Silence

I’m about three blocks away when I realize I’m still wearing my bathrobe. Must look like The Dude. I just had to get out of the house. I couldn’t face her. Even if she wasn’t disappointed in me, the very fact of her human presence around me made me hate myself and my failings.

I walk and walk. I walk in no particular pattern, just following whatever crossing lights were white. Path of least resistance, as usual.

Ugh. Why am I so not who I want to be?

The bad thoughts were starting to encroach again. I’ve been getting isolated and weird. Trying to meet people halfway, people whom I knew liked me and wanted to engage with me. People I love. I feel like I’m slowly warping into a person I don’t want to be. I feel myself slipping further and further away from them, even as I sit and smile mid-conversation. All I want is silence.

I’ve even stopped listening to music, one of my biggest passions of my youth. I don’t care about new bands or shows or anything. When I do feel the urge to listen to something, just to break the monotony, it’s always barely audible.

It’s like I can’t stop listening to the silence. It calls out to me. When I have to be subject to noise, I find myself longing for deafness. I want to finally hear nothing. Maybe if I didn’t hear how awful the sound of my voice is, I wouldn’t hate everything I have to say.

I walk, scowling at every car that passes for interrupting my peace. I try to step outside of myself, remember that they have as much right to walk the Earth as I do. But it immediately follows that none of us has any right. It makes it easier to hate them again for the crime of life.

There is a high parking garage gone dark. Only diffused moonlight filters through the cement structure. I duck into it and follow the smooth concrete upwards. The noise from the outside is turned down, having to traverse many angles to reach me. But it still seeks me. I walk slowly, carefully, as quiet as I can manage. Every scratch of sand beneath my shoes scrapes down my brain. When will this just end?

I make it to the top of the parking garage and the wind mocks me with its hiss. I sit down near the center of the parking level. There aren’t tears for this kind of desperation. I’m past tears. Tears are for amateurs’ little jaunts into sadness and despair.

Tears are for the living.

I sit and I stare.

I walk to the ledge and stare down. The city is quieter, but not quiet enough. As my foot shifts, a sharp metal clinking forces into my head. A long, thin nail lies at my feet. Maybe one last effort before I give in completely.

The second eardrum ruptures easier than the first one.

It’s quiet. I look down at the city and feel the wind brush me, neither one making a sound. I can almost enjoy my other senses now that I have the silence. Now, I kind of do want to cry.

As I start walking down into the parking garage, I notice the sound of my blood, round and organic. It was almost enough, but the necessary functions of my body still intrude into my head. The proverbial wind leaves my sails. I slow my pace to keep my heart rate low.

“James?”

I turn in fear and fury to the voice behind me. There is only darkness. I freeze.

I should not hear anything. And my name is not James.

“James?”

It’s still behind me. Closer.

“James?”

I turn again, met only by shadows. I can hear my blood rush. The shadows look finer, more defined in my terror.

“James?”

I run.

I can hear what sounds like wet meat slapping on the concrete and sound of bone crunching under heel.

“James?” The voice sounds afraid, pleading.

I corkscrew down the halls of the parking garage, hounded by the increasingly desperate cries.

I see the exit, a dark frame around the street’s safety of light and society. I burst out of the exit.

I don’t hear the car coming.

Once Upon A Time...

Once upon a time, there was a girl, a very messed-up young girl. At seventeen, she went off to college. She was haggard and tired of her life and felt so old. She felt so old that she was blind to how naive she really was.

           

She had always been a daddy’s girl. She had yet to realize that the things her father did with her weren’t quite right. She didn’t realize that her father was a little too loving. She didn’t know how profoundly it had compromised her, wouldn’t know for many years.

           

She got to college and found freedom. She had been used to such confines that she was overwhelmed. Everyone else takes that same journey their freshman semester. She was one of those destined for particularly trying times.

A few weeks into the semester, she met a man. He was a few years older, had been at college a few years longer. He was recently out of a relationship considered famously disastrous around the campus. He set his sights on her and she was deeply flattered.

She wasn’t really ready for a boyfriend. He told her that he wouldn’t share her with anyone else. They spent the night together.

He was just so into her. She was confused by that, flattered and disarmed. They spent a lot of time together – she didn’t know how to navigate college yet and he wanted her.

Time passed.

They ended up in a de facto relationship. Her roommate had gotten fed up with being locked out of their room for sex and she offered to switch rooms with the man.

He confessed things to her.

“I was arrested for threatening my ex and her new boyfriend with a gun. Does that scare you?” he asked.

“No,” she said, sure she could handle this. She’d handled worse. And, after all, he told her he loved her. Surely that meant everything would work out. Surely.

