Because Miles
I THOUGHT that I would give you an album’s worth of Miles Davis today. Divine music, Miles. It was in the book Lamb by Christopher Moore where he talks of how Miles Davis was actually the angel Gabriel come down from the heavens in disguise. I’ve read almost all of Christopher Moore’s books, simply because I used to do a visualization technique back in my days of foolishly pursuing book contracts and the like where I would go to a bookstore and find the exact spot in the store where my novel(s) would one day be housed – which was always in the fiction section on a shelf next to Christopher Moore, who had titles like Bloodsucking Fiends and The Stupidest Angel and Island of the Sequined Love Nun, and, well, how can you not buy a book with a title like that? (Hint: you should, but read The Stupidest Angel last.) None of those visualization techniques and efforts to write and then sell the Great and Hyperbolical American Novel really amounted to much, in the end, other than me buying a few fun Christopher Moore novels to read. Writing novels – hell, the whole act of writing in general – felt like an exercise in self-torture and strenuous exercise. I think I still have scars in my forehead from banging my head against that wall. I’m happy to report that I’ve retired from the pursuit of such lofty literary goals, and feel none the worse for it. (And everything related to this nonsense makes me all the gladder to be far removed.) I may one day write a memoir about that fruitless endeavour (working title: Tools & Whores), but in the meantime, feel free to click one of those book cover gadgets on the side of this page if you wish to purchase a novel or a book of poems. Or do it some other time, if you wish. I’m not going anywhere. I can wait.
I offer you an album of Miles because it is beautiful music, arguably some of the most beautiful of music ever made. (But don’t you go all jazz snob aficionado on me and start nitpicking with me over which of Miles Davis’ albums are the best. You’re probably wrong, and I’m not in the mood to argue.) And on the 11th of September every year, I make it a point to sit back and savour some of the small and simple things in life which I find innately, inherently beautiful. It doesn’t have to be anything extravagant (although that 2002 Cyrus Creek Cabernet Sauvignon in the wine storage is suddenly looking mighty tempting). It may just be something as simple as taking a long walk on a warm late summer day here in San Francisco and listening to an assortment of other musics – the birds, the passing cars – while enjoying a particularly good cup of coffee.
Aah, coffee. Last night, I went back and watched again the film Wings of Desire, one of the most poetic and soulful movies I have ever known, and in the pivotal scene, when the angel takes the leap and chooses to fall to Earth, what’s the first thing he wants? Coffee, of course.
“I can’t see you but I know you’re here. I feel it. You’ve been hanging around since I got here. I wish I could see your face, just look into your eyes and tell you how good it feels to be here, to touch something. See, that’s cold. That feels good … to smoke, have coffee, and if you do it together, it’s fantastic. Or here … to draw, you know you take a pencil and you make a dark line, then you make a light line and together it’s a good line. But when your hands are cold, you rub them together. See, that feels good. There are so many good things.”
– Peter Falk, Wings of Desire
It’s a truly remarkable scene, the falling of the angel from the heavens to earth, dropped into the grey and the drab slab, walking alongside the graffiti-covered walls of West Berlin, the hemmed-in city an ugly remnant of humanity’s ugliest conflicts, and yet to this newcomer, there is nothing but beauty everywhere. Because it is everywhere, and often it’s hidden in plain sight, but you can see it if only you take a moment to look.
Now, as you may have guessed by now, this isn’t exactly a typical entry to this blog. I mean, I’ve been on a roll here of late at In Play Lose when I’ve had the time to actually write. This pillaging of the Mariners came one day before they fired their GM, and I pretty much nailed The Nats dwindling to oblivion. And it’s bad football season, of course. Time to muse on why W.S.U. is so bad, marvel at how it’s possible that Kansas could be worse, and probably write that long post about how I really don’t care much about American football any more. But all of that can wait. It can wait for another day. Players and coaches and teams play badly on a daily basis – and in the case of the other football, it’s being played badly on a daily basis across the globe – but I necessarily get rather contemplative every year when this particular date on the calendar turns up.
But not for the reasons you might think.
