plans

first time in blue jeans

Northeast friends and fans! Please consider coming out to my book release event on October 7th at RJ Julia in Middletown, Connecticut, an outpost of a legendary local bookstore with a footprint that’s far larger than it’s indie status would suggest. Please RSVP here if you’d like to come. I’ll do a little reading, talk about the genesis of the novel, and answer questions, even insulting ones.

I’m getting ahead of myself, again. But I’m willing to risk it.

There’s potentially light at the end of the tunnel when it comes to my bum shoulder. Maybe. Longtime readers may remember that I had a rotator cuff repair in 2022. After 20 years of lifting, a partial tear had developed; after an MRI, some rest, and some PT, I was cleared to return to lifting, after a couple months of which the tendons fully tore while I was bench pressing. (To add insult to literal injury, while I was pressing 225, specifically.) I got another MRI, they scheduled the surgery, they performed the operation, I was in a recovery room for like an hour and a half, they sent us home with some pills that had a little tiny bit of codeine and a lot of acetaminophen, when the nerve block wore off I was left in an agony like I never felt before and I couldn’t tell that I had taken the pills at all, my stalwart wife worked the phone in the middle of the night to get me some real pain meds, I slept in a sling for weeks (which I absolutely do not recommend), I did like five months of physical therapy, I was declared healthy.

And yet all was not well in the interior of my left shoulder. It never felt right, not really, and over time symptoms became harder and harder to ignore. There has been a dull ache and there has been some numbness. The major problem though has been weakness, persistent and troubling weakness; I remain dramatically weaker in my left shoulder than in my right, to the point where it can feel like a struggle to push up the tailgate on our Mazda. I bought my wife and I a couple kayaks to celebrate our move to Connecticut, and we went out for a few fun paddles around in the ocean, but we’ve barely used them in the past two years because I can’t consistently get them up onto the rack on my car. I was sufficiently bothered about this problem that a couple years ago I went to a local orthopedist here, who ordered another MRI. He delivered the bad news: my repair had been among the 15-20% that fail. The tendon was off the bone, and appears to have never formed strong fibrocartilage-like tissue at the attachment site. Worse, there’s not enough tissue left to attempt another surgery. “We could try a graft,” he said. “Oh, would that work?,” I asked. “No,” he said, cheerfully.

For a couple of years I more or less accepted my fate. Getting a second opinion in a short time frame would have been difficult, given the way of health insurance companies. (That’s the health insurance company that charges me $830/month, just for me, with a $5000 deductible and $35 or $85 copays for in-network visits.) I can’t lift, which has left me without any means to feel good about my body given that all efforts to lose weight have failed thanks to my meds. The kayaks sit hanging forlornly in our garage. Any kind of over-the-head household task is a nightmare; trying to put the shower curtain rod back up when it falls has proven to be a particularly humiliating ritual. (My wife, I’m afraid, is a full foot shorter than I am.) But what’s really depressed me is that it’s difficult to hold my little boy. It’s really very important, in these early years, to be able to carry your baby around! And I shouldn’t have to put my fifteen-pound kiddo down after five minutes of holding him.

So, since a couple years had passed and this issue was bumming me out more and more, I did a little hunting around for a different doctor. They wanted me to go back to the same place where I had originally been told that there was nothing to be done, but that seemed clearly senseless to me, so I argued for a bit and got to go to a different practice. And they took a fresh x-ray and looked at the 2023 MRI and the doctor told me that he thinks that in fact something can be done, they have a really good shoulder specialist and there should be a surgical solution, let’s get a fresh MRI and figure something out. He also said, to the delight of my wife (who has long expressed great reservations about the fancy do-dah surgeon at the fancy do-dah Brooklyn hospital) that just looking at my scar suggested that the initial surgery was not performed according to the latest best practices and not done well. So, we’re gonna take a look at what can be done.

It has me feeling like this:

And, like I said, I’m getting way ahead of myself. We’ve done the new MRI but I won’t hear anything until next week. That new image might very well reveal to the doctor that, nope, the first guy was right, there’s nothing to be done. What’s more, though the insurance company has approved the image, that’s no guarantee that they’d pay for another surgery or similarly expensive treatment. Then there’s the fact that an even higher percentage of revision surgeries fail than initial surgeries. Plus, the timing here is hard and delicate - because I have an infant son, I want to fix my shoulder so that his daddy can be maximally helpful, but a major revision procedure would mean at least six weeks in a sling, several months without anything like full mobility, and six to nine months of physical therapy, probably. This would certainly be a lot to ask of my wife, not being able to carry the baby in his car seat or haul in a load of groceries at first, not being cleared to get things down off of high shelves for a long time, needing a lot of help for myself at the same time as she’s exhausting herself taking care of this baby…. Then again, it’s hard to imagine that it would be better to wait - it’s not like it’s going to get easier when he’s 18 months as opposed to now. And there’s the whole question of where and when to do PT. There’s a lot of stuff.

