Fuller Wiser

Of all the problems that I ever imagined I would face in my thirties, this is not one of them.

I’m losing my wife.

Not to death, or even divorce (yet). But I am losing her, and it’s tearing me apart.

When we got married nearly ten years ago, we were fairly universally regarded as perfect for each other by all who knew us. We shared an offbeat sense of humor, enjoyed long nights of thoughtful discussion, and generally believed that most other people were morons. We didn’t hew to traditional gender roles, and had no conflicting theologies. We both came from middle class upbringings with no serious family neuroses or traumas, apart from her father’s death a few years prior from a heart attack. Our voting records even matched, at least those since her anti-abortion activist years in college (a remnant of mild fundie churching).

We never encountered the sort of pitfalls that other relationships around us fell victim to. I never felt threatened by her making more money than me. I was proud of her degree and accomplishments, and her sharp intelligence. I liked that she didn’t wear makeup or spend hours shoe-shopping, or buy into any of the myths of feminine mystique that screw up our culture. And she had no expectations of chest-beating masculinity from me, and enjoyed my apathy towards football, hunting, and other stereotypically manly activities.

We believed in each other’s dreams. I knew she was a good writer, and I believed she could one day make a career of it. She saw through my early-career artistic stumbling and encouraged me to work hard to better myself, praising me when I did. Our first four years, while financially and professionally difficult, were full of unbounded love for each other and comfort in the one thing that worked in our lives: Us.

What killed us was the clock.

It was in 2002, in the excitement of our move to NYC, that the problem first threw its shadow upon our doorstep. It started amicably, just discussions, not arguments. Proposed timelines, if/then statements, poles in the water to test the depth.

As it turns out, this was where I made my mistake.

My fairly consistent statement on children for the first part of our marriage was “yes, once my artistic career is established.” We were both young and stupidly optimistic enough to find this condition perfectly reasonable. But as years went by and no such career materialized, the question then became one of biology. My wife was entering her mid-30s, from which follow the late 30s, after which the prospects for healthy childbirth get ever dicier in the steady course towards menopause. The question was obvious: If there is no artistic career, will there be children?

My gut instinct was that no, there should not be. Because I wanted my career more than a child. I spent my childhood subconsciously aware that my birth was not my father’s idea. I was not abused, but my siblings and I were studiously avoided by my old man, as I’ve discussed here before. Above all other things, I did not want to feel resentment towards a child, because I knew that they would be able to feel it even if I never verbally confirmed its existence. Even if I smiled in their face and gave them horsey-rides and encouraged them to be the best they could be, they would be able to tell whether I was excited that they had been born.

However, as our discussions went on, through 2003-04, I didn’t say no. My career needed more time to develop, we needed to get on firmer financial footing, we both had to be in a better professional place…argument after argument, I presented these conditions. But the clock didn’t care. It said now, now, now, and I kept saying wait, wait, just a little while longer, please, and still it ticked on, potential offspring evaporating like water from a desert pond.

I never said no. And I should have. I did not want to be the object of her resentment. And I knew I would be. I knew that the children I’d made her wait for would not be optional anymore. In the absence of her own artistic success (always more nebulously pursued than mine), she had placed children as her life’s wish, the thing that got her up in the morning. To take that away could mean the end, if not of our relationship, then our love. And I still loved her, I loved everything about her that wasn’t yearning towards motherhood. But that part of her grew, and it was not discussing now, but demanding a decision. Now, not later. What was my answer?

I crumbled. I couldn’t tell her no, this woman who meant so much to me, who had gotten me through my darkest days of despair. I couldn’t watch her turn into a bitter old woman, simmering with regret and resentment towards me for the child she never had. I couldn’t live like that, and neither could our marriage.

But I did one worse: I convinced myself that I wanted it. With absolutely no experience of what life with a baby was like, I told myself that it was a new phase of my life, a journey which would enrich me and fuel my creativity with new experiences.

I was an idiot.

Perhaps I am lacking a necessary emotional component, but for me, caring for a newborn is the height of brain-numbing banality. The life of the mind disappears, replaced by animal needs and repetitive tasks made even more drudging by sleep deprivation and, at least in the United States, income loss.

My creativity was not sparked by having a child. It was deprived of oxygen, strangled and shrunken now to the point where, like Grover Norquist with his ideal government, I can finally drown it in the bathtub.

Impossible as it is to believe, though, I don’t blame my son for this. As long as I can remember, I have had an intuitive sense of moral fairness. Only those who are directly responsible for a problem should be blamed for it. I have held to that steadfastly through all of my adult life. And so it is now. The blame for the death of my creativity stands squarely at my own feet, and I will never forget that. I love my son, and I will never for a minute penalize him for his father’s bad decisions. It is one of the only things I believe in with no reservations, qualms, or doubts.

But the fact is that it doesn’t matter. My wife, still eyeing the clock, has spent the months since my son’s birth lobbying for a second child, even as lingering post-partum depression sent us both into therapy and despair. This time, though, I have learned my lesson. I have said no. And in doing so, I have at last become the object of her resentment.

Take note, all who read this. Ignoring my instincts and principles for fear of bringing destruction to my relationship has only resulted in delaying that destruction for a few tiny years. Only now do I understand that this one issue was going to bring us down no matter what else happened in our lives, barring arrival of the elusive career success, and possibly even then.

We were doomed from the start. Because we didn’t know how to ask the right questions in the right way, and not only have an answer, but several answers, one for every level of potential outcome. Even as we congratulated ourselves on how smart we were, how much healthier our relationship was than so many others, we ignored the meteorite hurtling towards our tiny planet, soon to unleash great debris-strewn clouds of anger, sadness, and regret. We have become our worst nightmare, the couple who lie together in bed, yet cannot speak without opening a wound.

I will not live in a house where I cannot speak. The silence will become resentment, which will become anger, which will surely become hate. The words she does not speak will, in my mind, become sharper, crueler, more unreasonable, and my unspoken responses will grow nastier, more condescending, and less concerned with the hurt they may inflict. I watched it happen between my parents, and I swore never to let it happen in my life.

It is beyond infuriating that this single issue may ruin such a deep love. Because I still love her, all the parts that are not wrapped up in this debate, all the things we’ve shared, all the things about her that still make me proud to be her husband. And this makes her the object of my resentment, because I find it inexcusable that a good relationship should be snuffed out for want of one more birth.

And of course now it’s gotten more complicated. In passionate exchanges since my “no” verdict, I have let slip the fact that I fooled myself into greenlighting the first birth. She now knows everything I’ve just written here, and that rewrites a significant chunk of our past. She can now resent me both forward and backward.

Thankfully, we are intelligent enough to know when we need help, so we have lined up a marriage counseling session for next week. But in the days and nights of silence between us, the darkness will fester. Shapes, intents, emotions will be born from the formless black, demons named and released in anticipation of the coming conflict. Walls will be erected, defenses prepared, anger fueling the certainty of the worse-case scenario.

There is nothing so deadly as silence between lovers. In it, anything may come into being. In the bliss of new love, each partner impregnates these silences with their own dreams of the shared future, magic castles filled with each person’s deepest desires. But a castle, however beautiful, is a fortress, and inside these battlements dreams become entrenched. There may come a time when, looking up at last, you find that rather than building your dreams together, you have simply created adjacent structures, each protecting its own prize. One arrow may be all it takes to unleash wholesale war.

