire since reluctantly deciding four years ago to live like a human all of the time instead of occasionally, I’ve pretty well done and gotten my hands on, at least pre-covid. If, at Thanksgiving 2016, not long after the last booze-fog had evaporated and I was again building back from below ground level, I’d been asked to imagine a picture of my ideal 2020 life setting, it would have shown something close to what I now see every day: A near-perfect dog sleeping under a beautiful synthesizer, with a zippy little douche-wagon visible out the window of a place that’s obviously home and a neat row of jogging shoes prepared for duty in the background. My credit, previously on a par with a decent NBA field-goal percentage, is now more like an acceptable free-throw percentage. (Credit scores are a load of shit anyway.) All throughout, I haven’t had to leave the house for work or missed a rent or other kind of payment. I have engineered every one of my own work opportunities. I don’t have health insurance (and don’t care to), but I haven’t felt the need to visit a doctor in close to two years anyway — hell, for some reason I haven’t even caught a cold this year. I gave to at least ten different charities in 2019, though that’s dropping to zero this year.
This isn’t to boast — after all, it’s a pretty marginal life for someone my age who is technically educated — but to get the point across that, compared to people with more happening in their lives, like actual jobs and mortgages and kids, I have few unavoidable sources of day-to-day stress.
At the same time, I have thoughts about myself that you probably don’t. For example, when I’m reading or watching a movie, it will sometimes occur to me that the substrate containing the factoids and sensory impressions I flood my brain with in a controlled and often pleasurable way will one day be blown out the side of my nasty head by a high-velocity projectile and exist as an unseemly splatter on whatever is to my left. (I’m right-handed.) I navigate my days madly bombarding my head with data because the noise is preferable to untrammeled introspection, all the while understanding that it’s all going to disappear in an explosion of bloody neurological jelly when I finally grow too tired of the process to kick the suicide can up the road for one more week. (The same thing would happen if I died a natural death, but there is nothing graphic in that supposition.)
Even without such a gruesome snapshot of my concept of my own future, it’s probably obvious that I hold myself, if not all of my ideas, in low regard. On the other hand, maybe it seems that, as one who continually points out deficiencies in the human circus, I believe that I stand above or at least apart from it. The best way to describe my stance on the human animal is that we’re pretty gross, inescapably, but that we’re all blameless for this, at least to start out. It’s a version of hating the game rather than its unwashed-and-unwiped players, even though thanks to sheer luck I was given enough useful tools to remain in “the game” without much effort — something that only makes me despise the whole scheme even more, as uninterested as I’ve become in putting those tools to better use.
I’m introducing these things mainly because, well, I think about them a lot, and also because I decided last Thursday to shitcan my various antisocial-media accounts. I could attribute this to having watched The Social Dilemma or to wanting to avoid the extra madness of the impending election, but mostly it’s because I’m sick of hurling nonsense into that stream and being dinged by other people’s as it zips by. I will now converse with people only by e-mail, text or in person, not that we’re talking about an auditorium full of interlocutors, and this place will be my sole one-way bullhorn for conveying the symptoms of my steepening decline into optional misery and offering various defenses of the idea that staying as far from folks as I can get away with is the best of suboptimal social choices. I’m hoping that being divorced from some of the data stream will allow me to figure out how much of my inclination to bash people for bad behavior couched as journalism or activism — no matter how robustly I can defend this, every time — arises from my own choleric outlook and, really, resignation to chronic unhappiness.
There are different ways to assess the person who is motivated by morbid disgust to say correct or reasonable, but also upsetting, things; mine is that being right is preferable to being adored, but only if the cause is sufficiently worthwhile and the cost to all involved doesn’t overwhelm whatever good might arise. It probably doesn’t look this way, but when I write things critical of someone else or their ideas, I try to wait until I’m in a good mood to wrap the whole thing up, as a means of trying to strain some of the venom from the meat. Even so, I’m wondering what, other than the cheap satisfaction that can intoxicate any op-ed scoldsmith, I’m going to gain from repeatedly pointing out mistakes and lies that are not only obvious, but now so woven into the treatment of virtually everything of public interest that it’s futile — and more important, frustrating — to even notice it anymore, much less fight it. Besides, the concerns of this blog are bleakly parochial; it’s just distance running, for Chrissake, something most of you have wisely tried to quit at least once.
