Elka, Four Years After (Now With 40% Less Uncontrolable Sobbing!)

(Image Redacted For Reasons Of Privacy)

Today marks the fourth anniversary to my losing my mind.

Halloween 2009 was the worst day in my life. I waited months for a reply from a woman I was very much in love with and had foolishly prepared myself only for good news. And in reply to my page of heartfelt adoration - got a three sentence Dear John style reply that broke my brain. I may not have beat my head against a wall, but I understood why people sometimes did that when under duress.

Only two people saw me at my worst and its such a sensitive memory, I don't want to detail much of it. My emotions were completely out of control the first 24 hours: I had lost the ability to use words, sobbing so hard into my best friend and her sitting there knowing there was nothing to be done about it. I shook, I cried, snot ran freely. I was a hopeless bag of flesh; not quite a man, quite nearly a thing. She held me and after a time, said nothing, noticing that the words meant less than just being gripped tighter. It was strangely, deeply intimate in a way and its a favor I still feel I should somehow repay to her. I don't like being the vulnerable one, even less so to that degree.

The months that followed were a rolling fog. In hind sight, I probably should've gotten better help than being alone or even had myself checked into a mental health ward. I would come home every day from work to scream-cry on my couch, sometimes to the point where I'd end up dry-heaving into the toilet. I'd shake uncontrollably: my hands, my legs, the kind of feeling in your guts tremble under your skin. I'd have to go through this for hours every day, just to release all that tension, just to be able to fall asleep. Weekends were the worst since I was left to sit by myself in the dark. And though some days were easier for others, it would eventually crest once again and I'd be back where I started. It made my soul sick to be housed in such an emotionally-ignorant body.

Thats when I started writing about it:

And I know she still thinks about me. And I know she still feels for me more than she dares let on. You don't get close with someone with those kinds of words in an ankle-deep world and then just let go or forget or walk off. But shes with someone else now and I sit in an empty apartment scattered with beer bottles and loose change. A pile of struck matches around the cheap scented candles and the stabbed out ashtray. The bedding needs to be changed though its never been slept in it. The empty refrigerator. The cold linoleum floor. The TV tuned to a dead station. The hot, grimy intuition that shes thinking of me right now.
  

But that doesn't even matter. She's with someone else and she'll probably marry him and that is what wakes you at night and makes you look over at the little black velvet box sitting on top the nightstand. She'll get one like it from someone else.

And writing did help. It was a valve that helped me discard all the collected tension in my chest from days and weeks and months of waiting and suffering and wondering. But even writing can only do so much, words can only go up to the point of the incommunicable. You hit that barrier between language and experience: you can't step through it. And so, left at an impasse, I was right where I started before writing.

By this point, I had considered taking my own life. The memories, the feelings, the unresolvable madness of questions unanswered were pushing me toward that permanent silence. I didn't quite plan it but I was pretty resolved in doing it. I started writing individual letters to people, tidying up my affairs as it were. I began writing about her, about the cancer in my chest from all the thoughts I had had for months, in the hopes that it would not only explain why I was going to do it but have someone have some appreciation after the fact. "I understand why he did this" was what I wanted to hear.

Then I had the dream. A dream that scared the hell out of me. I was in a small glass enclosure, like a phone booth. This booth was floating around a fog of sorts and I saw all my dearest friends going on about their lives - being happy, having children, growing old and satisfied with living. I was banging on the glass, screaming as loud as I could but none of them could hear me. I was trying to warn them about death: that it was one-sided. That you'd float forever, able to watch but unable to interact. That the short time you had was it and that after that, you became a permanent spectator who was alone in his own little glass cube.

When I woke up, I realized that the subconscious part of my brain had basically solved my recent problems for me; that there was no guarantee of peace in death. That there is no contract, no reasoning, no universal agreement or proof of peace in the Great Beyond. That if I had killed myself in that brain-state - who was to say I wouldn't be locked in that place forever? A glass coffin for a ghost without a grave.

So, now what was I left with? I went back and started reading (the worst stuff you can read during major depression) Satre and Hesse and anything basically existential and provoking. I started watching The Fountain once a week; I started to mine myself for all I was worth by overexposing my soul to anything that could touch it. And it helped. Well, it helped a bit anyway. I was trying to squeeze as much blood out of the stone while I could.