I write this without knowing the result of this conflict, and thus without a clear-cut moral for the reader. But life is like that. Not until the end do you really know what it is that you have done.

I should clarify.

My last post read like a last will and testament, and to an extent it was. But not for my life. As I’ve written here before, I’ve been learning to let go of my aspirations for a career in the creative arts. Despite my best efforts over the past 17 years, I have not been able to make that which I love pay a living wage. This is not opinion, it is reality.

I have in fact been turning my attention to a new aspiration, one that in many ways is every bit as challenging and potentially rewarding as my artistic ambitions: By 2019, I hope to be a community college history professor.

In the hand-wringing screeds I’ve previously published in this space, I have frequently fretted about growing old in the administrative assistant profession, barring any sort of monetary return on my creative pursuits (an unlikely boon). The only other thing I really give a damn enough about to spend leisure time on is the discussion and research of history. I enjoy educating people about aspects of the past they may not previously have been aware of, and always have.

As much as it’s desperately needed in our society, I have no interest in teaching junior high or high school. My memories of being an adolescent history student are charged with bitterness about fellow students not allowing me to focus my attention on the subject, one of the only classes whose content actually engaged me in school. Plus the K-12 payscale is garbage, as my sister the educator can attest. Community college isn’t a whole lot better, but as far as I can tell, it is slightly more livable. And my brief stint in a junior college history class was enough to show me that crowd control needn’t be an integral part of the teaching experience.

This will require hard work. It will require a return to college, acquisition of a Bachelor’s degree, a Master’s degree, licensing, and plenty of student teaching hours. It will require my extra money, time, and brainpower for many years.

To be able to devote these resources to the task, it is imperative that I kill my earlier dream, and kill it dead. In the past, whenever a dayjob or other extracurricular activity has made demands on my spare time, and encroached on my creatively-focused work hours, it has been cut from the schedule. I have not given other projects priority because I retained the belief that they were always secondary to the work that I believed would shape my artistic career. It is time to turn the tables. It is time for art to take second place behind education.

It’s not that I won’t continue to create. But it will be sporadic, and only as time allows. It will not be My Life’s Work. It will be something I do because I enjoy it, and perhaps that will help me to enjoy it more. Because I have a creative project due for release this year, I’m holding off on my return to school until January 2009. This year will allow me to give my last hurrah a good push out the door and allow all who might enjoy it to know it exists. I would be lying if I said I didn’t hold a small measure of hope for it to be successful enough to make my coming sacrifice unnecessary. But it is a grain of sand on the increasingly large beachhead in front of me.

I hope this explains the previous post. The last thing I need now is for someone to believe in me as a potentially professional artist. If people enjoy what I create, that’s marvelous. But I’m done tensing for the leap into greatness. I’m going to do something useful for people’s minds, and hopefully for mine. Please let me be, I just might make myself proud.

Some people won’t let you die. Frank Slade in Scent Of A Woman learned that: poor, stupid Charlie rushing in to tell him he has something to live for, despite the fact that it was the old colonel, not the kid with no scars on his face, who had to live that pointless life.

I’m not talking about suicide, though. I’m talking about letting something go. Something that’s been hurting a long time, like a scarred, decaying limb that really needs to be amputated, and yet you can’t quite get up the nerve to make the cut.

And then one day you do it. You wipe away the tears, sit straight in your chair, and hack the damned thing off. You give a respectful salute to that which was once you. That was my arm, you tell yourself, but it has failed me, and now it is no more. What is now me does not contain that.

But then some bastard, some heartless sonofabitch, comes rushing in like Chris O-Fucking-Donnell, channeling a sandwich-hungry Homer Simpson. “It’s still good! You can save it! Don’t throw it all away! It’s still good!”

No, it isn’t.

You, who have only walked in for the last act, presume to know how hard I’ve worked to save it. Surely I haven’t tried this, or this, or maybe this…

Yes, I have.

I’ve done more than you can possibly imagine to keep that which I love from going bad, from losing its golden sheen, from the fate I’ve lain awake dreading for half of my life. You don’t know, and you never, ever will.

It can’t be that bad, you shout. There must’ve been something I didn’t try. These things don’t just happen, I must have missed something.

No, I didn’t, and yes, they do.

I was once like you. I blared in the faces of the downhearted that there was still hope, that no obstacle was insurmountable. Maybe they needed fresh eyes to see their problems, they just weren’t thinking clearly. I know, maybe you should try this, this, or this.

They didn’t. I cursed them, I wrote them off as losers, as the debris that constitutes so much of human life. Regular people. They just didn’t know what they were doing. They didn’t listen to me.

I was a fool. Why does every generation of idealists believe that no previous generation has ever thought that they would be the ones to change the world? But of course most of my generation got the memo: Idealism is dead, get yours and get out. Eddie Vedder told me. I will stare at the sun till my eyes go blind, how much difference does it make? But I’m a perverse bastard, and the resistance my classmates showed to idealism further stoked my fires. They, along with the old failures, were all wrong.

But you: How dare you come into my life and reawaken dead desires? How dare you assume that half of my life has only been a waste because I haven’t been trying? How dare you trot out simplistic solutions with no bearing on the realities of industry, of vanity, of cultural change?

You come in from outside and presume to know that which I’ve spent nearly two decades immersed in. You talk of how much better I deserve. Deserve? There is no deserve. We do not live in a merit-based world, not in business, not in academia, and certainly not in the arts. Quality (a subjective concept for a start) has no bearing on marketability. None. I know artists of such great talent that they should be millionaires many times over, and yet they lie awake in dank apartments, dreading the punch of the clock in the morning. And in ancillary capacities, I’ve watched the creatively bankrupt rake in profits far in excess of the weight of their output.

I’ve seen all of this, and you have not. You have seen Hallmark stories of hard struggle followed by blessed reward. But you have not seen those whose struggles remain fruitless. Those whose greatest love flowers in the dark, stretching for life-giving light, and slowly withers for want of the sun’s fickle touch. To watch its last gasp, its pleading to live and to be powerless to keep it from dying…you do not know what it is like.

Please. Leave me be. I know what it is that I do. Be thankful that you don’t.

Every few weeks it strikes me. The master plan. The way to bypass the system, become autonomous, and live happily ever after. The log cabin in the woods, the abandoned nuclear missile silo, the converted shipping container, etc., etc.

I’m an idiot.

It’s not that the plans wouldn’t work, necessarily. Some have a great deal of merit, and in the hands of someone else could be very useful. But they overlook one very plain fact: I am suburban.

I don’t know when it happened. I grew up in the country, but not the hardcore country. We didn’t grow our own food or give directions like “turn left on the dirt road after the rusted tractor wheel,” but we did have 3 acres and a barbed-wire fence. Mind you, we only moved there after spending my first 10 years in a suburb of Fort Worth, so maybe the seed got planted early on.

Upon leaving college in that small country town, I moved to Fort Worth and have thenceforth lived in cities or suburbs. Nothing illogical about that, my clerical skill set has a hard time making money in the sticks. And I only developed that skill set en route to pursuing artistic fulfillment, the routes for which generally exist in and around cities. 14 years in that environment, however lower class, have structured my standards for livability.