Getting back to the aforementioned game of life, I have an “insightful losers” theory that to me explains the underpinnings of most of modern society’s problems, probably put forward in formal, even more insufferable language by any number of psychologists already. I won’t get into all of that here, but the essential idea is that we’re aware of having lost basic coin-flips in the way other mammals aren’t. Thanks to the way living things are assembled, along with the fact that we don’t get to choose our birth circumstances, there is a great deal of variation in where people begin their lives and their prospects for individual success. It’s no secret that wealthy, smart and pretty people have it easier than others, and the world is structured entirely around the concerns of these people, other than peddling Jesus and Wal-Mart junk to the proles, who, after all and sadly for the machine, can and often do vote. On the flip side, people whose lot is to be poor, unattractive or dumb, often in dizzying combination, have to rely on luck, industriousness, resilience, and an unusual tolerance for bullshit in order to carve out what most would consider prosperous lives — although simply standing apart from the circus to the extent survival allows is another option, provided you’re constituted to simply not give a shit, in good times as well as in lean, about doing most of the things “normal” people do, like having kids and owning property and maintaining retirement accounts in lieu of plans to offset senescence with a firearm.
The above paragraph leaves out an important variable, which is, of course, cheating. This can mean literally cheating others out of property by stealing it, or cheating on academic tests or resumes, or cheating by using banned drugs, or cheating the reality of your own mortality by buying into the idea that some cosmic creator and arbiter is going to reward you for tolerating a shitty life by giving you endless bliss in some other plane while conveniently dispatching your enemies to be tortured for eternity. (Why do people say “all eternity”? That one’s right out of the department of redundancy division.)
It also omits emotions that distinguish humans from other creatures, such as resentment and envy, and the concomitant status-seeking, some of it all-consuming. Heartless as it sounds, people who aren’t traditionally attractive know they’re at a practical disadvantage, poor people couldn’t avoid the reality of their impecunity for a single day even if they wanted to, and even most really dumb people can figure out that their brains are always going to limit and betray them, even if the minds of others appear feeble as well. Most people adapt reasonably well to this cosmic unfairness, and settle into relationships and institutions scaled to their assets and abilities. Other people notably do not make this adjustment, and, deprived of what they irrationally believe they’re entitled to, and respond by actively shitting up the world just to spread the stink of failure and coming up with transparently laughable rationales for their paralyzing insecurities. That’s the kind of thing I want to avoid, and while I think it’s easy enough to not slip into, I think I am pretty good at masking the taste of poison with saccharine language while using it on the most vulnerable targets. In the end, this is just one more way for a monkey to screech that something smells in his own cage and he lacks the wherewithal to clean it. (I do think one undeniable point rests in my favor — being deeply damaged and dissatisfied rather than crazy.)
The world was set up for someone like me, frailties and all, to succeed on a surface level, i.e., be self-sufficient and in command of one or two skills consistently in demand. Had I not been endowed with an unusual level of scholastic aptitude, I would probably have died of my addictive and other defects years ago, intentionally or otherwise. My mom was a college dropout and my dad an Air Force vet, and my family wasn’t exactly wealthy, but we could afford a lot of books and my parents encouraged my every page-turning move. For whatever reason, I took to reading and puzzle-solving with fiendish precociousness, and from the beginning, I was always among the top students in any class I was in. By itself, this opened a lot of doors, especially after I took up a sport no one cares about and stood out in a state too small to matter. It was more of a thing then than now, it seems, to start seriously imagining career choices as a teenager, and I had decided that I wanted to go into medicine even before I fully appreciated that this was a lofty sort of position in the world (people have since mostly wised up). I was probably one of the first people on either side of my family to even get a four-year college degree (my mom actually finished hers in 1987, twenty-two years after starting). I had enough extracurriculars on my applications and high enough grades and SATs to be admitted anywhere, but ended up at a mediocre state school more or less on a whim and because the campus was pretty. I was on the track every kid who had grown up in the 1970s and 1980s was supposed to be on: Get good marks, stay out of trouble, pick a career, move ahead. Maybe breed, although I was skeptical of that idea from a young age, given the grisly puke-stained DNA I couldn’t help but pass along.