Oh, I can certainly contemplate and pontificate on the events of this date 14 years ago, to be sure. How can I not? It’s the single-defining moment of our generation. I know someone who died that day. People from my city died that day in a field in Western Pennsylvania. We all lost something on that day and in the days that followed – as individuals, as a society, and as a human race. But to be perfectly honest, I have no real interest in rehashing that time and again, simply because doing so renders the perpetrators of what took place that day as being relevant to my life. They are not relevant to my life, nor will I permit them to be relevant to my life. They are not worthy of being spoken about. I will not give them that belated and posthumous joy.
Nor will I permit them to define the meaning of this date upon the calendar. I take back the 11th of September. I take back the symbols and I make my own meaning. I took it back years ago, in fact. There are other things worth celebrating upon this day. (Including the birthday of The Official Scrabble Statistician of In Play Lose.) In fact, the 11th of September is one of the most precious days on the calendar for me, surpassed perhaps only by the 18th of October. (Aah, shit, I need to think up something cool for the anniversary … hmm … well, fortunately she won’t read this blog and know that I’m up to something …) But when I think about the 11th of September, I don’t think about 2001. No, I think about 2006, because the date of September 11, 2006, was the day that The Lose decided he was going to start winning.
Now, for some of you who know me personally, and have known me for a while, this next bit is old news. You can skip over this part. But I’ve met quite a few new people since then, of course, the great majority of whom I’m grateful for knowing, and this blog has now been read in over 80 countries – gasp! – which means that I don’t know a lot of you out there who are reading this post. Thanks for tuning in, I hope you enjoy it, and now seems like the appropriate time to give you a chance to know me a little better.
I’m going to repost something now from a previous blog I used to keep. It’s a post which was written on this date back in 2007. I explained it better then than I have ever done since, and I feel like all of you should know this about me. I ain’t got nothin’ to hide from nor be ashamed of. Apologies in advance for the sloppy grammar that follows. I was writing in a slightly different persona and character back then:
— — —
it’s odd that a date which has become synonymous in this country with death, destruction, anger and sadness has now, for me, come to be a date synonymous with life and new beginnings. but it’s best that way – i believe in taking back your symbols.
sep. 11 has become, in essence, my second birthday. you can call it the release date of xp version 2.0.
this is a very personal post, but i feel compelled to write it and finally feel as if i can talk freely about this. i’ve hinted at it before, but never gone into detail. those of you who know all of this about me, and who have kept it to yourselves, i thank you for that, and hereby absolve you of that burden. you don’t have to cover for me anymore.
so, on Sep. 11, 2006, i started over. literally. started everything over. i took a month off from work and entered a monthlong Partial Hospitalization Program at UCSF's Langley Porter Psychiatric Institute. technically, it’s an outpatient program – i could leave every day at 4:00 p.m. – but if you didn’t show up at 9:00 the next morning they’d send the police out to find you and lock you up on the 5th floor of S.F. General. serious shit. but hell, it’s not like i had anywhere else worth going to at that point, anyway.
so, why did this happen? well, during the summer i had what was essentially a nervous breakdown. i wasn't hospitalized, but i should have been. i was like a zombie. i was pretty much dead to the world. this breakdown was, oh, about 37 years in the making. i’ve suffered from severe clinical depression since i was a child. entire years of my life are just gone from my memory, lost in a fog and haze. day after day where it literally hurt to be alive and i wished that i was someone else.
and so, while most of my friends were off scrabbling at the nationals in Phoenix, i was spending several days going through a battery of psychological evaluations. it was eye-opening, to say the least, to hear the doc say to me, “well, Chris, most people who are like you either commit suicide or overdose before they reach 30. you’re 37. congratulations, you beat the odds.”
i’d never really gotten any sort of treatment for mental illness for a couple of reasons. first off, when i manage to put all the pieces together, i can do some incredible things – write 500-page novels in three weeks, design 10 prints in a day. a creative machine that nearly overflows with ideas and energy. i never wanted to mess up that artistic side of me, never wanted to mess with how i see the world.
but the main reason i never did anything about it was that i never wanted to admit that i was mentally ill. there is a terrible stigma to that, and the reality is that the vast majority of the people in the world who don’t suffer from it will NEVER understand the people that do. after all, i’m healthy and have a job and have relationships and all of that jazz. what could be wrong? just suck it up, everything will be OK.
