Mike moved into the guest room two weeks ago. He ‘lost’ and recovered Ryu on his first day living here The situation seems a win-win for both of us.
Sara no longer speaks with, or acknowledges me. The reasons remain unknown (plural, in case).
Derrick works a lot, sometimes in Ohio. Which seems unfair to him.
Two motorcycle experts (comparatively speaking) declared the Ninja ‘perfectly fine.’ The balancing problem was in my head, not with the bike. One part relief, one part alarm.
I gained some weight. I began lighting weights last month, specifically bench-press, in addition to the routine gym exercises. Unfortunately, I also eat more... a lot more carbs. Whether the source of this new weight (143lbs) is muscle or fat remains a mystery.
Last week a cold sore developed on both lips. A colleague suggested a Lysine product. The cold sore is nearly disappeared after seven days. That means the suggestion was a good one.
The company paid for the upcoming DELE exam. I’ve not put much effort into studying. Weekends. Weekends are for studying.
The department hired three people. My boss delegated to me the task of crafting an interview process. I enjoyed immensely the change of pace.
Pokémon Black and White released in Japan last week. I couldn’t tear away from serebii.net, pokebeach.net and 4chan’s
/vp/ boards.
Monday, September 20, 2010
Sunday, September 5, 2010
The Crack-up
This post began on 19th of July. Several edits, revisions, periods of neglect spanning seven weeks lead to this addition on the Labour Day weekend.
I think about suicide, on average, once every week. I characterise the suicidal thoughts like radon gas: imperceptible, invasive, unwelcome and deadly. The thoughts usually lack a coherence. They permeate the structure of my consciousness seemingly from nowhere and without any dramatic fanfare. I notice their presence and then wave it away to disperse into the mental atmosphere. The whole dangerous event runs its inscrutable course fairly quickly, in about the time necessary to clear a traffic intersection. These incoherent thoughts also lack a tactic for execution. In other words, I don’t follow them through to a method of annihilation; rather, I feel a generic desire for an end without the means. Simply to end, to disappear like the moisture left upon a countertop by a damp rag: evaporating without mess, burden, or (in the context of modern bureaucracy) paperwork. Wishful thinking!
I relate to thanatos, the Greek concept of death desire, as a natural and manageable condition of my life. The narratives of patients managing terminal illness such as Aids or cancers inform the tactic (I cringe in apology for writing that). Like Hiv and tumours, the suicidal thoughts will not likely go away absent some kind of intervention. Medication, which I deplore on purely arrogant grounds, helps blunt the cutting edges that I occasionally bump up against. So I favour instead the recognition strategy: embracing this internal murderer, seeing exactly its terrible inference, and then showing it the exit doors. Sometimes that works, and -- like any pharmaceutical or philosophical intervention -- sometimes it does not. Those ineffective instances occupy the outliers of my experiences. I’m given to understand that one often finds life’s juicy lessons within the outliers. The piece of writing, that begins in the following paragraph, began -- or sprang up -- in the midst of a fierce onslaught of suicidal thoughts which lasted the major portion of a week. The doom desire clung to the air. Fear corroded the machinery.
---------------------------------
19 July 2010.
F Scott Fitzgerald wrote in 1936 that, of the varieties of emotional and mental damage one is vulnerable to suffer, the worst is “the blow from within... [from which] you realise with finality that in some regard you will never be as good a man again.” Fitzgerald worried, in the most public possible way, that the greatest apex of his professional potential could be seen only in the metaphoric rearview mirror. This anxiety had merit. Fitzgerald tumbled upwards through Princeton, living outrageously well during the 1920’s economic boom largely within the Euro-American public eye. The domestic public drew him to a ‘tie’ with Ernest Hemingway as America’s most popular living writer; yet, in 1936 he lived in a dingy hotel room with an overdrawn checking account. From that squalid hotel room, Fitzgerald wrote the confessional essay “The Crack-Up” for Esquire (the author submitted the essay under some duress, as the editor demanded something to publish when Fitzgerald pleaded for money). I don’t know a nuanced reaction to the essay series but the response from the ultra-masculine Hemingway is sufficiently delightful: he described Fitzgerald’s essay as “embarrassing to read.” Further, he made a personal offer to assist in the restoration of Fitzgerald’s dignity by arranging his murder in Cuba. I hate to agree with Hemingway but the essay is embarrassing.