And it took over a year to be more or less back to myself. A lesser version of myself - that woman strip-mined everything I had been for 30 years and left me shallow - but myself none the less. And every once in a while, that feeling of her loss creeps up on me. It never comes on fully, it simply passes by and keeps going. Because truth of it is, I won't let it come around to stay anymore. I can't. It crippled me once, and I'm afraid a second round might kill me stone dead.

And I know a lot of friends who pat me on the back and tell me I made it through a bad ordeal and that I'm stronger for it - but the other side is that you're left to wonder if everything is worth surviving? That you're so changed after an event like that, you know you can't ever go back to who you were before, so you're lost even in yourself. The thing is everyone tells you time heals all wounds, but no one mentions that the scars can be disfiguring.

Would you really want to walk through Hell to prove any point? I wouldn't suggest it.

But I'm here now. And she married and had a couple more kids and I definitely think I dodged a bullet in a lot of ways. I don't regret what we had when we had it, simply how we decided to end it. It was a callous way to bring that amount of closeness to an end. And the experience has made me gun-shy: I've all but dismissed the idea of dating ever again. The best way to explain it is that wonderful exchange in 1991's The Rocketeer:

Peevy: You got a good thing goin' on with that girl, Clifford. And I'm tellin' you right now, if she flies the coop, it's gonna be your fault.

Cliff Secord: Aw, what do you know about women, Peev? You haven't had a date since 1932.

Peevy: [wistfully] Flora Maxwell. There wasn't any point datin' nobody after her.

But I'm a little more solid now, a little more on an even keel, a little happier not chasing after a skirt for the first time since high school. I'm practically disinterested in dating now and happy with that. I'll stay with this mindset for as long as it suits that happiness, despite the looks of concern from friends and terror from my elders.

Lets try this out for a while, shall we?

Lou Reed Is Dead. Long Live Lou Reed. - 90 Minutes After The Annoucement Of His Passing, Aged 71 Earth Years

 
The passing of Lou Reed is an odd one. I suppose the big reason is that, by this point, we had all assumed his hard-living lifestyle would've kept him permanently embalmed. Like a Keith Richards or a Iggy Pop, here was someone who lived hard and fast and then harder still and kept on living somehow. His face looked like someone had left Lyle Lovett out in the rain and sun for too damn long.

I don't have many distinct memories of Reed's music either. I really started listening to him in my early 20s, when I'd be up until three in the morning talking on Instant Messenger and watching the Late Late Show. There was a thing I liked about him that escaped me for many years - but it was really about how simple his music was. Unlike a lot of other rock artists before him or following, the great point of Reed's material was how simple it was. At times, I'm even reminded a bit of Philip Glass - where its one idea stretched to its greatest limit, changed in the simplest ways, so its basically four minutes of a chord progression. But where Glass is brilliantly maddening, Reed was brilliantly approachable. His music (and especially his lyrics) were so much like the kind heard in art class rooms where bohemian wanna-be teenagers strummed a guitar and didn't sing a song so much as talk through it. Not quite poetry, not quite fumbling in the dark. But it was distinctly understandable: some half-way-there poet finger-banging greatness but never going the whole way.

And thats where I think the tragedy is in Reed's passing: the man was a simple storyteller. In an age where music has been castrated and cauterized by increasingly stupid pop music clap-trap - the immediacy of a guy struggling to make a song sort of work has all the vibrant workings of a story around the bonfire. Simple. Direct. You either bought it, or you didn't. Pure narration, in a way. I respect that - its the same approach Hemingway had with his readers. Except, you know, nothing about blowjobs.

Reed was the ultimate dream-come-true for all those high school rock band kids. He never made it very far in the charts Hot 100 sense but he never gave in to outside excess or pressures from trends. He was just Lou Reed. Here he is. And his talent wasn't in arrangements or big ideas; he was just a guy with some cute ideas and they were the kind you could see him scrawl on ratty cocktail napkins with ballpoint pens. His kind wouldn't last in this day and age if he was just starting out - which makes you wonder how many other people are out there like him and don't get the chances he had. After all, we don't like people who are just talent and we don't trust people if they're not interested in just taking our money.

But I listened to him a lot. I'll fault the movie Trainspotting for introducing me to my favorite song by him "Perfect Day" but there were others like "No Money Down" which is terrific and a throwback to his love of 50s rock, though it took me a long time to warm up to. "New York Telephone Conversation" with its oom-pah-pah bounce comes off as Danny Elfman finally not giving a shit after coming home to a dirty, laundry-smelling apartment after spending all night drinking mezcal in a dive bar in Hell's Kitchen.