It’s not just a housing thing. Try as I may, it seems I cannot live on less than $1,000 per week. Granted, a portion of that goes to city-level rent and utilities, but a surprising amount of it is used for what we call pocket money. I buy the most expensive coffee, I pick up new books in hardcover, I choose big-name groceries over cheapo store brands, and I drive a new car. Mind you, it’s bottom-of-the-line and the only car our three-member family has, but it’s not the hunka junka that a truly frugal person would drive (although an argument could be made for the savings in repairs, yaddah, yaddah).

I have this impression of the level of life I should be having in my mid-30s, and I live as close to it as my budget will allow. It’s a nationwide problem, evidenced by the vast industry of beyond-your-means lending that has been groaning, and now fracturing, under the weight of my generation’s unrealistic expectations. Most of us will not have the financial security and debtless spending money that many of our parents did, and we have thus far not been able to accept that fact.

World War II left the planet in ashes and the United States with 50% of the world’s wealth, and a corresponding rise in lifestyle quality, at least for those not Jim Crowed into poverty. Slowly but very surely, that share of global assets has diminished, to the point that we now only comprise between a third and a fourth of the world’s economy. We of the GenX set have only known bubbles, not true prosperity. My twenties corresponded with the tech bubble, and indeed it burst all over my face. Now, in my thirties, the mortgage bubble has popped. It’s likely that many more letdowns are in store, and the distribution of the workforce across continents offers little hope for the lower middle class’ future beyond somehow maintaining the low end of the present status quo. My uncle-in-law spotted the tech bust coming in 1999, I myself spotted the impending real estate bust 5 years ago while processing insane mortgage applications, and in various capacities since I have seen portents of future calamity which I won’t go into here.

At this point, the logic is plainer than plain: Get off the goddamned grid. Establish a life as separate from the prevailing societal winds as possible, and weather the storm. Learn to live with less, preferably in a sustainable manner, and largely free of debt obligations.

How. Incredibly. Boring.

And that’s really what it boils down to, I suppose. There’s probably a reason for the stereotype of the artist who spends what he hasn’t got, revels in isolated moments of prosperity, and basically does himself in due to lack of forethought. But of course it’s not lack of forethought. I’ve thought about it. The information is there. I’m just not using it.

The left-brain/right-brain divide is a pesky force in human history. It can be perfectly evident what the logical course of action is, and yet the lives of perfectly intelligent people are often lived as if logic does not exist. The frustrating thing is that sometimes the less attention you pay to logic, the better result you get. And you never know whether the problem you’re currently pondering is one of those best solved by the gut, or one of the myriad sharp stones just waiting to be stumbled over by ignoring the obvious shadow they cast in your path.

Biographies are filled with tales of those who threw caution to the wind and won. That’s because no one’s interested in those whose caution got caught on the tree branches and ripped to shreds.

I have twin forces working on me at the moment. One is the impending completion of a creative project which will require a bit of money and effort to get to market. Hope and optimism direct me to give it everything I’ve got, in the belief that it will advance my artistic career, which is, mostly, what I live for.

The other force grows by the day, and would probably stop if I weren’t a news and blog junkie. It is the growing certainty that this country, and possibly the world, is headed for a recession/depression/big ball o’ shit in the very near future. Were I single and childless, I would start thinking about joint housing options with friends, and bohemian ways to duck the blade should it slice my way.

What I have, however, is a dependent and a spouse, and the requirements for each have to factor into my thinking. Yes, I know children are resilient, but if I’m gonna have a kid, I have a certain standard of living I want to keep up, both for his sanity and mine. My wife’s standards are a bit higher still, though hardly oppressive. Just a hair enough above mine, and most of them kid-focused, which is as it should be.

All of this means that as much as I’d like to give myself over to artistic dreamland, I really do feel I have to make plans for the possibility of economic disaster. I have grandparents who made it through the Great Depression, but not without harrowing tales of deprivation and struggle. Yes, the world is a different place since then, but in many ways it’s far more dangerous. The U.S. population has more than doubled since 1930, and many people, including myself, have skills that are only of use in a robust, hi-tech economy. Yes, I could bust rocks and lay concrete if I needed to, but there are others far more suited to the task should the need arise.

Upon reading the previous paragraph, of course, I spot the sort of hyperventilating apocalypticism that has traditionally pushed my derision button. And yet the evidence mounts that we are in for very bad things indeed, things we have been blithely ignoring in an economy whose sole impetus is growth.

And every time I get that feeling, I start with the master plans. Moving to the less expensive areas of the EU, trying alternative housing methods in remote parts of the U.S., finding a magic bullet to take us off the grid somehow.

But I am suburban as hell. I enjoy access to art-house theaters, good music venues, nice bookstores, Starbucks, and people who don’t talk about hogs and hay all day long. The sort of country town I grew up in got very stifling after a while, and there’s no reason to think that it wouldn’t again. Again, is a life that’s safe, secure and dull as hell any sort of life at all?

We read history as cause and effect. This led to that, which led to that, and so on. We sometimes blink and wonder how the people who lived through historic times couldn’t have seen them coming. We giggle at people who were totally convinced of an imminent catastrophe that did not in fact materialize.

We know nothing. No more than anyone in history ever has. We make guesses. Those who guess correctly get written up in one type of book, those who do not are thrown into different anthologies. Events do not take place on straight lines, they pop up snarled in webs, with threads woven by millions of individual lives. The entire design of the past is only visible from some distance away, and from that distance we cannot always see the smaller contributions to the greater whole. Like Vonnegut’s Tralfamadorians, we see beginnings, middles, and ends, but seldom the snapshot of a life in mid-decision.

And yet here we are, all of us in mid-decision, a probability wave that resolves every few moments, laying down futures and pasts that will, in the end, seem inevitable. I’m ill-equipped to crank up the free will debate train. I believe I know myself well enough to predict that my upcoming decisions will be far more based on the cerebral end of the hierarchy of needs than the visceral. Nature or nurture, it’s how I’m wired, and always has been.

Logically, then, I should just toss the anguish and accept that if the worst descends upon us, I will be a victim and deal with it as it comes. If we are spared, I will have lost no sleep or time hunting phantoms.

There it stands. It can do no other.

Midway through Joss Whedon’s Serenity, Mal and the gang find a dying Shepherd Book amidst the wreckage of his slagged outpost. In his last breath, hands bloodied, he grabs Mal by the lapels and hoarsely whispers, “I don’t care what you believe in, just believe in it…”

At first glance, it’s the sort of thing you find in Unitarian and Humanist circles, the idea that the very act of believing is sacred and important, less important than the specifics of the belief itself. Yet a grade-schooler who thought about it for a minute could knock the premise down. What if you believe that everyone you know should die by your hand? What if your belief entails stamping out other people’s beliefs? What if I believe I don’t have to do homework? Et cetera, et cetera…

But for quite a while now, I have been in a place where if pressed, I couldn’t actually tell you what I believed. And it’s damn near impossible to live that way.

Recently I’ve had some successes that ten years ago would’ve made me jump out of my seat and go have a celebratory dinner with friends and family. Because ten years ago, I believed that it was possible for those sorts of successes to take me somewhere.