The girl was not just metaphorically tired of life. She was always exhausted. After a couple months, when she tried to beg off his sexual advances, he stopped being kind.

Not long after, he became cruel.

“I’m too tired, I just want to go to bed,” she whined.

“Why won’t you ever fuck me?”

“I’m tired a lot. I just can’t tonight.”

He leaned in close in the dark. “I’m not letting you sleep until you fuck me.”

She turned over and faced the wall shrugging the blankets closer to her face. He kept picking away at her, getting louder and louder.

“If you’re a dyke, just tell me you’re a dyke. Then we can tell all of your friends you’re a fucking dyke and then I’ll let you go to sleep. Are you a dyke?”

“No,” she said, tears in her eyes.

“Then fuck me,” he shouted.

Eventually, inevitably, she would let him do what he wanted.

Exhausted, trying to not audibly sniffle her nose or shed any tears, she would let him.

Four, five o’clock in the morning with classes fast approaching, after hours of trying to maintain her own dignity, she would let him.

Numbing herself, slipping away in the dark, she let him.

Almost every night, she let him. She always tried to resist. She tried to exert some power, some agency in the relationship. He was never too tired to grind her down into compliance – he had seemingly limitless energy for that.

Eventually, she needed some sexual release that wasn’t emotionally crippling. All she had was herself. He found out and flew into a rage.

“You want to masturbate but you don’t want me? What the fuck is wrong with you? Are you fucking broken?”

The only answer she could come up with was “Obviously.”

She didn’t know what was going on. She didn’t yet know what the word “coercion” meant, and she’d never heard it paired with “rape.” Rape was rape, getting beaten up or tied down or drugged. What they had was “relationship problems.”

           

She tried leaving. He would always pull her back in somehow. She didn’t know how to leave. She had no idea how to even talk about what was happening. She was consumed by shame. She felt like an ingrate, as if literally anyone else would be lucky to have a man who wanted her as much as he did. She felt frail and flawed – a failure.

           

She couldn’t let go of trying to be happy. She was stupid and stubborn. She believed that she was an adult, not a barely eighteen year-old idiot with a martyr complex. She fucked up her second semester, hard. Over the summer, she went home while he stayed at the college. He visited her a few times when he could get away from work. All they did was fight.

The next school year started and they moved back in together because she didn’t know how to say “no.” But that was sort of the theme of her life. They picked up right where they left off. No end in sight.

Any time friends would come over to their dorm room, she would put on this huge smile, afraid that if she didn’t perform he would take it out on her later. She always tried to keep the friends over as long as possible, to delay the inevitable. He could always outwait her.

Towards the end, he stopped making her have sex with him. And she, fucking idiot that she was, took it personally! She actually got self-conscious, thought she wasn’t pretty anymore! Can you believe this moron?

At the end, it was almost a foregone conclusion that they were done. She had fucked up school pretty bad and was going to be kicked out. He, well, who knows what was going on with him. He never seemed to go to classes. He was always just there, waiting.

She wasn’t sure if she had tanked school as a way to get away from him or because she just didn’t have anything left to work with. Either way, she was leaving and they were done, whether he wanted to accept it or not.

The dorm they lived in had separate rooms. The night she finally had enough, she locked her door. After an hour and a half of him banging on her door, she snuck out her window and walked around the campus.

It was early winter in Florida. A cool, clear night. She walked to the large center court and stared at the few stragglers wandering through under the dim orange lights. She said her goodbyes to the college, the first place that she had, however briefly, known freedom. She berated herself for squandering it. She resigned herself to the fact she would forever regret fucking up her full ride to college because she made the wrong choice in a person.

But she was done.

Fourteen years later, she’s friends with him on Facebook. Because she feels that she has to be. Because it might seem petty of her to not forgive. Because not forgiving might mean weakness. Because – well, fuck if anyone knows.

 -----------------------------------------------------

This is how I failed out of college. And this is why it matters so much to me that I am graduating in two weeks, fourteen years after the fact.

I couldn’t write this with the proper genders, because the rape of men by women is still minimized and scoffed at. Especially when it can be qualified and diminished as something like "coercive rape." 

I still feel like a worthless thing when I think of her. I am still friends with her on Facebook, because I feel like I would be less of a man if I weren’t – however that makes any fucking sense.

I’d prefer if no one showed this to her. I’m still, despite all my growth, afraid of her.