“The Crack-Up” is a perverse triumph of human professional defeat. The essay makes a coherent case for the vertigo felt at the endpoint of loss: that ‘giving up’ is perhaps the best method of salvation because incoherence rules the days. Fitzgerald’s confessional reads as the best (if only?) professional suicide note I’ve ever encountered. And this is why I agree with Hemingway that the essay feels embarrassing, but not for man-of-steel Hemingway reasons. No, “The Crack-Up” embarrasses because it poses an uncomfortable paradox: that men of Fitzgerald’s staggering intellectual and creative calibre can create a new world on paper but cannot escape the crush of the real world. That sentence feels clumsy, so let me instead write that if Fitzgerald can experience and confess to a yawning crisis of confidence, it renders the mediocre men in similar circumstances such as myself (though eighty years later) feel near to goddamn hopeless.
“The test of a first-rate intelligence,” Fitzgerald famously defined, “is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time, and still retain the ability to function.” I ascribe that kind of intelligence to the survivors (endurers?) of the Nazi camps, those displaced by the South African apartheid state, Frantz Fanon’s colonial intellectual, and the Amnesty International organisation. These swaths of people fit Fitzgerald’s definition because they balance(d) some bitterly opposed binaries, such as death/life, exile/home, identity/alienation, liberty/confinement, yet retained the ability to function. I think -- I dare -- identify that what enables the machine of daily existence to continue operating is a lubrication named hope. Does this sound simplistic? Childish, even? Perhaps, but hope seems the sole common element present for a person or a group of people to want a better future than what the present promises. (Sidenote: I hope Sarah Palin accepts an offer at premature lionisation.) Nazi power seemed unstoppable in the 1940s, yet their appallingly high number of victims did not end their own lives; the South African National Party considered using a nuclear weapon upon domestic soil if necessary to maintain political control, yet citizens (within and uitlander) failed to collectively resign and flip through passbooks... you get my point, I hope? I point out Fitzgerald’s definition of intelligence and offer up hope as that which makes his definition functional because I feel the distinct lack of it.
Fitzgerald writes in “The Crack-Up” about receiving an unnamed diagnosis -- which given the evidence is clinical depression (or the 1930’s version of said). He describes the most profound effect of his condition as the jettisoning of a “consistent social circle” in favour of solitude. This makes sense. The depressed person is a selfish person. I don’t mean ‘selfish’ in the knee-jerk pejorative but in the denotative ‘focussed on the self.’ Reading Fitzgerald’s self-described diagnostic, I felt resentment and embarrassment. Wow, a whole social circle from which he can walk way? That must be nice. How terrible for the once rich and talented to have a coterie of friends and acquaintances. I’d like very much to have a social half-circle or social right-angle. Resentment. To walk away implies possessing a starting point, which Fitzgerald certainly did. I have no friends since moving to Holland (the one exception moved to Las Vegas in 2008). Acquaintances, yes. People whom I see frequently as part of a routine, yes. A list within a social network, yes. Friends, no. That’s embarrassing. I tried to compose a list of what can be forfeited upon the altar of giving up, and came up where I began: empty.
Two weeks ago I laid in a bath tub filled with warm water and two cups of dissolved Epsom salts. A white rag touched open wounds, congealed blood yielded slowly to the combination of pressure, temperature and chemicals; the water stayed clear, though. I cried because no person could hear me. When the crying stopped, I talked to myself to fill in the quiet. The bath tub seemed a metaphor for a casket, the house a tomb. Talking felt simultaneously silly and reasonable; reasonable because one should talk about a scary incident; silly because, aside from the very intelligent Ryu, I was very much speaking alone. At some point, I began responding to my voice with questions that were not rhetorical. These questions wanted answers, like the characters Gollum and Tyler Durden. Here are a few of the things I remembers saying:
You could have died, do you know that?
Why practise Spanish; why do you care?
God does not exist and that’s OK.
What five accomplishments are you proud to claim?
I resent Steven Recker for being the man of my dreams, and a fascist.
You have no right to resent other people.