As I’ve mentioned eight million times on this blog, the 21st century has worn down my belief in the potential for good things, both in my life and in the wider world. False starts, bungled second acts, dead ends, recurring themes, bad timing, hours upon hours of ignominy and obscurity, these things accumulate. They collect around a life, blocking the view, as the windblown newspapers smother Harry Tuttle in Brazil. And like Tuttle, I’ve had a hard time keeping the accretion of unfortunate events from actually becoming me. In fact, I’ve completely failed to do so.

A consciousness is in part a collection of experiences. We know how and why to laugh and smile because we’ve experienced laughs and smiles. I see that from the change to my little blank slate during the two years since I brought him home from the hospital. Some tendencies and temperaments came with the package, certainly, but experiences either heighten or diminish those predispositions, and add emotional memories of attempts, punishments and rewards that reside in memory long after the event itself passes from conscious memory. This process doesn’t stop in adulthood. Those who haven’t realized their dreams frown as they test hypotheses developed in childhood, editing and rewriting in desperation like Garry Marshall before a shark jump shoot. Those with successes write their pasts into a seamless story arc, committing crimes of omission along the way to further frustrate observers in search of a successful third act.

I visited the forum of a favorite author recently, one Dan Simmons. I’ve enjoyed his work for many years, and he makes himself far more approachable than many authors in his sales bracket, commenting frequently on the forum threads and offering writerly advice.

Bio-combing is something I am guilty of. From a young age, I studied the lives of those I wished to emulate, and have fretted many times when my own course has lacked the crucial milestones that my heroes document. Certainly, all courses vary, but there are, let’s say, Behind The Artist moments that permeate most bios.

Simmons is a bit of a special case, in that he didn’t have anything published until he was 34, the age I am now. I’m already ahead of that. Five years later, Simmons was able to pursue writing full-time. Dare I believe that such a thing is possible for me?

Fear, of course, is the driver here. To have hoped deeply and then failed is a far more raw hurt than to have vaguely aspired and gotten lucky. But as in love, it seems the greatest rewards arise from the highest risk, the exposure of the heart to something that could either bring utmost joy or scorching pain. The effort can save your life or ruin your soul, and no amount of statistical analysis can bring you assurance as to which it will be.

But a life without such risks is no life. Orwell noted that he would rather be in a war zone than dying the slow death that many resign themselves to, devoid of all highs or lows. A Prozac life, even and uneventful. The old curse wishing the recipient to “live in interesting times” carries weight, but its reverse curses equally, if not more.

In Fooled By Randomness, Nassim Nicholas Taleb makes what should be an obvious point, that the quality of lifestyle enjoyed by your neighbors directly affects your satisfaction with your own lifestyle. Someone with a solid 3-bedroom house in a neighborhood with dilapidated 2-bedroom houses feels like they’re doing pretty well. Move that house into the middle of an upscale 4-bedroom-with-a-study neighborhood, and there will be a corresponding drop in the homeowner’s perception of their own lifestyle.

I know this to be true, because it doesn’t just apply to houses. When speaking to people whose paycheck comes directly from their writing, I feel like some slacker dumbass. Whereas if I’m talking to Sue Ellen McDinglewampus about how she just got her 50th rejection letter for her Cat Who Solved The Mystery novel, I feel positively brilliant.

As I’ve written here before, Buddhism covers this, the recognition that pain arises from the chasm between expectation and result. It’s not new information. It’s not hard to understand. But it hides at the periphery of my vision instead of in the crosshairs, unseen until I bother to look for it. It isn’t intuitive, and even if it were, I don’t know how to not want what I want.

At this point, those reading this may throw their hands up in frustration and exclaim, “Well, quit your bitching, get up off your ass and DO something about it!” Well, I would, except walking away from my desk here at the big corporation would result in a pretty quick termination of paychecks, followed shortly thereafter by eviction in the absence of the rent.

I do work on my non-dayjob projects during the business day, but of course it’s necessarily piecemeal in between calls, copies, faxes, and filing. Inspiration and flow can get lost in such stuttering bursts, and thus most of what I feel I can safely finish are things like these blog posts. Which are useful, but ain’t nobody paying for ‘em.

Which brings us back to belief. What has driven me to finish any of the projects that have gotten any success whatsoever has been a belief that once finished, they would bring rewards. It’s a terribly crass, capitalistic viewpoint, but monetary reward is something that does seem to matter to me. Particularly since God and Divine Fate have been tossed into the chipper. Artistic expression is all very fine, but by itself is much like chasing one’s own tail.

So in a world without omniscient design and karmic moral management, what belief can one have that good will come? What I’m beginning to lean towards is the idea that rather than having belief in a positive outcome, I should have a belief that there cannot be an assured negative outcome. My new belief is that I’m not doomed to failure. Why? Because there is no God. If there is no God to assure my success, then neither can there be one to assure my failure.

All options are open, and there is zero evidence to show that the odds will tip either towards me or against me. I simply don’t know, and in the absence of certainty, I can choose belief in the better outcome. If I’m proven wrong, nothing will have changed. I can either be depressed now or wait until later.

Sounds good on paper. Can I believe? Well, I’d better. Without it, I create the certainty of failure. With it, at least there is no certainty. That’s probably the best anyone can ask for.

Every so often I get this urge to wipe the slate, start fresh in some new life, make a clean break with the life I’ve lived thus far. The fantasy usually involves a move away from Texas, either to another U.S. locale or elsewhere in the world. My NYC move was the only instance in which I gave in to the urge, and while that was very good for me, it didn’t provide the sort of fundamental life change I’d hoped for.

In fact, my NYC experience and subsequent return to my home state taught an important lesson: My problems are not necessarily location-based. While changing the scenery can shake up ossified perceptions and catalyze change, the new scenery eventually becomes familiar, and old behaviors return, prompting yet another urge to move and start afresh.

It’s tempting to think of this as the manifestation of my nomadic Native American genes, and not just someone running from his problems. Honestly, I’m not sure which is more disturbing. If indeed I am predisposed to wandering, I have lent myself to life habits and commitments that will keep me rooted and frustrated for the foreseeable future. If I’m feeling the instinct to seek greener pastures because I am unable to effectively face and correct more fundamental psychological barriers to happiness, the outcome is largely the same.

I have this notion that life in the modern United States is a sick thing. There is opportunity, but only for those willing to work within the system, to learn where the ladders are, and climb them to a higher perch, from which the next forward motion can be best plotted. But the journey changes you. Ten years spent inside the system, learning its geography, finding its handholds, it’s impossible not to have absorbed some of its morality, its logic. It’s the sort of thing that turns people like John Kerry from idealistic revolutionary to milquetoast bureaucrat (take issue if you want, but watch his 1971 Senate testimony and tell me the guy wasn’t sincere; compare and contrast to name-your-2004-press-conference).

It would seem the logical thing to do. Work the system, get your winnings, and with that fortification, set out on a path more to your liking. Cold logic upholds it, but passion cannot. To put aside yearnings of the heart for years on end, in hope of a future day when they can be put to use, that requires a constitution I certainly don’t possess.

But this assumes that the U.S. model is the only one available. What opportunities may lie outside this country? True, the options are limited. Third-world oil-holes, Asian globalized manufacturing hubs, Iron Curtain mob-run industrial scrabblers, most nations would hardly be an improvement over Middle America. The EU, of course, offers some of the highest standards of living, but with corresponding levels of taxation and high hurdles for entry. They don’t want disillusioned Yanks moving in any more than Canada does, and what a waste it would be to go to all that trouble and realize that guess what, the problems are still in yer own head, me bucko.