The Ghost and the Machine

The Ghost and the Machine

Identifying Lockean Problems Through Science Fiction

John Locke’s empiricism explores a number of notions on identity that may not be as fleshed out as one might hope. Many other philosophers have attempted to clean up untidy ends, while others pull at the loose strings to unravel his ideas even further. One of the key points foundational to his system is the parsing out of various types of being. He offers accounts for what  he believes constitutes identity over time for vegetables, animals, men, and persons. His division between “man” and “person” is perhaps one of the trickiest and most important concepts, a space in which many debates rightfully take place. In order to examine and intellectually test the implications of Locke’s system, one must engage in thought experiments that defy conventional laws of nature. There is no better arena to explore these notions than science fiction. This paper will examine Locke’s notions by discussing the conceptual integrity of identity through John Crichton’s “twinning” in the television show Farscape and the process of teleportation in Star Trek.

In order to rigorously examine these experiments, some criteria must be determined to establish on what identity can be based. Vegetables, the simplest changing life forms, require material organization that allows for the change from one form – such as a seed – to another – a tree. It must also have a story of continuity, a “continuity of insensibly succeeding parts united to the living body of the plant” (Locke, 210). Animals are a step up the chain in that they possess perceptive abilities. Man possesses the capabilities of the “lower” forms, but not much more than that – Locke discusses the possibility for a soul, but assigns no empirical value to it. The identity of man is judged by his place in space and time, so there must be spacio-temporal consistency, just as with the vegetable and animal. These notions combined can be discussed as part of bodily continuity theory.

Alternately, there must be psychological continuity theory. In this, Locke explains the nature of identity for the person, a very different organized being than man. The person is the conscious, perceptive being that can reflect upon his self. The primary identifier of the continuity of consciousness is memory, the self’s ability to maintain a personal story connected through time. This is where the ground becomes shaky, as memory is a deeply unstable notion. Harold Noonan states “if memory and consciousness are together regarded as logically necessary and sufficient conditions of personal identity then forgetfulness ensures the loss of, or an interruption in, personal identity, and this is surely implausible. That is, it is implausible to hold that my past identity as a person should depend on the present vagaries of my memory” (173). Another concern is that “Memory could not be logically sufficient for continued personal identity because memory is only ever partial, what is remembered is only ever a subset of what the individual was actually conscious of at the time that is remembered” (Helm, 184). However, for the sake of argument, it can be said that memory acts as an imperfect informant from one period of time in a person’s life to the next. This imperfection should in no way undo Locke’s entire project, but does allow for many reasonable challenges.

With this framework established, the boundaries must be tested. Under the restrictions of this rather humdrum universe, there are seldom significant outliers to the traditional human experience which shed light on the “normal” notions of identity. Mental illness can offer some perspective, especially those individuals afflicted by multiple personality disorders, persistent vegetative states, or fugue states. These human organisms do not properly synch with the expected one-to-one ratio of man to person. However, Locke has provided at least some answers to these cases. The truly difficult cases lie in speculative fiction. These thought experiments allow for hypothetical conclusions to be drawn from a variety of interesting – if unlikely – situations. Through these reflective exercises, Locke is put through his paces to see just how well he would hold up in the case of unlikely situations.

The first unlikely situation is pulled from the science fiction television show Farscape. At a certain point, the main character, John Crichton, is subjected to a process called “twinning.” It is described as “the splitting of Crichton into two identical beings; neither of the Crichtons can be called a copy and neither is the original; they are both equally John Crichton” (“John Crichton”). This is an example of a hypothetical situation referred to by Sydney Shoemaker as “branching.”

The very instant that Crichton experiences fission, there seem to be two versions of the John Crichton. Both have equal, legitimate claim to be called Crichton in the historical sense of identity through memory and retrolineal spatio-temporal continuity. However, from that point on, they are both experiencing different subjective realities and, as such, each can only be referred to as a John Crichton. Crichton A and Crichton 1, named so for the purposes of this paper, experience almost all forms of continuity required to maintain personal identity as John Crichton. Each is thereafter exposed to different environmental and interpersonal stimuli, resulting in slowly diverging behavior patterns, which would also fit rather well with Locke’s notions of tabula rasa and its implications for the empirical development of identity. This is a source of great distress for the Crichtons, as each one considers himself to be the original and the other to be a usurping pretender.

Paul Helm would not agree that either have a legitimate claim to Crichtonhood, saying “Given Locke's criterion of identity no divided consciousness could be identical with the undivided consciousness since there is another consciousness spatio-temporally continuous with the original but distinct from the other consciousness... Locke's criterion of identity seems to require us to say that upon division the original consciousness went out of existence” (183). Helm argues that a consciousness must be connected with itself forward through time, not simply backwards through memory, in order to maintain continuous personhood.