This is the moment, without a doubt, I began to crack-up. This is the moment of analogy: Fitzgerald in his grubby hotel room, I in my bath tub; Fitzgerald pleading for money, I pleading for a sanity; Fitzgerald wrote for Esquire, I lay shrivelling in salty water.
Last night, I sat on the terrace of the café in town reading a short story. I looked up in time to watch a flock of seagulls glide westward, in the direction and time of Lake Michigan embracing the sun. The east wind carried the smell of both into the city. The birds were indistinct shapes against the obtuse angles of weak sunlight and the few clouds I thought best defined as coloured “dusty pink.” After what was likely a few seconds of time, I lost sight of the birds in the tops of centuries-old oaks. I looked ahead then, where young people loitered around the sidewalk. Two people at separate terrance tables read academic-looking books. It seems that writers use scenes like this to express “This is Life.” Taking in this little civic scene upon a backdrop of another summer dusk, I heard to my right the ascending sound of a pair of footsteps. Seize the day, I closed my eyes and said a mental ‘good bye’ to no-one (Ryu?) wishing desperately that one of the footsteps would shoot me in the head. A quick end, no appeal. The walkers passed behind; nothing happened, of course, except Life as usual. I picked up the book, disappointed.
Cracking-up feels like a persistent insult. The cracking person contemplates ‘why do I feel this way?’ without getting a satisfactory answer because that question masks the more insidious question ‘how come others don’t feel like this?’ The latter question feeds a loopback of isolation. How one measures the space between the two rhetorical questions I leave to the reader, but to the questioner, the distance is calculated in units of selfishness. The second question inevitably brings resentment. The happiness, real or perceived, of other people arrives into the cracking-up mind in the form of a an accusation: happy people don’t know X or Y, or else that smile’d drain from their faces. X or Y invariably (pun!) connects to one’s own obsessions. That obsession is terrible to neutralise because of its contradictory nature: the horror of resenting other people is the horror of resenting one’s self. It feels great, it really really does, to mentally lash out at other people. The tingling sensation felt mocking their fashion, their boyfriends, their existence is intoxicating because it feels brave. Feeling brave counts as the trait in the shortest supply for the crack’d person. However, that delightful assurance it really is a form of idolatry. Bravery looks a lot like a golden calf; or, a golden scapegoat. I hate people because I hate myself; I hate myself because I hate people. The cracking-up mind target others for scorn happens at random: cracking up isn’t logical. Fitzgerald made this point, describing his bitterness towards such random objects as: the radio, magazine adverts, country silences, human softness and hardness, hating the night and the day -- for differing reasons --, Celts, blacks, and retail clerks. I lack any Celtic acquaintances, but feel this same bitterness every day. Married people make me angry. Their wedding rings feel like a slap in the face. More to the point, they have an (ostensibly) loving partner and I do not. A man and woman seated at a table enjoying each other’s company makes me furious. At whom or what?
To the aforementioned, Fitzgerald describes as “inhuman and malnourished... is the true sign of cracking up.” That feeling counts as the most troubling facet of a crack-up precisely because the path out of resentment parallels (more or less) the path to healthy thinking on the whole. It’s easy to resent people because the focus of that bitterness seems so separate, so alien from the self. That misdirected attention and energy can easily become malice. Remember the cartoon “Ducktales?” In one of the many episodes of which stealing Scrooge McDuck’s money bin forms the plot, a paint-by-numbers brutish thief takes hostage the plucky elderly plutocrat. The episode would be, and maybe is, forgettable save for one line of dialogue: the thief stares menacingly at Scrooge and growls in a baritone “you know why I hate rich people?” [he doesn’t wait for Scrooge to answer] “Because they’re rich and I’m not!” The happy couple at the restaurant table are happy and I am not. Their happiness throws my lack of it into contrast; their togetherness highlights my solitude. I want to burn them down.
The fatigue remains constant: less so, at times; more so, at others. Right now. I want desperately now to leave the café for home where I fancy reading on the couch until half an hour before bedtime. This morning I sat in the public library (for the first time in a year!) at a table well-placed adjacent the floor-to-ceiling windows on the building’s east side. Ten minutes after arriving, I fought the urge to flee: to slink back into bed for a “short nap” (at 1126a). I fight the urge to fall asleep in my chair at the office. The bag full of material I bring to the office every day -- from Spanish exercises, newspaper articles, essays, books, and Pokémon games -- sits on the desk unacknowledged, day after day, week after week. I mentally collate a list of excuses to avoid engaging any of the stuff: how about after lunch? the phone will interrupt me; I’m tired; other people’s voices are distracting; It’s too cold/hot in here; etc. Rinse, repeat. Oh, and I didn’t cut the crass for a month.