When I left medical school in 1996 more than halfway toward my degree, again still near the top of my class, it was a wake-up call in a couple of ways. I only noticed one of them at the time, and that was that the mostly internal chaos I had managed to conceal behind doing well enough in the visible areas of young adulthood had finally won, at least temporarily; I was paying a price for being not just human, but a bona fide fuckup. I couldn’t skirt the reality of my own burgeoning unrest, which I often couldn’t place anyway, and, to use as apt a metaphor as any, overwhelm my lack of defense with a good offense. For once, I had to actually deal with my uncertainties instead of just waiting for the next opportunity to — in my head, anyway — paper it over with a good performance on an endocrinology exam or a quick 20-miler.
Even though drinking isn’t the official reason I took a leave of absence from school — somewhere on my DOD paperwork is a note about a strabismus, or lazy eye, something I’m sure I could have gotten a waiver for — it’s the main reason I never went back. The other part of sort-of waking up was that I had no game plan for my life other than being in the Army and playing doctor for a while before it was time to get out and set up somewhere else. And so, to increase the pace of this muddy narrative greatly, I spent the next twenty years pretending I wanted to have a meaningful career as a writer, taking side trips into coaching and teaching, while also training for marathons, going on a couple of galactic benders a year, winding up in new places and relationships, and gradually deciding that I’d had enough of the dynamic-bozo life without ever committing to this for long, leading me to careen into more people’s lives. I spent the last several years of my binge-drinking coming up with new, relatively painless ways I could both kill myself and never be found: Self-pity mixed with a nice bolt of pettiness. I wasn’t just embarrassed at having squandered some great opportunities; it had finally dawned on me that I really didn’t give a shit anymore, other than not causing or experiencing more pain. Had I ever really cared? Obviously, after two-plus decades of steadily kicking myself in the crotch and spreading the misery around with increasing disregard for the consequences, I was going to tell myself that all of the stuff that it was now too late for me to have, I never really wanted anyway; that’s a typical psychological defense mechanism. But it really is hard to imagine myself having gone into a career as a clinician (i.e., non-research type), given how little I care to be around people and their complaints and also given the way doctoring is done nowadays. I tend to think that a lack of patience for being around people is an inherent trait as much a result of winding up a low-wattage citizen despite showing early promise, and that I would have disliked being a doctor or doing anything forcing me to routinely interface with people in need. Which is everyone.
Though I have uncorked some sadness since the onset of this pointless whine, I mentioned feeling well enough situated in my modest life. This is true, and it’s funny to me because it’s despite most of the inherent, sometimes quirky advantages I enjoyed as a pre-Internet-era youngster having been eroded by technology. No one cares how well you can spell or calculate sums in your head. Trivia mavens have been rendered impotent by the Googling rabble — any goober can look up anything he needs to know if he can spell some of his questions half-right, although he’s as likely to find misinformation or disinformation as he is legitimate information. In fact, this is often the goal. Regardless, when my long-term career plans didn’t work out, and I became aimless running bum who occasionally took interesting-looking jobs for short periods instead, things still somehow worked out in a way that lets me sit at home and earn what it technically a living. I like to think I’m adaptable, but I like to think a lot of fanciful claptrap.
Anyone who permanently gives up a persistent mind-bending, life-wrecking habit can always wring wry historical significance from the date, since shit never stops happening in the world, especially anymore. But all happy jacking and jerking aside, the timing of my last drink couldn’t have been more comical from the standpoint of someone whose refuge in intoxication was driven in part by an apparent inability to tolerate garden-variety bullshit — mine, yours, politicians’, that in “holy” texts, whatever. The country had just elected an odious moron I’d been giggling at since I was twelve years old, like Donald J. Trump Sr. is now, to the presidency, and the bloc of Americans I find most odious of all, Christian fundamentalists, were gleeful. This in itself was, well, weird, but what I have found more disheartening than anything else in the past four years has been the widespread embracing of the president’s and other people’s flagrant, full-throated lying. Trump is the most obvious example, and most of the time he’s not lying to convince anyone of anything — he’s doing it to endear himself to a well-circumscribed subset of the American populace. But I don’t think it’s me having a clearer head (I wasn’t drunk for all twenty of those really bad post-dropout years) that is responsible for this perception. All politicians lie, but Trump has upped the ante so much that both his detractors and his supporters have decided that the only way to play along is with equal disregard for reality. Even more than being opposed to whatever Trump’s policies appear to be at any time — mostly, reversing Obama-era policies on principle — I hate that 40 percent of the country is okay with the way he goes about his job. I see the abandonment of a basic reality framework in public discourse as being extraordinarily damaging, even catastrophic, maybe because I discern cause and effect at the micro level more than others do. That is, validly or otherwise, I see people lying more and expecting to take less of a hit for it because dishonesty and misdirection have become so normalized. But for millions of people, life is an attention bazaar, and if fibs are needed to grab as much of it as possible, lying becomes more a weapon than a detriment.