Yet I do dream. And dreaming about the future is something I’ve been doing a lot lately, though it’s hard to say that anything particularly different is coming next.

I’ve been trying to put together something resembling a simple and stable life out of everything that’s come in the past decade. You might easily say, well, haven’t you been doing that for the past eight years? And, yeah, in the broader sense. But it’s really been a slow crawl through stages, each one so small and provisional that it barely feels like progress until I look back. First it was just “get into immediate, life-saving psychiatric treatment.” Then it became “achieve basic stability,” then “develop healthy routines,” then “get my financial house in order,” then “build something I can live with professionally,” and then “save what’s left of my personal life.” Now I’ve got my girl and my baby, which are the biggest signposts of success I can imagine. None of it has been grand or sweeping; it’s just been a series of little steps, incremental and imperfect, but steps nonetheless. And that’s all recovery really is, less a triumphant leap into a new life than a long shuffle forward, one unglamorous adjustment at a time. Pardon me if this is both cliche and self-aggrandizing; it’s also simply reality. The thing to remember is that recovery is also always asymptotic: no matter how high up you climb, there’s always another branch on the tree, and that perpetual, Sisyphean element has caused a lot of people to despair even after years of stability.

I’m writing all this, in part, because I’ve been struggling. My son’s birth is the greatest blessing of my life, but the extreme sleep deprivation - less than four hours a day on average, still, and awake from 9PM to 5AM every night - the collapse of routines, and the sheer stress of it all have shaken my stability. I’ve found myself more prone to saying unstable or inappropriate things, my impulse control has worn thin, I’m getting into endless pointless squabbles, I can’t compartmentalize or prioritize, I’ve slipped back into the kind of interpersonal dramas I thought I’d left behind. The lack of sleep has created a derealization effect that makes it even harder for me to remember that there is another person on the other end of the internet. So this is a confession as much as it is a statement of intent. I know I can’t keep living in this state of constant online connectivity. More periods of instability will come - that’s the nature of my disorder - and I can’t keep letting them drag me into paranoia and personal conflict. At some point, for my sake and everyone else’s, I have to step away. Being in digital spaces where I’m constantly at arm’s length from people who I might have conflicts with is just no good for me or anyone else.

In my defense, I didn’t ask to be in the arena I currently find myself in.

I really, truly left social media behind. From 2017 to 2020 I not only did not publishing anything for a public audience, other than a couple of life updates to reassure well-wishers that I was in recovery, I also had no real social media. I say “real” because I had (as I have right now) a football-related burner Twitter account to follow the NFL media, but I never tweet with those, don’t have followers, don’t like or retweet, etc. I similarly have had a variety of Reddit burners over the years, but again always anonymously and for the purpose of asking questions about troubleshooting PC issues or travel or gardening etc. I restarted Facebook for a year and a half or so in 2020 at the request of St. Martin’s (for book promo) then deactivated that account for good. I am constantly accused of running various accounts that I don’t and have been for years; a casual Facebook joke about the Twitter account “Alice from Queens” has led to an endless obsession among certain too-online weirdos that I run that account, but I don’t, and I will gladly sign a sworn affidavit under penalty of perjury attesting that I have never had anything to do with it. You would think that it would be enough to point out that (I believe) that account was tweeting while I was in the OR watching my wife deliver my son, but experience says otherwise. Anybody who wants to pay a lawyer for me to attest to the fact that I’m not behind that account or any of the others I’m accused of running, I’m game. (For the record, I very explicitly said that I don’t do real social media back in November.)

No, I’ve been blissfully social media free for several years… and then, suddenly, there was Substack Notes, unexpectedly injected into my life.

When Substack rolled out Notes, it felt like someone had dropped Twitter directly into the middle of my professional life. Suddenly the thing I rely on to pay my bills came bundled with the very platform dynamic that has always been the worst for me: endless little arguments, personality contests, and the constant push-and-pull of online status. I hated the idea when it was being rolled out, not merely thanks to my own needs but also in principle, and I said so loudly to the Substack team at the time. (You can ask them.) Among other things, getting into the social media space explicitly did not help those of us who have been pointing out that platforms should be value neutral. But I lost that fight, as I have almost every fight in my life, and much of the Substack world appears delighted to have Notes. Meanwhile, I’m sure there are many who just continue to write their newsletters and ignore the little notification button in the corner. In theory, I should be able to ignore it too. I mean, absolutely, as a functioning adult with free will, I should have the patience and self-control to just disengage from Notes. In practice, I can’t. My brain won’t let me. The result is that the newsletter profession, which already forces me to spend too much time as an internet personality, has become even more entangled with the kind of interaction and exposure that I know corrodes my mental health. I’m not built for it, and it’s not built for me. That’s been obvious for some time. What I need is a clean break, and that’s not going to happen while I’m still writing a daily newsletter.

