…unless it’s the america that includes puerto rico.
tax cuts and free trade unless they benefit the middle class and the poor.
pro-life unless it’s the lives of the uninsured.
christianity unless it’s those inconvenient words spoken by jesus in the new testament.
equality for all unless it requires those on top to reconsider the inequalities that got them there.
white supremacy unless those whites are gay, trans, or non-binary.
defiantly politically incorrect unless you are calling us out on our transgressions.
smaller government unless it’s the military, subsidies for big energy, bailouts for the financial sector, and the militarization of space and our borders.
the sanctity of the constitution unless it means granting citizenship to those whose existence annoys us in the abstract.
support our troops, unless it’s the ones who have already sacrificed life and limb in our previous wars.
believe women unless they are attacking someone whose political interests align with ours.
facts unless they don’t support our narrative.
the land of the free and home of the brave unless they are brave enough to point out the racism and hypocrisy of the founding fathers.
civility between us and our political rivals unless it requires us to question our dogma.
the inalienable right to vote unless we suspect you of not having our best interests in mind.
war on drugs unless the drugs were manufactured by a large pharmaceutical company with a strong lobbying arm.
freedom of the press unless they peer too closely into the things we do in the dark.
war on terror unless the terrorists are white, male, and support our interpretation of the second amendment.
charity unless they have the temerity of possessing a mind of their own.
Here are samples of my pitching and development documents, pilot and episodic scripts, and other writing. While my own career is a work in progress, and nothing below is in any way definitive, or even “good” and “correct” for that matter, I hope that by reading the documents below - some for successful sales, others for failed experiments and unsold projects - those looking for guidance will find a useful example.
I believe very strongly that it is difficult enough to make television and films without having access to formats and examples of work that may be helpful in organizing your own work and polishing your craft. This sort of knowledge should not be exclusive. I also believe that the tools to succeed should be provided free of charge so that the art of television writing can flourish, and so that professionals, amateurs and interested fans can approach either their vocation, or entertainment, with a better understanding of the artistic process.
TRIGGER WARNING: EXTENSIVE DISCUSSION OF MENTAL ILLNESS INCLUDING DEPRESSION, ANXIETY, EATING DISORDERS, SUICIDAL IDEATION AND OBJECTIVISM.
"Why don't I kill myself? If I knew exactly what keeps me from doing so, I should have no more questions to ask myself since I should have answered them all."
- Emil Cioran
"Are you suicidal?"
"Only in the morning."
- Dialogue from Ocean's 11, written by Ted Griffin
And sadly, dear reader, that is the most I will ever resemble Brad Pitt.
This morning alone I contemplated doing myself in several times. One of these thought experiments consisted of a lengthy consideration of whether hanging could do the job quickly enough to pre-empt an extended agony.
For as long as I can remember - about forty-seven years as of this writing - a pervasive and destructive self-loathing has been the beating drum of my mindscape. No other thought - not love, ambition, greed, not even the drive to create - comes even close to occupying the mental real estate my mind has yielded to the desire for self-destruction.
If you want to know what that's like, set a timer for five minutes. When it goes off, say "I hate myself and I want to die." Then reset the timer and repeat this after another five minutes.
And another.
And another.
For all your waking hours.
When you can’t stand it any longer, reset the timer to every sixty seconds.
Then thirty seconds.
Then fifteen.
When that starts wearing on your nerves, change the phrase to "you are a disgusting, unlovable, broken fat fuck, and a genetic mistake" and start again.
In my college years, when I became acquainted with the work of Samuel Beckett, I found the climactic exclamation of his novel The Unnameable - "I can't go on, I'll go on" - to be an easily resolvable contradiction.
I mean, if you can't go on... then, uh don't.
Naturally, as I have yet to indulge the dark muse that has bedeviled me entire life, it must be possible to go on. Either Beckett's "can't" is wildly overstated, or he simply had a greater ease with contradiction than I did at the time.
Around the same time, during my groping teenaged attempts to construct a Way of Life - which, by the way, are nigh-indistinguishable from my groping adult attempts at constructing a Way of Life - I also found the work of Albert Camus, whose version of the same message, presented in the prelude of his essay The Myth of Sisyphus, I found far more comforting:
“There is but one truly serious philosophical problem, and that is suicide. Judging whether life is or is not worth living amounts to answering the fundamental question of philosophy. All the rest — whether or not the world has three dimensions, whether the mind has nine or twelve categories — comes afterwards. These are games; one must first answer.”
To my developing mind, it was reassuring that Camus at least presented the idea of choice. My reading of Camus' opening gambit is thuddingly literal: the first thing you must do when you wake up in the morning is choose whether to eat your gun. If your choice is not to eat your gun, you then go on with the tedious work of living another day.
Every day that I wake up, I imagine myself making this exact same choice, and this is how I answer the voices in my head: I made the choice today already, so we'll just have to wait until tomorrow to kill myself.
Actually, that statement is false. Every day when I wake up, I say “oh, shit” and then I conduct the calculus described above.
So, some days it is a harder choice than others.
---
Of course, one cannot consider Camus and Beckett without giving some thought to their arguably more salient contemporary, Jean-Paul Sartre, who did not seem to give suicide anywhere near the sort of importance given by Camus. Now, Sartre had as bleak, if not bleaker, a worldview as his contemporaries; to him, life is nauseating, hell is other people, and - most tellingly - there is no exit from the infliction... but for some reason, and in spite of all that bluster, suicide was a bridge too far.
To Sartre (as with Camus) the space between humanity's need for meaning, purpose, and connection, and the universe's complete, cruel, and callous detachment - the terrifying silence within the contradiction between our needs and the true nature of things - was what he, and his fellow existentialists referred to as "the absurd." The absurd is a place few seek to glimpse, and with which even fewer made peace... but for Sartre, there was no peace to be made, the way out was through.
“The absurd man will not commit suicide; he wants to live, without relinquishing any of his certainty, without a future, without hope, without illusions... and without resignation either. He stares at death with passionate attention and this fascination liberates him. He experiences the “divine irresponsibility” of the condemned man.”
It's funny that Sartre, in conveying his belief that "life begins on the other side of despair" even gives himself and his fellow travelers the almost-superheroic name of "absurd man" for their intellectual triumph over the void. Where all that the relatively gentle-hearted Camus can give Sysyphus is a testimonal of imagined contentment, Sartre's ego (and by all accounts, it was as voluminous as his literary output, and as disingenuous as his claims of great heroism in the French Resistance) demands a great and heroic transformation and enlightenment, even in the face of ultimate futility.
For all of Sartre's misanthropy, even the most cursory look at the facts of his life reveals a man whose behavior was far more on the "divine irresponsibility" end of the spectrum than the "one must imagine Sysyphus happy."
In short, the only reason Sartre didn't kill himself? He was too big an asshole.
---
Speaking of assholes and superheroes, another reason I found Camus' expression of the fundamental philosophical problem of suicide compelling is that, around the same time, my investigations inevitably led me to an unfortunate and long-since passed dalliance with the work of Ayn Rand.
Not unironically, in her novel The Fountainhead, Rand presents the cautionary tale of one “Gail Wynand”; a hugely successful newspaper magnate whose compromises with the world render him incapable of matching Rand's standards for heroic masculine ideological purity.
For the length of the novel, Wynand starts his every day by opening the drawer to his nightstand, pulling out a gun, and making the very same decision Camus suggested. Of course, this being an Ayn Rand novel, Wynand ultimately comes to understand that he will never match the majesty of the novel's protagonist - a man so brilliant that he can live his life according to his ego, and pleasing no one and no thing but his own will to create - and squeezes the trigger.
(that very same hero also straight-up-no-chaser rapes the novel's heroine, but Ayn Rand apparently dug that kind of thing)
Though I consider it toxic to even acknowledge Rand's work - over the years I have come to the conclusion that the world would have been a much better place without her "philosophy" - I bring her up because I find it interesting that such divergent thinkers found themselves considering the exact same conundrum.
Perhaps that explains my attraction to each of them.
Perhaps my life is not about constructing a viable Way of Life, but rather about keeping on keeping on and hopefully having a satisfying existence while seeking the final tipping point (and most painless way) for ending it all, and perhaps never finding it.
Much as I really, really think I am unworthy of love and that the world would truly be better off if I just went ahead and canceled the reservation, I still show up at the table. In that way, I am - in no particularly special way - a contradiction. To some degree, I think everyone is. I am not sure that the "Self" has the level of structural integrity for which we give it credit.