well, it wasn’t OK, and it’s never been OK. it just doesn’t work that way. not for me. trust me, i wouldn’t willingly be this way.
so i agreed to go to the UCSF psych ward for a month, at enormous expense (none of it was covered by my insurance, so i’ll be paying for it until about 2010). Langley Porter is one of the best institutions of its kind in the world, and they have a program designed specifically for people similar to myself: functioning depressives. i got there the first day and surveyed my fellow group members: a nurse, a biologist, a 3rd grade teacher, a Ph.D. student, an executive chef, an event planner, a foreign correspondent. the sorts of people you read about in the papers, the ones who have careers and degrees and families and then turn up dead, having killed themselves, leaving everyone at a loss as to why it could have possibly happened.
Losers. all of us.
probably the hardest thing i’ve ever done was to walk through the door. and, for the first three days, we were all collectively miserable. the social worker asked why the energy level was so low and V., the event planner, said, “because we’re all fucking losers. we suck at life.” and D., the biologist, said, “we’re in a psych ward. life can’t get any worse.”
and then the light came on for me. yes, life COULD get worse. we could all be dead. (i was about the only one in the group who hadn’t attempted suicide.) we could all carry on in this pseudo-catatonic state for years and years and years to come. we could all be jonesing for a fix in an alley. we could go on ruining our lives and ruining other peoples’ lives in the process. yeah, life has been terrible, but we’re here, in this place, because we all need help and we want our lives to be better. THIS is actually the first step in the right direction.
and, really, that was what the program was all about: taking the first steps. teaching people who have suffered so badly, for so long, how to actually live life again, and how to cope with their illnesses. and living with those illnesses meant owning them.
so i owned it. OK, i’m nuts. i’m a lunatic. fine. fuck it.
the group was desperately in need of someone to take the lead, and so i did. i was sick of suffering, and it was time to put an end to it. so, on the fourth day, i decided to lighten the mood. i started telling jokes. i started ribbing people, playing with them, making them laugh and smile. and it continued on for the rest of the month. i would treat people to coffee at the Starbucks across the street. i would take A., the Ph.D. student with the eating disorder, to Safeway to help her conquer her fear of food. i would call people on the weekends and encourage them over the phone. i would clown and goof off, keep the energy level high in the room, stay enthused.
the verve was contagious. i made the commitment to try and get better, and made the others come along for the ride. and it was a hell of a ride: there were days when we would all laugh so hard that we cried, and then feel bad about laughing, and then laugh some more about that.
being crazy doesn’t have to suck.
honestly, going to that program at UCSF was probably the smartest thing i’ve ever done in my life. xp the malcontent, xp the bitter divorcé, xp the jilted lover, xp the walking attitude problem who has been fired on 5 occasions, had over 30 jobs, moved 15 times, and always had a black cloud hovering over his head, was thanked on the last day by his fellow loons for being such a positive influence and making such a big difference in their lives. i don’t think that’s ever been said of me before. i love all of those people like they are my brothers and sisters, and i’m going to call a few of them today and see how they are doing.
as i said, i’ll be paying for the program for years, but i also make anonymous donations from time to time to the general fund. whatever i can give. lack of funds shouldn’t prevent people from getting help and getting better. and, really, there is no reason to suffer. anyone who is suffering should get help, and not be afraid to do so. it’s worth it. trust me. it’s so, so worth it.
one year later and i’ve certainly had some bad times. i always will. there is no cure for depression. you have to learn how to cope. but it’s better. so much better.
one of the things i began to do while i was at UCSF was the act of setting goals for myself, committing to the process of working to those goals, and then documenting and appreciating the progress. small stuff, nothing huge or overwhelming. breaking things down into simple steps. it necessitates a Zen, somewhat meditative approach to things that suits me quite well: living in the moment. being mindful and present and engaged. and while i still fly off the handle from time to time, in general i’m considerably calmer. at peace. i no longer feeling like i’m fighting all the time.
