American D... Well That Word Got Flagged... Pills

Days go by, and the stream of content is endless, the vast majority of it passing without comment, like the infinite flow of trillions of neutrinos through your body at any given point in time. And then sometimes -- much like the occasional neutrino that pings an electron, thus creating an observable reaction in an underground observatory -- you see some dick pills, and these dick pills seem to say something. Something important. 

 

Every little detail is a goddamn masterpiece, isn't it? The dopey name, SWAG, complete with this being the "platinum" edition (memories from my middle school years of Big Tymers' "#1 Stunna" and the video with Bernie Mac selling them platinum rims, along with platinum everything else), the stick figures with crotches on fire looking like something a 5th grader in a ketchup-stained t-shirt he's been wearing for the past three days would get in trouble for drawing on the inside of his Trapper Keeper, the fact that "SWAG" apparently also stands for "sex with a grudge," implying that these are being sold not so much as dick pills but as rape pills. Although if we take the milder interpretation of sex with a grudge, the idea of interrupting a screaming couple-fight hatefuck -- "Fuck you bitch. Oh wait, let me take my SWAG, it should kick in in a few minutes..." -- is just terribly, terribly sad.

SWAG. American flag emoji. Made in USA!

It's apparently available at gas stations and online. For a population that finds its masculinity and purpose and hope for a brighter future stripped away by deindustrialization, wages stagnated for the past half-century, penises numbed by opiates and SSRIs, sapped of energy by morbid obesity, still vaguely imagining the total chads they could have been, the Chris Evans and Channing Tatum characters who seem to embody everything they're not. You imagine the gas station smelling of burnt coffee and nacho cheese in the first flurries of Ohio winter, the solitary man going through the selection of aggressively marketed dick pills stacked with "herbal" extracts, hoping for the equivalent of Monster Energy Drink shot right into their genitalia, itself a recapitulation of late '90s XTREME! marketing, praying they can use it for something other than a two-hour marathon of the greatest hits of Riley Reid and Mia Khalifa.

I wrote all of that before I learned that the actual compounds of SWAG include ant extract (you read that right, which is apparently common?). It was before I learned that the FDA had actually issued warnings for the product because it contained Sildenafil, the active component of Viagra, which I guess means it might work, but which also means that it is a controlled pharmaceutical being sold over the counter under the guise of "herbs." And it was before I learned that fake versions were being widely distributed, and the idea of a man looking for Chinese fakes of gas station dick pills on eBay at a marginally lower cost made me even more terribly, terribly sad than the pausing of a hatefuck to take the aforementioned dick pills.

Because it's the starry eyed yearning that makes it sad. 

Because if you want something that's less sad, and more just pathetic, I draw your attention to the upper middle class equivalent, Hims, the Viagra with a millennial-pastels Squarespace website complete with pictures of dashingly handsome and clever-tattooed young men of all races, advertising itself as a positive masculinity lifestyle brand, dick pills for men who don't want to admit that they need dick pills, and need it wreathed in obnoxiously precious therapeutic prose (direct quote: "an open and empowered male culture that results in more proactivity around health and preventative self-care," barffffffff), who feel guilty about their desire for masculinity, and think it can be fixed with an app. 

Jesus, if that's the other option, give me the damn gas station anger-sex pills. But it shouldn't be.

We live in a time when maleness has found some weird goddamn outlets, whether that's the parasocial relationship that Americans have to their military, as evidenced by the hideous flag-waving at any sports game, or the legions of mini-Rittenhouses who LARP as elite defenders of the American way, or the attempts by horsefaced tittybaby Josh Hawley (R-MO) to attempt to become an avatar of the American male. When really Josh Hawley is a beta soy cuck who lacks the courage to simply be a beta soy cuck.

It really is an almost perfect pairing, like pinot noir and duck breast, to the shrillest elements of the prudish phony "left," who embody a bourgeois feminism braying about centers and margins and bodies and spaces -- one that calls itself "intersectional" but fails to honestly examine the intersections and prefers to focus on victimhood, not solidarity -- that Simone de Beauvoir or Rosa Luxemburg or Emma Goldman would have proudly squirted fem-jizz all over in contempt.