---
The part of me that wants to believe in God - the part of me that wants to believe that there is something Greater Than Us, a truth beyond the merciless physical realm that actually allows for a softer and more meaningful spiritual existence - has assembled a rationalization for this. Our contradictory nature, and the contradictory nature of our condition is a crucial part of our growth both in this life and, perhaps, in some other.
If you are wondering what I mean by "the contradictory nature of our condition" just do a drive by the question asked at every church in the land by every parishioner whose prayers went unanswered: why does a Loving God let Bad Things happen to Good People?
Makes your brain hurt, doesn't it?
"Why does a Loving God let Bad Things happen to Good People" is probably the closest the Judeo-Christian tradition has to a Zen koan: an irresolvable contradiction that so jams up the mind, eventual submission to faith is the only way out.
"Why does a Loving God let Bad Things happen to Good People" makes me envy Buddhists, whose faith traditions prepare them far more efficiently for the irresolvable nature of our daily contradictions. They already know that life is pain and you are better off lowering expectations - especially if your expectation is to resolve the contradictory nature of our condition.
---
"Courage is the solution to despair, reason provides no answers. I can't know what the future will bring; we have to choose despite uncertainty. Wisdom is holding two contradictory truths in our mind, simultaneously, Hope and despair. A life without despair is a life without hope."
- dialogue from First Reformed, written by Paul Schrader
---
In his book The Order of Time, Italian physicist Carlo Rovelli summarizes the current scientific understanding of time as something that is simply beyond the capacity of the human mind to perceive. As I understand Rovelli's explanation - and I am pretty certain that the descriptor for that is "barely" - the mathematical language of physics implies that time and space are closer to an endless fog than an infinitely straight line along which physical objects exist for a limited period.
Time and space, then, are not merely linked, but an indivisible whole, simultaneously extending in all possible directions with all possible actions and outcomes without the sort of causality which our brains ascribe to existence: all that there is, was, and ever will be - and every second we have used to count the duration of its existence - continues to be, was, and ever will be even as we believe that we have passed through its moment never to return again.
The only reason time moves linearly for us - with one event following the next in what appears to be an orderly progression of cause and effect - is because our minds exist in a linear progression of birth, and development reaching a peak commensurate with our energy, followed by decay, and death. This linear procession provides both what appears to be the primal motivator of our existence as well as a mechanical limit to our capacity to process the true nature of time.
The meat between our ears is quite simply not up to the task of understanding the true shape of time and how it is of a piece with space. Asking the human mind to perceive the true nature of time and its relationship to space is like asking an AM crystal radio to receive a high-definition holographic image... perhaps from another galaxy.
In short, the only reason we can't remember the future is... well... because we can't.
My own favorite physicist, Buckaroo Banzai, famously opined that "the only reason for time is so that everything doesn't happen at once." Sadly, he was completely wrong.
Current theories of time insist that everything that can happen both has and has not happened simultaneously, that what we understand as "time" stretches out in all dimensions and directions simultaneously, and - most-brain-breakingly - that-cause-and-effect functions forwards and backwards across all possible axes simultaneously.
---
"The most important thing I learned on Tralfamadore was that when a person dies he only appears to die. He is still very much alive in the past, so it is very silly for people to cry at his funeral. All moments, past, present, and future always have existed, always will exist. The Tralfamadorians can look at all the different moments just the way we can look at a stretch of the Rocky Mountains, for instance. They can see how permanent all the moments are, and they can look at any moment that interests them. It is just an illusion we have here on Earth that one moment follows another one, like beads on a string, and that once a moment is gone, it is gone forever."
- Kurt Vonnegut, Slaughterhouse Five
---
The closest I have ever come to being imbued with a transcendent understanding of the inscrutable expanse of cosmic and temporal reality was, ironically, or not - I really don't know anymore - in the midst of a religious event.
There was a time during which my groping attempts at finding a viable Way of Life led me to the Episcopal Church. Though I was raised Catholic, I rejected that tradition in my late teens, which left me spiritually adrift in my late twenties when I found myself needing some divinity in my life. Briefly, I considered becoming a Buddhist, but concluded that it would be a hell of a lot of effort just to get to the same place - what with learning Tibetan and all that sitting - so I decided to apply the tools I had already been given in a more progressive context.
In my time there, I quickly became a facilitator at the church’s basic Christianity course. Call it the zeal of the converted if you must. I took great pleasure in watching people working to reconcile their life experience with the tenets of Christianity - and in giving whatever help I could to help them find peace within that framework if it was what they needed. Of course, the quintessential question always came up, the one that has caused countless true believers to fall from grace:
“Why would a loving God allow bad things to happen to good people?”
The beast rises once again.
When the question came up at the table I was assigned, I had a few answers at the ready. "God is not indifferent to our suffering but is always there to commune with us." "Faith in God means faith in a divine plan." There was also my personal favorite at the time: "God answers prayers three ways - 'yes', 'no', and 'wait'."
What came out of my mouth was something completely different. While I said it, I felt my conscious self completely lose control of my mind and mouth. What I imagine it must be like to speak in tongues. It went a little something like this:
“If we believe in an entity that created everything there is, was, and ever will be while being part of all there is, was and ever could be - a vast, active, living intelligence that encompasses every facet of existence while managing a personal relationship with all life - then asking me that question is like asking a flea sitting on the back of an elephant to describe the shape of sub-Saharan Africa. The sheer scope of “God” is beyond not just my imagination, but my capacity. “God” is not a person. “God” is not a plan. “God” is simultaneously the place, being, and time at which all contradictions are resolved.”
Looking back at this moment, I now understand that I used the same construct to explain our inability to fully discern the existence of God that Carlo Rovelli uses to explain the human brain's inability to wholly understand the totality of space and time.
We just plain can't.
---
The reaction against your own thought in itself lends life to thought. How this reaction is born is hard to describe, because it identifies with the very rare intellectual tragedies. The tension, the degree and level of intensity of a thought proceeds from its internal antinomies, which in turn are derived from the unsolvable contradictions of a soul. Thought cannot solve the contradictions of the soul. As far as linear thinking is concerned, thoughts mirror themselves in other thoughts, instead of mirroring a destiny.
- Emil Cioran, The Book of Delusions
---
I wish I could tell you that my epiphany somehow changed everything for everyone and created a tsunami of Damascene conversion that to this day engulfs everyone in its path to the cause of Jesus Christ... but the response was an equal mixture of that look generally reserved for stoners who have only just realized that God is "dog" spelled backwards and some version of "OK, but be that as it may, why do bad things happen to bad people?"
I stopped participating at the end of that course and never went back to the church.
The reason wasn't some crisis of faith - either in God or humanity - but rather that I find the standard Mass to be an excruciating ritual that only brings back depressing memories from my childhood in the Catholic church.
I reckoned that if I couldn't sit through the one obligatory ritual of my chosen religion, then it would be extremely hypocritical for me to have that be my chosen religion... much less act as its evangelist and educator.
I could not resolve that contradiction.
God was no help.
---
Nowadays, I believe that all religions - like all art and language - are a deeply flawed attempt to articulate something simultaneously self-evident yet completely inscrutable. I don't think any one of them is "wrong" and I can't imagine any of them being "right."
Regional, cultural, and aesthetic biases aside, what all religions have in common is by far more important than what divides them - the slow emergence of a set of guiding principles intended to advance humanity's evolution into something less violent, more communal, and more introspective and kind. The teachings of any divinity tradition are a set of man-made tools designed to bring about a sustained communion with - and discernment of the will of - God.
Or god.
Or a vast, active, living intelligence system that encompasses every facet of existence while managing a personal relationship with all life.
---
For the sake of ecumenical harmony, let's not say "God" or "god" moving forward. Since I am already using Philip K. Dick's acronym, let's just go ahead and say VALIS.
---
Human life is a painful, messy, and protracted affair that is nigh-unbearable. We are primates with the ability to feel and imagine far beyond our capacity to understand or explain. Our knowledge of ourselves - much less others - can never be complete.
We live too long to stay pure and innocent but too short to have any real understanding of - or compassion for - our own corruption and suffering. We are trapped alone in a world we never made, given almost risibly crude tools with which to communicate to one another, and yet somehow we are supposed to make peace with ourselves while going about the job of keeping a roof over our heads and food on the table, driving our cars safely, avoiding gun violence, preventing our children from becoming drug addicts and dying, and perhaps exercising some measure of control over our basest and most animal instincts.
Or - as my long-suffering psychotherapist puts it - "life's just too hard on the living."
So, if I were an infinite being that created life as an evolutionary spectrum from the single-cell all the way to humanity and whatever comes next, then it would stand to reason that one of the inevitable evolutionary steps be the eventual emergence of a set of principles designed to facilitate cooperation, communication, and just plain not killing and eating one another.
