Hey how are you? (Trying chatty mode because this post, begun a week ago, keeps falling from my lips and I can’t lift it without the prop that you and I are talking). How are things going for you this last week of January, 2024? If we were talking over coffee, that’s how I would start. Are your body and soul together? Good! Or if not, which one leads the way — body or soul? Or, are you coming undone? I’m sorry. Let’s figure it out.
I am hushed-up a bit because I just finished Tales Told Out Of School, a novel of 60,000 words, cranking it out like a hurdy-gurdy read-aloud. Yeah. Some of that is my being tired. It’s not a capstone, just a milestone. Ha, or a millstone. I have to say, I am very relieved to be done.
But there’s a helluva lot more to this silence. I can hardly say anything discreetly that passes by. My writing group is on hiatus, seemingly. I could write there. People know me there. They know me here on Substack a little bit, people know me on media, and a few know me in person. Options now are narrowing for places to speak discreetly about loss, aging, encroachment, illness, and death.
But I have to. It’s a Substack. What else ya gon do?
I think of mortification in terms of a big humbling experience. Some humbling mortifications have hit home, some due to my inconsiderateness, traipsing around public with cold germs, some without any explanation, a new old friend from the eighties who sought me out to understand her past, then erased me, and another quite horrifyingly, by death. Having someone drop or ghost you for a while is sad; having someone unfriend you without explanation is another. A friend’s suicide is beyond all. His manner of death was so hideous that — and aren’t they all, but — although I can speak the method quite plainly, I cannot say it. And you know me. I’m never at a loss for words. I’m not shy on paper. If I am angered, if I’m throat-stomped to such an existential pulp that I can’t wrap my fingers over my mouth and stifle it, then I scream it. I blow up, speak the unspeakable. That’s not it. This is self-imposed. I will not say how he killed himself, exactly. I wasn’t ready. And I deal with the suicidal. When I heard it, I lost my breath and caught a shock to my head. There are things to say that should never be spoken. If I lose my mind one day and write horror, I can write it. Fiction has always been my bait-tank of ideas out behind the shop in the shadow under the awning. You know the bait tanks out back? We’ve got fresh shiners. Fish really like the cold dark water. (Just humor me — I don’t know.)
We’ve lost some people lately, both my wife and I. She, her ex-husband, Jim. Friend Bill. Friend Reid. Friend Brigi. She and I both lost brothers. There are many more and I can’t recall them. Oh, and mentor Jane this past summer at age 86. Jane, who heard us moan about the people we’ve lost, and said, “Well” — long pause and a wry smile — “brace yourselves. It doesn’t get better.”
The elephant in the room, as if death weren’t a big enough elephant, is the number of defectors. I have a few ex-friends. I can hear their harrumphs and “Gods!” of frustration. I know what they’re saying. “They shake their heads, they say I’ve changed.” They know what they know, and nothing else, that I drove them off, they gave me 100 chances. I’ve bitten feeding hands, slapped generosity aside, they’ve tried reasoning, kindness and forgiveness, but I continue to say vile things, that enough’s enough, and they’re not putting up with it anymore. That covers it, I think. I have wrong opinions for a born-and-bred Liberal. It does not matter that I am pro-choice, for gay marriage, that I still work with many “transgender” psych adolescents, that I’m for single-payer health insurance, early childhood education, and better drug and mental health services. My voting Democratic doesn’t matter!
No! I am wrong! “It’s not even about politics, Theo,” they say (even though it is). It’s because I despise Black Lives Matter and the childish lesbian Marxists it rode in on. I don’t believe in Justice 4 George Floyd or anyone else, because existentially, there’s no such thing. I mocked the Hamas keffiyeh as a murder scarf because it stands for murdering Jews. I mocked the progress pride flag, mocked Netflix and Disney, and laughed at the stupefied foes of the Florida “Don’t Say Gay” bill that doesn’t say “don’t say gay.” I laugh at deranged trans activists who try to dissolve parental rights at school, want to end your livelihood, and I showed a unicorn vomiting a pride rainbow into a toilet. I’m over Pride. “Queer” and “trans” kids are my favorite patients. In psych, I’m often their favorite “staff,” but Pride is so 2019, or 2013. I’m on OutFront Minnesota’s email list telling me we’re just six months away from Pride month. I quip that we are in the 24th year of Pride Century. I’ve mocked the intersectional pyramid of power, created by “noted philosopher” Kimberlé Crenshaw, arguing that everyone impinges on everyone else’s rights, that DEI & Belonging is 3D Tetris, that reparations are due for anyone who’s lost land. I say, indigenous people owe other indigenous people slavery reparations, because if reparation checks go out in the mail, then other Indians in Louisiana better pick up the tab. So too, probably, are Irish from Minneapolis to Boston owed some money. We’re only talking because of indentured servitude of the late 19th, early 20th century. And if olden days come up, what about the 1630 plantations in Ireland under bloodthirsty Cromwell? We Irish can go back bitching 800 years if we want to, with all the goddamned settler colonialist Danish Vikings. That’s twice as far back as the 1619 Pity Project of New York Times’ writer, Nikole Hannah Jones.
Politics is stupid as curling. Stupid as chewing gum. Its shrill echoes careen down dark metal walls, never coming back to the ear mellow and wise. Shut up with it. Tell me old stories and I’ll listen.
People are always leaving. (and coming) I say let them. Cheers