the best part of it all was connecting and reconnecting with my family and my friends, all of whom i had kept at a deliberate distance. once i accepted the fact that i needed help, i was amazed to discover that i wasn’t alone, after all. the people in the world whom i love and who love me are, in fact, like objects in the rearview mirror – a lot closer to me than they appear. their love and support through all of this has been immense and immeasurable.
i’m reminded of the story of my musical idol, Miles Davis (who happens to share my birthday), who went home to St. Louis and locked himself in his own bedroom and quit the heroin for good. when he was done, the only thing Miles wanted to do was write song after song, and try to catch up after wasting so damn much time. i can’t get back all of the time that was lost and the opportunities in life that were wasted, but that’s OK. i’ve got lots to do and lots of time to make up. i’ll get there. and, in a lot of ways, i’m feeling younger now than i have in years. and that feels better than i could ever describe.
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Now would be a good time to listen to some of that Kind of Blue up there at the top of the entry. I’m certainly going to, because I’m certainly feeling kind of blue after recalling all of that, and I need to figure out where the hell I’m going with all of this.
[Listens to All Blues …]
That’s much better now. OK, so, where were we? So, that UCSF experience took place nine years ago. Nine years have passed. Ho-ly shite. Back in 2006, I hatched a fool-proof, 3-step plan for combating my own mental illness:
1] Own it. OK, I’m nuts. So be it. Next?
2] Knowledge is power. Learn about it. Learn everything that I can about it.
3] Kick its ass.
Well, OK, so #1 was easy. But #3 would be a whole lot easier to accomplish if I could just get past #2. I’ve spent nine years working on #2 and still haven’t come to terms with it. Learning about it means figuring out the ways in which it’s affected me in the past, how it affects me in the present, and how it might affect me in the future. And it’s not just as simple as saying, “oh, well, yeah, I was crazy back then, which is why I acted like such a dumbass.” Uh-uh. Not good enough. That’s too easy. That’s smelling the smoke and seeing the embers and saying, “well, obviously, the house burned down,” but not explaining why and how it caught fire in the first place.
And let me tell you something. #2 sucks.
But frankly, all of it sucks. Let me just get that out of the way because I’m reminded of some conversation I got into online surrounding assisted suicides and one person who was clearly an overly devout simpleton and who was a … hmm, what’s the right word … fuckwit? Yeah, that works … and who was a fuckwit kept vamping on how morally wrong it was that, in Belgium, there had been cases where people had gone the assisted suicide route not because of having terminal illness but because ‘all’ they had were mental illnesses – apparently having zero understanding of the sort of physical toll that mental illness takes upon you over time. It wears you out.
In my case, I’ve spent my whole life living with this feeling of impending doom, this inner sense that the walls or the ceiling or the roof are going to collapse in upon me, I feel that pressure constantly building and my response is to tense myself up. Well, when you spend 46 years feeling that way, your body twists up in knots. My spine is like a corkscrew. I have migraines. I cannot really drive a car, nor barely sit in an airline seat, because it hurts my back. I have pinched nerves in my neck, in my shoulders. And guess what? Those sorts of pains are, at this point, probably never going to go away. This is how I get to live from hereon. Isn’t that swell?
I also have several addictions I cannot get rid of – nicotine, caffeine – and probably drink more than I should simply because I’ve spent the entirety of my life trying to cope. This is why, when the psych said, “you should’ve been dead by 30,” she meant it. Clinical depressives kill themselves, they overdose, they have more accidents because they don’t take care of themselves. When you go through the entirety of your life this way, feeling like shit all the time, feeling like all that you can do is cope and get by, eventually you just stop caring. Or, you do what I did and simply resign yourself to it. Well, this is how life is supposed to be. It’s supposed to fucking suck. Oh well. Tough shit.
And see, that sense of resignation settles in. You’ve gone past a threshold of misery. Things don’t work out – you don’t get the job, or the grad school offer, or whatnot – and it’s not because of the fact that, well, sometimes that happens to people, but it’s obviously because you’re shit and you shouldn’t expect anything to work out. Just shut up and get on with it. Move it along. You make bad choices, bad decisions. You cannot ever succeed because success isn’t possible, unless you’re just stupid dumb lucky. Whatever good interpersonal relationships you might have start to flounder, because those people wonder just what in the hell they are supposed to do with you, or you can just settle for some bad ones, usually one-sided affairs where your boss in your bad job or your spouse in your bad marriage simply point out how shitty you are and bad at everything you are. But this is how life goes, see? You have a brain that doesn’t work, you’re not normal and you cannot function like the others around you. This is obviously the way it was meant to be, right?