In his discussion on the identity of vegetables, Locke states that a plant must exist as organized matter “constantly from that moment both forwards and backwards” to be considered the same plant (210). This also applies to both animals and men, but not necessarily to the person. Locke says of person that “as far as this consciousness can be extended backwards to any past action or thought, so far reaches the identity of that person” (211). It must then be the case that, at least to John Locke, John Crichton the man died the moment he was divided, though Crichton the person could arguably have lived on in the forms of Crichton A and Crichton 1. Bodily continuity is destroyed while psychological continuity diverges into two persons growing ever more unique.

The other hypothetical situation is the concept of identity and the use of transporter technology from the classic show Star Trek. As a means of near-instantaneous long distance teleportation, a transporter dematerializes an individual and rematerializes him or her at another location. This is a process of total destruction and recreation, as a person’s being cannot be physically transmitted through space. This concept is very similar to Sydney Shoemaker’s hypothetical “brain state transfer” procedure, in which “Precise details of your brain states will be recorded and then, simultaneously, your entire body will be destroyed and, in another location, exact duplicates of your brain states will be implemented in the blank brain of a body previously cloned from you” (Naylor, 390). In the case of Star Trek, an exact duplicate of one’s body is also created. On the show, characters are portrayed as calmly being atomically destroyed and remade with seemingly no disorientation or discomfort.

From the Lockean stance, a few problems arise here. First and foremost, there is not just a gap in memory (as a night of drinking may produce), but a momentary gap in existence. For at least a few seconds, there is no Captain Kirk. His position in spacio-temporal continuity ceases entirely. This would eliminate the possibility for bodily continuity outright. Captain Kirk the man must no longer exist. Thus it remains, does Captain Kirk the person persist?

Andrew Naylor does not believe he does. Returning to the brain state transfer procedure example, a new clone “would not be you according to a properly formulated psychological continuity theory [because] the psychological states of the clone would date not from any times prior to the onset of the operation of the BST-device, but only from the time at which the device structured the brain states in which those psycho logical states are realized” (390). Naylor believes that the memory of doing a certain action, e.g. making out with a hot alien, must have been generated during the act of getting down with said alien.

While this may hold sway with the bodily continuity theorists, it does not seem to refute psychological continuity. It shouldn’t matter when the memories were created in the “new” mind. A strict empiricist should realize that it makes no difference that memories are newly instantiated in the mind – memories are not required to have developed immediately responding to external stimuli. One can never verify the inception of a memory empirically as it is impossible to return to the original stimuli to experience the memory being created. The knowledge of the development of memories itself lies in memory and is therefore hazy at best. The true empiricist should recognize that the only requirement is that the memory can be recalled. The only sensation that is able to be recognized is the immediate sensation of the act of remembering. One cannot verify the age of a memory, only place it within a temporal context relating to other memories. As such, memories are only situated relationally – they don’t come with fixed time stamps. The personal identity, the thinking, sensing mind that extends backwards to past actions must remain if the person carries with him or her the narrative of collected life events. Strictly speaking, the age of particular memories have no empirical value and should not could. This implies that the person persists, albeit with a fresh new man after every away mission.

Consciousness is constantly being interrupted, usually on a daily basis. Sleep interrupts personal continuity, and yet the person persists. Locke says “Socrates waking and sleeping are not the same person” (213), showing that these gaps in personhood are rather quotidian. Identities are continual, not continuous, and this is a source of no small anxiety for individuals and societies. People use connective narratives – “I was asleep/drunk/temporarily insane” – to avoid having to confront the possibility that, for at least one evening, they did not exist as the discrete individuals they claim to be. Over the course of a nap, a person ceases to exist, which can be a very troubling notion. The truth is not in the details for Locke, but in the overarching trends, just like identity. Each person is a chaotic advancement through time, not some imperious, unbroken line. While his system is in no way unimpeachable, it certainly offers a greater account for the unavoidable Heraclitean flux that people seem to experience as a necessary part of daily life.

Works Cited

Helm, Paul. “Locke’s Theory of Personal Identity.” Philosophy, Vol. 54, No. 208 (Apr., 1979): 173-185. JSTOR. Web. 13 Apr. 2014.

“John Crichton.” Farscape Encyclopedia Project. Farscape Encyclopedia Project. 2014. Web. 14 Apr. 2014.

Locke, John. “An Essay Concerning Human Understanding.” Modern Philosophy.” Ed. F. E. Baird and W. Kauffman.4^th ed. Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall, 2003. 173-239. Print.

Naylor, Andrew. “Personal Identity Un-Locke-Ed.” American Philosophical Quarterly, Vol. 45, No. 4 (Oct., 2008): 387-396. JSTOR. Web. 13 Apr. 2014.