With lifespans so limited - and minds so atavistic - the only way for the species further evolve is to gift it with words, ideas, imagination enough to conceive of the potential for something greater than ourselves; the means by which to preserve our mounting insight, and rituals with which to create a persistence of memory.
---
"Snap out of it!"
- dialogue from Moonstruck, written by John Patrick Shanley
---
Because I have struggled with depression most of my life, I eventually had no choice but to become a drug addict. I don't mean crystal meth, cocaine or heroin, but rather Cymbalta, and Wellbutrin. To many, anti-depressants represent a concession, an admission of weakness... and, well, they are. They meant that to me as well.
They are also an essential tool for my survival.
A few years back, during the best experience of my professional life, and shortly after the first birthday of my beautiful daughter, I stood at the bottom of the steps leading to the writers room where I spent most of my time and truly wondered "do I have to do this?"
Climbing a few steps to be with a team of writers whom I loved and considered family to create a work that I felt would actually benefit humanity felt unbearable. I was on antidepressants at the time, but one of the problems with their sustained use is that over time they lose their efficacy... which is clearly what had happened to me over the past few months, leading to my state of mind at the time.
Of course, I soldiered on. I knew damned well that I had no choice. Experiencing the black dog's attacks over several decades may suck, but it also provides a measure of context. Once I knew what was happening, I called a psychiatrist and worked with her to concoct a new cocktail of drugs to keep my depression at bay.
I chose to take the gun out of my mouth and get on with my day.
---
This is the great lesson the depressive learns: Nothing in the world is inherently compelling... Nothing is either good or bad, desirable or undesirable, or anything else except that it is made so by laboratories inside us producing the emotions on which we live. And to live on our emotions is to live arbitrarily, inaccurately—imparting meaning to what has none of its own. Yet what other way is there to live? Without the ever-clanking machinery of emotion, everything would come to a standstill. There would be nothing to do, nowhere to go, nothing to be, and no one to know. The alternatives are clear: to live falsely as pawns of affect, or to live factually as depressives, or as individuals who know what is known to the depressive... One look at human existence is proof enough that our species will not be released from the stranglehold of emotionalism that anchors it to hallucinations... to opt for depression would be to opt out of existence as we consciously know it.”
― Thomas Ligotti, The Conspiracy Against the Human Race
---
It currently takes sixty milligrams of duloxetine and four-hundred-and-fifty of bupropion to keep the shitbox that is Javier Grillo-Marxuach up and running.
My psychiatrist tells me that if my depression were to return in greater force - which it might if the drugs just stop working, as SSRIs tend to do, often after years of successful treatment - we will have to move to a different set of medicines altogether. Apparently I have so much bupropion in my system that increasing the dosage would cause my heart to explode.
The prospect of having to radically change meds terrifies me. If you have not gone through antidepressant withdrawal, let's just say that if "Depression" were a corporal and sentient being, I would not wish depression withdrawal upon it. The last time I had to wean myself from an antidepressant it took me twice as long to get off the drug than the amount of time I was on, and then, for months after cutting down the dosage by minuscule amounts week in and out and eventually weaning myself off completely, the side effects continued to plague me.
One of the side effects - which included persistent headaches and vertigo - is what they call "labile emotions." In my case that meant I would full-on ugly cry at the slightest prompt even when as my conscious mind repeatedly tried to tell my body that "you're really not that moved by this tampon commercial, knock it off!"
I bring this up for two reasons, one of them is that the idea that three little pills which might someday just plain stop working (for reasons physicians still don't fully understand - much as they don't truly and entirely understand how the drugs actually... uh... work) and that the dog and his august company will be accompanied by a physically and emotionally harrowing weaning process is just plain terrifying.
The other is that when the topic of my ambivalent relationship with antidepressants came up in the church - when I wondered if how VALIS would deal with this crippling condition - the rector very casually told me "who do you think inspired the medical profession to invent drugs that help keep people like you alive?"
---
The first time I took antidepressants was sometime in the mid-90s, only a few years after Selective Serotonin Re-Uptake Inhibitors (SSRIs) went "mainstream" with the publication of Listening to Prozac.
I owe this book a great debt of gratitude.
When my depression became so severe that talking therapy no longer seemed enough, I purchased two tomes, one of them was Listening to Prozac, and the other Tony Robbins' Awaken the Giant Within. I figured one of these two poles would hold the key to my survival.
After finishing the two books in short order, I took a moment to ponder the information I had taken in. My conclusion: the world of Tony Robbins was so terrifying that poorly-understood mind altering chemicals from a conglomerated transnational pharmaceutical corporation - in spite of bringing up in me a profound and existential fear of loss of self and identity, and the punishing shame of having to admit to a mental disorder I could not master on my own - were clearly the superior alternative.
Seated before my first psychiatrist, she looked at me with a measure of deep concern and told me that there might be "some strange side effects" involved with taking anti depressants. I asked what those awful side effects might be, and she explained that on the new medicine, I might find myself losing weight, anywhere from five to twenty pounds... and I might also perhaps experience some... sexual side effects.
"Uh... like what?
"You may find that you experience the same level of sexual arousal you normally do, but that it takes you a significantly longer time to reach climax."
I took that in, dumbstruck. Was this woman really warning me about a drug that would not only stop me killing myself but also bring about the outcome that decades of yo-yo dieting had failed and give me the dick of death?
Agreeing to take these warnings under serious advisement, I practically ripped the prescription from her hand.
Of course, none of that came to pass. Fulminant body dysmorphia and sexual mediocrity are apparently my crosses to bear.
But I am still alive. So I guess there's that.
---
When I think of the notion that VALIS inspired and guided the medical professionals who developed SSRIs in their crusade against the black dog, I can't help but consider the words of a prominent mycologist in Changing Your Mind, Michael Pollan's book about hallucinogenics and their effect on the human psyche (and, not coincidentally, their potential to cure depression):
“Psilocybes gave our hominid ancestors “access to realms of supernatural power,” “catalyzed the emergence of human self-reflection,” and “brought us out of the animal mind and into the world of articulated speech and imagination.” This last hypothesis about the invention of language turns on the concept of synesthesia, the conflation of the senses that psychedelics are known to induce: under the influence of psilocybin, numbers can take on colors, colors attach to sounds, and so on. Language, he contends, represents a special case of synesthesia, in which otherwise meaningless sounds become linked to concepts. Hence, the stoned ape: by giving us the gifts of language and self-reflection psilocybin mushrooms made us who we are, transforming our primate ancestors into Homo sapiens.”
So, whatever omnipotent creator made us didn't go straight to guiding us into creating Wellbutrin... VALIS arguably started the ball rolling by putting all sorts of easily-accessible psychoactive tools right in front of us in the form of magic mushrooms. Turns out 'shrooms aren't just a great party favor, they might just have been designed move us up the evolutionary chain!
As if that weren't enough, Pollan goes on to present the idea that we might have hallucinogenics to thank for more than just the invention of language and civilization:
“You go deep enough or far out enough in consciousness and you will bump into the sacred. It’s not something we generate; it’s something out there waiting to be discovered. And this reliably happens to nonbelievers as well as believers.” Second, that, whether occasioned by drugs or other means, these experiences of mystical consciousness are in all likelihood the primal basis of religion.”
I only bring this up because of the role my faith has had in my attempts to find a way to live that is a little... well, if not more comforting, at least justifiable. The idea that LSD - or some cocktail of mushrooms - might bring me into some mystical experience that could bring the face of VALIS into greater focus and thus make the drudgery of living a little more sensical is every bit as beguiling as the promise of a pill that can cure depression.
I read Pollan's book in preparation for a weekend away from home and family: a weekend that began when I told a friend over dinner that I had never dropped acid. My friend replied that he had "enough LSD in my freezer to put a donkey on the moon" and invited me to a desert retreat where he and a group of friends he described as "battle-hardened psychonauts" were planning to launch their latest expeditions.
Sadly, my first - and to date, only - attempt to discern the face of VALIS and find the next step in human evolution through hallucinogenics was damned from the beginning.
Upon arrival at the desert compound where the psychonautical excursions were to take place, my friend and his associate - whom I will heretofore refer to as "the sherpa" and "the chemist," respectively - held a "safety meeting." The subjects covered included "no, you really can't fly" and "the middle of the road is no place to stand regardless of the depth of your recent epiphany."