This is a good time to again point out that I have great friends who manifest none of the characteristics that have grown popular in the antisocial-media era, notably narcissism, caving in to tribal pressures to accept and propagate bad ideas, and underhandedness. The “they” out there is something we can all find and oppose if we feel like seeing the worst in civilization and giving it the finger. As a rough example, I will probably be voting for the same major candidates as 90 percent of the people in my city will be next month, but I can describe a number of ways I vigorously disagree with the typical Boulderite, maybe even 90 percent of them, in all sorts of other ways. If I want to, I can quickly decide on the basis of a few unconnected, half-assed convictions that I don’t fit in well anywhere and basically exist on a philosophical island.
This would seem to be a poor philosophy for achieving anything resembling happiness, but it’s a great operating principle if you’ve already decided against that and are simply trying to string together a series of non-threatening and solitary amusements before the lights go out. The two most accurate descriptions of my feeling-space are lonely and hopeless, although neither applies in the acute sense of having no friends or sources or support or otherwise facing a crisis. These feelings are more the consequence of being unwilling to take even modest risks in life, and deciding that it just has to be this way because there is just nothing out there but gobs of deception and failure and I have already left enough garbage in my wake as it is. I also have absolutely no reason to think — and this is new, ergo a little troubling — that my attitude would improve even if I reached any of the remaining firm goals I have. The world doesn’t require any more middle-aged zeroes trying to run under five minutes for the mile, or awful novels, or Instagram puppy-pics. (Sometimes, I even get the wondrously infantile idea that if I knew with certainty that I could write a brilliant novel, screenplay, piece of music, or whatever that I would withhold it because nobody deserves nice things anymore, even harmless literary escapes. A cure for cancer — now that, I would turn over for sure.)
At this point, anyone bothering to read has probably decided I’m one more person giving a baroque name to his clinical depression. I think it’s different from that, and additive, and possibly worse. Given how fixed my social philosophy appears to be, I don’t see a change in my mood leading to any significant changes. I don’t really see myself doing anything differently in the long term if I suddenly and unaccountably became Mr. Sunshine by some therapeutic or pharmacological magic, because again, I strongly believe that that we are fundamentally ruinous, bumblefuck critters and, on balance, constituted to compete more than we are to cooperate, yet absolutely reliant on cooperation to some extent. And today, all of this animated, unsatisfied stinkflesh has access the World Wide Web.
I also realize that I’m one of about a gazillion people whose particular anxieties and insecurities have been amplified by the past seven or eight months of lockdown living. My main source of income, something I was really good at doing, was dissolved by the parent company. That I could live with, but other dropped or missed chances have proven more grating. I may not go out around here much, but in 2020, I was counting on my mom coming out here for the first time ever in April, meeting my entire family in D.C. in June (I haven’t seen my dad since 2012) and traveling to London for the first time in October. Oops! There is really no one to blame for these meetings not happening, but it’s one more reason to just childishly resent having been excreted into being in the first place by a couple of well-meaning long-haired Beatles fans.
I am not a close follower of Ann Coulter, the famed conservative shit-stirrer with the harpy visage, but I do know that she occasionally lets on that much of the reason she does her go-ahead-and-hate-me-for-this-but shtick is that she figures she’ll be alone forever, so why not be a turd in the ointment, with flies somewhere in the septic mix. That’s not exactly how I feel, and it’s dubious to compare myself with someone who knowingly writes for a huge audience, but I can appreciate her resignation and her ability to hold her low self-esteem, or sometimes just basic irritation at life, accountable for the outbursts she lasers at liberals. She knows that there is something “off” about her, and that even though it’s probably fixable to some extent, the bullshit involved in the effort isn’t worth it.