I never wanted to be a nostalgist, but I’ve become one as I’ve aged. In part that’s because, as I’ve argued, I’m in the unfortunate position where my adolescence really was a better time to be alive - everyone dismisses nostalgia for your youth as inherently irrational, but I think it’s actually perfectly natural, given what’s happened in the 21st century, politically and culturally. But set even that aside and I can never get passed the simple reality that, had I been born twenty years earlier, I might have been a writer in a time period where my personal instability wouldn’t have mattered much, because so few people would have known about it. You look around at the successful writers of the second half of the twentieth century and they’re a mess, but a) we had much more tolerance for messes back in those days, which is weird considering all of our “honoring” of people with mental illness and addiction, and b) most personal instability was hidden away behind layers of social and professional distance but is now revealed through the internet. It’s of course pathetic, in a way, that I might be wistful for a period when I would be protected by a technological shroud of privacy. But I am wistful for it. What the media and publishing are going to allow me to do appears pretty damn constrained, these days, and there’s another era in which that might not be true. You are allowed to say that’s all that I deserve. But permit me this bit of bad faith.

Well: I long ago made piece with the fact that, creatively and professionally, my limitations will always be set by my personal instability. What I produce as a writer will always live in the shadow of what I might have done in another version of my life where I wasn’t such a fundamentally fucked up person. But! What matters is that in this reality, I have my wife and my son, and that’s what I need. And the question is how to make a living that can support them while doing what’s best for my own mental health and stability. Any other life is irrelevant.

I’m still recovering. I’m still trying, in my halting way, to figure out how to put together a life that works. My ambitions are both smaller and larger than they once were. Smaller, because for reasons that are both my fault and that of this industry, any hope for a deeper reintegration into fancy media is now quite dead; somehow I have even less ability to get published in fancy places than I did when I was just reemerging after my scandal. Larger, because I want to imagine a different kind of life altogether, one that takes me out of “the spotlight.” Please note that the spotlight here is the kind of spotlight you have as a grade-Z internet celebrity, a minor public figure even by the debased standards of our current era; the Rizzler will always have more influence, importance, and clout than I do, by a factor of ten. The point isn’t that I’m a big deal but rather that being a professional writer who trades words for money in the 2020s means being treated in some strange way with the scrutiny of a public figure who actually matters, and this has proven to be a bad match for me. So I want to do something else. While I’ll be fine writing this newsletter for another year or three or five, I know I can’t keep up the pace and performance of a regular newsletter schedule forever, not without driving myself crazy. Not when I feel such strange guilt about accepting money and such directionless anxiety about earning it.

In my ideal future I’d focus on writing books, maybe some ghostwriting or editing, the occasional freelance piece if anybody will have me, and hopefully teaching again. Perhaps a part-time gig at a college somewhere, I don’t know. Enough to pay the mortgage. On the one hand, the 21st century has seen it become harder and harder to make a living in a creative field, as perverse as that is, and I know I sound a little greedy. On the other hand, on an intuitive level my goals feel sustainable, human, possible. It’s sadly the case that this industry has responded to its own ongoing collapse by becoming more sclerotic, scared, and risk-averse by the hour. But there are sometimes some green shoots. I was presented with an offer to write for a TV show a couple years back, like a real-deal thing; the show never ultimately came together and wasn’t made, but that’s the kind of random opportunity that makes me think maybe I still have a chance to do cool stuff outside of this same lane I’ve been working in for so long. And, no, I don’t need anything as glamorous as writing for TV. I just need gigs, chances.

The problem, of course, is my own reputation for instability. I know I’ve done real damage to myself, that I’m responsible for it all, and I don’t want to minimize that. But I also know that a reputation, once it calcifies, becomes a cage. I try to face this with a certain kind of honesty: I’ve earned some of it, I haven’t earned all of it, but it’s mine to live with either way. The saving grace is that my ambitions really are modest now. I don’t need to win the internet or convert the masses. I just want to build a quiet, stable life where I can take care of my wife and my little boy. That’s the whole program. It’s almost embarrassingly small compared to the ambitions that were once assumed of a writer, but it’s also more than enough. One of the little saving graces in my life has always been that I’ve never really desired celebrity, and so it hasn’t hurt as I’ve reached middle age and become aware that it will never come. I know that sounds awfully self-aggrandizing and terribly pious, but it is true that, for whatever reason, I never really thought of myself as someone who would succeed in that way. And so many people my age have been badly hurt by a culture that has convinced them that the only successful life is one that ends in fame. Well, anyway, here I am asking for simple financial security and satisfying work at a time when that is increasingly seen as demanding an indulgence in and of itself.