My wife and I have investigated alternate lifestyles such as commune farming, and while they are logical responses to the resource problems this country faces and may be the sort of fresh perspective on life that could help us, I have a nagging sense that we wouldn’t, in the end, be able to cut the cord from our suburban comforts, meager and inconstant as they may be.

Worse, a factor that will complicate our lives until at least 2024 is that both my son’s sets of grandparents live here. Non-family childcare can be an expensive thing, and though they only see him once a month, I’m glad he has some connection to them. Moving out of state, not to mention out of country, would mean he would see them maybe twice a year; not an arrangement conducive to building a real relationship.

But is that more important than his parents keeping themselves from going stir-crazy, from feeling stuck in lives that make them at best indifferent, at worst miserable? And is that state of affairs at all related to location, or something that will persist, with the added problem of separation from extended family?

I have a little dream in my head, of being the steadfast salaryman and artistic hobbyist throughout my son’s childhood, then at age 50, embarking fully upon my life’s work, armed with decades of experience in Real Life. It doesn’t sound altogether bad on paper, but of course it’s a check written on Swiss cheese. Between 2008 and 2024, I could contract a major illness, suffer a stroke, be involved in a life-changing accident, or even die. There are reasons for lofty maxims of the carpe diem variety, and they are very real. To be within sight of the goal and be stricken down, few fates could be crueler. And though I’m not a Person of the Book, the image of Moses standing helplessly outside his promised land contains enough brutal truth to make me grimace in recognition. Even if I believed in heaven, I have to think that the old man was pissed as hell.

The journey is important. It may be more important than the goal, and the goal may change because of the journey. Mine already has, though whether for good or ill is impossible to say at this point. So what happens when the journey is making you crazy? Change the journey, of course. But to what end? Happiness. And what is that? Doing what I love, and having it pay the bills. Odds: Improbable.

I’ve touched on this before, and it’s a problem philosophers have grappled with over far more sleepless nights than I have so far put in. But I’m catching up.

These recurrent problems I’ve mentioned, the ones that come back after the new car smell of fresh scenery fades, are of a circular nature. If they weren’t, they wouldn’t seem so daunting, because one-time problems can be assessed one at a time. But a cycle suggests a nature, and the more my behaviors reveal my nature, the further I recoil from the image, like Dorian Gray before his mottled, scabrous portrait. I begin to think that the molecules and trajectories I inherited from the Big Bang are traveling a path that I cannot change. More and more, I feel like an observer of my own life, a passenger in this body that does as it shall do, my will be damned.

I compensate. And I compensate in the stupidest areas of life. I know, for instance, that by bringing my own lunch, I would have $35 extra dollars per week, $100 extra per month. I know that forsaking my Starbucks would bring me $45 more dollars per week, $180 extra per month. $280 extra dollars per month could be used to reduce debt and advance my non-dayjob career. But day in and out, I am convinced that my crappy life needs compensations for how crappy it is, so I allow myself a few perks. Which turn into a few more perks, which becomes a lifestyle that eats away at the acceptable profit margin until suddenly I’m tied to a certain income to maintain that lifestyle.

Part of that is due to disillusionment and loss of belief in a positive outcome for my non-dayjob efforts. If I create what I create and no one gives a shit, then all time spent ascetically in hopes of reward is fruitless. Might as well have a good time if you’re going to get ignored anyway. Except of course I’m not having a good time. Certain days I am, and certain times within those days, but overall there is a sense of waste, of frustration, of regret.

The last time I seriously challenged myself to remake my life was when I moved to NYC in 2002. At that time, I hadn’t gotten around to ditching the sky fairy, and I was still under the impression that there was a Way which I would find if I simply regimented myself and worked hard. I was on the Atkins diet at this time, and lost 50 pounds, dropping below 200 for the first time since high school. I was a drill sergeant when it came to that diet. No temptation could get past my vigilance, I had come to meet my destiny, with work ethic and iron will in hand.

It took a while and many ego-beatings, but by late 2004 I was done. The world was a much shittier place than I’d ever imagined it to be, and became more shitty the more I saw of it. And this wasn’t a New York thing, this was New York experience piling onto Texas experience, creating such a gigantic pile of shit that its meaning couldn’t be ignored any longer. Upon seeing such a pile, many start looking for the pony, but I was too tired, and anyway it couldn’t have been a very healthy pony even if I found it. Seeking Pegasus and unearthing a diuretic mule is a real letdown.

But none of this gets me any closer to improving my journey. Delusion is helpful in seeking happiness, but I have a hard time believing it’s essential. And I really don’t seek happiness anymore so much as I seek less unhappiness. I seek meaning.

It may be that I really am too self-centered to find my meaning in fatherhood and marriage. I still seek to create vestibules of meaning, works that contain it, leading to a life lived to pursue it. But what if this is it? What if this, what I mean to my wife and son, and to my friends and family, is a greater meaning than anything I could achieve professionally?

The bastard part is that I’ll never know for sure. No one but the deluded ever has ironclad confidence in the quality of their decisions. I may have passed the point of no return before I even knew it was coming. But I have to think that in a world without a Plan, destiny can be put in the hands of the destined. My molecules may groan, but it has to be possible.

What does that mean? Damned if I know.

Relationships are weird. The ones you have, the ones you once had, and the ones you’re not entirely sure you’re having.

Despite my mostly unconventional ways, in some areas of my life I’m a ritualist. One of these rituals is the morning workday routine. Though the food portion of my breakfast can vary, the drink never does. As soon as I’m off the train, I duck into my local Starbucks and get a tall mocha frappucino. Been doing it for months now, and the staff there knows me.

The staff. It’s usually the way I think of the people who take my orders at restaurants. I’m not one of these who strikes up relationships with the staff, because I see my activity in food establishments as very businesslike, something to get done so I can go do something else. It might be the fact that I’ve never worked in food service. I chat far longer with booksellers and grocery store clerks, both of which are members of my former professions. But with food, I’m very much hi, gimme the food, see you later.

Now, this is not to say I don’t think of the staff as people. I believe politeness is a necessary component of human interaction, because really, we’re all just trying to get through our day with a minimum of high blood pressure and resentment, and why the heck would I want more stressed-out people in the world?

And of course, I am a heterosexual male, so some members of the staff may get slightly more attention from me than others. This is the case at my local Starbucks, where I not-infrequently share a shy smile with a girl we’ll call K.

K is my kind of girl. Quiet, cute, got a bit of meat on her, and a little shy. And I have been able to infer, both from her behavior and those of some of her co-workers, that she may be attracted to me.

Flirtations between quiet people can be sweet, but often frustrating, especially if your only interaction is in a work environment, and your relationship is that of customer-employee. Were I a chattier sort, I might make offhand remarks about something my wife and I did over the weekend. That’s worked well in the past, when a spark flew between me and another woman. It’s tactful, difficult for onlookers to decode, and is utterly devoid of rejection. With the right body language, it says, “I like you, too, but I’m already taken.” The recipient of the message then gets a charge from being desired, and a signal not to focus their energies in a direction that will end up being fruitless and disappointing. It’s worked that way on me in the past, anyway.