And if you happen to be me, someone who has lived their whole life in a state of mental illness and come to accept it as it is, you might even do something like marry a woman who is the single-most evil and cruel person who will ever meet and then, some five years after you divorce them, you’re casually walking down a street in San Francisco and you notice her mother approaching you (the second-most evil and cruel person who you have ever met, for that matter), and it occurs to you that you should duck into the Egyptian convenience store in a hurry, because if she sees you, and she happens to tell her daughter about how she ran into you on the streets in San Francisco, then that person will now know where you live, and there is a nonzero chance they will turn up at your doorstep and shoot you dead, but first they’ll make a point of shooting your girlfriend dead, so maybe you should rush home and tell Kate that her life is in danger. Holy … motherfucking … shit …
I’ve had that nightmare now for 17 years, even though we divorced in 1998 and she died in an auto accident in Farmington, New Mexico, in 2003. And you know, Tam, I have made peace with many, many people, I have forgiven and been forgiven, but you are an exception. I hope you rot in the hell you made for yourself. In the end, I did nothing, ever, to deserve that.
And one of the things you do, when you learn about your own mental illness, is start to figure out the difference between what’s your fault and what isn’t, and come to be honest about it. Whatever line you’ve heard about how it’s always easier to blame others for your misfortune is a bunch of bullshit. When it comes right down to it, it’s actually far more easy to blame yourself.
And quite honestly, I don’t know why I just wrote all of that, since I’ve never spoken of it before. Damn, I really do feel like I have nothing to hide. Oh well. Fuck it. It is out there now and I don’t give a goddamn.
And everything that I just mentioned there, that’s all part of learning about it. How did I contribute to my own demise? It’s sort of difficult for me to parse all of that since, in general, I have very sporadic memories of large swaths of my life. I’ve spent most of the past year working with a therapist essentially attempting to rebuild my memory of pretty much everything that occurred prior to 1998. Because honestly, I don’t really know any more. I can no longer tell the difference between what is real, what was imagined. But it doesn’t do me much good going forward if I don’t actually know how I got here.
One of the tenets of DBT (the therapy technique they employed at UCSF) is the concept of ‘radical acceptance,’ in which you come to accept that which has happened in the past without making judgments. (I may be the only person you know who actually says, “it is what it is,” without irony or contempt.) It’s been shown to be effective with people who’ve suffered all sorts of traumas. (Hmm, I think what I was just writing about qualifies.) And it sounds simple, right? Pfft. WRONG! It’s actually about the hardest thing you’ll ever do in your life. And it’s really damn hard if you basically have no idea what you were doing in the first place. The whole point of this has been to figure out how being mentally ill was affecting me all along. I’m basically my own personal case study. Yeech.
And in the past, when I have attempted to work through my own mental illness, attempting to sort it out, the result has been near disastrous. It has left me feeling even worse. I have attempted to do so in the context of writing fiction, in fact – most of the 10 years I spent between novels was spent trying to somehow explicate the nature of mental illness in the context of a novel. I concluded, finally, that no matter how good the finished product would have been – and I am serious when I say that it would have likely been the greatest work I could possibly produce – it was not worth killing myself over. So I set that aside and wrote a comedy instead. I ain’t ever writing any serious fiction ever. I’ve already experienced some of the worst people on the earth, including myself. I don’t need to go about making those sorts of characters up.
But reassembling the past was important to me. I wanted to do it and now, with the help of my interminably patient therapist, I’ve pieced together something of a past, even though it’s taken me all year and a few thousand pages worth of writings on the side. And it’s easy, at this point, to find myself laden with regret. Regret is a killer. Don’t succumb to regret.