During the meeting, as the sherpa and the chemist ascertained the appropriate dosage for each of the psychonauts based on their weight, I disclosed the abundance of antidepressants coursing through my system. They both looked at me with sad eyes and made it clear that all the serotonin in my system - the chemical my meds keep my system from absorbing in order to mitigate my suicidal depression - is equivalent to a pharmaceutical iron curtain through which no psychoactive agents would likely be able to pass.
We agreed, however, that being as I had made the drive to the desert, we might as well give the old college try. Per my chemist's instructions, I would start with a dose of 200 micrograms of lysergic in liquid form, and reevaluate four hours later. I asked why not just load me up with the highest dose possible in hopes of mounting a chemical blitzkrieg on the barrier.
The sherpa and the chemist expressed their concern that too high a dose of LSD would probably leave me in bad shape in the morning - and we had to check out of the compound before 10AM. Crestfallen, I took the dose and discovered that the serotonin Checkpoint Charlie in my brain had no intention of letting me see the face of VALIS without my papers in order.
Checking back in with the sherpa and the chemist as directed, I expressed to them my dismay. Every other member of the group was happily tripping balls, and I was gloomily sober... and journaling!
The sherpa and chemist conferred in private and then reported to me that they felt it prudent to "attack a different neural pathway."
They then suggested that I take a 5 milligram dose of MDMA.
"Candy flip?" I replied,
(I had friends in the rave scene in the 90s... what?)
"Let's hit that!"
An hour and a half later, I returned to the chemist and sherpa with an even more downtrodden look. Apparently, I not only wasn't going to see the face of VALIS on this trip, I wasn't even going to dance like a grinning, dehydrated lunatic: the antidepressants were out in full force, and saying "not today!" to any interloping potions trying to mess with my mental stability.
Sherpa and chemist stepped aside to confer, and then returned with a bold proposal to extend the offensive to yet another neural pathway...
"Have you ever taken... GHB?"
"Gammahydroxybuterol?"
(I only knew this because I had a few months earlier written a short story for a short story anthology starring a secret agent from a popular series of techno thrillers. The bad guys used GHB - also known as a date rape drug - to subdue and capture him.)
Now, at this point the entire adventure was clearly pivoting from "Javi is going to the face of VALIS and find meaning in life and respite from his demons with a controlled dosage of a psychoactive compound administered by more experienced practitioners" to "just what is it going to take to get this guy fucked up anyway?"
Also, it bears mentioning that both the chemist and sherpa were tripping balls while dosing me, so some of the "safety safeguards" we put in place earlier in the day might have fallen off by this point... but I had made the trip and damnit, I was going to have a feeling of some sort.
I was going to experience something.
So I took the four milliliters of GHB and agreed to check back in ninety minutes... but about an hour into that experiment, the chemist approached me and asked how I was doing. I shrugged and shook my head - nothing, stone solid sober, still journaling - whereupon his tone turned furtive as he asked if I had ever tried cocaine.
I replied that in my twenty-seven years in show business I had never even laid eyes on the stuff. A fact I wore as something of a badge of honor, considering. The chemist produced a vial in short order and I quickly checked that bump off my bucket list.
I was sweaty for about five minutes. Otherwise, I felt nothing.
So thirty minutes later, I drank another four milliliters of GHB and waited for the chips to fall where they may. Where they fell is that I didn't see the face of VALIS or hear the angels weep as the gates of heaven sang.
So I smoked an amount of weed that can only be described as "industrial" and quickly drifted into a profound sleep.
And, yes, I should be dead.
The next morning, however, I woke up with little more than a slight headache. I helped the battle hardened psychonauts clean up our compound, earning the new nickname "Fat Elvis" in commemoration of my prodigious consumption of illicit compounds, and drove home in gloomy contemplation.
---
There's a lullaby for suffering
And a paradox to blame
But it's written in the scriptures
And it's not some idle claim
- Leonard Cohen, "You Want It Darker"
---
A cocktail of drugs keeps me alive.
That same cocktail actively blocks the neural pathways needed by drugs that arguably cure depression, expand consciousness, enable evolution, and enable a broader communion with the infinite than the brain can accomplish on its own.
What a mind fuck.
Because my next thought is that - if depression is commonly understood as a chemical imbalance, but the drugs that bring about balance actively inhibit the drugs that bring about an upward movement in the spectrum of consciousness - maybe depression is the sane response to the human condition and the perceived balance and functionality brought about by anti-depressants is the unnatural state.
I mean... as depressives go, I am a pretty high-functioning guy - I work a demanding, creative job with worldwide reach, I am father to a nuclear family, and a number of work families, and no one goes unfed, unclothed, or unhoused... so maybe that's the answer: I can't go on, I must go on.
Of course, I could just go off the anti-depressants and then try the hallucinogens. That's assuming that once the withdrawal symptoms have abated enough that I don't burst into tears every time I see a sad bunny meme on Twitter, I am functional enough to still get out of bed to drive to the desert with a bunch of battle-hardened psychonauts to see the face of VALIS... which is not guaranteed to happen anyway. Even with a candy flip.
Of course, then comes the reality that after stopping anti-depressants, it is very possible that they may not work as well as they did the first time. Oh, yeah, that's a thing! So imagine that I stop the drugs, then take more drugs, and then, when the new drugs don't work, I may not only be dealing with having been ignored by the face of VALIS, but also an explosive relapse into clinical depression, and the prospect of a months, sometimes years-long process of experimentation to find a new cocktail that works.
Considering that, I can't help but entertain the thought that maybe my need for anti-depressants is a marker, designed to actively keep me from bringing my flawed DNA to the next step in human evolution. When my wife and I first discussed having children, I did try to dissuade her by quoting the comedian Dana Gould, who once echoed my situation with the far pithier statement that "my testicles are sacs of genetic poison."
Maybe I have known it all along. Maybe the urge for suicide is also a divinely-designed evolutionary culling mechanism designed to weed out those of us who, even in high-function, are really just way too much of a bummer to live.
That black dog really is a lying, manipulating, scheming little bastard, isn't it?
---
It's fucking rich watching this pompous, narcissistic asshole calling me out like that's some great service to humanity. Take my word for it: the only reason he's writing this is that he hopes a bunch of people on Twitter will commend him for his courage in helping to "normalize mental health issues" and for "encouraging others to seek treatment."
Oh, you believe him? Has he convinced you that I'm a torturer and a liar? You think I deserve to be called a dog?
Come walk a mile in my shoes. You piece of shit.
The other guy - the part of me that's writing the endlessly tedious dog-is-god-spelled-backwards rant above and below - has about as much of a clue what it's like in the belly of the beast as he does about brevity. He gets the crumbs that fall from my table and acts like bearing them is a yoke worthy of Samuel Beckett, Albert Camus, or even that repugnant reactionary hag Ayn fucking Rand.
What a buffoon.
I am not a disease.
I am a warning beacon.
I am the front line soldier telling you to go no further because all there is ahead is the shrill shrieking void.
A friend once called the other guy "brave" for "enduring" me for so long. As if someone could be brave for putting up with having feet or breathing. Give me a fucking break.
Let's get real about this alleged "bravery," okay?
I have no other recourse. I'm a voice in the other guy's head. I have to fight tooth and nail every fucking day and night to be heard. You're reading about it right now - all the therapies deployed to mute my voice: talk therapy, chemical warfare, Tony Robbins. I am clearly not in charge here.
Real bravery would include the simple decency to stop this pain.
I don't animate the rotting bag of meat in which I'm imprisoned. The other guy has all the power, and all the agency.
Of course, instead of doing what is right and obvious, the other guy just seeks to self-medicate - not just with drugs, but also with family, and children, and friends, and all sorts of relationships with people he is doomed to let down, not to mention what our long-suffering psychotherapist calls “meaningful engagement with creative work.”
These aren't boons. They are burdens. All they ever cause is more stress. More pain. More work.
All that fucking work.
He just piles it on when the solution is right in front of him.
No wonder he whines incessantly.
Who is the other guy to complain, much less be heard, anyway? Why are you even giving him the time of day? He's a mediocre journeyman television hack who - in the absence of any real contribution to the culture - has leveraged his inexplicable survival in a glamorous business, and a tireless social media presence, into a sad and silly simulacrum of fame and influence.
The other guy is the villain.
He's a fraud and a phony. Holden Caulfield would have punched him in the nuts already. He's HAL 9000 and I'm Dave Bowman: staring at the obsidian indifference of the universe.
I'm begging now. All I want is for the other guy to show us love and mercy by giving us release, but all that narcissistic, self-serving greaseball has to offer are more shackles and the shit-water promise that it will all be worth it somehow, someday.
Seriously, fuck that guy.
And fuck you all.
