Sorry I Didn't: a Post to She Knows Whom

Sorry I didn't buy you a bundle of crimson sex organs grown in a warehouse in the Meadowlands by immigrants making less than I do with chemicals that have more constiuent parts than I do. Also, I meant to pick you up a polysteyrene ursus americanus holding a facsimilie of symmetic ventricles but the pick up truck along Hylan boulevard only carried ursus maritimus and the ventricles more closely resembled arotas which is frightfully illogical if you really understand their distinct functions

I didn't pay thirty-two yuan for a sheet of recycled paper thickened up with petro-resin and embossed with half naked infantile angels and someone else's words professing something about someone, perhaps you; sorry about that.

Unhappy that I am, I cannot heave my heart into my mouth or Chinese trinckets or thickened, folded sheets of tree pulp or dying flowers or a spa treatment or oysters or wine or my credit card balance but I do feel the same about you as I did three days ago and as I will tomorrow and countless days after that.

The Mortician: An Essay on Writer's Block

It is raining. This is melting the snow. It took a few good days of rain to finally melt last year's two feet of snow and that came around March. It is January and it snowed two days ago. This snow is gone already. 

I had started mending my friend's parents' lawn today. Maybe this is why I falsely believe it is spring. I put on a worn out shirt and my cowboy-tight, ripped work jeans. It was like theolddays. April. Mucking a golf course east of Wichita before undergrad on the east coast. 

It is muddy here in this Staten Island yard; not as muddy as the trenches of Kellogg, nor as silty but overgrown and reeking of years of rotting peaches from a lone, diminutive, un-pruned tree. Mulberries poke their heads out through weeds like rye. These must be cut by me and cut again and cut again. It rains harder.

Harder. Hard enough to dampen my clothes faster than my body heat can dry them out. I retire to my car. Tilting the seat toward Kill van Kull where a ship passes. I doze with my knees poking through their well-deserved holes. I doze like theolddays only, now, I don't get paid for lounging. Rain means another day I have to wait for a check. This keeps me from dozing. I head for coffee. Find some at a deli. It is terrible. 

I hope some voodoo or wishful thinking will clear the rain. I am paid by the job not the hour now. It kills me to wait here as opposed to theolddays where I would sleep in the heat, my check trickling up like a broken sprinkler-head futilely trying to nurse a new berm. 

I suck the coffee through the hole in the lid; let the windows blur. I go in and let Mrs. Spinelli know I will be back in the morning. Another day the check is delayed.

I drive around for awhile in the false spring. I drive deliberately through puddles and listen intently as the water meets the running boards like a dozen snare drums. There are new suspension parts behind my tires, it is good to get the salt off.  Salt begets rust. Rust begets break. Break begets wreck. Wreck begets repair. Repair begets bills. Bills beget a necessity to work with my body again.

This is a writer's problem.

The mind is no use to anyone so the body must be sold. Turn a spade, watch a child or cat or watch many children and be called a professor. My mind is no use to anyone but the mortician. She will dissect my brain and make my poems expensive realizing they are so rare: like diamonds except with less dictators and more women.

Enhance Your Shelf Life NOW: Debunking the Debunking of Sexism

This Salon article would be laughably ignorant if it were not so painfully ignorant. In it, male novelist Teddy Wayne (an author who has written a novel I have never heard of) complains that Jennifer Weiner (author of, apparently, many novels I have never heard of) complains too much. Using some less than artful euphemisms, Wayne argues that Weiner is wrong in her assertion that the New York Times  is "sexist, unfair, loves Gary Shteyngart, hates chick lit, ignores romance." 

Weiner goes to great lengths to prove her point. If you are like me, however, pictures make a lot more sense than words so here are some from an organization (VIDA) for which I intern. (I am admitting my bias here, see)

VIDA is an organization devoted to women in the literary arts. To boil it down to absolute terms, VIDA is seeking to create a conversation about women writers and cultural perceptions of them and their work. VIDA's most fundamental project is The Count. This is where I come in. As an intern I am in the trenches doing this counting. It sounds straight forward of course, "how many men?" "how many women?" It is not. Often bios do not reveal one's gender. Often names do not either. For example, my dad's name is Alex, so is my female cousin's. Part of a Counter's job is to definitively ascertain the gender of an author. Then we can actually count them. But first! we must figure out how to categorize their work. Is this a literary piece in and of itself? For example a poem in Poetry. Is this a critical piece by one author about another? For example, the contents of the book review section of the Times disclosed above. Whose literature is being talked about? Obviously and as expected, mostly men. There is another pie chart to accompany this one over on the official count page. It is reveals whose opinions about literature (the reviewers) are being published. Again, as expected, mostly men.

I should be able to stop here because the point is made fairly clear by all the incredibly straight forward evidence that VIDA presents. Unfortunately, Wayne somehow read all this and came to a different conclusion. Look at the above pie chart one more time. Seriously, I'll wait. Study it. Got it? Okay now read this:

 In short, midlisters are middle-class professionals scraping out a living — and being a midlist male author who writes about males is a distinct financial disadvantage. Not only will you not get reviewed in the Times, but you won’t get reviewed in the women’s magazines that drive sales

That thing about women's magazines had something to do with the incredibly condescending view Wayne has about women's book clubs (or something) but the important thing is that he really believes males are reviewed less in the Times. Remember the pie chart, right? Okay.

