Tag Archives: melancholy

A Eulogy

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February 22, 2024

A Eulogy

On Wednesday, 21 February 2024, at approximately 3:30 a.m., I made the decision to end Newcastle’s life. Everyone I’ve spoken to about the subject told me that I’d know it was time—that he’d tell me. I didn’t understand. I’ve spent the past three weeks in a near-constant state of stress. I spent mornings on work-from-home Fridays and Mondays, along with the weekends, begging him to come out from under the bed. In the afternoons, he would. He would walk to the food bowl, eat (less and less each day), drink some water, go to the bathroom, and yell at me to come pick him up like a baby. But after I got home from work at 1:00 p.m. on Tuesday for a telehealth appointment, he had found a space under my bed that was dark and cramped, and he hasn’t come out.

Ordinarily, when I would lie down on my bed at night, he positioned himself at my feet like the lions at the New York Public Library (Patience & Fortitude/Hallelujah & Amen/Run & Hide/Rack & Pinion, whatever their names are). He’d done this since he was a kitten. I think he was protecting me from the monsters. After I was asleep, he’d go somewhere else until breakfast. He didn’t do this Tuesday night.

Last night, I dreamt that he was fine. He jumped onto a stack of boxes I still haven’t unpacked to get my attention. The dream faded, and I found myself on an empty bed in an empty apartment, and I remembered. I gave him one of those yogurt tubes that cats will maul you for, and he ate some. I was so happy, I gave him another one, and he turned around and faced the other way. That’s when I knew.

Between crying jags, I made the preparations. I reached out to a pet hospice that makes house calls; it’s expensive, but this was the last time I’d spend money on him. I found a pet grief counselor to talk to after. I canceled his quality-of-life appointment Friday, and I canceled his twice-monthly kitty litter shipment, and let the online pharmacy know we couldn’t be needing their services anymore. I scheduled some time off work and arranged coverage for my job.

I don’t know what I’m going to do with his stuff. Because it’s a handy place to stash art supplies, I’m going to keep the cat tree I’d planted next to my desk so he could take a nap with Dad while Dad was working. He never used it because he’d rather lie down on Dad, preventing Dad from working.

He’s never going to do that again.

I asked Nicole to be there, less for me and more for her and him. When Nicole lived with Kate and me in 2012, she and Newcastle had a pretty great relationship. When we moved in with her five years ago, she was his auntie, though I’m pretty sure he thought of her as Mom. She gave nicknames to all the cats she’s lived with as an adult, so Henry is Gibbon, Andrew was Gray Cat, Magik was Badgley, and Newcastle was Babycat, shortened to Bebe.

Newcastle was an ugly, sickly kitten. They were going to put him to sleep when Kate rescued him and nursed him to health. This was during the six weeks between my deciding to move to Bloomington and me actually doing it. As she was cleaning bloody snot off the walls and giving his greasy body baths, she told me that she intuited that he wasn’t her cat. She didn’t know whose he was. After I’d been living with her a while, she realized that she couldn’t separate us.

When he wanted to play as a young adult, he’d run up to me, meow, and do a backflip. He was like a dog, always at my heels, playing fetch. When I’d taunt him with the birdie on a string, he’d reach a point where he’d just grab it in his teeth and walk away. I always let him take it to his den. He’d earned it. It’s been a long time since he’s played with me. Until Tuesday, he just wanted to snuggle.

He also did this thing where, before guard duty started at night, he had to sit on my chest and massage my throat. This wasn’t exactly comfortable for me. It seemed to be a compulsion, and he always had a serious look on his face when he did it, like it was his job. And yet he purred the whole time. If he came to bed and found me spooning Kate, he’d tap me on the shoulder until I moved down to my back. I tried massaging his throat with my thumbs to see how he liked it, and it turned out he liked it a lot. It’s been a long time since he’s done that.

I saw a movie the other day. I’d put it on so I’d have something to listen to while I drew, but it turned out to be engrossing, and I brought my iPad to bed and pet Newcastle while I watched it. Ben Kingsley played a good-natured senior citizen who befriended an alien, and Jane Curtain played an elderly woman with a cat so elderly it couldn’t walk anymore. Another character tried to persuade her to put her cat to sleep, and she said, “He’s all I have.” She took a breath and added, “He’s all I had.” Newcastle spent his last three days under the bed, not eating, not going to the bathroom, and only coming out for water. When I looked for him, he was just a pair of yellow eyes just out of reach.