When you do something like this, you also lose all of your good and convenient excuses. You cannot blame doing stupid stuff on being mentally ill, since you did plenty of not stupid stuff as well. It’s been a humbling exercise, one which in the past would have left me feeling even worse than when I started. But it’s different this time. I always make it a point to walk home from these intensive sessions, putting in the headphones and finding some beautiful music, ignoring my angry right ankle and just opening my eyes wide, permitting myself to take in the world around me. The sights, the taste of a cup of coffee, the beautiful aroma of the BBQ joint I walk past (a scene which is absolutely unfair), the feeling of the breezes. Small things, really. Simple pleasures, all of them meaningful in their moment.
And learning to live with your mental illness, ultimately, comes down to learning to live without it. Wait? What? What does that mean? Didn’t I say before that there’s no cure? Well, I did. But I also said #3 was kicking its ass. And kicking the ass of something that will never go away is a good thing, because it just means you can keep kicking its ass all the time and gaining satisfaction from doing do.
But what it also means is that everything you have known about being alive has to change, and you must be willing to make that change – which is actually kind of scary. It’s what you know! And yes, learning to live without it when you’re 46 years is inevitably going to make you wish that you had learned to live without it when you were 20 or 25. You can’t get the time back, you can’t change it and you can’t undo what you’ve done. But hey, if you get to 46 and you’ve learned to live with it, and come to see yourself as being both a by-product of your own mistakes and a survivor, then, hey, it’s not so bad being in the present.
And I’ve spent the last nine years doing what I can to kick mental illness’ ass. My fucking weird stupid brain which revs at 20,000 rpms all the time is actually useful for that. Since I don’t take any medications – they don’t work, my tolerance is too high – I’ve basically had to train myself to practice a constant mindfulness routine, one in which I’m constantly aware of how I’m feeling and adjusting to it. It’s sort of meditation on steroids. I’ve gotten to the point where I can do it constantly, all day every day, while going about my work routines at the same time. Being a master multitasker comes in handy. I’ve practiced this routine for nine years now – just sort of checking up on myself, thinking about how I’m feeling, noticing the environment around me and how I respond, etc. It’s become second-nature to me. It comes as easy as breathing.
But in order to that, and commit to it, I’ve also had to mellow out. I’ve had to teach myself how to relax. I’ve had to find appropriate outlets for stress – such as this blog of mine, in fact, because the most effective stress relief I know is laughter. Being blessed with a good sense of humour and a heightened sense of absurdity comes in handy. I laugh easily. I let it all go.
But I also don’t take any bullshit. I have no tolerance for bullshit. I’m too old for that crap and I haven’t got the time for it, so don’t piss me off – although, in truth, that is pretty hard to do these days. Harder than ever before.
You see, I’m winning a lot these days. Maybe not as much at scrabble as I would like, but that’s mostly due to the fact that I’m a terrible scrabble player. I like my profession and I like what I do. Gone are days where I felt the need to kill large swaths of brain cells with beer to cope with working for operations which I felt to be morally, professionally, and ethically bankrupt. (Any job I get is inherently going to be someplace dysfunctional, however, simply because dysfunctional people are far more interesting.) I write books and tell stories and I’m going to write more of them, so keep on buying them. Being a complete and utter failure at most everything I did for most of my life has made me an expert on losing, which goes well with this blog, so that’s not as terrible as it sounds. I have a mathematical brain and the eye and the voice of a poet. In the past, that made me weird. Now, that makes me versatile, multifaceted. I can pretty much do anything that I wish to do. I live in San Francisco, which is terrific. (Although there’s been far too much success here of late. But the A’s are in last and the 49ers start up this weekend, so I’ll have some more material to work with.)
Most importantly, I have a great wife who loves me and brings me peace of mind, I have terrific people surrounding me who mean the world to me, I’m alive when by all rights I probably shouldn’t be and every moment of it, no matter how small, is time well spent. For that, I am and always be grateful.
And I’m going to listen to that record again now, Kind of Blue, even though I’ve been listening to it while writing this blog, and even though it’s now 3:50 a.m. and I ought to sleep, because I’m all about being present and being in the moment, and that record contains several of the greatest moments of them all. What’s most fascinating about that record is just how spacious it is, how sparse. Miles was, at times, making music by not making music at all. It’s those gaps and open spaces which, paradoxically, are often the most beautiful tones.