Noonan, Harold. “Locke on Personal Identity.” Philosophy, Vol. 53, No. 205 (Jul., 1978): 343-351. JSTOR. Web. 13 Apr. 2014.

Yum

@ and & met in a room, shades half-drawn. Blue dusk colored the world. Their bodies took on a velvet softness in the light as they fumbled through disrobing. Their mouths pushed together, breaking only for increasingly labored breath. They spilled onto the bed, entwined, a gravity pulling them toward something inescapable. They each breathed in the smell of the other, fingers curling in hair.

They came apart to stare at each other. All was darkening shades of blue. @’s lips parted with the need of a kiss, but & would not return it yet. & moved its mouth down @’s neck, scraping its teeth on shuddering flesh. A hand on a throat, gentle, but with the promise of mastery.

@ raised its arms above its head, arching its back. Pillows fell from the bed. Vanilla and salt on the tongue. @ could not move. The explosion inside was burning through its cracks, shutting it down. “Let go,” & whispered.  @ forced itself to release, unclenching its muscles. The furnace burning inside raged. The pounding of blood in their ears filled their heads, and the scent of sorrow-turned-hunger stained the bed.

“Trust me.” & unhinged its jaws. It wrapped its hands around @’s thighs and bit deep into its hip. @ moaned, feeling like it was pierced with sugar and silk. @ licked its lips as & swallowed the flesh and moved upwards. Sticky sweetness welled up in the teeth marks and slicked the sheets, as blue as all the rest. At @’s side, & stopped to wipe its mouth. For @, there was no feeling of separation, no incompleteness. It was whole but collocated, lying in bed and burning inside &’s throat.

& returned to chewing its way up @’s core, breathing heavily through its nose, taking in all of @. Having consumed up to the breast, & started biting into the neck. “Breathe,” & said. @ complied, now too overwhelmed to be able to rely on instinct to control necessary functions.

They pulled each other close as flesh gave way. A surge from @’s chest took root in &’s and the bodies bridged. Separation slowly eroded. Pockets of individuation sparked and were dissolved into unity. Their foreheads pressed together trying to, by physical force alone, manifest pure, unclouded understanding. They were sinking into the morass of each other, held by an unshakeable certainty of need. Pressing their final kiss into each other’s lips, their mouths shattered into one, each breaking bone a scream of joy.

At the end, they were compressed under the weight of their longing. Having become singular, they lost form and substance, ending in blackness.

As the red light of dawn painted the room, their eyes locked. Whole, separate, defined, they knew aching again.

“I don't think sex can ever actually be portrayed – the sensations and the emotions are... beyond language. If you only describe the mechanics, the effect is either clinical or pornographic, and if you try to describe intimacy instead, you wind up with abstractions.” Alice Elliott Dark – “In the Gloaming”

Some of the best sex I have ever read is from Clive Barker’s Imajica, because there is no pretense of realism. This is an attempt of mine to concretize the abstract so as to avoid entirely the mechanistic boredom of the act of sex. The act is immaterial – it is only the emotional that is valuable. To turn the emotional into the tangible without the limits of space, anatomy, and causality is the only way to begin to touch what sex truly is. Sex doesn’t need gender, and it doesn’t need identity. It needs you.

Sedona

There were a lot of factors that led us to Sedona and that informed what happened there. We had been in Mountain Rest, South Carolina, a nowhere little place near Walhalla, a slightly larger nowhere place. It was my junior year of high school.

Both my mom and I had been diagnosed, accurately or not, with Chronic Fatigue Syndrome. In either case, it could as easily have been depression. My mom wouldn’t leave her bed for days except to sneak to the bathroom when no one was looking. When she did interact with us, it was in short, emotionally unhinged bursts. She mixed up her words constantly, I ended up being her translator.

 I was allowed a medical leave from school, during which I spent about six hours a week with a teacher who gave me my assignments and tried to tutor me as well as possible in the short time. Surprisingly, I still managed all A’s and B’s, even in AP courses. The rest of the time, I slept, usually about fourteen to sixteen hours a day.

I didn’t really have friends there, except for my ex-girlfriend Cindy. She was probably the best relationship of my youth, but during the convergence of multiple personal crises, I pushed her away to reduce my dependence on her. It didn’t work.

My step-dad was getting increasingly resentful of the burden of supporting my mother. She became a ghost; a fat, pale, gibberish-spouting mess of a ghost. He was commuting two hours one-way to Greenville for work, and when he got home, mom would be shut up in her room. I’d be left alone with him and his bitterness. Denied the life he thought he would have, he drank. He drank and he yelled while mom hid.