Newcastle loved me. He loved me when I was depressed. He loved me when I was manic. He loved me when I was angry. He loved me when I went on long vacations. He loved me when all I wanted to do was hide. He loved me. I’ve never had that kind of devotion before, and I can’t imagine I ever will again.

I’ve never felt as lonely in my life as I have this past month. My hobbies are reading what I want to read, watching what I want to watch, blasting whatever music moves me and me alone, and writing and drawing. These aren’t social hobbies. Even when I lived with Kate and Nicole, people with whom I spent most of my time, and even when I drew apart from both of them, I always had Newcastle.

I never doubted him, but after the move, I could never be sure how he was doing. When the vet gave me the diagnosis of his kidney failure, I watched him so closely I got headaches. The vet gave me a couple of months. It’s only been two weeks.

The thing that upsets me the most, as I sit here in bed without him, typing this, is that I’m going to get used to his being gone. I’m not going to come home from work or from the store and look for him. It won’t bother me when I sit down at my desk to work, and I don’t get interrupted by his begging for attention. That editors and coworkers won’t see him draped over my shoulder and ask after him. I don’t want that to be normal. I don’t want this pain I’m feeling to ever end. But it will. I will feel better. I’ll go back to work on Tuesday. My gas bill is due tomorrow. I need to run to the store to pick up half and half.

Today, 22 February 2024, at approximately 9:30 a.m., Newcastle died, his face in Dad’s hands.

When the cardiologist diagnosed him with congenital heart failure, he gave Newcastle a year. That was in 2015. I had twenty years with him. It wasn’t enough.

The Limits of New Relationship Energy

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In the summer of 2000, I had grown apart from all of my friends. I was then, as I am now, socially anxious, but one day, I set a goal: I was going to have a conversation with one stranger every day after work in Manhattan before I went home. I succeeded, and a couple I chatted with about the band The London Suede (or Suede in their native England) invited me to a party. Then, as now, I couldn’t imagine a worse place to be than at a party where I knew literally no one, not even the hosts.

I made myself a deal: if I would go to the party and stay for an hour, minimum, I would go to the free concert with Mike Doughty, formerly of Soul Coughing. (There was another band playing after him, a little group no one’s ever heard of called They Might Be Larger Than Average? They Might Be Enormous People? They Might Be The NFC Football Team From New York? They Might Be Something.)

I went to the party, and I went to the concert (Mike Doughty was a huge disappointment), and keeping with my goal of talking to strangers, I forced myself to talk to the really beautiful woman dancing to the intermission elevator music like she was a marionette and her puppeteer had the hiccups. I walked up to her and internally smacked myself in the head when I said to her the following, “You must really like this music.” After a brief chat, she told me that my liking and wanting to illustrate comics was a deal-breaker, and she would not go out with me.

During our first date, she kissed me. Our second date, she tested me, and I passed. We saw X-Men in the theaters. Her last boyfriend, the reason for the deal-breaker that wasn’t, would not have found the humor in the movie that was unintentionally pretty goofy. (She tested me again later with my favorite movie, The Matrix, which has a surprising amount of comedy between the grab-you-by-the-lapels philosophy and the pointless bloodbaths.) Our third date found us on the Brooklyn Bridge and led to her falling off the bed when she was taking my pants off.

Her name was pronounced AND-ree-uh, but I pronounced it Ahn-DRAY-uh. I don’t know why.

Speaking of goofy, she was really goofy. That was one of the things I loved about her. Our honeymoon lasted the first six or seven months we were together, laughing, holding hands, being horny, and just having fun with each other. Unfortunately, the summer of 2001, I lost my job and sank into a deep depression, which led to me being unforgivably unpleasant, which I usually am between Memorial and Labor Days. Literally the day the heat broke and I started to recover was September 11, 2001. Unfortunately, her thirtieth birthday was September 13, 2001. We limped along as a couple until February 2002, when we were heading in different directions socially, and I put our relationship out of our misery.