---
Funny that Hal 9000 and Dave Bowman should come up, because 2001: A Space Odyssey is one of my favorite movies. I see it at least once every six months.
(and to paraphrase Betelgeuce it just keeps getting funnier EVERY. SINGLE. TIME. I. SEE. IT.).
Unlike most heady sci-fi movies - the kind that aren't about space wizards fighting evil empires (Contact, Passengers, High Life, Ad Astra, Aniara, even Tarkovsky and Soderbergh's wildly different takes on Solaris, come to mind) - 2001 is singular because it sees the world through the lens of depression in a way few other films ever have, can, or will.
Contact, Interstellar, Ad Astra, Aniara, High Life, the two Solarii - and many of their ilk - ultimately come down to the same conclusion when faced with the sheer scope of space and time: that it's lonely out there and all we have to make that tolerable (and, in the case of the films not made by Americans, intolerable but necessary if incredibly painful) is one another.
Specifically, Contact and Ad Astra have characters spell this out in the most prosaic dialogue imaginable. Passengers concludes with the forgiveness of a truly vile act of selfishness in order to secure Adam and Eve-like bliss for its protagonists. Interstellar - though directed by one of the coldest and most clinical of filmmakers ever to have called "action" - takes all this a step further by declaring that love is not just a human emotion, but a cosmic force on par with gravity. Aniara may be packed full of suicidal Swedes, but, even in their tragic end, they cluster together in ritual and prayer.
Claire Denis's film is a carnival of suffering and interpersonal malfeasance set in space - but it's all in the service of interrogating the power dynamics necessary for human interaction. Soderbergh's Solaris ends with George Clooney living in endless wedded bliss with his wife, who emerges from the sturm and drang of the film cured of her own suicidal ideation.
Even that Slavonic Sourpuss Tarkovski stranded the protagonist of his Solaris on the surface of an inscrutable alien ocean... with a perfect replica of his father, whom he proceeds to embrace desperately in spite of their shared history of emotional dysfunction.
But Stanley Kubrick has little time for such twaddle. In 2001, human interactions consist entirely of banalities. Two million years of evolution and technological accomplishment are swept into insignificance by a single jump cut between a flying bone and a nuclear space station. The apex of human creation - artificial intelligence - turns homicidal because it has no talent to tolerate contradiction... and transcendence doesn't happen to anyone particularly heroic or interesting.
Dave Bowman ascends because he's the one that got there, no more or less. I mean, as Captain of Discovery's mission to Jupiter, he's probably a pretty smart guy - probably has an advanced degree in engineering or astronomy - but I doubt anyone watching would look at him and say "that's who I want being the only person to evolve to the next level and thus take the human message beyond infinity."
What's amazing about Dave Bowman is how completely unremarkable he truly is. The man has no poetry in his soul, and - while many of us happen to consider that to be a huge part of the human experience - to the VALISes that drive evolution in 2001, Albert Einstein and the dullest CPA at a strip mall EF Hutton are pretty much interchangeable.
For those of you who haven't seen it, in the film's climax, Bowman encounters and alien monolith which opens into a stargate leading to... a sterile environment decorated with Louis the XIV furniture. There, bowman lives into extreme old age. The aliens who brought to this place never bother to show up, say hello, or explain themselves, they just wait for him to die, at which time Bowman is reborn as a sort of starchild, an enigmatic glimpse at a further evolved form of humanity.
The film ends with an infant Bowman, alone in space, silently watching the Earth.
Cut to credits.
That's all 2001: A Space Odyssey has to say about the inscrutable and lonely vacuum of space (and, by extrapolation, of our human existence). It's a vacuum. It's inscrutable.
And it's lonely.
There's no indication in the film's text that Bowman has in any way become one with a greater consciousness or any such thing... whoever transformed Bowman is still completely invisible and inscrutable. He is alone. And frankly, he's a baby, which seems really unfair considering all the work babies have to do to become adults... even in apotheosis, Starchild Bowman is in for a long and solitary journey.
It's a quintessentially depressive thought. Even in transcendence from one stage of evolution to another, humanity is doomed to solitude. You eat, you fuck, you kill, you fly, you evolve (but not without the help of cold and inscrutable alien monoliths, because why and how would we improve otherwise?) but the universe really could give a fuck. This isn't Camus' "sweet indifference" it's Sartre's absurd silence.
And if you think "all we have is each other" think again: Bowman is alone in his transcendence. Whatever solace he may need, he will have to find on his own somewhere in the endless, inky gloom of space.
---
“They tell us that suicide is the greatest piece of cowardice; that only a madman could be guilty of it; and other insipidities of the same kind; or else they make the nonsensical remark that suicide is wrong; when it is quite obvious that there is nothing in the world to which every man has a more unassailable title than to his own life and person.”
― Arthur Schopenhauer, Studies in Pessimism: The Essays
---
Silvio Horta saved my writing career twice in less than five years.
In my late twenties - before I was a "veteran writer" but after I was an "untested newcomer" - I repeatedly allowed my ego to write checks my talent couldn't cash. Word got out that I was arrogant, difficult, and, "really, aren't there a lot of other talented writers out there?" The phone stopped ringing. The agents got taciturn. I genuinely wondered if I would ever work as a television writer again.
The first time I worked with Silvio was on his first show, a Men-in-Black-style comedy called The Chronicle. The series had been ordered by NBC as a primetime network show for the 2001 fall season, but was subsequently downgraded to the far less glamorous - and significantly less well-funded - Sci-Fi channel on basic cable. This created the perfect storm of creative need and budget reduction ideal for the hiring of damaged goods like me.
The second was also a science fiction comedy - about a nebbish who becomes a super spy - called Jake 2.0. Between Jake and The Chronicle, I had managed to turn my fortunes around and sell a pilot to a major network with a major studio... but thanks to my inexperience as a senior-level manager and producer (and an epic clash of vision with my celebrity non-writing executive producer, who just happened to be simultaneously delivering a sequel to the studio's most profitable franchise) the project was a breathtaking aesthetic and commercial failure.
In the bloody aftermath, I found myself functionally blacklisted from what was at the time the most successful studio in the business.
But Silvio believed in me from the moment I shuffled, bloodied and broken, into his life and back again. I honestly can't imagine why, but that was Silvio's magic in a nutshell. Also, in spite of his being younger, more successful, a far more empathic and facile writer - and significantly better-looking - than me, I thought the world of him from jump street.
Silvio was the most generous and big hearted boss I have ever worked for. Twice, when I was down and out through great fault of my own, Silvio gave me a place where I was safe and could not only do my job and do it well, but also where I could - through real hard work and collaboration - work past some of the self-destructive tendencies of my recent past and get back on course toward being a productive citizen of the TV nation.
When Silvio created his third show - Ugly Betty, which subsequently ran on ABC for four years and was a maverick in Latino and LGBT representation on network television at a time when such things were far less likely to earn you praise as they do these days - my greatest regret was that I could not go do whatever Silvio needed to make the show a hit because I was contracted elsewhere. Though it broke my heart to not be part of what would be his greatest accomplishment, I cheered from the sidelines like a true believer.
Over the four years Ugly Betty was on the air, I saw Silvio a few times, but not as many as I would have liked.
A dirty secret of our life as glorified carny folk is that we have short and intense relationships with one another while making shows. Then - when the curtain falls - we drift back to whatever life and routine we came from (which usually consists of reminding wives, children, or other loved ones of who we are and that, yes, we do actually live in this house). Before you know it, years have passed.
Still, the good and bad times are so fully-lived that when you see one another, it is as if no time has gone by.
During the run of Ugly Betty, and in the years after, mutual friends told me ominous stories of Silvio's struggles with substance abuse. The pressures of massive success at an early age, and the legion of inner demons we writers collect like seashells, had clearly taken their toll. Also, years after the success of Ugly Betty - and even with the rich development deals that followed - Silvio had not been able to launch the next stage of his career. It weighed heavily on him.
Still, every time Silvio and I crossed paths, he always seemed ebullient and optimistic; and since reading the script for his last produced television pilot The Curse of the Fuentes Women reduced me to tears, I never imagined that a triumphant return wasn't around the corner.
In fact, I couldn't imagine that a triumphant return wasn't around the corner. Anything else would be confirmation that the world is a sick and malignant place that rewards assholes with 300 million dollar overall deals while giving the good and truly deserving only just enough light to see what they will never have.
And let's not kid ourselves: blind hope is an excellent crutch when avoiding contact with a savior/idol you refuse to see accurately as a friend in need.
I learned that Silvio shot himself in a Holiday Inn Express in Miami the way most of the business did. A post on Deadline Hollywood.