Mom saw psychics. She was so desperate to have some hope, no matter how ephemeral, that she funneled money into the pockets of those egotistical, crazy, or manipulative enough to bill themselves as seers of the future. They saw right through her, that’s true enough. She brought me along, and shit but that made her an easy mark. What do you tell a hopeless woman who is very clearly obsessed with her son? Tell her the son is destined for greatness. Tell her that he’s an angel incarnate, fated to help guide humanity into a new era. She’ll have meaning by proxy, and it’s so much more believable because it doesn’t feel as arrogant. The kid will be just as convinced because he is alienated and suicidal and wants any measure of hope that he might actually matter some day. Win-win, if you can forgive that it’s all bullshit.

It was from one of these psychics that mom first heard the name Sedona, Arizona.”It’s got seven energy vortexes!” she told me, having just learned what vortexes supposedly were. Deeply dissatisfied with life and about to reap the benefits of a class action lawsuit, it was time to move again. My step-dad would stay behind and continue working, sending money to my mom while he slept in his car.

So, with our usual lack of any sort of plan, mom cashed a $10,000 check, put the bulk of our shit in storage, and we got in our truck and headed west. We drove for five days to a place we’d only heard of a few months before, because anything would have been better than where we had been.

One of the psychics had hooked us up with a woman who would rent us a room until we found a place. Two months sharing a room with my already cloying mother. But we started meeting people and my mom started to do things. Without me. It was great.

I started feeling better, too. Could have been those vortexes (vortices, if you aren’t all New Agey). More likely, I was out of range of my step-dad’s rage and was no longer my mother’s sole emotional connection in the world. I also made a few friends. I had been moving towards the goth scene a bit, but this was before the Internet was big and I didn’t have a lot of role models that I could examine. Pretty much what I had was The Crow and Marilyn Manson until I was able to dive deeper. But I actually met some other people who were going through their own self-discovery and I felt like I kind of fit. Of course I was the new kid like always, but I actually felt like I had more than one friend for the first time in a long time.

We got our own place after a month or two and I was going back to school full-time. Vortexes. Or maybe not wanting to kill myself, which was so surprising as to be a giddy sensation. It didn’t last long.

After about five months or so, shit took a nosedive. My step-dad had continued to work in South Carolina and live in the back of his truck. I hadn’t asked many details as he was a miserable fuck who, almost a continent away, was still too close to my life. He must have hit a wall in his desire to function. He got busted on a DUI and spent a few days in jail. Lost his job because of it, or so he said. He was driving out west.

I stopped eating.

I didn’t eat for the next few months, taking in all of my nutrients with Mt. Dew and caffeine pills that I stole.

The money from the lawsuit was nearly gone and the financial lifeline my step-dad had provided had dried up. Mom hadn’t gotten a job because Reasons. So the bastard joined us and I started unraveling.

Thankfully, I had people I could retreat to. I fled to my friend’s houses when I could. I became a burden, but I couldn't stop myself. I got a job at a TCBY and worked as much as I could while being underage. At 16, I was the only one in my house drawing a paycheck. Food started getting scarce. My mom made me call up my dad to see if I could get my birthday money a few months early so we could pay rent.

My mom got arrested for a bounced check my step-dad wrote.

My step-dad went to my friend Matt, a 16 year-old kid, and asked him if he could borrow $900 dollars to pay off the debt. Matt had been saving for a while at the insistence of his parents, and my step-dad had known about it somehow. Matt gave it to him, unbeknownst to me. I don’t know if his parents knew, either. I couldn’t bring myself to ever ask.

Not long afterwards, I was downstairs reading when my step-dad said, with the nonchalance of a mortician, that I should talk with my mom.

I went upstairs to her bedroom and she was lying in bed – she’d gotten back in the habit pretty hard. Her eyes were red-rimmed and puffy, but she tried to tell me as calmly as possible that she was going to kill herself. She said that she was going to sit in the car in the closed garage and end her life because she couldn’t take the failure any more.

We hadn’t had any food but condiments in the house for a few days. Seeing someone eat peanut butter with a spoon still makes my stomach churn. I hadn’t told anyone that I had started stealing what little food I ate from convenience stores or work. Mom and my step-dad had applied for emergency financial aid and got something like $200 once, but whether they just didn’t know where to go to help or they weren’t eligible for some reason, we had nothing left and mom was giving up.

I panicked. My innate, animal dependency on my parent kicked in and I did whatever I could to save her so she could maybe someday get around to raising me. My step-dad sat on the edge of her bed, saying fuck all, looking more bored than anything. I knew that I was responsible for keeping her alive. I knew that if she died, it would be my fault for not stopping her. I flailed for answers, crying and pleading. “If you kill yourself, I will, too” I lied, hoping that that image would stop her. It eventually did, but I would pay for saying that for years to come.