Whatever vitality Fitzgerald seized upon to manage his cracking mentality, I wish lamely for the same. It seems that vitality never ‘takes’ a person; either one has it or lacks it, like brown eyes or a baritone voice. I feel a terror that feelings trumped experience, what Fitzgerald described as the morass of “I felt, therefore I was.” A quicksand.
I think about suicide, on average, once every week. I characterise the suicidal thoughts like radon gas: imperceptible, invasive, unwelcome and deadly. The thoughts usually lack a coherence. They permeate the structure of my consciousness seemingly from nowhere and without any dramatic fanfare. I notice their presence and then wave it away to disperse into the mental atmosphere. The whole dangerous event runs its inscrutable course fairly quickly, in about the time necessary to clear a traffic intersection. These incoherent thoughts also lack a tactic for execution. In other words, I don’t follow them through to a method of annihilation; rather, I feel a generic desire for an end without the means. Simply to end, to disappear like the moisture left upon a countertop by a damp rag: evaporating without mess, burden, or (in the context of modern bureaucracy) paperwork. Wishful thinking!
I relate to thanatos, the Greek concept of death desire, as a natural and manageable condition of my life. The narratives of patients managing terminal illness such as Aids or cancers inform the tactic (I cringe in apology for writing that). Like Hiv and tumours, the suicidal thoughts will not likely go away absent some kind of intervention. Medication, which I deplore on purely arrogant grounds, helps blunt the cutting edges that I occasionally bump up against. So I favour instead the recognition strategy: embracing this internal murderer, seeing exactly its terrible inference, and then showing it the exit doors. Sometimes that works, and -- like any pharmaceutical or philosophical intervention -- sometimes it does not. Those ineffective instances occupy the outliers of my experiences. I’m given to understand that one often finds life’s juicy lessons within the outliers. The piece of writing, that begins in the following paragraph, began -- or sprang up -- in the midst of a fierce onslaught of suicidal thoughts which lasted the major portion of a week. The doom desire clung to the air. Fear corroded the machinery.
---------------------------------
19 July 2010.
F Scott Fitzgerald wrote in 1936 that, of the varieties of emotional and mental damage one is vulnerable to suffer, the worst is “the blow from within... [from which] you realise with finality that in some regard you will never be as good a man again.” Fitzgerald worried, in the most public possible way, that the greatest apex of his professional potential could be seen only in the metaphoric rearview mirror. This anxiety had merit. Fitzgerald tumbled upwards through Princeton, living outrageously well during the 1920’s economic boom largely within the Euro-American public eye. The domestic public drew him to a ‘tie’ with Ernest Hemingway as America’s most popular living writer; yet, in 1936 he lived in a dingy hotel room with an overdrawn checking account. From that squalid hotel room, Fitzgerald wrote the confessional essay “The Crack-Up” for Esquire (the author submitted the essay under some duress, as the editor demanded something to publish when Fitzgerald pleaded for money). I don’t know a nuanced reaction to the essay series but the response from the ultra-masculine Hemingway is sufficiently delightful: he described Fitzgerald’s essay as “embarrassing to read.” Further, he made a personal offer to assist in the restoration of Fitzgerald’s dignity by arranging his murder in Cuba. I hate to agree with Hemingway but the essay is embarrassing.
“The Crack-Up” is a perverse triumph of human professional defeat. The essay makes a coherent case for the vertigo felt at the endpoint of loss: that ‘giving up’ is perhaps the best method of salvation because incoherence rules the days. Fitzgerald’s confessional reads as the best (if only?) professional suicide note I’ve ever encountered. And this is why I agree with Hemingway that the essay feels embarrassing, but not for man-of-steel Hemingway reasons. No, “The Crack-Up” embarrasses because it poses an uncomfortable paradox: that men of Fitzgerald’s staggering intellectual and creative calibre can create a new world on paper but cannot escape the crush of the real world. That sentence feels clumsy, so let me instead write that if Fitzgerald can experience and confess to a yawning crisis of confidence, it renders the mediocre men in similar circumstances such as myself (though eighty years later) feel near to goddamn hopeless.