When I was about a year free of alcohol, I ended an on-again, off-again relationship of eight-plus years. There was no crushing blow to bring this about, and I’m still as close with my former partner as I am to anyone; I’m grateful to have her confidence and support, especially considering what I put her through. The decision stemmed more from the creeping belief that, sober or otherwise, I was going to wind up being the source of some amount of grief and hurt in the life of anyone I was close to no matter how clear-headed I might be, and that I was going to experience and cause lots of aggravation thanks to a low frustration threshold and all manner of other nettlesome character traits. That was three years ago, and in the time since, I have adopted a dog, purchased a splendid keyboard, bought a new old car, and taken some fun and rewarding trips to different parts the country. I run every day, usually twice; I watch a lot of Netflix and am never far from the next chuckle. But almost without exception, I have selected pastimes that include no elements that can return human affection, and this is no accident.
[Before I lost my insurance and was still seeing health providers, both my therapist and my doctor expressed jocular surprise that I hadn’t wound up with one of the purportedly limitless over-40 fitness divas or whatever. I thought it was funny, and telling, that I was being told this by two women who mostly fit this description, and heard their words as an unintentional reveal of what’s wrong with this fucking guy? I admit to dabbling a little in the world of online dating, and have made a few new friends that in the past might have become something else. But as with so much else, most of these unremarkable experiences have been characterized mainly by lying, ghosting, and general unreliability, which, while unpleasant, has been great for reinforcing my resolve to be a hater and a hermit. I’d sum up taking romance off the table indefinitely as: I have to little respect for humanity as a whole to imagine myself being in a part of any kind of ultimately flourishing relationship, but enough to avoid hunting for future ex-girlfriends.]
I know some genuine optimists. The world needs people like that, if only to keep people like me from doing even more damage by unraveling into even worse assholes. I have a few projects going that, if I described them and broke the funereal mood, would probably put a dent in the thesis that I have completely cashed out in the way of ambition and am avoiding all temptation to contribute to good endeavors being undertaken by good people. But my cynicism, unfortunately, is so well integrated into my approach to life by now that the main reason I want Joe Biden to win the election is not to see widely desired policies enacted but to shove a thorny dildo up the ass of Evangelical twits, whose yammering won’t be checked by a change in old men at the top, but whose influence might be. It’s not as if the millions of Americans who now blindly hate each other, or at a minimum don’t care if the other group simply disappears, are suddenly going to chill out now and shake hands while wearing grubby, aw-shucks grins, like it’s the end of a contentious Little League game.
I have been actively suicidal before, and know what that feels like. These days, I am experiencing something else, not something I remember from my purely dismal drunk-depressions: Feeling pissed-off and complacent at the same time. I am happy to wake up and go outside, then do nothing, or stew. I am too convinced of the rectitude of my own lazy nihilism to do anything but coast along on my savings, which I can do for a couple of years, while nourishing and justifying my solitude, even if this means having no one to talk to in those times it can be really nice to have that. (I will say, I make a great dog dad.)
As Doug Stanhope, who confirms far too many of my own ideas, says in one of routines, life isn’t for everyone. If he were someone other than a cringe comic, Stanhope might say that some people are just better at being drones than others, and learning to value what others do, even if some of it’s “silly” or “a long shot.” Some folks learn from a young age that playing along with as many norms as possible causes the fewest waves and creates the most opportunities in their lives, even if this means knowingly adopting, generating, accepting and transmitting a good deal of bullshit. Arguably, they are better at living life than I am, even if I can poke holes in some of their foundational convictions. But ultimately, there is no judge of that. (The religious types and I can’t even agree on that much,)
Maybe it’s a touchy subject, but I do in fact expect to die by my own hand someday, although an accident would suffice, and I know what the preconditions for this would be. I am in no imminent danger of that or any kind of psychological collapse as long as I still have Rosie and the other half-dozen earthly beings and pleasures I hold most dear, and although I really do wonder if I’ll say no mas soon after she’s gone, there’s just as good a chance that I’ll adopt another dog and persist as an even more unhappy bastard, shiftless writer, and malcontent. But as ugly as it may sound to those more saddled with humanistic impulses than I am, I don’t want to burden myself with reasons to stick around unless I think I can be a good curator of whatever those prove to be. No matter who or what is responsible — and I hope I have conveyed the idea that there is really no one to blame for the way I feel, it’s just part of the onus of consciousness and the choices I’ve made — I want to be able to leave the party with as little a fuss as I can, and if I could, I would ensure that every unique thing about me and my life was forgotten within ten minutes of it ending.
I do have some great Netflix recommendations, but I’ve run out of steam for now.