The thing about her was that her last relationship was the worst relationship she ever head, followed by the one before it, so she exited us hating my guts. I had friends who had mutual friends with her, and my name could not even be mentioned around her without a meltdown. And that makes me sad. I’m one of those people who sees the past with rose-colored glasses (despite knowing how miserable I was through much of it), so I knew it was over, and I understand why, but I still remember how good it was when it was good.

For a long time, I thought the was “The One,” and she’s still one of the most important relationships I’ve ever had, even though we didn’t even last a year and a half. I remember walking with her through Prospect Park, listening to her laugh when we watched an episode of The Muppet Show for the forty-seventh time, spending a Halloween party dancing like we were the only people in the apartment. I was really, really in love with her, and that was a good feeling. I will never forget it, no matter how much she hates me.

That brings me to twenty-one years later and the Doctor Who fanfic I’m tinkering with. I’m not sure why, but I decided to base the Nth Doctor’s companion on her. Like my Andrea, she’s impatient, self-righteous, enthusiastic, and goofy. She’s also a gifted collage artist. When it came time to illustrate her, I found an album of pics that her professional photographer brother took and tried to use them as a reference. That did not work at all. So this weekend, I tried again, but did it entirely based on memory. This time I think I nailed it. Only a handful of people, including my parents and Barry, have any experience with her, and they have likely forgotten what she looks like, but this is how I remember her. I just wish there was some way to share it with her.

Living in Infamy

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For the first few years, the mantra was “Never Forget.” Cruising through Facebook and Tumblr today, it’s clear we’ve forgotten. Last year, I wrote about how September 11 is fading because it’s not the worst thing that’s happened to this country in the past twenty-five years. But it’s the worst thing that’s happened to me.

After twenty-two years and an assortment of pressures in my current life, I don’t really have anything to say today. This wouldn’t be the first time. For the first ten years I only wrote two journal entries on this day, one in 2005, one in 2011. Since then, I’ve written about it inconsistently. All eight blog entries about it can be found here:

However, as I’ve noted the significance of the day receding in the public consciousness, I think it’s important for me to mark the occasion by not going into work and by writing something.

Last year, I penned a novel in need of a serious rewrite about a female assassin. I wanted to set it in New York, but I wanted to set it in my New York (see September 11, 2011), so I set it in 2001. And because it might be cathartic, I set it in September of 2001. As my memories of the actual event and the TV coverage become blurred, I wrote “Chapter 6: Living in Infamy.” It’s longer than my usual posts, but it would mean a lot if you took the time to read it.

Chapter 6

Girl of my Dreams

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I could say I don’t dream, but humans will die if they don’t dream, so I’ll say I don’t remember them. Every once in a while, I’ll get one that sticks with me and inspires me. In 2005 or 2006, I dreamt that a middle-aged mentor type was tempting me to smoke marijuana (which I hadn’t done by that point for over a year) in the library by saying, “Let’s take a walk on the green,” a phrase that I don’t think was used by a marijuana smoker at any other point in history. I was also a student in high school, and I was my age at the time (let’s see, 2005 was eighteen years ago, so that would have been twelve), and I had a thing going on with a fellow student. I took the imagery, reduced the creep factor, and penned my first novel, posting it on LiveJournal while I was writing it.

A side effect of marijuana withdrawal is vivid dreams, which would explain why I’ve woken up over the past few weeks, swearing I would write this down as soon as I finished brushing my teeth, then forgetting everything. The other night, though, grabbed me. It wasn’t the part where Kim Basinger came onto me and eventually kissed me. Of course not—I think kissing is gross. It wasn’t that I tracked down Clark so I could brag. Clark was a childhood acquaintance of my ex-wife who moved to Bloomington while we were there who turned out to have a lot in common with me, and we became good friends. Ultimately, he was Team Kate, and like everyone else I met through her*, he ghosted me following the divorce.

But what got me so much I didn’t forget, even after brushing my teeth, was what happened when I was lying in the hammock in my backyard. The hammock exists in real life, though I haven’t touched it in over a year, during which it rained an average of every third day. Approaching me from the alley on a dirt bike was a slight figure wearing a hoodie, hood up. The figure hopped off the bike, let it fall, and rushed over to me. It was dusk, so it took me a while to figure out it was a girl in her mid-teens, her face obscured by the shadows. We fell into an easy conversation. I don’t know what we were talking about, but it had to do with my book. Eventually, she pushed her bike home, and I walked with her.

