Month: May 2002

Astronomers don’t expect to really see some of the things they look for. Instead, they have to reach conclusions from indirect observation to find things like distant planets or dark matter. They have to observe visible objects like stars and see how their views of these objects change as they are affected by the presence of the things they can’t see directly. Changes in light levels or color, properties that can be seen and recorded and measured, can be caused by the gravitational pull of these other, unseen objects as they pull the light source in one direction or another, or as their gravitational pull focuses the light like a lens, revealing sources of light that were otherwise too dim to notice.

Which is to say, you don’t always have to see something directly to know it’s there. You can see how things change around that thing — how they directly respond to its presence — and the thing itself is revealed by these ripples in its environment. And then there it is, no secret at all.

I couldn’t find the right words when I was struggling to articulate something the other day, but this is pretty much exactly what I was trying to say.

It was a big decision for me to be candid here on the site about what’s been happening to me lately. But considering that a lot of my struggles are about being afraid to admit to weakness or vulnerability, I thought it would be a healthy step to let it all hang loose for once and see how things go. Also, my thoughts have been so addled lately that it’s been good for me to record them here during moments of clarity, or at least during the moments when I had the energy to try sorting them out. For friends and family and such, it’s proven to be a useful way to take a barometer reading of how I’m doing. For other people who read but don’t actually know me, I guess it just makes for a curious roller-coaster ride of depression and angst. Whee! Come watch Sparky get his crazy on!

I haven’t really found it detrimental to just own up to my problems here, however. I feel a little exposed, true, but all the venting and the navel-gazing has been pretty cathartic. That counts for something, right?

This weekend’s special treat was supposed to be a long-awaited visit from Big Daddy Jessie, but it looks like he’s all sick now, so we’ll have to reschedule our big plans for the Doughnut Tour of New York and late night gab sessions back at the Swanktuary (formerly known as the Rumpus Room until its rechristening this past weekend). Damnation!

If anyone in San Francisco catches him out and about enjoying himself this weekend, smack him soundly upside the head and tell him to get back in bed and drink some cranberry juice.

Almost nine months later, and a detailed story about September 11 will still make me teary and sick to my stomach. “102 Minutes” is an excellent Times feature that tells stories of what went on inside the towers the morning of the attack, pulled together from e-mails and phone calls from people trapped inside, and video footage and eyewitness reports of what went on. It’s brutal to read.

The smarmy memorial pieces and the constant references to the day don’t trouble me one bit. Any time I read any detailed reports of what happened that day, however — any time I’m reminded of the enormity of the disaster and the shock of the whole experience — my stomach does the same flip-flops all over again.

You know things are grim when all those Smiths lyrics start making sense again. I’ve said for years that the most fucked-up things about the Smiths wasn’t the bleakness of their lyrics, but that Morrissey was an adult and not a teenager when he wrote them. I guess I just needed the right attitude to adjust that opinion.

The antidepressant must be kicking in. I should be in the throes of a full-on anxiety attack (if the last few weeks have been any indication of a pattern), but instead I’m just curled up trying to block out the dull, maddening pain of accepting the inevitable. that’s the trouble right now: I’m not lost in some groundless depression that will just drift away with the ingestion of a few happy pills. No, I find myself deeply, deeply unhappy again, perhaps moreso than ever before, considering how much hurt I’ve been dredging up once and for all. In a way, I’m fighting the medication: I desperately crave numbness, a release from the acute emotional tortures I keep feeling, and wallowing in a depressive fog is the closest I ever feel to numb. I can sort out why some things upset me and how those things tie to other things, but it doesn’t change the fact that there are things staring me right in the face and shouting in my ears that make me feel miserable in a very real way.

This, of course, has all been very counterproductive to my master plan of nobly facing my demons and seeking occasional guidance without being a burden to anyone. As far as I can tell, I’m worrying the crap out of some people and becoming an unwelcome burden to others. Or another, at least. I can see that I’m less cheerful in public that I can usually muster the energy for. I can see that the effort to catalogue and battle the demons is taking a toll on me personally, and on my life in general.

And the demon leading the pack lately? Yup, that ol’ devil called low self-esteem. You know the one: it’s everybody’s favorite. The funny thing is, I don’t really think I’m all that bad. I don’t think I’m so bad looking, and I’m clever and often quite witty. I’m open to new ideas and I’m considerate and I have a lot of interesting stories to tell. I’m a good kisser and, when the chemistry is right, I’m a lot of fun in the sack. The thing that gets me is why none of these nor any other virtues and charms ever seem to do the trick when I really want them to. People swear up and down that I’m a great catch, but the positive reinforcement doesn’t come. Quite the contrary, in fact. I’m just the passing fancy, the second best, the good personality, and just the friend, if even that.

Maybe it’s shame more than low self-esteem. Though I can admit that I’ve got plenty of good stuff to offer, I also have to face up to being damaged goods. It’s easy enough to whine, “Wah, nobody loves me,” and blame it on fickle tastes and too much competition, but I’ve been on the other end of the equation enough to know it’s not that simple and sometimes feelings just don’t last. No, it’s the real stuff that upsets me the most: being positive, being prone to depression, getting so needy when it takes a hold of me, feeling the need to aggressively make things right when they go wrong, being too fast for the clean-cut guys yet too clean-cut for the fast guys. This is the stuff that makes me admit to myself now and then, in my smallest, neediest voice, “Why should anyone pick me when it would be so much easier not to bother?” And it’s so easy to listen to that little voice when I appear to screw things up the few times they really count.

So while I was sleeping off the evening’s thrill ride, my old pal Mark had another outbreak of Scaroliosis (his unique condition that makes him so prone to occasionally comic but often catastrophic back luck).

You see, Mark had a long day and strolled outside his front door a little after midnight to give Buster, his sweet and playful Yellow Lab, a quick walk before bedtime. He and Buster were walking a few doors down on his quiet little street in Fort Greene when the cops pulled up and asked where Buster’s leash might be. Mark explained that Buster was just out to find a nearby tree before heading back inside, but the cops informed him that this infraction was a “quality of life crime” and not the sort of thing they could overlook. Since he had no I.D. on him, they asked him to run inside and get something to show. He brought Buster and came back down with his license, and was greeted with handcuffs and a ride down to the station.

The officers who later came by to bring him to a jail for the night were appalled at what had happened — getting arrested for walking a mushy blonde dog of the leash in the middle of the night — and apologized profusely as they brought him to his evening’s accomodations in a 10″ x 12″ cell shared by 10 other guys (at least one of whom had also been brought in for walking his dog without a leash).

So who thinks things are finally back to normal here in the city? Who thinks the terror warnings are no longer quite enough to keep the annoying police-state happenings at bay any more? And who thinks Bloomberg is going to have the same smarmy savvy that Giuliani did to keep things from really blowing up about it once and for all?