All by Myself

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In my life, aside from my Facebook friends, I have three people I call my good friends. Two of them I see about once every other month, and the other is my roommate, who I see, if I’m lucky, once a week. I have two jobs where I interact with people regularly, and I have warmer relationships with some and simply professional relationships with others. During my time off, what little of it I get these days, I spend it writing, going for walks in the city, watching movies, and because he absolutely insists, cuddling with my cat. Someone recently expressed concern that I was lonely. 

I’m not. This is how I want my life to be. Maybe not working sixty-plus hours a week, but otherwise, like this. Writing is my passion. It means more to me than anything, and it’s a solitary pursuit. Also, I want to watch whatever dumb movie I want to watch without having to negotiate with anyone else. Walking in the city is something that can be done with others, and when she’s available, Nicole does it with me, and we have a great time. I like talking to people and hanging out, but I don’t need to, and after a run of long days at two jobs, I don’t particularly want to. 

I think maybe people overestimate the time Kate and I spent together. Toward the end of our marriage, I saw her for, at the most, an hour a day, and she used that time to check Facebook and play Charmed in the background. I was lonely for a long time with her—I didn’t have any friends at all when we were together—and I eventually grew to enjoy my own company. I’d been pretty solitary before that, even during my most social (2002-2003), and by this point with Kate, I had become a hermit. Not all of that has gone away. I don’t want it to.  

And so, if you want to hang out, that’s great. I love hanging out with you. If you don’t have the time, that’s too bad, but don’t worry, I’ll be fine. I now have some extra time to work on what I think is the best novel I’ve written so far.  

In short, I may be alone most of the time, but I’m not lonely. Not even a little bit. 

Paranoid

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I’ve come down with a bad case of paranoia.  

Something I’ve learned from nine months of job searching is that, if it looks too good to be true, it’s probably a scam. And so much about this job looks too good to be true. I won’t go into all the details because I’ll make myself crazy, but the crux is this: I was recruited to apply for a job I’m only marginally qualified for, and less than fifteen minutes after an interview I was positive I’d bombed, they offered me the job. That kind of thing doesn’t happen to me. It happens to exceptional people, and I’m not exceptional. (Some of you may want to argue with me on this point because you’re really sweet, but really, I’m not, and that’s okay.) 

It doesn’t look like a scam. The recruiting agency is real, and the recruiter herself has a page on LinkedIn (where she found me) that doesn’t look like it was put up on the fly. The company I interviewed is real, and there was nothing artificial about the office. (But still, Jeremiah, the job offer came from the recruiter, not the employer. Yes, Jeremiah, that’s how staffing agencies work—you’ve done work for four of them in the past six months, and it’s always like this. But she got the offer when I was on the phone with her, Jeremiah—that doesn’t happen. Good point, Jeremiah.)  

I’m losing my mind. So I ask you, how can I just relax until my (alleged) start date next Thursday? How can I trust that this one thing is actually working out for me? Help! 

Interview with the Temp

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I had a job interview this morning, and unlike most job interviews, it was pretty clear what they thought of me as it went on. This is how it went: I was seen by one person who asked me questions and described the job. She went downstairs to get her boss. Fifteen minutes later, her boss sits down with my resume and says, for real, “I’ll be honest, I’m not sure what you’re doing here.” She says that my editing background is solid and tells me all the ways this isn’t an editing job for about ten minutes before she lets me explain that I wasn’t there as an editor. She then brings me to her associate who is not sure he fully understands my jump from editing to administrative work. 

After they send me on my way, I call the recruiter who set up the interview and tell her how disappointed I am. Had they not seen my resume before calling me in? This was kind of a waste of my time. The recruiter told me to hold, her boss was on the line, and when she returned, she told me that was the job asking when I could start.  

It was quite the roller coaster this morning. 

Total Recall

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I have ADD, and it’s really bad. If I wasn’t taking a steady dose of time-release methylphenidate, I’d be like the guy from Memento. It’s bad enough that I got disability from the government for a while. And even with the drugs, and with the endless rituals and reminders I need to function, whole conversations, events, and important details simply don’t implant themselves in my brain.  

People don’t have a lot of patience for this, especially people I’ve been married to (who were more than happy to cash the checks when they came, but never to answer my questions). Nobody likes to repeat themselves, I get it, but I’m not asking you twice because I’m a flake or because I smoked too much pot or because I’m lazy, or even for fun. I can’t fake a functioning memory like I can fake a smile when I’m depressed. This is a serious medical condition.  