The irony remains bitter: my harshest critics, the people who seem most determined to see me gone, have also been the ones most intent on limiting my ability to build something new. When I lost my job at Brooklyn College in 2020, I spent ten months trying to find a normal job, only to discover that I couldn’t get one because my reputation had been reduced to rubble. That condition was my own fault, as I’ve said over and over again, but also indisputably worsened by the people who insisted I should go away forever. Media Twitter (back when that was a thing) wanted me to go away, but when a prospective employer Googled me, a lot of what they saw was invective directed at me by the kind of people who were on Media Twitter, which is how I found myself in a position where I had to go back to writing for money, which is exactly what they didn’t want. I say this from the admittedly untrustworthy perspective of someone with a paranoia disorder but also with experience and sadness: something like that is happening again. I’m trying to move on, to step back, to find work that’s better for me and for everyone else, but the same chorus of enemies is making it harder. And the truth is, all I want is to disappear in the best possible sense, to leave behind the grind of the internet, to build a modest professional life outside of it, and to live simply without constant exposure to other brains, which brings out the worst in me.

I want to be clear that I’m enormously grateful to be able to make my living writing a newsletter, and I do believe I still have a lot to contribute. None of this would be possible without the people who subscribe and stick with me, and I can’t thank you enough for that. And the banal reality is that I don’t have the financial ability to just stop; I need this work to support my family. (And hey, four years of inflation later, it’s still only $5 a month!) I still have a strange burning sense of responsibility to write constantly, given that people give me real money for this, despite how often I’m told I should publish less often. I will not forget what a blessing this is, and I think there’s some cool stuff coming, some new ideas and fresh takes. But what I’d really like, over time, is to reach a place where the newsletter can exist as a free publication, something I update maybe once a month, with space to promote my books when the time comes. I can see that life so clearly: the newsletter still alive, but smaller, gentler, and me finally able to put most of my energy into writing in a way that’s healthier and more sustainable. I just need to work a few things out to get there.

Well, there’s no one weird trick to get there. Another little virtue of mine - which isn’t chosen or achieved, so isn’t really a virtue at all - is that I don’t have a get-rich-quick mindset. Again that sounds pious, but it’s just an expression of a quirk of psychology I did nothing to bring about; honestly, it’s also generational. I am so disturbed by how many younger people seem to think that any vision of slowly building up the life you want is a sucker’s game, the obsession with crypto and meme stocks and online gambling, the notion that the only worthwhile professions are YouTuber and OnlyFans star…. That too never seemed in the cards for me, and that too is an affliction that I’m luckily a little too old to suffer under. I am far too well aware of the nature of reality to think that my upcoming novel, a work by an obscure writer for a small press, will be a ticket to fortune. (But you should preorder it anyway.) I can see it opening up new avenues for me, which I could then use to pursue more slow, steady work towards long-term financial security and a life where I am not constantly subject to my own worst instincts, which is to say, a life where I don’t have to be online.

But as the recent attempt to review bomb the novel with bad ratings on Goodreads shows, there are still people who do wish me harm, the caveat about trusting a man with a paranoia disorder about such things still firmly in place. For the book to matter the media has to cover it, and the media has a dogged reluctance to covering any books that don’t come from established stars. Hence why all of the “Books to Check Out This Fall!” lists are currently stuffed with Thomas Pynchon and Elizbeth Gilbert and Margaret Atwood and Dan Brown. (Really opening people up to new experiences, guys!) Plus ça change. And that’s before you get to my own particular relationship to this industry which is barely mine, and that’s a topic I’m sure you’re all very sick of.

Still and all: hope springs eternal, and I am very lucky and deeply grateful. I just wish I had more of a sense of where to go next. I do feel that there is some cool opportunity coming, but I don’t know what. As far as my future financial security, I am confident it will be secured, one way or another. The nice thing about having had nothing in your life, as I did when I left my childhood behind forever at 17 years old, is that you can go back there again without much fuss. More likely, of course, is that I will get less than I want but as much as I need. We’ll see. Write books, love wife, raise baby, that’s the plan. If “work at Target” ends up being an essential part of that scheme too, I will take to that with pride. In the meantime I’m doing this, and I’m full of gratitude for it. It is true, though, that I am closer to the end of this thing than the beginning, and I wonder, I worry, and even at 44 with a bum shoulder and a bad reputation, I do dream.