“The test of a first-rate intelligence,” Fitzgerald famously defined, “is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time, and still retain the ability to function.” I ascribe that kind of intelligence to the survivors (endurers?) of the Nazi camps, those displaced by the South African apartheid state, Frantz Fanon’s colonial intellectual, and the Amnesty International organisation. These swaths of people fit Fitzgerald’s definition because they balance(d) some bitterly opposed binaries, such as death/life, exile/home, identity/alienation, liberty/confinement, yet retained the ability to function. I think -- I dare -- identify that what enables the machine of daily existence to continue operating is a lubrication named hope. Does this sound simplistic? Childish, even? Perhaps, but hope seems the sole common element present for a person or a group of people to want a better future than what the present promises. (Sidenote: I hope Sarah Palin accepts an offer at premature lionisation.) Nazi power seemed unstoppable in the 1940s, yet their appallingly high number of victims did not end their own lives; the South African National Party considered using a nuclear weapon upon domestic soil if necessary to maintain political control, yet citizens (within and uitlander) failed to collectively resign and flip through passbooks... you get my point, I hope? I point out Fitzgerald’s definition of intelligence and offer up hope as that which makes his definition functional because I feel the distinct lack of it.
Fitzgerald writes in “The Crack-Up” about receiving an unnamed diagnosis -- which given the evidence is clinical depression (or the 1930’s version of said). He describes the most profound effect of his condition as the jettisoning of a “consistent social circle” in favour of solitude. This makes sense. The depressed person is a selfish person. I don’t mean ‘selfish’ in the knee-jerk pejorative but in the denotative ‘focussed on the self.’ Reading Fitzgerald’s self-described diagnostic, I felt resentment and embarrassment. Wow, a whole social circle from which he can walk way? That must be nice. How terrible for the once rich and talented to have a coterie of friends and acquaintances. I’d like very much to have a social half-circle or social right-angle. Resentment. To walk away implies possessing a starting point, which Fitzgerald certainly did. I have no friends since moving to Holland (the one exception moved to Las Vegas in 2008). Acquaintances, yes. People whom I see frequently as part of a routine, yes. A list within a social network, yes. Friends, no. That’s embarrassing. I tried to compose a list of what can be forfeited upon the altar of giving up, and came up where I began: empty.
Two weeks ago I laid in a bath tub filled with warm water and two cups of dissolved Epsom salts. A white rag touched open wounds, congealed blood yielded slowly to the combination of pressure, temperature and chemicals; the water stayed clear, though. I cried because no person could hear me. When the crying stopped, I talked to myself to fill in the quiet. The bath tub seemed a metaphor for a casket, the house a tomb. Talking felt simultaneously silly and reasonable; reasonable because one should talk about a scary incident; silly because, aside from the very intelligent Ryu, I was very much speaking alone. At some point, I began responding to my voice with questions that were not rhetorical. These questions wanted answers, like the characters Gollum and Tyler Durden. Here are a few of the things I remembers saying:
You could have died, do you know that?
Why practise Spanish; why do you care?
God does not exist and that’s OK.
What five accomplishments are you proud to claim?
I resent Steven Recker for being the man of my dreams, and a fascist.
You have no right to resent other people.
This is the moment, without a doubt, I began to crack-up. This is the moment of analogy: Fitzgerald in his grubby hotel room, I in my bath tub; Fitzgerald pleading for money, I pleading for a sanity; Fitzgerald wrote for Esquire, I lay shrivelling in salty water.
Last night, I sat on the terrace of the café in town reading a short story. I looked up in time to watch a flock of seagulls glide westward, in the direction and time of Lake Michigan embracing the sun. The east wind carried the smell of both into the city. The birds were indistinct shapes against the obtuse angles of weak sunlight and the few clouds I thought best defined as coloured “dusty pink.” After what was likely a few seconds of time, I lost sight of the birds in the tops of centuries-old oaks. I looked ahead then, where young people loitered around the sidewalk. Two people at separate terrance tables read academic-looking books. It seems that writers use scenes like this to express “This is Life.” Taking in this little civic scene upon a backdrop of another summer dusk, I heard to my right the ascending sound of a pair of footsteps. Seize the day, I closed my eyes and said a mental ‘good bye’ to no-one (Ryu?) wishing desperately that one of the footsteps would shoot me in the head. A quick end, no appeal. The walkers passed behind; nothing happened, of course, except Life as usual. I picked up the book, disappointed.