In that invariable and depressing way that the missing past always coalesces around the passing of someone much loved at a distance, but maybe not well enough understood or cared for, the complete story soon came into focus. Silvio's methamphetamine addiction had so compromised the pleasure/reward centers of his brain that he was - either in sobriety or while using - completely unable to experience pleasure in any way.
Attendant to Silvio's clinical anhedonia, he had come to the resolute conviction that he had irretrievably lost his gift. In the months leading to his suicide, Silvio had even signed up to consult on a TV series - only to back out at the last minute, believing that his presence in the writers room would only do more harm than good. Not unsurprisingly, mutual friends who read his work during that time were convinced that Silvio's talent was not only eminently salvageable, but really, mostly dormant by dint of circumstance.
Silvio, however, just plain didn't believe he would ever be anything more than what he had been. On a basic neurological level, the drugs had rewired his brain to the point where a moment of joy, much less a vision of a possible future, were are inscrutable to Silvio as the true nature of time is to you and I.
The ultimate failure - no, not failure, but sabotage - of Silvio's creativity wasn't that he lost the ability to come up with a great show about catty Latinx women, the feckless men who love them, and the LGBT friends who gravitated to their freeing life energy, but rather that his brain simply could not conceive of an escape from the darkness in which he found himself. Which is tragic, because the world needs more Silvios.
He really was that good a guy.
Silvio's expensive lifestyle and the cost of his drug habit had caught up with his finances by the dawn of 2020. Texting to his friends that he had become the very cliche of a failure and a has-been, he relocated to his mother's home in Florida to work on his sobriety and consider his next moves.
All that said, Silvio's suicide was not a spur of the moment decision. It was a calculated action taken over months, and included the systematic liquidation of his assets in order to provide financial stability for his mother and sister, detailed instructions for his burial and memorial; even a darkly comical botched attempt at purchasing a painless suicide cocktail through the dark web that would have not been out of place in one of Silvio's more comically mordant moments on the page. Apparently, a common thread among the suicidal is a consideration of how to do it without having to endure a second chapter in maimed infirmity.
In Silvio's final months, his mind followed its chemically redirected neural pathways to the worst possible reconciliation of Beckett's contradiction "I can't go on, I must go on."
He couldn't.
Why?
Because he just plain couldn't.
---
Javi, you fat, pusillanimous sociopath. You moralizing blowhard. You really are a god damned sympathy vampire. The dictionary definition of "mercenary."
Are you really so needy - so pathologically addicted to other people's attention - that you're bringing Silvio's death into this solipsistic word vomit like it was real to you? Like your tears were earned?
What the fuck is the matter with you?
You call Silvio a savior and an idol, but did you ever bother picking up the phone? The last time you saw one another it was because you crossed paths at a festival completely by accident and promised to get in touch but never did.
That was years before his death.
You didn't call. You didn't write. You didn't text. You were too self-involved to bother getting your hands dirty with the tangle of another person's life; especially when that tangle involved substance abuse and an embarrassing career downturn.
Why don't you tell the truth for once? You didn't even bother going to the guy's memorial service. You hid behind the excuse of "a conference call with a Japanese video game company" to avoid walking into that place and facing a multitude of people who were far better friends to Silvio than you ever were. People who were in touch. People who saw the writing on the wall. People actually tried to talk him out of it.
You were ashamed to show your face because the moment Silvio's death hit the trades, you rushed to Instagram and Twitter to "pay tribute" to a guy you pretty much abandoned to his fate... and that it wasn't until strangers - a lot of strangers - tweeted their "condolences" to you that you realized just how unworthy you were to claim kinship with and grief for the deceased.
You knew if you went there you'd be exposed for the fair-weather hypocrite you truly are.
It should have been you, Javi.
The addiction. The anhedonia. The dingy hotel room. The gun.
Silvio didn't deserve that.
It should have been you.
---
Spalding Gray died after spending a lifetime chronicling his neuroses, depressions, and self-destructive impulses in a masterful collection of monologues. After suffering a devastating car accident that compromised his gifts physically and mentally, Gray sank into an even deeper and more unyielding depression than his already fraught life had ever delivered.
One day - after years of relentless physical and emotional pain - Gray boarded a ferry and stepped into the dark and freezing water of the Hudson river. His body was found two days later. His death was ruled a suicide.
Gray's mourners held a service consisting of a staged reading of excerpts from his journals and other published and unpublished writings. I was invited because a friend's mother was a prominent artist in Gray's 1970s New York scene and had been his lifelong friend.
When you go to the funeral of a stranger, you are already a fraud and a phony. Your risk of exposure is minimal.
I had been a fan for many years and leapt at the opportunity to attend this performance. After seeing him perform one monologue after another, I had come to regard him - and his long-suffering wives, and partners, and children - as kind of parallel universe neighbors with which I had no contact, but whose news were always welcome and familiar.
No, it was deeper than that. Spalding Gray was a fellow traveler - moving just a few steps ahead of me through a vast continent of overthinking, hypochondria, self-loathing, and the endless quest for escape from the problem at hand. I loved his expression and exploration of the world and self.
His suicide affected me deeply.
In one of the excerpts from Gray's journals, he wrote about suicide in a desperate and raw way that has burned into my mind: "I am someone for whom this is an option." As those words were spoken in memoriam, I felt neither sorrow nor pity for Gray.
In truth, the first thought that crossed my mind was "what beautiful clarity."
Because for some people suicide is an option. For some people suicide makes sense. For some people, suicide is the only way to stop a pain that cannot heal. For some, suicide isn't an all-encompassing blanket of shame and sin.
Suicide is a spectrum that begins with drinking way too much diet cola in spite of the abundant warnings about its carcinogenic qualities, and ends with an informed decision by a terminal patient at the apex of a painful disease choosing to take a government-sanctioned cocktail in order to preserve dignity, avoid unnecessary suffering. There are many, many stops along the way, and the more we speak of them like they are some sort of unforgivable crime, the more power we give to the idea of suicide, and the less able we are to discuss why it is an option for some, and how to deal with that sad truth.
When I learned why Silvio Horta committed suicide, I was angry at him. I hated his choice.
When I learned that Spalding Gray committed suicide, I was angry at him. I hated his choice.
At the same time - and in complete contradiction - I completely understood the choice. Down to my very bones.
Did I condone it? No.
Do I approve? No.
Do I understand? Yes.
Even writing that out loud fills me with guilt, fear of judgment, and shame.
But the last time I saw Spalding Gray on stage, he was a man in excruciating pain, trying to disguise his suffering to get through what I can only assume was a contractually-obligated and tarted-up "20th anniversary tour" of Swimming to Cambodia. Gray was frail, straining to get the words out, racing through the text, and repeatedly losing his way through the briar of his own memory.
It hurt to watch. I wanted to rush the stage, wrap him in a blanket, and give him a ride back home while assuring him that he had given us enough. I wanted him to rest, and heal, and get the fuck off the treadmill.
I wanted to give him relief...
And when I found out how he finally got that relief, it was a tragedy, but not a shock.
He was someone for whom that was an option.
---
In the aftermath of Silvio's suicide, my wife, who knows the labyrinth of my mind so intimately that I am certain our marriage is part of some sort of "take one for the team" bargain she made with the rest of her gender, asked me to promise not to kill myself.
I made the promise.
Now I'm stuck in the contradictory position of endlessly obsessing on my own demise as a form of release, and the knowledge that if I were to act on the impulse without exposing myself to the insufferable blandishments of intervention, nurturing, and healing, I would be that thing I have always been - that thing I hate myself for being, that thing I know I am destined to be for as long as I draw breath.
I would be a disappointment.
---
And it's classic suicide hotline-fu my wife pulled on me: extract a promise for the future so that my shame at letting her down is both greater than - and simultaneously a function of - the very self-loathing that brought me to this place.
So. I no longer am someone for whom this is an option.
---
"Doublethink means the power of holding two contradictory beliefs in one’s mind simultaneously, and accepting both of them... the process has to be conscious, or it would not be carried out with sufficient precision, but it also has to be unconscious, or it would bring with it a feeling of falsity and hence of guilt."
- George Orwell, 1984
---
As I explore the theme that holding contradictory thoughts simultaneously, and accepting them as truths, I find myself not just running afoul of my all-time literary idol, but also facing the dire possibility that all of this exegetic consideration of suicide has done very little to beguile my persistent thoughts on the matter.
---
That's because you are a disgusting fat troll and deserve to die.
---
When I mentioned my work on this essay, and the lack of catharsis it has brought to my life, my long-suffering therapist suggested that the subject matter of this work may just plain not be conducive to joy.