But since I’m not a talker, saying something like that at the Starbucks counter would call far more attention than would be comfortable to either me or K. And since I lost my wedding ring some years ago and haven’t gotten around to replacing it, there are no obvious signals that I’m married.

Last month, I noticed that she started taking extra care to call me by name, rather than by the drink I ordered, and since I’m far from the only regular there, it seemed significant. A question about how I was spending my holidays was out of character for her, and could have been an opportunity for me to derail the train with a wife comment. Unfortunately, it was a morning in which the kid had woken up periodically all night before, and thus I wasn’t at my mental best. Vague holiday references were all she got in return, and then I was out the door, fishing in my bag for an ibuprofen.

This was apparently a fairly significant event, because after the holidays, her interactions with me were unusually terse and devoid of smiles. I had obviously pissed her off, because other customers were still seeing K’s friendly grin.

In what may either have been a foolish or wise move, I doubled my efforts to be friendly to her the following week, and gradually I saw the smile come back. It’s very awkward, though. Expressing friendliness without stepping over into flirtiness is very difficult, especially when the target considers you to be on the market. But I was glad to have the old K back, even if the riddle of the guy who wouldn’t advance wasn’t solved.

Today, though, was very interesting.

As I’ve hinted at before, I’m not as skinny as I used to be. Not fat, per se, but certainly not trim. I know I could look better without the paunch, and it’s my intention to address it one day. My plate’s just too damn full at the moment to even bother with it. But someone else is noticing, too.

I thought it was odd last week when I gave K my order, and she repeated it, saying “no whip, right?” She makes my mocha frappucino every day, she should know I go whole hog. I corrected her politely, and her eyes fell visibly. At the time, I wondered if this wasn’t a message. I’m under no illusions that the whip is good for me, I just like it. But she sees me drink this stuff every day, and knows where at least part of my gut is coming from. Very thoughtful of her to help, but no thanks.

But this morning, to a smiling K, I gave my tall mocha frappucino order, and heard it immediately called back to the prep area as a “tall light no-whip mocha frappucino.” I thought about contesting it, but K, her shy smile peeking out from shaggy bangs, stopped me in my tracks. This was an intervention. She was trying to help me. For her own reasons, perhaps, but also in my own interest. K had issued her own coded message: “I like you, but you could stand to lose a little weight.” I can hardly deny it. And the light no-whip tasted just fine.

It’s hard to say what’s next for me and K. At some point, I will find the opportunity to reveal my marital status, and some of the tension between us can dissolve. But for now, I can feel a little warm inside that someone I don’t know very well cares enough to help me take care of myself. I’m unsure how to reciprocate, but even in taking the time to think about it, I’m paying more attention to a restaurant staff relationship than I ever have, and it’s making my life better.

There’s probably a lesson here. Lessons can be hard to extract from ongoing situations, but it’s worth doing if you can. Because life is an ongoing situation, and me and K are just trying to figure it out.

Midway through Neil Gaiman’s Neverwhere, a scene takes place in the fictional London Below, at Night’s Bridge. Richard, the main protagonist, is holding the hand of a little girl he’s just met as they walk across. Crossing the span, both Richard and the girl sink into black shadows, full of dark apparitions and emotions that threaten to pull them under. Upon emerging from the darkness, Richard finds himself on the other side of the bridge. Looking behind him, he sees only the girl’s necklace on the damp stones. She didn’t make it; the darkness took her.

I recall this today because I feel as if my wife and I have been making the journey across Night’s Bridge for quite some time. Two years, really, though we not-infrequently found ourselves bumping around Below in the preceding seven. But our childless years were difficult in a different way, and the struggle of parenthood is so alien to anything we’ve weathered as a couple before that it has threatened to tear us apart on a number of occasions.

And in this darkness, it has been hard to find comfort in the one place it has normally been plentiful: Each other. Our hells have been very personal, very internal, and the knowledge of how bad our partners were hurting has kept us from seeking help from the other. Even when we tried, we were often rebuffed by our respective No Vacancy signs, no room for any more grief here, move along, stranger. And of course this would ignite more pain, throw us deeper into our lonely well of despair, which may well have been the same one, for all that we could see. Like crabs in a bucket, we flailed, scratching for purchase, oblivious to whether that was a branch or a hand we had just stepped on. In our solitude, we were killing each other.

I’m not entirely sure what happened this weekend, but I hope it lasts. For the first time in a good while, I was able to communicate with my wife. I think, like most developments, it had to get worse before better, because last weekend was a carnival of mental breakdown, mostly for my wife, who after a long time of pushing down a certain range of emotions for a variety of reasons, finally let them take her. It was painful to watch, and more painful still not to be able to help, but each day has been progressively better between us. Not back to normal exactly, but at least bearing some resemblance to the open communication we’ve enjoyed for most of our marriage.

When we first moved back to Texas in early 2006, while my wife was still looking for a job, I temped in a very bleak former strip mall for a very shady company, mostly stuffing their unmentionable documents into nondescript boxes. One fellow temp, a woman my mother’s age, found out I was a new parent. She pulled me aside one day before lunch, and said, with immense gravity, “You should know that your marriage will never be the same. My daughter is grown, and my husband and I get along well, but it’ll never be like it was before. Ever.”

At the time, I thought it was a bit extreme, not to mention presumptive. Relationships vary, as do the dynamics that power them. But really, it was a very tactful statement. She obviously knew that she had no idea how my marriage would change, that it would be in different ways than her own. What she understood, as I eventually did, was the sheer mass of the change that parenthood would bring into our lives.

As science tells us, any object with great mass will affect everything in its path, bending space and time around them even as they are pulled by other massive objects at the same time. Two human beings of equal mass can form binary systems, each orbiting the other peacefully, enjoying the pleasant gravitational pull from their partner.

Grim as it may sound, a birth in the family is like a black hole opening between two stars. Energy and mass are pulled towards it, disrupting the original orbit. The new arrival grows, gathering what it needs from its surroundings. There is no malice in this need, it’s simply nature. But it is powerful, and it is destructive, and it can be fatal.

This, of course, is where my astrophysics analogy breaks down, because a black hole would indeed destroy all stars in its path. What actually happens, though, if you’re lucky, is that pressures equalize. Orbits become stable, and soon there are three massive objects, each in the pull of the others.

It can end this way, but it doesn’t always. And I have been very concerned that our little system would not be one of the fortunate ones, that not all of us would make it across Night’s Bridge, if you’ll pardon the mixing of metaphors.

Of course, we haven’t really made it yet. The kid’s only two, and as I recall from my own childhood, some of the worst is yet to come. But I have to think that we can take heart from surviving this period, and use it as a lesson that as tough as things get, we are indeed strong enough to make it through, and make it through together.

I don’t know, and I can’t know. But I have hope, and that’s something I’ve been missing. The hope I have is that hope will be enough.

I read an article in the New York Times this morning about starting a small business. And of course, as I feared, the pangs began.

When my wife got pregnant back in 2005 and we started making plans to move back to Texas from child-unfriendly NYC, a major component was me staying home with the kid during the day and running my own business at night. I knew people who had been successful running the sort of business I wanted to operate, so I figured I could pull it off.

Well, a few things happened to that plan.