Cracking-up feels like a persistent insult. The cracking person contemplates ‘why do I feel this way?’ without getting a satisfactory answer because that question masks the more insidious question ‘how come others don’t feel like this?’ The latter question feeds a loopback of isolation. How one measures the space between the two rhetorical questions I leave to the reader, but to the questioner, the distance is calculated in units of selfishness. The second question inevitably brings resentment. The happiness, real or perceived, of other people arrives into the cracking-up mind in the form of a an accusation: happy people don’t know X or Y, or else that smile’d drain from their faces. X or Y invariably (pun!) connects to one’s own obsessions. That obsession is terrible to neutralise because of its contradictory nature: the horror of resenting other people is the horror of resenting one’s self. It feels great, it really really does, to mentally lash out at other people. The tingling sensation felt mocking their fashion, their boyfriends, their existence is intoxicating because it feels brave. Feeling brave counts as the trait in the shortest supply for the crack’d person. However, that delightful assurance it really is a form of idolatry. Bravery looks a lot like a golden calf; or, a golden scapegoat. I hate people because I hate myself; I hate myself because I hate people. The cracking-up mind target others for scorn happens at random: cracking up isn’t logical. Fitzgerald made this point, describing his bitterness towards such random objects as: the radio, magazine adverts, country silences, human softness and hardness, hating the night and the day -- for differing reasons --, Celts, blacks, and retail clerks. I lack any Celtic acquaintances, but feel this same bitterness every day. Married people make me angry. Their wedding rings feel like a slap in the face. More to the point, they have an (ostensibly) loving partner and I do not. A man and woman seated at a table enjoying each other’s company makes me furious. At whom or what?
To the aforementioned, Fitzgerald describes as “inhuman and malnourished... is the true sign of cracking up.” That feeling counts as the most troubling facet of a crack-up precisely because the path out of resentment parallels (more or less) the path to healthy thinking on the whole. It’s easy to resent people because the focus of that bitterness seems so separate, so alien from the self. That misdirected attention and energy can easily become malice. Remember the cartoon “Ducktales?” In one of the many episodes of which stealing Scrooge McDuck’s money bin forms the plot, a paint-by-numbers brutish thief takes hostage the plucky elderly plutocrat. The episode would be, and maybe is, forgettable save for one line of dialogue: the thief stares menacingly at Scrooge and growls in a baritone “you know why I hate rich people?” [he doesn’t wait for Scrooge to answer] “Because they’re rich and I’m not!” The happy couple at the restaurant table are happy and I am not. Their happiness throws my lack of it into contrast; their togetherness highlights my solitude. I want to burn them down.
The fatigue remains constant: less so, at times; more so, at others. Right now. I want desperately now to leave the café for home where I fancy reading on the couch until half an hour before bedtime. This morning I sat in the public library (for the first time in a year!) at a table well-placed adjacent the floor-to-ceiling windows on the building’s east side. Ten minutes after arriving, I fought the urge to flee: to slink back into bed for a “short nap” (at 1126a). I fight the urge to fall asleep in my chair at the office. The bag full of material I bring to the office every day -- from Spanish exercises, newspaper articles, essays, books, and Pokémon games -- sits on the desk unacknowledged, day after day, week after week. I mentally collate a list of excuses to avoid engaging any of the stuff: how about after lunch? the phone will interrupt me; I’m tired; other people’s voices are distracting; It’s too cold/hot in here; etc. Rinse, repeat. Oh, and I didn’t cut the crass for a month.
Whatever vitality Fitzgerald seized upon to manage his cracking mentality, I wish lamely for the same. It seems that vitality never ‘takes’ a person; either one has it or lacks it, like brown eyes or a baritone voice. I feel a terror that feelings trumped experience, what Fitzgerald described as the morass of “I felt, therefore I was.” A quicksand.
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