Do you have any idea how frustrating it is knowing you should know something, but it not being there? It’s like having a word on the tip of your tongue but you can’t quite remember what it is, but on a grander scale. When you add in the dread of someone I care for biting my head off because I had to ask something twice, this is really awful.  

All I can do is do my rituals and reminders and take my meds and try to not be annoying when I ask for clarification. I don’t really have a choice if I want to function in society. 

I’m just tired. 

Putting it to Rest

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I realized I’m missing something: I have no ritual, no way of marking the occasion when I finish writing a novel. Since early 2018, I’ve completed six of them, and I’m a few pages away from I realized I’m missing something: I have no ritual, no way of marking the occasion when I finish writing a novel. Since early 2018, I’ve completed six of them, and I’m a few pages away from my seventh—which I will likely finish at work because it is so slow there—and the only thing I do when I’m finished writing one is flip the page and get started on the next one. I don’t go out partying with friends because I don’t have any friends to party with, I don’t treat myself to a nice dinner because I do that whenever I want (or never now that I’m broke), and I don’t pop open a bottle of champagne for obvious reasons. I don’t even give the book a once-over and prepare it for publication because a) I wait months before I reread something I’ve written, and b) it’s not getting published. (I love to write. I write not to be read, but for the act of writing itself.) I kind of wish I had something to do, though. I feel like writing an entire novel is something to be celebrated. 

Memories Fade, Part 2

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I hate this day. I hate it so much. In August, I usually start dreading it and wondering how I’m going to feel this year. It’s been eighteen years. 9/11 is old enough to vote. It doesn’t haunt me most of the time, it doesn’t drive me to drink. I hardly think of it anymore. But I’ll never forget. And still that date rolls around. 

It’s just a normal day anymore, with the exception of Twitter and Facebook remembrances (like this one), but I want the world to stop. I don’t want to go to work. I don’t want anybody to go to work. I don’t want people to have Meet-ups or dates or parties. I don’t even know what I want people to do instead, I just don’t want them pretending that nothing happened today. 

Maybe it’s because I was there. I took the train to the World Trade Center stop only a half-hour earlier. I heard the plane crash into Tower 2 and carried on stuffing envelopes like nothing happened. I evacuated my building and looked up at the double-landmark I knew and trusted as my compass in New York City on fire. I was almost hit by a smoldering cell phone case that someone was likely wearing on their belt when they died. I thought the world was coming to an end. 

But it didn’t. And here we are. We got revenge on the people who caused it (as well as a whole lot of people who had nothing to do with it). Presidencies were won and lost. The Right went back to hating New York for being a bastion of moral depravity. The city rebuilt. And September 11 is just a normal day anymore.  

This anniversary makes me feel so lonely. It doesn’t seem like anyone else feels as intensely as I do about today, not after almost twenty years. And how would anyone know how I felt? I’m pretty good at hiding it. Most of the people I’ve met over the past ten years have no idea what I went through that day. I don’t have anybody to talk to about it, and even if I did, I don’t know what I’d say. I can’t even write a coherent blog post after counting down to today working on it.  

It’s been a long time. Never Forget. 

Memories Fade, Part 1

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I don’t want to be the guy who dwells on bad news and trauma, but this is something I’ll never forget. Part of it is because I literally watched it happen, and eighteen years isn’t enough to erase those images and those smells from my memory. I don’t think of it often as time has gone on, but on this date, I always do, and I feel really lonely anymore.  

Nobody checks to see how I’m doing whenever this day comes around, a day I start feeling the dread for around late August. (Although, to be fair, hardly anybody I’ve met over the past ten years knows about my experiences with it.) (Also, I’m willing to bet that the people who are aware of it don’t know what to say or assume that I don’t want to talk about it.) I’d be happy to talk about it, but that’s not the kind of thing you can just bring up, especially given how complicated the emotions are attached to it.  

And suddenly it arrives, and it’s nothing. There’s not a lot about it on social media anymore, and on the news, it’s mentioned pretty casually, before moving onto the next dumb-ass tweet from our president. But this was the defining event of twenty-first-century America. This mess we’re in right now directly ties back to what was planned in that cave almost twenty years ago. (September 11 led to the Iraq War, which was responsible for the election of Barack Obama, which was responsible for the election of Donald Trump and everything that has come with him. That’s just simplifying it.) Three thousand people died that day. Three hundred police and firefighter ran into the buildings I was running from, and they paid the price for their bravery. How do you forget that? 