We did this every day—she’d meet me on the hammock, always at dusk, and we’d walk together through the dirt road that cut through my neighborhood. The hood stayed up until the last trip together when she pulled it down. I don’t know what color her hair was because of the grayish blue of the sky and the amber of the street lamps, but she was pretty, with delicate features. She also had the scars of a Glasgow smile, which is one name for the Joker’s disfigurement in The Dark Knight. It didn’t upset me, and it never occurred to me to even wonder where it came from. All I saw was the girl’s unique face.

That wasn’t the reason it was our last walk together. She invited me over to dinner to meet her family, but when I tried to drive over to her house, I couldn’t find it. And in the way that dreams will change the subject, it wasn’t about the nameless girl anymore.

The scars aren’t the reason I haven’t stopped thinking about her for the past couple of days either. It was her positivity. She had a warm, friendly, energetic personality that made me feel at ease, the way no stranger, or most people I know can. Our conversations, even though I don’t remember what they were about, were intimate. She didn’t think of herself as ugly, and the scars didn’t get in the way of her finding someone to talk to. I feel like I could learn from that.

In the way I took the classroom and the relaxed mentor of that dream eighteen years ago and spun it into a long tale, I’d like to write about this girl, but I don’t have any ideas for a story. And on top of that, I don’t want people shipping the me character and the girl. I’m thirty years older than she is, and even the idea of being her friend is already kind of weird.

In the way that I dreamed about falling in love when I was young, I dreamed about making a close friend, something I have a dearth of. The day after I watched a goofy Marvel franchise descend into DC darkness, I could use a little positivity. I have a new character now. She just needs a name and she needs a story.

* With a pair of exceptions—though she actively reached out and tried to recruit them to her side.

** Which was the dirt road in front of the house I lived in in high school.

Man’s Best Friend

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I just got a second opinion about Newcastle’s latest health crisis. He’s nineteen years old with a congenital heart condition and now hyperthyroidism. None of the treatments are particularly savory—either for price or how difficult they’re going to make Newcastle’s life. I don’t want to buy more time with him by making him miserable and confused. (“Why is father sticking his finger down my throat?”) And I can’t imagine he’s got long anyway.

When I asked my regular vet what would happen if I chose not to treat it, she gave me a huge guilt trip. When she was listing the treatments, she mentioned a topical ointment, but when I asked about it and told her it was the most appealing, she shamed me for not caring about my cat. A little discomfort a couple of times a day is better than all the suffering he would go through if the ointment didn’t work.

When I talked to my parents, they said, “He’s just a cat.” They didn’t say it in a derogatory way, but as a statement of fact. I trust my mother’s impartiality on this issue despite Newcastle earnestly trying to kill her.

So I got a second opinion. This doctor told me about the effect untreated hyperthyroidism could have, especially on his heart. She told me that cat could possibly live five or six years untreated, but not likely. She looked at his medical records and told me Newcastle could live another three years, but a lot less if the hyperthyroidism went untreated. She said it’s in the early stages, so I could just monitor him for a few months. I basically went to a second vet looking for permission not to treat him, what I got instead was peace of mind and total honesty.

I let Newcastle into my backyard this afternoon, and I monitored him the whole time so he didn’t get into any trouble. I watched him, clumsy, slow, and arthritic, explore. His feet walked on loose soil and packed concrete, and he picked and chose which plants to sniff and which ones to snack on. He escaped into the neighbor’s yard before I could stop him, but I lured him out, using myself as bait. I had brought my phone out with me because I expected to be bored. I was not. I was transfixed.

Overwhelmed, he sat down, and I understood what I want. I want my cat to be this happy until it’s time for him to retire. Nothing will ever compete with the jungle outside the back door, but I’m giving him extra scritches, longer cuddles, some human food, and maybe a spa day or two. And if this means making each other miserable for twenty seconds a day, then I’ll do it. I’m not ready for him to go, and if I can buy another three years, then here’s my credit card. On the other hand, I will not extend the life of a suffering animal just because of my feelings.