When we were finally evicted from our apartment, we lived out of our car but were able to crash at a friend’s house for a while. My mom begged her family for help, but no dice.

One day, my step-dad announced that he was leaving. He decided he was going to his mother’s in North Carolina and fucked promptly off. Not quite a “going out for cigarettes” event, but close enough. That was that. Never saw him again, may he rot.

Finally, my aunt Sally came through for us. We had an out. We just had to wait for some funds to sort out and we could go.

I was used to moving and not having more than maybe one person give a shit, so much so that I was completely surprised when my friends threw me a going away party. I tried like hell to not cry the entire time. Matt, Gretchen, Mattie, and Michael – their faces stick out to me profoundly. They were the icons of an era of my life, while I merely wandered through theirs. That is the curse of the new kid – always feeling that you remembered people more than they remembered you. It happened every place I went, all through my childhood up through New College. I was transient, temporary, while they were fixed points in my life.

Today Facebook allows for that slight tethering, just enough for me to be proud of how beautiful and adult and happy they all seem now. Except for Matt. I don’t know what happened to Matt. My asshole parents never paid him back, as far as I know. I don’t know if he is angry or not, or where he is, or anything at all. I’ve been too afraid to ask.

It’s a weird time, between a going away party and the actual going away, especially if that going away keeps getting delayed. Much needed closure almost prohibits further interaction, but I wasn’t really in a fit state to interact. In addition to not eating, I had stopped sleeping but for maybe two to three hours every other day for the last couple of weeks before we left Sedona. The place we were crashing at was like a halfway house for cultists and conspiracy theorists. I met a guy who had been in Heaven’s Gate, but had been kicked out before the mass suicide. He said he felt like he’d missed his one great chance for living a real life. I could relate.

But then we left. We left the most beautiful place I have ever laid eyes on, the place that had hosted one of my greatest trials. We were saved, at least temporarily. That chapter was closed.

Coping

“Tasteless” and “offensive” are sort of part and parcel of how I communicate. I try to make it funny, and sometimes I try to make it valuable. This will invariably be hit or miss. I’ve taken a  lot of shit from people for my defense of dark humor, and, to a degree, I haven't enjoyed losing the esteem that those people may have held me in. But this is me, and I don’t feel like I have a choice in being me.

I’ve been through too much to face life head-on. I just can’t. I don’t have it in me.

I feel like the only option that I have left is to come at life sideways through humor. I use jokes to defang the things waiting in the darkness.  

I’m sickened and terrified by rape.

I’m sickened and terrified by murder.

I’m sickened and terrified by suicide.

I’m sickened and terrified by hatred.

So I make fun of these things to try to chip away at their enormity. And not just about the concepts in general, but the damages done specifically to me. I joke about having gone hungry, about having been homeless. I joke about the fact that my mom shot herself in the head. I joke about the fact that my small body was subjected to the unstoppable hands of predators. I joke about the fact that I was abused in every way possible by people who were supposed to love me. I joke about being rendered less than a man by a crippling infirmity.

Therapy can only help so much. It helps you to find your own coping mechanisms. I have found mine. To people who don’t know me well, it can seem callous or sophomoric. It can be caustic and uncomfortable, which I suppose it is, and it can conflict with others’ coping mechanisms.

So be it.

This is what I’ve got. I’ve got a shitty, crass, foul-mouthed demeanor and I admit who I am. Hell, sometimes I even come close to liking who I am. My intentions are not to harm. My intentions are almost always to amuse. Few things in life give me the high of making someone laugh; truly, deeply laugh, especially at something frightening. The rest of the time, my intentions are to enlighten, because I’m pedantic and arrogant enough to think that I might have some wisdom to share (the desire to teach is an innately arrogant thing). Either way, what I want is to make the world better, or at least maybe easier, strange though that may seem. This isn’t always accomplished by Reader’s Digest saccharine wholesomeness. Sometimes helping requires a sharp edge.

I don’t take my suffering as free license to abuse others, no. I don’t attack anyone, and I do not invade another’s intellectual space to start stirring up shit. I keep to my own soapboxes to shout my profanities. Every reader always has the choice to roll their eyes and keep scrolling, or to terminate our friendship entirely. So it goes.

What I'm not doing is I'm not apologizing. I'm not saying how I act is right. I'm not saying it's righteous. What I am saying is that it is inevitable. If this seems terrible to you, then I guess we won’t see eye-to-eye, and that may be the demise of our relationship. Denying me my coping methods would only compound the damages already done to me and I can't afford to let anyone do that. my grasp is too tenuous. If you don’t like what I say, you have the freedom to ignore me or to walk away. I won’t blame you.