I’m sorry. I just hate this day with a passion, and it’s just weird to me that it’s no big deal anymore. 

Strong Female Protagonist

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According to the Legend of Joss Whedon, during an interview he was asked why he creates so many strong female characters. He responded, “Because you asked that question.” 

I write a lot of female characters—the main character in my six-and-growing unpublished book series is a woman. The villain in my fan fiction is a woman. But I’m not doing it to be political. I’m doing it because, “Why not?”  

My fanfic villain was conceived to be a man, but as I sat down to write, I scribbled an “S” in front of “he,” and now she is menacing the sweet holy hell out of Connor MacLeod of the Clan MacLeod, but as a petite, frequently underestimated Native American woman as opposed to the imposing badass I’d first considered. Why did I add the “S” in the first place? Because part of the character’s origin is in their spouse getting murdered, and do we really need another dead wife? 

The thing is, it’s not that hard to write women. I don’t know why the entertainment world has such a problem with it. Yes, there are differences between the genders that, as a cis het-male I’ll never fully understand, but I can always ask. And even so, the real lesson here is that there are more similarities than differences between men and woman from a character-building standpoint. Men and women both want things, and as long as you understand that, for women, these wants don’t stop at pretty dresses and a man, you’re on the right track. 

So yeah, if somehow my books got out in the world and I was asked about my female protagonists, the first thing I’d say is, “You know who could write women better than me, even? A woman.” Then I’d say, “Women are people. Try writing people. I don’t see why this needs to be spelled out for you.” 

The “Why not” principal also works for races that aren’t yours, as well as sexualities. Just don’t make cartoons out of characters, and you’ll be fine. 

Surely You Jest

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Don’t read the comments.  

I just perused a column where the writer posited the question, re: the new Joker movie, do we really, in this day and age, need a movie about an aggrieved white man who murders a bunch of people because of perceived injustices? The comments were instantly full of a bunch of oversensitive snowflakes (i.e. white men on the Internet) were upset because the writer pointed out that the Joker was a white man. But then there were a few comments that made me want to be the Picard WTF meme, the ones that said, “You haven’t even seen the movie! How do you know it’s about a white man murdering a bunch of people? That’s not what the previews say it is.” 

So let me get this straight. You think that a movie called Joker, about one of the most famous mass murderers in comic book and cinema history, rated R, produced by Martin Scorcese, starring Robert DeNiro, set in a New York analogue in the eighties, is not going to be about a man murdering people? What do you think it’s about? A man who is beaten down by society (this is in the previews, by the way), puts on clown makeup, and the world is a happy place?  

But that question is pointless because yours came from a place of intellectual dishonesty. You know the movie is about a white male killing spree, and you’re just being argumentative because your feelings, as a white man, are hurt, and you have no real counterpoint. 

I’m just not interested in Joker because it doesn’t look interesting to me. I’ve seen these rampage movies before, and grease paint isn’t a really novel way of telling the same old story. And the Joker is a character that, like Batman, I think we’ve seen enough of. Also, in Todd Phillips’ filmography, Old School was the only movie I really liked. I know that puts me in the minority. The Internet is really excited about this movie, and God bless them. I hope they love it. But don’t tell me that it’s not about a disenfranchised white man murdering a bunch of people, because that makes you full of shit. 

Phantom Vapors

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I have been smelling a phantom, hallucinatory scent for about two years. It smells like someone mixed gas and barbecue sauce together and set it on fire. It’s pretty rare, maybe once or twice a month for an hour, so I didn’t think much of it, but I told my psychiatrist about it a few months ago. He did a ton of research and crossed the medications I’m taking off of the possible causes, and he has referred me to a neurologist, who I will be seeing next month.  

I’m not worried about having a tumor or anything. Like I said, it’s so infrequent that I barely even think it’s a thing. What I am worried about is cost. If I’m prescribed an MRI, how the hell am I supposed to afford that? I don’t have a steady job (but I still make too much for Medicaid), and my insurance is garbage.  

I allegedly live in the greatest country in the world with a health care system that I have been assured by those in power is also the best in the world, yet a procedure that would be a minor inconvenience to a Canadian or anyone from Europe is cost-prohibitive. If I do have a tumor, I’m screwed.  

My appointment is September 16. What happens after that is up in the air. God bless the USA.