So yeah, Lou Reed is dead. Long live Lou Reed. Ain't gonna find many more like him unless you look harder at the people struggling in high school art class with badly tuned guitars and not giving a fuck about it.

From The "Just So I'm Better Understood" File...

I am what I like to think a deeply empathic person. I feel for the misery and plights of others - be they strangers or friends, be they of any creed or color. I can put myself immediately into that other person's shoes and experience their good news first hand. I would like to think this is an element that makes me maybe not a good friend but a trusted one.

However, theres a fucking limit to it. And you know I'm somewhere near that limit if I'm using the word "fucking" to emphasize it.

To quote the late, great George Carlin - "I don't have pet peeves, I have major, psychotic fucking hatreds" and thats true. Thats the other side of the deep empathy of people - the complete and utter revulsion of them. That is to say I can emphasize with people but it is such a tenuous and exhausting skill that I am an introvert by nature; dealing with people is literally the most exhausting thing I can experience.

So thats the set-up, and heres the meat of the joke.

I purposely delineate all parts of my life from the next. My personal life does not affect my work, my work life does not affect my family life, my family life does not affect some ... other thing that I can't think of right now. But everything is compartmentalized: I do this on purpose. I don't like bleed through. I do not like parts of my life interacting with other parts. If I am dating a girl and she asks me about my job, I'll likely shrug it off. I don't do this to be rude but my work life is exceedingly disinteresting; more over, I don't want to talk about work outside of work. Similarly, I don't want to talk about who I'm dating with those I work with. I haven't told my mother about any dating I've done since probably 2006.

Now I realize that not everyone works this way and thats fine. But there is a boundary involved here that some people see and most people don't. The line is this: don't try to drag me across into your own values. If I do not want to mix my personal life with my work life, it needs to be accepted that way and thats it. My job is not who I am, its merely what I do. I do not wrap myself in the flag, I feel no loyalty to an employer past collecting another paycheck. Thats all I am there for and don't ever think otherwise.

I do not view my job as a second family.

I  view my job as getting paid for having to deal with people I would otherwise avoid.


Similar to the line in the sand about values, as a rule, I don't talk about things like religion or personal opinions often. Its cheap, its chinzy and let me be totally honest (and an asshole) when I say that every one of these discussions at work end up with four people trying to out-yell the others, before they turn to me. "Well, see, I'm leaning more toward the concept that God is only the outward expression of Man's own inward nature as detailed by..." and then I realize I've totally lost everyone already. I am by no means a profoundly smart person - I am simply a well-learned idiot - but I also have no tolerance for people who want to swim in an intellectual ocean with water wings for an IQ. It also doesn't help that I am atheistic but don't identify as with atheist groups. Frankly, I think having a belief system of any kind is stupid; the moment you discard your safety net of an assumed reality, you take things as they come a lot better. Its not always easy but its much easier to cope with reality when you're allowing yourself to

Now where does all this come from?

A coworker of mine has had a family loss. I feel nothing but sad things for him because he's honestly a very nice person and I like his company quite a bit. However, someone else in the department suggested-to-the-point-of-commanding that we get a sympathy card.

And I realize my opinion of not wanting to sign it makes me out to be a monster, but at the same time, I didn't ask for nor did I get one when anyone from my family or friends passed. The point there isn't "I didn't get one, so why should they" sour grapes as it is "I didn't get one because I don't feel comfortable with it; why should I send one too if it makes me uncomfortable?"

I think this is a valid opinion. Its not one made in cruelty or emotion. Its simply saying "I do not want to be involved on this level." Because I purposely bond with very, very few people and I do not want to diminish that capacity by being shoehorned or be made guilty into doing something half-heartedly.

This is a huge reason why I need to leave my job. They are asking too much from me in this way. It is draining. It is vexing. And more over, I find it intrusive in the most horrible way. I am not at my job to peddle my soul to people who do not know me past what I allow them (nor do I ask them to peak into my soul to validate their intrusive nature). I am there to put money in my pocket. Were I to leave it tomorrow, aside from two people, I would not know the other two hundred or so people I see every week. I did not choose to know them; its membership by osmosis in the same way that we're all human - but so the fuck what?

The funny thing is is that my demanding these barriers, and this distance is purely because I do not have barriers and distance with my few close friends.