Newcastle is not suffering, though. He got to see the backyard. Life is good. I ordered the ointment.

Mud Simple

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When I was a kid in the mid-eighties in a neighborhood called Indian Hills at the eastern border of Gallup, New Mexico, there were these dirt ditches. One of them was behind my house, and it was like Disneyland for kids who couldn’t go to California.

Every August at that time, we’d get a monsoon, and the eponymous hills of Indian Hills (known colloquially as the Hogbacks) would disgorge thousands of pounds of mud, which would flow down the street, mix with the ditches, and pour down our cul du sac like a river, and when the clouds parted, all that was left was a thick layer of muck.

It was glorious. My friends, Eric from a block over would join me, along with Will, who lived on the other side of the neighborhood, and Max, the coolest guy I knew, who lived at the end of our cul du sac, would join my sisters and me in this celebration of unbridled ickiness. I remember finding cat poop buried in these ditches. When we got hungry, my parents hosed us off, and we could come inside again. It was the most fun we’d have all year.

In 1986, we moved away, but two years later, we returned to rent a house identical to our previous one, only across the street. And those assholes had paved the ditches and installed drainage so that the mud was directed in an orderly fashion into what passed for the Rio Puerco, the river that was technically not there. I was twelve at the time and on the cusp of being over that kind of thing (thirty-five years later, this is decidedly not true), but I still enjoyed the majesty of those mini-mountains gifting us kids with the thing we wanted most: to become utterly disgusting.

Never again.

I know why they did it. The mudslides crippled the neighborhood every year, like clockwork. It took countless dollars to clean it up, and as Indian Hills expanded and grew more popular, that kind of thing just wasn’t acceptable in a functioning city.

But I still remember getting shoved into the muck by Max, who would get shoved in return, and shouting and being a goddamned kid, and I remember it being taken away from me, and this being my first real taste of how adults can suck the fun out of everything.

Trigger Warning

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This post has a pretty big trigger warning on it, for reasons that will become apparent very quickly in the next paragraph.

This past Thursday, during my commute home, so about four o’clock, I was sexually assaulted on the DC Metro. I won’t tell you exactly what happened because I’ve been reliving it pretty steadily for the past week, and I don’t feel like immortalizing it. I can tell you what happened after. I was in a crowded train, and I screamed at the guy, and nobody saw or heard a thing. They didn’t mind looking at me until I looked back, then it was the floor or the person next to me. I was sexually assaulted in front of dozens of people, and no one saw anything. 

My attacker sat down in the closest available seat and stared at me, who was standing by the door. When a couple got between us, he changed seats, moving through the crowd like he wasn’t even there, his eyes always following me. I knew right then that this guy was going to follow me home. Sure, I picked this place because it was right by the stairs to the mezzanine at my stop, but there was only one exit, a long escalator ride, and no Metro personnel in the station at all. This guy could assault me again or worse, and no one was coming to help me. When we reached my station, I waited until the door was closing, then I slipped out and went home.

I still spent most of the evening with the blinds closed, hoping that he didn’t backtrack to my stop to find me. When I woke up the next day, I wondered if he wouldn’t be waiting at my station for me when I would have to go back to work on Tuesday. Maybe he remembered which train I was on and which car I’d chosen, and he’ll be waiting for me when I get out of work. 

I feel like I should underscore how utterly alone I felt when I got home Thursday. I was the only other person in a crowded train car, and when I thought about who to talk to about this, I was reminded that I had no one to talk to. I have texting friends, and I reached out to a few of them, and they got back to me after an hour or so. Nicole was in bed in Romania. I called my mom, which I’d rather have avoided, but I had to speak to someone with a voice. One of my friends did call me several hours later, and she was a godsend, but for the first hour or so after the incident, I was on my own, and I wasn’t sure that was a bad thing. 

With the exception of the few of the friends I’d reached out to on Thursday, as well as an HR rep I spoke to on Friday, I hadn’t told anyone about this. I’m not ashamed—violated, but not ashamed. This wasn’t my fault. The reason I’m avoiding it is because I hate how everybody looks at me. I hate the catch in their voice when they process it. They’re not doing anything wrong—it’s a natural reaction to hearing something awful like this. But I still hate it. 