First and foremost, the birth was a disaster. The short version (I’ll likely reveal the long one in future) is that a natural birth turned into a botched c-section, which turned into major post-natal complications, which turned to post-partum depression for both of us, which to be quite honest, hasn’t completely gone away. Its effects, such as weight gain, chronic sleep deprivation, and the resulting fatigue, are lingering, and will be a factor in our lives for the foreseeable future.

The second obstacle to our plan was the business model. The friend whose business I used as an archetype of my own had gotten his start in the early 1990s, at a time when the industry in question was rather different than it presently is. The thing he got paid decent money to do then was the sort of thing one can do oneself for very little money now, and I hadn’t realized how prevalent the cheaper option had become in the intervening years, and worse, I actually believed experience added value to my offering. Pfft.

But the third stumbling block was in fact the hardest to take, and that is this: Put in a situation to pursue my own business, at long last, after years of corporate subservience, I discovered that I am a slacker.

Not the egregious kind of smokeout slacker, the couch-surfing sugar-momma bait, or the mom’s basement Hutt. But the sort that, when presented with a few open hours, stands a 50% chance of using that time to do completely unproductive things. Even when he knows that his income is dependent upon him using that time to drum up business. How the hell did I become that guy?

I’ve mentioned this before, but I used to think of myself as someone with a very powerful work ethic. That’s the sort of person I wanted to be, the kind of thing people always said about my heroes in interviews. I believed it about myself, and a good deal of the time, I acted as if it were so. I certainly worked harder than a lot of people I knew, and that work contributed to the body of knowledge and experience I currently have, despite failing to derive any financial success from those efforts.

But in amongst all that hard work were large blocks of what could easily be seen as wasted time. I wasn’t a drinker, nor a smoker, nor a womanizing raconteur, but I did enjoy a good party, as described by me and my dorky friends, anyway. Late nights of pizza and RISK, cash-draining road trips, movie outings, aimless drives out in the country searching for inspiration and solace, these were the stuff of my unmarried twenties.

Marriage brought more opportunities for unproductive time, and this is the first time I’ve ever admitted that in writing. I certainly don’t hold my wife responsible, as I am quite capable of driving my own slacker bus, but having a significant other hanging about the house very naturally expands the possibilities for your free time. Fun possibilities, but not productive in a career sense for most of us.

As my twenties progressed, the system breakdowns lurking in my genetic grab-bag began taking hold: Slower metabolism, intestinal trouble, sinus issues, bum left knee, and so on. Who knows, my aforementioned thyroid deficiency may have gotten its start ten years ago. Whatever the case, I still had the same amount to do, but less energy with which to do it.

Add to that state of affairs the regular ego-beatings attendant to an unsuccessful stab at an artistic career, and the available energy begins to slip down the graph southeasterly, year by year. Which brings us to the present, in which nearly all of the already diminished energy left to me is spent taking care of a toddler.

Well, obviously I’m a fool. Attempting to start a business from scratch while learning the ropes of parenthood and simultaneously battling a downward spiral of emotional state and energy level is about as stupid an enterprise as I can now imagine. I have no idea why it seemed sensible to me at the time, but mind you, “at the time” was before the birth of my son, and in the cocoon of idealistic inertia, before any rubber ever touched road. “We’ll make it work,” I said. It’s the sort of thing people say when they don’t know what the hell they’re doing. 

Because of course we didn’t make it work. It didn’t work at all. What we’re doing now is what I hoped we wouldn’t have to do, albeit on better terms than I feared. And I can’t see a way out of it, not really. Idealistically, sure. But the numbers, that’s where I always fall down. Making A plus B equal C. I’m a perfect expression of the old formula:

1. Idea
2. ???
3. Profit!!

I’ll be 34 soon. Given my genes, that’s a little over a third of the way to Beulah Land. Not old enough for midlife crisis, nor for wistful hindsight, but just old enough to start looking silly as a 6-foot-4 man behind a receptionist desk.

I know. I KNOW it’s sexist. I’ll be the first to complain about that, since I know women who have been trapped in assistant positions well into their dotage without meriting a single consideration that maybe they should be promoted. But the fact is, I really don’t know how much longer I can do this. In the rather likely event that I will experience another layoff in my adult working life, would a 40-plus man applying for an assistant job get laughed out of the room? 50? 60? The prospects get worse year by year. Yes, I’m now making more than I ever have, and have more experience than the little sprouts who I generally compete with for this sort of job, but at some point people just get uncomfortable with an old man making their copies for them.

I saw it in action once. I was temping in an NYC finance office, and my agency sent us a new temp to help out during the busy season. The guy was 50 if he was a day, and all of us, including the middle-aged supervisors, felt really weird about giving him the shit jobs he’d been hired for. I mean, the poor bastard. He’d probably been somewhere for a good while, maybe since he was a young man, but just hadn’t felt compelled to climb the ladder. Then wham, they pull the plug on him, like they tried to do to my old man at least three times in 30 years, and he’s up a certain creek without a certain implement. And now he’s doing the best he can, getting work where he can find it, and he gets a damned pity party from the youth brigade.

That experience has stuck with me, obviously. What is the endgame for me, assuming my artistic projects (stuck in the hobby arena for the foreseeable future, as previously reported) never provide me a living?

A couple of years ago, I thought I had a handle on the answer. But then some slacker showed up. A very tired, disillusioned slacker, who might once have been a true believer, who knows. One thing I’m old enough for is forgetting who I once was. I can give you a rough sketch, but how much of it was artifice and how much foundation, I really have no idea now. But I’ll tell you this: I don’t like it, and I don’t know how it’s going to end up. None of us do, of course. There I go, dragged back down to earth with the other mortals. I grieve. 

I got an odd sort of Christmas present today, one that on its surface would seem to be a lump of coal. After a blood test, I’ve just been informed that I most likely have hypothyroidism.

For those unfamiliar, here is a brief breakdown, via WebMD:

“Hypothyroidism means your thyroid is not making enough thyroid hormone. The thyroid is a butterfly-shaped gland in the front of your neck. It makes hormones that control the way your body uses energy. Having a low level of thyroid hormone affects your whole body. It can make you feel tired, weak, and depressed.”

Well, holy shit. Guess who’s been tired, weak, and depressed?

It is true that humans like to find excuses for themselves and their behaviors. This tendency is a favorite target of conservatives against liberals and vice versa. Scapegoating is as old as politics, which is as old as civilization, which started the minute someone threw an insult instead of a rock, a moment which, depending on your outlook, was either the start of enlightenment or the beginning of the pussification of man.

True scapegoating has had consequences for our culture, and blowback. How many times have you seen a comic deride a fat person by mocking their claim of a “glandular problem?” Or heard someone blowing off another person’s depression, saying they just need to toughen up?

So what does one do when a real culprit springs into view? How much weight should someone give to this possible explanation of their undesirable behavior?

The wisest thing to do, logically, would be to wait and see what, if any, changes occur after a month or so of treatment. But I can’t help a little squee of excitement rising inside just by knowing that maybe, just maybe, my fatigue and depression may not be my fault.

We in the United States like blame. We aim it everywhere: The government, minorities, the opposite sex, these kids today, and in varying degrees, ourselves.

Self-blame, or as I called it, personal responsibility, has been the petard on which I’ve hoisted myself from a very young age. If I couldn’t accomplish something I wanted to, it would not, could not, be anyone else’s fault but mine. I simply wasn’t believing in myself enough, or working hard enough, or thinking correctly. Outside factors beyond my control could never be considered, lest I be convicted by a jury of myself of making excuses and being weak.