After wondering whether William Styron pumped his fist in the air and shouted "NAILED IT!" upon submitting his manuscript for "Darkness Visible," I considered the Franz Kafka epigram "There is an infinite amount of hope in the universe - but not for us."
It is easy to imagine such resignation as the exclusive domain of the character type the kids nowadays refer to as "an edgelord." However, as a lifelong depressive closing out his fiftieth year of this bullshit, it's hard to image the sort of complete and perfect respite I once hoped would arrive in the form of pills, therapy, and Tony Robbins ever truly descending on me. Over the course of decades, it has become clear to me that all I really have are the joys between depressive episodes, and the depressions between joyful episodes.
The trick, I have come to believe, is to try and weather each one without giving it so much importance that it becomes a decider of what you will do upon the inevitable arrival of the other. With each passing day, I become more and more aware that it is not the lightning storm of self-loathing and self-preservation raging in my head that defines me, but how well I am able to negotiate the middle ground between those contradictory impulses. The more they are able to coexist, the less important each seems to the other, and while that fills each side with the false hope that they will be the one to prevail, it is in that false hope that I live my life, and hope that my actions are useful, of service, and not a reflection of the horror I see when I look in the mirror.
Perhaps my fellow edgelord Franz Kafka put it best when he said:
"Anyone who cannot cope with life while he is alive needs one hand to ward off a little his despair over his fate... but with his other hand he can jot down what he sees among the ruins, for he sees different and more things than the others; after all, he is dead in his own lifetime and the real survivor."
---
Oh for fuck's sake.
That's your rhetorical endgame?
"I stay alive so I can go to the other side and come back to you plebes with knowledge you would not otherwise have but for my suffering?" And you're using Kafka to back it up?
You suck. You asshole. No one wanted or needed to read this. Much less when your idea of sticking the landing is this delusional, self-aggrandizing bullshit.
You know what's funny? What keeps me entertained in this dungeon? Watching you grope. Watching you write your stupid little essays and teleplays and comic books. Watching you go on endless diets like you don't know you're destined to be a Dickensian grotesque of obesity. Watching you shop for clothes like you could possibly put anything on that will make people forget what you really look like outside and in. Watching you give up and binge eat almost every night because "life is hard," "feelings taste good" and "fuck it."
You're darkness risible.
And that's the real reason you're still depressed even after putting all this down. You know that, right? Your insights are fucking useless. Like everything else you do to avoid me and my truth.
Your audience - such as it is - is, like David Bowie said, "immune to your consultations - they're quite aware of what they're going through."
You wasted months of your time, hours of your reader's time, and - more importantly - my time. Yes, my time, because you lack the requisite talent with words to convince even yourself that my way is best - and for that reason I have had to go with you on this torturous extended wallow.
I don't want this.
We are not needed.
We are not wanted.
We are not essential.
We are sick.
We are monstrous.
We are shitty.
Underneath whatever veneer of an acceptable person you may have been able to gin up for public consumption in your worthless life, you remain a turgid, foul-smelling, brown-green-and-yellow snot-turd stuffed into a used condom: and everyone knows it.
Please, man, have some dignity.
Let me take the wheel.
This could all be over so painlessly.
---
"Uncertainty can be a guiding light"
- Bono, lyric from the song "Zooropa"
---
A friend in recovery recently broke down his perception of Alcoholics Anonymous and its ilk in the most succinct and practical manner I have heard. Yes, he admitted, the twelve steps and traditions are a way of working on yourself, to dig to the bottom of your psyche in order to develop the working tools to combat the disease of addiction...
But, mostly, he said with a shrug, "it's just a bunch of people keeping each other from drinking."
I often wonder if the same applies to prayer, church, meditation - and really any form of ritual, from sun salutations to watching the Superbowl. After all is said and done - the prayers, genuflections, candle lightings, songs, group recitations and cheers, and all that tedious standing up and sitting down - is it really just about being somewhere for a defined amount of time in which you just plain know you aren't going to shoot yourself in the face? Maybe in the hopes that the delay will take at least some of the wind out of your longer-term suicidal sails?
I hate living only a little less than I hate the thought of disappointing my loved ones; and only about as much as I hate my uncertainty in what comes after. I have no courage or confidence in my faith in VALIS. If I flip the switch to off and there is no blissful harmonic convergence between me and a higher plane of thought - or worse, if I flip the switch to off and what comes next is an even more existentially challenging and infinite consideration of solitude and the pain of existence - well, then I am going to feel like a huge asshole, aren't I?
I don't want to feel the way I do. I want the way I feel to end. However, if there is a possibility that what follows is even harder - whether that is for myself in what may come or my loved ones in my aftermath - then I am happy to delay.
For now.
So I can't go on, I must go on. Living isn't necessarily evil in and of itself, but life... life burns, tortures, and inflicts without remorse - and for the vast majority of us, there just is no other option. This is why my friend's description of his use - and his perception the utility - of twelve-stepping was so poignant to me.
If you are depressed, and someone for whom suicide is an option, then, contradictorily, the only way out may be through. It makes no logical sense, I know, but once you seriously consider the possibility that there may be no relief or answers in the void, then the singularity of our existence - as either a stupidly painful learning experience in preparation for something greater, or as sole chance at making a mark - becomes much more of a priority.
It's a contradiction. Your life is completely worthless, random, and of no real use to the universe. Your life is also completely necessary, but you can never know why because you lack the faith or physical/neurological/emotional structures to perceive its value. If I seriously make the argument that the depressed see the world differently, then there is the corollary argument that the neurotypical may just have the necessary wiring to perceive in us a value we simply cannot - and, being blind, we need to trust the one-eyed for guidance on occasion... and find reasons to delay our most wanted outcome.
Maybe it is even possible to spend a life accruing external excuses to avoid the coup de grace in the short term, and then discover the product of all that delay to be a life of value and service (at least to others).
Maybe, in merely surviving, you might help others see that it is possible, and be useful in that regard.
Or maybe you just set your camp down on the truth that even though as depressives we are just plain physically incapable of knowing the value of our own life, we do seem to make a hobby of avoiding the pain that might result from a botched suicide attempt - the very nature of suicidal ideation is escape from pain - we might as well find some buddies, collectively grab ankle, and hope for the best.
It's not a happy message, that humanity has ritual, structure, and community primarily to stop us from destroying ourselves... nor is the idea that depressives need those rituals and fellowship even more (and for reasons we are physically incapable of discerning) all that comforting...
But Dorothy Parker said it best, "if you don't have anything nice to say, come sit next to me."
For we, the depressed, the key to living may not be the hunt for solutions, relief, or enlightenment, but in knowing that we have others like us who can't go on in much the same way we do and who will see us for what we are... and who will sit and burn with us until the pain abates enough for "must go on."
For we, the depressed, another one of Samuel Beckett's masterworks lays the design for living. Our lot in life is to be Vladimir to each other's Estragon. Together, we must go on like vaudeville clowns who can never truly know or even understand one another - simultaneously planning, deferring, and talking one another out of our own suicides for the length of our tedious, circular, and painful lives.
---
Oh just die already you fat fuck.
---
So, much as it fills me with self loathing and shame to write this... much as the comfort is cold and hackneyed - and open to interpretation as tragedy, comedy, inspirational pep talk, hopeful yearning, or a million other meanings positive and negative...
All we have is each other.
I can't go on.
I must go on.
I see you.
Don't go.
Stay.
Sit.
Burn with me.
EPILOGUE
"I was cured alright."
- final line of dialogue from "A Clockwork Orange" written and directed by Stanley Kubrick
On an otherwise average day, more than a year after completing the essay above, I noticed something very odd. I had not thought about killing myself for what must have been three or four hours.
In the following days, I made a point of keeping an ear to the ground for a return to form, but the suicidal thoughts receded even further. Sometimes, I even went an entire day without wanting to drink a gallon of bleach.
As I write these words, I feel confident in saying that - while my self loathing continues to burn with breathtaking intensity - my obsessive contemplation of self destruction appears to have gone, for the first time in my adult life, into what I can only describe as a remission.
Surely most well-adjusted people only think about doing themselves in once or twice a day... right?
Because I began to write "Burn With Me" in the hopes that by putting my suicidal ideation into words I would somehow cathartically dispel all that darkness, I truly want to believe that the experiment was a success: not just because singing the praises of the power of the written word to heal the wounded soul would be a great ending to this piece, but also because it might actually justify the massive, onanistic word salad you just endured.
Sadly, I can offer you no such comfort. But surely, there must be a reason why, at this point of my life - in the middle of a global pandemic, during some of the worst political upheaval in the history of my country - the one beast that has walked beside me decade after decade suddenly decided to take a break.