I felt alone on the Metro. I felt alone at home. And I felt alone because I’m a man. This is not someone who believes that men have it worse than women, but they don’t warn a guy this could happen, do they? No, they don’t. In fact, unless it happens to you, the only thing you are likely to hear about male sexual assault is how goddamned funny it is. From “Federal pound-me-in-the-ass prison” in Office Space to Ving Rhames getting hilariously raped in Pulp Fiction, to little kids make dropping-the-soap jokes, male sexual assault is fun for the whole family.

Victims are made to be overly feminine, like the “bitch” trope in prison (Ben Kingsley had a bitch in a Marvel short that can be seen on Disney+)    . The reason why is that a real man would never let that happen to them. Fuck that, I don’t want to be a real man. Real men are assholes. Besides, what was I going to do? Was I going to punch or kick the guy into unconsciousness? Wrestle him down and present him to the non-existent Metro cops? What if he had a knife? What if he kicked my ass back even harder? I couldn’t count on concerned citizens coming to the rescue, that’s for sure. 

I’ve chosen not to go to the police with this. It will accomplish nothing. I left him on a Maryland-bound train. I don’t have any details on the train itself that would lead them to the guy. The suspect was wearing a Covid mask, a hat, and a black parka. In this city, he’s invisible. They will never catch him, there will be no justice, and he’ll do it again. But I will not spend hours in the station telling and retelling my story to be the thing they joke about in the break room. My HR rep is kind of angry with me for this decision, and she spent most of Friday trying to talk me out of it.

I don’t spend a lot of time wondering what I did wrong because I didn’t do anything wrong. He came from blind corner behind me. He didn’t make a sound. There was nothing I could have done to prevent it, which is both a relief and a reason to be terrified. (On Friday morning, when I was still paranoid, I asked myself aloud, “Is this what it feels like to be a woman every day?”) I’m an overweight, forty-six-year-old, pale dude. This could happen to anybody.

But what makes me really sad is that I don’t really put a lot of thought into my appearance anymore, but on Thursday, I put in the effort. I wore a dress shirt that matched my beloved sweater vest and my business casual shoes, and I braved the frigid air walking from the train to my office because I knew that, when work was over, it was going to be the perfect weather for my corduroy blazer, and I looked good and I felt good, and I never want to wear those clothes again. There’s the part of me that notes it was the one thing I did differently that day. No, I don’t think the person who attacked me was attracted to me. This kind of thing isn’t about sex. It was about scaring me, and well done, sir. 

It’s not the physical act of what he did that has kept me trapped in my apartment for the past week, it’s the helplessness. The things I thought I could count on to stay safe—bright lights, public spaces, crowds, back to the wall, all failed me. And the recent break-in showed us that you can lock the house all you want, but if the locking mechanism fails in one of your windows, they’re coming in.

I’m grounding myself by writing a novel about the oldest characters I’ve created and reteaching myself how to ink and preparing for my inevitable comic book, but this weekend, I couldn’t. A lot of the initial horror of what happened has faded, and I was able to go out and buy a latte (I was concerned that the barista was my attacker because he was the same size and skin tone to my attacker) Mostly what I have is mild agoraphobia, and I don’t know if I could do that again. 

I’ll be fine. I’ll work from home this week and see if I can use the Metro again soon. There was a bit of a tug of war between my supervisor and HR about this, including the question, “Can you Uber into work?”; which stunned me in its tone-deafness, but HR won. My supervisor was demanding more information, and I think she was looking forward to having something to gossip about. I’ve discovered that I’m less willing to let things in my apartment slide. If my socks don’t both make it into my laundry basket, I now pick up the stray immediately, as opposed to letting it enjoy its freedom for a couple of days. There’s been little housekeeping projects I’ve been putting off that are now getting done.

Don’t worry, I’ll leave the apartment again. I’ll ride the Metro again. I won’t be watching out over my shoulder anymore. It might take a while, but I’ll be fine again. I got two cats counting on me.

Blackjack Anniversary

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My neighbors are all women in their late twenties, and they have the priorities people their age have, like dating and FWBs. We have a picnic table in our backyard, and they like to hang out there when the weather is good, sometimes with the company of gentlemen callers. A handful of times, when I’m taking out the trash, they will invite me to sit with them. A handful of those times, I’ve taken them up on it. I never say anything, I just listen.