Wayne did raise a point that VIDA has not looked into or at least has not published any awesome pie charts on: shelf placement. Is Wayne on to something when he moans that if you are a male "Barnes & Noble will relegate you to the back shelves"?


I wanted to give him the benefit of the doubt so I looked into it. One of the perks of being an enormous literary nerd with no job is that I also have no friends and so can while away an entire afternoon jotting notes about book shelves and not worry that there is a whole world out there waiting to be grappled with, engaged in and employed by...

Anyway. I really wanted Wayne to be right because if nothing else it would prove that while the scholarly world(we'll call the Times scholarly...for now) overlooks women, maybe the commercial one does not.

I went down to my neighborhood Barnes and Nobel; below are the hard numbers. I started with the front shelves. If the men are all on the back shelves it should be easy to prove Wayne right by just counting the first shelves I see when I walk in. I chose the shelves "New Fiction" and "New Writers" to also look into Wayne's "book-editor-friend's" statement: “When we buy a debut novel by a man, we view it as taking a real chance.”

Hm. Okay, strike one, we'll get this next one.

"Taking a real chance," eh? Okay, strike two. I get three right? (There were only two categories that pertained to fiction and/or new writers but sure, 3 tries it is.)

An entire shelf dedicated to a man? Damn. Guess that make strike 3 right? (Yup, but I'll give you an honorable mention. Janet Evanovich had her own shelf too, right next to the $2 reese's bars under the cashier's stand. Women's literature is evidently equal to that of sugary impulse buys.)

Now that Wayne's little reverse sexism theory has been shot full of holes lets sink this ship for good. But first! Wayne tell us how he really feels:

Yet the Franzen-Weiner-Picoult-Stockett universe is the literary 1 percent; they’re all doing just fine, male or female. If you’re upset that you’re deprived of two separate reviews and a profile in the Times, as Weiner evidently is, then, to quote Brad Pitt in “Moneyball,” you have “uptown problems, which aren’t really problems at all.”

Got that, female writers? You should be happy with money. We do not need to have intelligent discussions about women's writing so long as we give them money. Shut up, look pretty, here's a royalty check. Which might explain Wayne's parting shot:

 male authors are somewhat like male porn stars: getting work, but outearned and outnumbered by their female counterparts, who are in far greater demand from the audience

I have no idea what Wayne was hoping to accomplish with his invective. It seems obvious to me that sexism remains an enormous force in this country. The examples are numerous and growing daily. Pick one. All male presidents. All male presidential candidates. Predominately male CEO's. Predominately male editors and on and on and on. I suppose Wayne was more worried about authors that never make it to the B&N shelves but maybe hangout on the St. Mark's shelves. I point you again toward VIDA. The reviews conducted by The Paris Review, Poetry, Boston Review and Granta all qualify as the "midlist" writers that Wayne was talking about and only one publication (Poetry) covered an equal or greater number of women compared to men. The simple truth is that Wayne (and anyone who believes him) is wrong; blatantly so. And to finish this all up, take a careful look at the author picture on the right. I happen to be a male writer. I am even openly heterosexual. Yet here I am lending my voice to feminism. Clever ploy to get in good with the ladies? No. Resistance against an unfair system which is silently repressing equal expression? Absolutely. If we men are really the great writers all the major journals and critics say we are, we will not mind a little fair competition and discussion with women. Those who defend the status quo have something to be afraid of: their own inadequacy.

Owning It: a Candid Discussion of Depression

Caveats of caveats, all things are caveats. First, let me say this is not a pity party for me or anyone else nor is it an invective against anyone else or me. This is being open and honest and hoping to create a conversation about something which, quite frankly, it disgusts me that no one really talks about.

Depression.

Over a year ago now a friend of mine, a bright star in the darkness that life can all too often seem, committed suicide. When that happened I had vowed to finally open up and talk, publicly, like really fucking publicly, about my own battles with depression as a way of owning up to and hopefully helping others open up and own up. I never did.

The issue was and is that most people who do not have depression, and even many who do, do not admit what it really is, what it really means and what it really does in one's life. As such, I was afraid to talk about it. Well here I am and as a young professional ever-grasping for more opportunity this is a risky thing to be talking about on something that comes up under the top three Google results of my name but I forge on. 

To be upfront, depression is a disease. The same way a cold, canker sores, MRSA and syphilis are diseases. And like all of the above, especially the latter, requires treatment. Being a twenty-something male in a patriarchy such as ours makes it damn hard to admit that but this is a fight one cannot fight alone. If you do not get antibiotics for MRSA you will end up with a wooden leg and none of the perks of a pirate ship, syphilis, just look at Stalin. It has to be treated. That said, there are many ways of doing so. Too few people, and this is the result of the rampant negative characterization on many fronts, turn to medication. I remember reading a Times article which had the audacity to crack jokes about the sexual side effects of one of the more popular anti-depressants; the one I happen to take. If there is anything that is going to scare a twenty-something male in desperate need of treatment away it is telling him that he is going to end up with ED as a twenty-something. I can't speak of the side effects for women but it goes without saying that they are not wanting for any more reasons to have their sex-live stigmatized.