And of course, this judgment extended to others. If someone wasn’t successful, well, it had to be their fault, didn’t it? They weren’t doing it right, and they deserved their ignominy.

If this is beginning to sound familiar, there’s a very good reason. I grew up in a Calvinist country. You can hear these same arguments being blared over thousands of watts of talk radio, blown windily through coaxial cable connectors and out your teevee hole, and shat upon the printed page all over this nation. That my old man was a subscriber to the Puritan work ethic, despite the fact that he didn’t call it Jesus, certainly didn’t help. Add to that my aforementioned mother’s insistence on the best possible world for all who simply believe in themselves against all odds, and you can see the big failure soufflé bubbling, just waiting to bust its bloated crown at t-minus 30 years or so. Blammo, and now you need a new oven.

If you had suggested to 20-year-old Fuller that he should seek psychological advice on his many neuroses, he would have treated you to a lengthy diatribe on what the hell was wrong with you and why his life wouldn’t turn out crappy like yours. True, many 20-year-olds would give you the same sort of spiel, or just ignore you, but such was my confidence that it actually drew a great many followers at that time. I believed my own delusions so much that I convinced other people to follow them.

The George Bailey bit, the world that would’ve existed in your absence, cuts both ways for me. Certainly there are people who I’ve helped, some in fairly substantial ways, who might not have found that help elsewhere. But then there are others, those who I led on crusades through the murky swamps of Mordor, seeking our destiny, the one that we were due because I said so. I sometimes wonder if they really are better off than before they met me.

I’ve contributed to derailing careers, relationships, education, happiness in obscurity, and most of it with a poor facsimile of altruism, masking the opportunism that led me to bend people around my path and accept it, at least in part, as their own. I threw my tractor beam in all directions, drawing in those with the lowest self-esteem, and driving away all others. When it became apparent that someone was no longer of use to me, I cast them off, with a heavy heart and apologies galore, but always with an eye to my own success and the belief that they would find the future that best fit their ability to accurately follow their fate.

Were it not for my being self-aware about this sort of behavior, I might fairly accurately be called a psychopath. Many successful people are, and indeed if I had allowed myself to follow through on some of my more draconian ideas, I might well be both successful and psychopathic.

And yet the very stumbling blocks I’ve cursed for being obstacles to my career success are the things that have kept me human: Consideration for the feelings of others (leading me to associate with dubious talents for far longer than was healthy), acknowledgement of my responsibility to be fair and honest in relationships (a rare quality among successful artists), and a belief that the world should be a fair place, the responsibility for which lies on all of our shoulders.

You can see the problems here. Consider the feelings of others, and you’re stuck with Pete Best and no record contract. Be fair and honest with your love interest and you’ve gotten rid of a whole section of your standard artist biography. And as for the world being fair, well, I spend half of this blog covering that ball of crap.

It may be that the onset of depression in my 30’s is merely the soft, thudding sound of chickens coming home to roost. But if this psychological process has been aided in any way by a physical and chemical process, then I may be living in a personal hell that is not entirely of my own making. When “bad” becomes “the worst thing ever,” one might be justified in taking a closer look at the old spectacles to see if the prescription is correct.

Regarding roosting birds: Walking into work today, I stopped to read a historical marker (a weakness of mine). A horrible crack-thump a few feet to my left startled me, and alarm turned to horror as I saw the source of the sound. A pigeon, who knows why, had fallen onto its back there on the sidewalk, and could easily have been mistaken for dead but for the slow twitching of its claws.

Enter personal responsibility. It was pretty obvious that the bird was not going to make it, and anyone with half an ounce of empathy knows that quick death is preferable to slow, painful throes of mortal injury. I should’ve killed it. I don’t know how, but I should’ve found a way. And yet I hurried on down the sidewalk, cursing to myself for the thing I was allowing to happen with each step away from the hurt animal.

It wasn’t my fault, I reasoned. Birds die all the time, some of them horribly. If I weren’t there, it would suffer the same fate. But you were there, I responded to myself.

But this is the 21st century, I shot back. An office worker on the way to his desk job in the city doesn’t stop and kill a bloody pigeon. It isn’t the farm. The pigeon doesn’t know what your job is, I replied, it just knows that it is in agony, and no one else is around to help it.

I knew I couldn’t argue my way out of the moral wrongness of my actions, and so I got as far away from the scene of the crime as possible, as quickly as possible. I don’t know if that bird’s dead yet, and I don’t plan on walking back the way I came, lest I find out. I am a coward, and I can’t blame that on my damned thyroid.

There have been moments in the past few years when the real level of my delusion about the world has become painfully apparent. The most recent was a year or so ago. I’d ventured out to the local Bennigan’s to get a couple of beers, a benign enough expedition. A man, or more accurately, a dude, was perambulating around the bar, talking smack and making a nuisance of himself. A guy sitting next to me started talking trash about the dude, who very soon got thrown out for his behavior, and once the dude was gone, me and my neighbor cracked wise for a while about stupid people being stupid, and how stupid the dude was.

Upon leaving the bar an hour or so later, I was rather surprised to find a white Cadillac bearing down upon my tail on the highway. A passing streetlight illuminated the passenger: The dude in question. The driver looked less familiar, but it wouldn’t be a stretch to consider that he was a friend of the dude, and had overheard my trashing of his pal after the guy got thrown out. If they were mad enough to wait for me to leave the bar, they were mad enough to kick my ass, or worse.

It’s only in moments like these that it becomes starkly, horrifyingly apparent that I have never in my adult life contemplated, in advance, a way to defend myself if attacked. Once, alone in a park bathroom but for a crazy person eyeballing me through the stall door, I came up with the brilliant idea of throwing poo in his face to distract him while I made my escape. Thankfully he left, but he could just as easily not have.

So here’s this guy and his friend, obviously well-versed enough in fisticuffs to chase down a stranger with intent to clobber, and I have absolutely no idea what to do about it. My solution (thank everloving Jebus that I brought my cell phone) was to call the cops. Though I was on the line for several minutes and many miles trying to get across the nature of my emergency, I bought enough time and probably put on enough show that my would-be attackers peeled off their pursuit and, who knows, found another body to vent their frustration on. If that hadn’t worked, or if they’d gotten me in the parking lot, I would have been well and truly fucked.

In the adrenaline-fueled aftermath of that evening, I made a solemn vow to myself never to allow myself to be in that situation again. Not just by making sure never to hit the bar alone or talk smack about fellow patrons, but by acknowledging violence as a fact in this world and making preparations for its inevitable appearance. By learning to defend myself.

Well, of course a promise of personal productivity made by the father of a newborn is a check that a wise man might think twice before cashing, and thus far its corresponding funds have remained hypothetical. Doubly so if the signer is in the midst of a crippling depression, as I was at that time.

There are many realities that fatigue and depression have not allowed me to acknowledge, or even in doing so, to do anything about. If medical treatment of a chemical imbalance can give me just a little more possibility of following through on my responsibility to look reality in the face and prepare myself for its onslaught, then it is a good thing.

So yes, I have a disease. And all things considered, I’m very happy about it. A month or so from now, getting to the root of what’s wrong with me will be that much easier.