On one occasion, the subject of September 11 came up. They weren’t kind. They treated it as an overrated, overhyped spectacle that people needed to get over. If I really wanted to make them awkward, I could have told them where I was that day, but I’d probably no longer get invites to enjoy their show. Plus they’re kids. When I was twenty-seven, I wasn’t a kid, but twenty-seven-year-olds now are kids. Prior to September 11, 2001, I was pretty flippant about Vietnam and the people affected by it.  

I wasn’t offended, and that’s because I’ve been writing a novel where two twenty-six-year-old women fall in love. They’re in Battery Park, New York City, and the subject of the 9/11 Memorial comes up, and it occurred to me as I was writing that the Twin Towers on fire looked just like a movie. If you were a kid, say five years old, when this happened, how would you be able to tell the difference? Maybe I should ask a Baby Millennial/Geriatric Zoomer.

My main character: “September 11 is Generation X’s defining moment, like Vietnam was for Boomers.”

Love Interest: “What’s the Millennials’ defining moment?”

Main Character. “Look around. Take your pick.”

If disaster and disaster came my way just as I’m becoming an adult or trying to settle down with my young family, and if the people in power don’t represent your viewpoint anymore and are legislating hard against people like you, somehow two buildings falling down doesn’t seem like that big a deal.

September 11 is old enough to drink or, in select states, purchase cannabis. What’s happened is that it, like every memory, grew hazy with time. September 11 was bad, but twice as many Americans died in Iraq fighting a war that was proven beyond a reasonable doubt to be manufactured by people who profited immensely from it and were never punished. Almost that amount died in New Orleans when a hurricane they should have been prepared for ravaged a US state, and many more died because relief efforts were so poorly planned. And so on, to this decade, when a virus spread through the country, killing almost a million people, which could have been contained if leadership wasn’t incompetent. Now we have mega-billionaires bending the country to their will and a reactionary minority preparing to take rights away from all of us.

All that in mind, what does 9/11 mean to me? It’s not the worst thing to happen to this country in the past thirty years. Why do I feel something heavy in the pit of my stomach every time I see the date on a calendar? Is it because I was there? Because everybody’s memory of September 11 is one tower burning while a plane crashes into the second, while mine is from a different angle, on the ground, looking up buildings so tall, you couldn’t see the top, now covered in flames and smoke.

My experience with COVID was disappointing, to say the least. I was hoping to be bedridden for a few days, but all I got was a headache. But twenty-one years ago, for about four hours in the morning, the world was on fire. Strangers would grab you and yell in your face that they destroyed the Pentagon! They’re taking out the bridges! And the guilt. I actually believed I could run in there and help people. I didn’t care how or what I did, I thought I could help. Instead, I ran. I’ve made a lot of decisions in my life, but that was probably the smartest.

This essay doesn’t have a clear thesis. Like September 11, there’s no lesson to be learned here. It reveals nothing about our humanity. My generation likes to think they’re jaded, latchkey kids who’ve seen it all. But we were spoiled. America won the Cold War and was riding high when we were young. We were the punching bags of the Boomers until Millennials came along with their avocado toast, and that’s really as bad as it got for us collectively. (Individually, I know a lot of Gen-Xers who’ve suffered unfairly in life, but as a whole, we’ve done pretty well.) Our innocence died on September 11, and as a result, the subsequent generations never really had any. Maybe that’s why I go back to that day, again and again, starting in August every year. It was the morning that changed everything, even for the Millennials and Zoomers who don’t realize it.It was the morning America got so scared that it went completely mad and hasn’t recovered since.

Imagine growing up in that.

Stepping into the Same River Twice

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I’m doing something a little presumptuous. I’m writing my memoirs. I’m doing it in an unusual format, which is I picked twenty people who influenced my life, from high school friends to more recent individuals, to my ex-wife, and I’m writing a chapter about each of them. Sometimes, I’ll take a page or so of someone else’s chapter and remember another important figure who I don’t have enough to write a full chapter on.