But I might call you a cum-rag.

(I might call you that if we stay friends, too.)

---Meant with genuine love---

Warning Label

The past three weeks have been profoundly challenging. The pain has escalated so much, and with so many sudden spikes, that I have mentally retreated from the world as much as possible. 

I am emotionally unstable. It feels like the door to my happy place, whatever that is, has been barred. Not a minute goes by that I don't remember that I am in pain and that I have been in pain for seven years straight without a day of rest.

It has gotten Bad.

I'm not saying this for pity or sympathy. I am saying this because a wounded animal is a dangerous animal. It is a struggle to mitigate how much I want to lash out, and anyone in my sphere is at risk. I feel I have kept myself in check, but I want this to preemptively explain my behavior. No matter what I am going through though, I am still accountable for my actions, which is something so many people forget. My trials do not entitle me to be selfish. 

I want to go out. I need a good time. I simply can't bring myself to get out of bed for anything but an obligation. 

Even opening up about this is hard, which is a rarity for me. I'm not even sure that I want to engage people about the topic. Talking about it makes me think about it more, and there is nothing any of you can do for me. It simply felt unhealthy to keep this in for so long, as I have been in some serious depths. 

As for my plan, I intend to try like hell to stay distracted and to just keep plodding on.

Open Letter to David Shore, Creator of House, M.D.

What do you do when you suddenly find yourself a cripple? What prepares you for that? How do you let your life change around you and still hold on to the illusion of control?

February of 2007, the pain started. To say the least, I wasn’t ready for it.

There are no classes in dealing with what happened to me. There are probably support groups for the newly broken, but I never learned of them. Who could I look to in order to navigate this complete shift in my life?

I’m an American, so I could only look to television.

Every handicapped person on television is a fucking champion. Every last one of them has a huge smile and a can-do attitude. They sit in their wheelchairs and play basketball like goddamn pros, proving that the world will never get them down, that limitations are all in the mind. If they do experience hardship, they’re only a montage away from becoming well-adjusted and whole; one short sequence of grimaces during physical therapy, finding new ways to reach the top shelf in their kitchen, and suddenly our hero is the little cripple that could. Every single one of them seems indomitable.

I did not feel indomitable.

I felt highly fucking domitable.

After only a few months, I felt my brave face slipping. Shit started getting real. Really real. Time after time, doctors told me that they didn’t know what was wrong and it felt like a fresh piece of me was lost. My emotional stability was eroding and I simply didn’t know how to cope. Not one of these goddamned heroes on TV had any answers for me. They exemplified these ridiculous standards of bravery and composure that I simply couldn’t maintain. They were like the happy, smiling black people; the ones that comfort an audience by showing that, hey, that guy is having a good go of life, surely there aren’t any problems we need to deal with. These angels on crutches were the model minorities made to comfort the masses. They are made to seem happy and totally fucking fine, because disabled people are frightening reminders that at any passing moment, you can suddenly find yourself one (like I did!)

I whined. I cried. I snapped at people. I wished my pain on others. I began to hate people who took their bodies for granted. I withdrew from people who were close to me. I stopped going out. I started becoming a boring recluse. Every event had to become planned, every outing plotted and considered. Bar crawl? Anything with the word “crawl” in it went right out the fucking window.Then there were the pills and everything they did to me.

Everything they do to me.

I grieved for the life I had thought I would have as I slowly came to realize that unrelenting pain was my new normal. It would be with me, as far as anyone could say, for the rest of my life. It became A Fact.

Then I start watching House, M.D. Here was a brilliant man who suddenly found himself broken and was dealing with it just about as poorly as I was. It helped that our afflictions were almost identical, though from different causes. For the first time, I started feeling like maybe I wasn’t a shitty, weak wuss who couldn’t effortlessly tap into the irrepressibility of the human spirit to surmount every challenge I faced. Maybe it was okay that I sucked at being a cripple.

The story arch in which he has the Ketamine procedure and the pain goes away for a while hurt to watch. There is a scene in which he’s running on the treadmill, trying to power through the return of his pain, and it’s getting more and more apparent that his relief was just temporary – I fucking bawled.

The episode in which he makes a big deal about going on vacation to Vancouver Island, just to spend a week alone on his couch with his Vicodin without anyone calling – God, I fucking get that. Why hassle with striving against your limitations just so you can get a photo or three? Better to slump into the furniture that you know you can find some kind of okay position in and stay there for as long as possible.

His anger, his bitterness, his frailty – I needed it like nothing I’d ever needed in my life before.

House was the one realistic representative that I got in the media, but he was the only one I needed. 

He saved my fucking life.