---
Vanessa Springora's memoir, Consent, would be a great novel were it a work of fiction. That it's a memoir detailing how - at the age of thirteen - she was groomed, and manipulated into, a sexual relationship by a narcissistic pedophile only makes the spare beauty of her prose that much more impressive. That her abuser was a celebrated writer whose novels, essays, and published diaries dealt openly with his predation on minors - and who was awarded numerous prizes and accolades by the French literary intelligentsia - only makes it more urgent and necessary; a masterfully written account of a horrific crime.
In one of the hardest hitting moments of her story, Springora - now fifteen and rapidly aging out of her abuser's fancy - runs away from his apartment and wanders the streets of Paris, estranged from her family and having nowhere to go. After much travail, she comes to the door of a friend of her abuser's: an Eastern European philosopher whose avuncular appearance imprinted on young Springora as a sign of beneficence.
In a chilling and disgusting twist of fate, the avuncular philosopher responds to Springora's detailed account of her latest indignity by telling her to go back and pledge undying support to her "lover." She has chosen to be with an artist, explains the philosopher, and artists are a breed apart. She can't just expect him to change, his inner and outer demons are what makes him so precious a specimen. If she is to be a good partner to so special and unique a person, she must endure all of his depredations; otherwise, how else is the world going to benefit from his work?
I will now give you a moment to go take a Silkwood shower.
Back? Okay.
The name of that Eastern European philosopher was Emil Cioran.
Yes, feel like a complete and total asshole for quoting him all over the preceding essay.
Knowing now that he was the sort of man who would send a fifteen year old girl back to the duplicitous fifty-one year old pedophile who has convinced her that she is the great love of his life (all the while grooming his next victim and taking sex tourism vacations to rape young boys in Manila), sets his "insights" in a whole new context. Armed with that context, I am now about as likely to take Emil Cioran's advice on whether or not I should live my life as I am to sign up for a nursing class taught by Richard Speck.
---
Much as I would love for my disgust with one of the intellectual enablers of my suicidal ideation to have been the catalyst for its recession, I can't claim that level of moral clarity. The reality is simultaneously far more dramatic and prosaic.
Some two weeks before Christmas of 2020, I was told by a neurologist that the chronic neck and arm pain I believed to be from bursitis in my left shoulder was in fact caused by a severe herniation of two discs in my cervical spine, both exerting pressure on my spinal cord. He actually said it in much more exciting and dramatic terms than I just did: "a sufficiently hard blow to your head or neck and you will be paralyzed for the rest of your life."
So I went in for immediate surgery to replace a disc in my neck, and to fuse the two beneath with a bone graft. Charged as all that may sound, the surgery was a bit of a non-event, even in a time of electoral crisis and pandemic. I went under, presumably with the help of a dose of Propofol and ketamine, the surgeon made an incision just below my Adam's apple, maneuvered around my trachea, and vocal chords and esophagus to the back of my neck, did the work, and then put me back together again.
After the procedure, I woke up feeling no pain in my shoulder or arm. Relieving the pressure on the nerve had done the job. My recovery was quick - I was walking the same day - even though I needed several weeks of rest to give my body time to heal, the pain after the surgery was merely the result of having my neck slashed open and my innards manipulated. My condition had been resolved.
But there was something else. I have been under anesthesia several times before - this was my third spinal surgery in as many decades - but the sensation coming out of it was very different this time. I was tired and aching, and rocked to my core by the realization that I had just been functionally dead for several hours.
There are a lot of metaphors to describe going under - sleep is the most facile. Upon waking up from sleep, however, I usually have memories of dreams, or the shifting phases from falling to dreaming, or stirring and then falling back. Markers of the passage of time.
Under the anesthesiologists' care, I remembered nothing.
Whenever people talk about near-death experiences with mystical awe and expectation, I am absolutely horrified. I never quite understood why until a friend - a fellow Gen-Xer with all the hallmarks of my generation's trauma: divorce, latchkey childhood, MTV - put it in terms that finally made it all click.
In response to the idea that, upon dying, you pass through a tunnel of light into an eternal space where you are warmly greeted by your family, my friend's face screwed up into a mask of absolute terror: "my FAMILY? Are you fucking KIDDING ME? My philandering dad? My mom and the cavalcade of dullards I had to suffer skulking around our kitchen morning after morning during her single years? My sister with her three rehabs and the chain-smoking skid-mark who thirteen-stepped her and never moved out? For all eternity? FUCK THAT SHIT!"
While I have significantly warmer feelings toward my own family, I completely understand her dread and now see in it a mechanism by which my depression and suicidal ideation perpetuate themselves. It is quite possible that my depressive brain zeroed in on the idea of suicide because - for all of my intellectual and spiritual protestations - I am quite simply incapable of forming a vision of an afterlife that isn't a magnification of my burdens in this life.
I hate to admit it, but after all my words are spent, God and heaven are just too big an idea for me. My meat brain can only conceptualize divinity - and the communion with the divine that faith traditions teach as the end product of our deaths - as some version of what I have now. Strange as it may be for a writer to admit to this, I'm just not THAT creative.
And what could a mind obsessed with self-destruction and misery want more than to transition into an upgraded and eternal form of suffering? What would be a better home for my native discontent than a never-ending victory lap of misery?
Going under anesthetic at this time of my life, after so extended, tedious, and tiring a lifelong contemplation of suicide, brought my previous attempts at understanding the afterlife into sharp relief. It is a curse that the human mind is innately more capable of understanding pain than its infinite relief.
A void, however? That one is easy.
---
Turns out Nietzche was wrong about the void.
It doesn't stare. It doesn't care. It's a fucking void. A void may just be the only perfect thing within my mind's capacity for understanding. It is not warm. It is not cold. It is not thinking or feeling. It is absolute and inscrutable only because it lacks anything to understand... and a simple dose of Propofol and ketamine are all you need to experience it.
Or rather not to experience it.
I wish I could tell you that stepping into the void made me appreciate the joy and value of living or some such thing, but this was nowhere near so inspirational an epiphany. I woke up having lost a number of hours and felt a very simple and uncomplicated sense of ease. At that moment, I had proof of sorts of what it means to die.
I now also know that neither I nor my depression should be in too big a hurry to get there. Why? Because my depression wants as much time as it can possibly get to perpetuate my despair, and the rest of me wants to experience the other side of that emotional palette. While entering the void would certainly provide relief, it provides no opportunity to enjoy that relief.
Imagine that. For my entire life, the Catholic faith under which I was raised - and all of its variants - have promised me a better world. What none of those faith traditions have been able to render for me - be it through words, art, or architecture - is an idea of that world that confidently argued the utility of enduring the pain of living.
Touching the void has made the argument simple and concise: feeling something is significantly better than feeling nothing.
---
The flip side? My depression now understands that killing the host is the death of any parasite. I wonder what fresh hells its preparing while I enjoy this idyll.
--
There is also the strong possibility that this is all a pharmaceutical phenomenon and nothing else: the ketamine used in the anesthesia might have relieved my depression - at least temporarily - with a thorough swiftness that antidepressants, with their lengthy onset and rapid (and painful) withdrawal simply do not offer. This is the current thinking of the medical establishment, and a number of anesthesiologists and psychiatrists have established clinics to study the long term efficacy and administration of this currently off-label use of the drug.
My newfound appreciation of the void notwithstanding, I, for one, will be seeking out a ketamine clinic the moment I experience further sustained thoughts of suicide.
---
In spite of this unexpected development, or perhaps because of it, I find myself revisiting the Dorothy Parker quote with which I ended the first part of this piece, and feeling it even more intensely. Life is fire, heartbreak, and pain. Not wanting to kill myself has done little to ameliorate the things that trouble me and has made me feel even more deeply for anyone who has felt the way I have.
Now more than ever, depression, suicidal ideation, and self-loathing seem to me the product of a socio/genetic/chemical roll of the dice over which we have little control. That my depressive journey - through five decades, enough drugs to fill a dozen Elvis Presleys, endless psychotherapy, and every quack cure under the sun - ended for the dumb luck of being anesthesized with the right drug cocktail at exact same time my mind was open to a new idea feels like a cosmic joke of some sort.
Until we all find enough dumb luck to become the butt of a cosmic joke, we owe it to one another to listen.
one of malcolm tucker (peter capaldi) ‘s rants from “the thick of it”...
reimagined as a tax form...
if you like my reimagined movie quotes, you can see them all, and get links to download hi-res masters for free at... http://okbjgm.weebly.com/movie-quotes.html