There was this young woman in college who I very consciously set out to befriend. It was a success. However, it was approaching the end of the school year, so we became pen-pals. Every other week, I received a letter from her, long and a little stream-of-consciousness, and just all kinds of wonderful. When asked by her therapist about journaling, she said, “I do journal. I write Jeremiah.” She had lost her father recently to cancer, so she pleaded with me to quit smoking, which I didn’t do. We cared for each other, we supported each other, we loved each other, and we didn’t have sex, so I called her my wife. Corresponding, we had no one else in our lives, but in person, not so much. When we reunited that fall, we didn’t click, and we drifted apart.

At some point, I think she started a cult. It was some kind of internal spirituality thing, and it sounded like a cult. Later, after she found me on Facebook, I discovered that she was a pre-COVID anti-vaxxer, and after she posted some really objectionable science, I hid her posts. The last thing she said to me was a comment on a post I made debunking the Mandela Effect, saying that I was wrong, there’s more to the Mandela Effect than just faulty memory. If you know anything about the Mandela Effect, you know she means alternate universes and apocalypses. That’s when I muted her feed.

While writing this chapter, I realized that I still had all of her letters. I dug them out and reread all of them, which took some time because each of those letters was a tome. What I found was a young woman desperately trying to find her identity and make sense of this world. She struggled to get over her last boyfriend, she tried dating back in her small, South Dakota town to disappointing results. She signed her letters with “Love” but would sometimes cross that out and write “Always” instead. She read a story I wrote inspired by her hostile first meeting with me, starring a thinly veiled me and a thinly veiled her, and she informed me that these two characters would make great friends but there would be no romance (I recognized the subtext, even at the time).

Reading pages and pages of her careening trains of thought reminded me of how it felt to open up my mail and get one of these oversized envelopes. I wrote about three double-spaced pages about our relationship, and I wondered if maybe she would like a nostalgia bump, so I searched her out on my friend list, but she wasn’t there anymore. I searched her out anyway and discovered that her feed is public.

She isn’t just a little anti-vax now. She has gone full-throttle. She’s posting news stories about people dying from the vaccine, and about people applying for jobs at concentration camps that they’re going to create for the unvaccinated so they can force them to take a shot. She is not coming from a Republican place with this, this is all conspiracy from the Left. It was in college that she started down the New Age rabbit hole and got stuck.

How I feel about this is the same as when you have to sneeze, but can’t. I’m seeing this lovely, confused, hopeful young woman on paper, but in reality, she’s kind of insane. I go through nostalgia kicks and can’t or won’t contact the person I’m feeling it for, but I’ve never run across so many red flags screaming “Don’t!” What am I supposed to do with this warm, lovely feeling reading her letters has given me when this person isn’t the same person I remember (all the while being unquestionably the same person)? This is so frustrating to me because the two things I got from this experience that I want to hold onto forever is this woman as I remembered her and the feeling of writing actual, physical letters to someone and getting one back. I can’t have either anymore.

I miss her. I had no idea how much.

Saving the Date

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You know who’s not thinking about this day? Kate. I can’t read her mind, and I haven’t any contact with her in over a year when she wanted me to disconnect the cable in the condo because it was in my name. (Plot twist! They disconnected the cable when she initially called two days earlier, so I had to wait on hold and tell my story to three different people over the course of an afternoon for no reason.) I like to think that being married to her for almost fourteen years means that I have some clue how she thinks. However, if I really had a clue how she thinks, I wouldn’t have been sucker-punched by the divorce papers. She didn’t think much of me at the end, and she probably thinks less of me now. She told people our anniversary was April 31.

I blogged two years ago that I feel like this was a holiday that people were forgetting. As is the case with September 11, I want the world to stop on this day. I want people to remember the date. But it’s a Saturday, and it’s a lovely spring day in Washington D.C., and who’s got the time? It’s not my marriage that trips me up this day every year, it’s that this was once one of the most significant days of my life, and to everyone else, it’s time to go to the farmers’ market and pick up some produce.

I’m the only one who remembers this day, and I wish I wouldn’t. Maybe I’ll do something nice for myself.

Do you remember the Princess I told you about in that little fable I shared mid-February? It’s her birthday tomorrow. I want to go back to celebrating that, like I did before I found myself saying “I do.” Tauruses for life, amiright?