I am as human as the next person. But I prefer to be human over there.

This Revolution Will Not Be Televised - Gillian Anderson Photo Op, 2013

As with all people now in their 30s and full of themselves, I loved loved loved The X-Files. Usual nerd reasons, I won't bore you with them. So when Ally offered me a day pass to New York ComiCon this year, I *had* to go after finding out Gillian Anderson was going to attend that day. Photo ops were a touch expensive but I figured it was worth the cash for a determinedly awkward photo proving, well, absolutely nothing. Lets face it: these are cattle calls. I'd heard iffy things about the company that was doing them but I sent them a Paypal payment anyway. You only live once.

I got in line very early because the queue system wasn't handled well. The staff running the floor were generally very nice but totally out of their element past "don't cross this line" schtick. I had three giggling German girls ahead of me, all of which were super nice, and somewhere to my right and back (the queue went up and down and up and down several aisles) a very nice guy from Australia dressed as Mulder who was charming to talk to and gave really great insight on his experiences in America (all of them positive).

But what was suppose to be a thirty minute wait turned into ninety as Gillian Anderon's plane was late or stuck in customs or something. We got different stories. I didn't care. I was fourth in line and the first guy - my heterosexuality was proven that day, I'll tell you what. The MC working the line eventually said "She's here folks, get your tickets out, stand at the black curtain entrance until staff calls you in to take your ticket" blah blah blah. He was generally a very nice person but anyone who works at NYCC had to be burned out by four in the afternoon. His face was etched with the wrinkles you get from smelling neck sweat and acne topical medicine all day.

The first two girls go in, swallowed up by the velvet entrance. I give my bookbag to the staff to hold. The next girl is called in. Then me. The next few details happened within the span of 2 to 5 seconds.

After walking through the black velvet fabric, the room was a lot to take in. The size of a classroom, something like ten people running around, the light guy adjusting for height, the photographer, two people on computers, the printing guy, the ticket person. Aside from the girl who was just leaving and the girl whos having her picture taking next, I'm alone in the room, in the corner like a truant.

Gillian is 45 pushing 22. Shes wearing a black dress that, when she picks up her water or to turn to talk to someone, proves its actually a matching two-piece. Shes extremely polite and smiles broadly. She's trying to make small talk the people shes taking photos with and its upsetting the cameraman. He continually screams NEXT with the nuance of a drunk cattle baron.

My turn is next. She half-follows the last of the german girls out of the room and then turns to me. We held eye contact as I walked to the mark on the floor for the picture - all of FIFTEEN FEET, which is a lot longer than it seems. She smiled broadly as I approached. I tried to turn on some of the old Sean Connery style charm I use to get phone numbers while at bars. I'd like to think I was successful but ... well, the outcome isn't proof of that.

Me: "Good morning"

Her: "Hey! Good morning! How are you?"

Me: "Pretty good, yourself?"

Her: "I'm good, thanks."

Click. "NEXT!" The end.

(Note to reader: It was 3 in the afternoon and I said "Good morning". Yes, I am dumb sometimes.)

So why aren't I posting the photo here? Right as I replied to "how are you", I had just walked up to her expecting to take a picture like the girl before me - side to side, crooked smile like you're saying "Hi Mom!" on the nightly news - when she stops the cameraman. She holds up her hand and says "Wait, let's do this..." then grabs my wrist and puts my arm around her waist and my hand on her hip, with all the subtlety of a dancing instructor with a new student. As if to say "No, honey - that goes HERE." Much to my credit, I gave the gentlest of squeezes as she put her hand on the small of my back. Between the surreal aspect of the situation, the unexpected physical contact and the fact that we were basically talking as it was taken, well, my face comes off as a half-hearted attempt at Jared Lee Loughner's mug shot - a bit too intense, though I've gotten use to the picture a bit since then.

I'm not disappointed by the photo per se but I am sort of deflated. I've rarely photographed well - I sort of have a brow that makes my eyes seem strained so I end up looking extremely serious when all I'm doing is thinking about what I want for dinner - and this was no exception. A badly timed no exception, actually.

But she did put my hand on her and you better believe I gently got a palm of that. It ain't Abelard and Eloise by any means but, well, fuck you, I'm sticking to the totally grand delusion she thought I was cute if she got that close on her own. Until then, I'm hiding that photo behind something else and taking it out as a great (visual) anecdote for when I'm (drunk) with friends.