I "wrote a letter" as we curmudgeons are wont to do but it wasn't published. I argued, essentially, that while there are side effects, usually the benefits far outweigh them. Diminished sexual function vs. the ability to function at your 9-5? Yeah, I'll take the latter thanks. It didn't help that the Times (and many others) compared the effects to those of placebo. Yes, sometimes one course of treatment does not work. That's why there are lots. Some are even gummy, I hear.

The Times comparison to a placebo is more nuanced than it seems however and might not even be that bad. Based on some research I read about in the New Yorker it appears that the brain can actually heal the body just because it thinks it can. Harvard researchers are seeing signs that people who have been told they are taking a placebo start feel better anyway. There are a wide range of science-y explanations and questions for this but it all adds up to chemicals in the brain. This might not work for say, your splintering, post-MRSA shin, but it probably means a lot for things like depression.

Depression is widely attributed to an imbalance of the neurotransmitters Serotonin and Norepinehprine. The chemicals usually used to treat the disease are typically "reuptake inhibitors" responsive to one chemical or both. "Reuptake" refers to the fact that the cells that produce these chemicals often suck them back up when they are supposed to remain floating in the brain. This also, is where the side effects come in. An SSRI (e.g. selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor like Prozac, Celexa, Lexapro) blocks the "reuptake" of serotonin but it can also block the normal uptake of the chemical causing depression to get worse among other things. 

What's important in all the technical jargon above is that depression is based on chemicals, involuntary productions that do or do not occur the way they are supposed to in your brain. Essentially, it is not your fault. 

It is not your fault.

What is your fault is refusing to do anything about it. Man up and admit you can't do it alone because you can't and guess what, no one anywhere has ever done anything alone. Yes there are go-getters out there (I consider myself one) there are trend-setters out there (I hope to be one) there are unique individuals out there (I know I am one) but none of those things happen in a vaccuum. You can't be top of the pack without a pack to beat, you can't set a trend without people to follow it, you can't standout without a background. Everything relies on something and someone else. That is how evolution built us. Don't fool yourself into thinking you are bigger than the problem by refusing to ask for help. Asking for help, admitting you have such an unfortunately stigmatized disease, is the bravest and best thing you can do to deal with it.

But wait there's more!

Don't set it and forget it. You can't just go to the doctor, get a bottle of pills and start seeing roses and sunshine and unicorns, but if you can, let me know which doctor you see cause I want in on it. From personal experience, an anti-depressant essentially makes it easier for one to treat oneself. Before the medicine I would wallow, quite literally, in whatever I was feeling (with depression it is often that you feeling nothing at all) and would just sleep or browse the internet aimlessly. What Prozac has helped me do is see that I am not well and take my own steps to get better. Yesterday morning I was feeling that way. I woke up late and just wanted to stay in bed. I figured the cards were already stacked against me because I missed out on much needed time to be productive. It can happen. No medicine is not a cure all. When you get an infection you have to take amoxicillin and usually do something else like rest or eat better. With depression you have to take medicine and take care of yourself. Without Prozac I might have just stayed in bed and let everything get one hundred thousand times worse but I got up and kicked its ass. I picked up my bass, put on some real angry, gritty, nasty Black Flag songs and went to town. I played like I was in my high school pop-punk band again, in my apartment, in my underwear but unfortunately without that one cheerleader who always used to stand near the front at our shows. But hey, it felt good and I ended up making use of the rest of my day. Was it one or the other or both? The answer is probably all of the above with the most importance being that I took the situation into my own hands (specifically my now very blistered fingers) and did something with it. That's the key.

Move and you will move on.

With the help of a friend, I recently discovered the depths of misery and then simultaneously the heights of self-affirmation. To make a long and yet to be concluded story short, she did something bad to me but I got over it in part because I was able to take the energy I had for feeling like crap and turn it into energy for lifting weights and reading lots of books and also because a friend is a friend no matter what happens. Would I have been able to put all that negative energy to positive use without help? I doubt it -- no wait -- I know I would not have been able to snap out of that without help.

There are so many cliches, "bad things only happen because good people do nothing," "life is what you make it," blah, blah, hopelessly-optimistic blah.

But it's all true. If you don't want to be depressed. Stop being depressed. There are a million ways to do so. Find yours. Don't be afraid to admit it starts with a trip to a doctor or therapist. It's better than the alternative, trust me.

If you still don't think it's manly to be honest about your feelings, here are some videos of a guy who could definitely beat the shit out of you telling you about his. They're long videos but they're worth it.

This post is dedicated to the memory of David Sommerhauser.

Facts > Wtf-ever you just said

So, this guy

Governor Rick Scott of Florida

said this

Our country is now completely dependent on Russia for travel to and from space. A private business would never let any part of its operations be dependent on someone else.

about this

ignoring the fact that these guys

Yes, even the heroic private company that is saving our space program.

do exactly that.

Do this

here: http://goo.gl/zS0qZ