Personally, I've never felt too attached to masculinity, because I'm not too big on identities of any sort. I mean, I have a cock, and enjoy fucking women with said cock, so I pretty much fit the cishet box, but I'm also pretty effeminate in a lot of ways, and am fairly proud of that, because it would be far too boring to live a gender stereotype, and because, hell, no matter what chaos my adolescence brought me, I was always pretty confident in who I was, even if I wasn't confident in vocalizing that. Maybe I would have identified as some flavor of non-binary if I'd been born 15 years later, but then again probably not. Because why should my love of home scents, my expressive and borderline campy communication, or my nasally West Coast-inflected vocalizations say anything about my gender identity, in the same way my love of football and straight bourbon doesn't, in the same way my aggressively grayscale/a few shades of blue wardrobe doesn't. Call it the David Bowie attitude. A woman I once loved asked to draw a portrait of me, and she drew me as a naked woman in shibari sneering in contempt, a glass of wine in hand. It is the most accurate portrait of me ever drawn.

So I can't say that any of these mediated narratives have ever appealed. But my advice to any young man seeking a guide for the perplexed would always be the same -- chill out, you be you, abandon all labels, be unafraid to love, be unafraid to abandon your ego, live tough and smart and graceful, read and travel and learn different languages, and find those times where you can actually throw a middle finger to the system and stick it to the man, and do it with pride. And do not trust, for a goddamn second, anyone who tries to turn a profit on the myriad holes that inevitably exist in your heart.

Scenes from an Izakaya and the Joys of City Life

I tend to use the phrase "the joys of city life" ironically. The screaming drunk bankers with Home Counties and New Jersey accents ruining your favorite bar? The joys of city life. The traffic jam caused by a pointless motorcade? The joys of city life. The homeless dude lying across the bus shelter bench at midday jerking his cock with abandon? The joys of city life.

But as of late, as we emerge from a multi-month lockdown here in Bangkok, I've come to use the phrase unironically. At a time when I'm reminded of everything I adore about living in a place I share with 15 million people, somehow managing to live cheek by jowl in relative harmony, lives intersecting, people working together, living together, eating together, drinking together.

Sure, at my worst moments, I trudge through the city under an umbrella, repulsed by every goddamn thing I see. But at my best moments, I practically dance through it, engaging with the rather old-world cafe society elements of it, how everyone kind of knows everyone within a certain negroni-swilling caste of which I am a member, sighing as the afternoon light dances off the river.

And there is no better venue to experience those true joys of city life than a good izakaya.

The izakaya is Asia's only real competition with the English or Irish pub as an institution of social and gustatory life, and unlike those two, the food is actually good. Furthermore, there's a far smaller market for phony izakayas -- whereas every college town in America has Irish pubs seemingly fitted out by the same wholesalers -- and so you're far more likely to get the genuine article, someplace that would be at home in a quiet out-of-the-way chome somewhere in Tokyo.

However, there are always signs of a good izakaya outside Japan. The lighting should be at just the right level of gaudiness, and generally I find marquis-style single bulbs to be a good sign. Furniture should be shabby and seemingly made from cast-off beer crates and things of this type. Specials should be written on long strips of paper on the wall in Japanese, even if virtually none of the staff and a minority of the customers actually speak Japanese. Paper lanterns advertising Japanese breweries and distilleries are a must. There should be at least one large smoking section with cheap aluminum ashtrays, possibly hidden on an upper floor, probably in complete contravention of local laws. No more than one TV screen is allowed, and it should be playing some highly stylized NHK cooking show involving mackerels being effortlessly filleted, or a baseball game, and if there are only two Japanese customers, they should be two middle-aged men cheering on the Hanshin Tigers or the Yakult Swallows.

So I sit down at my favorite table at my preferred izakaya -- certainly not the one with the best food, or the tastiest beer, but one with a good location and the atmosphere of this seat is unbeatable, right by the window. I nurse my beer, look at the infinite mix of reflected lights at sunset over the city.

This is my human aquarium: signs in Thai, English, Chinese, Japanese, Korean, and more, headlights and taillights, the parade of people coming home, going to night shifts, on their way to dinner and drinks, the couple in a tuxedo and ballgown on this perfect cool-season evening, 23 degrees celsius and breezy, the three (presumably) Burmese migrants, probably no more than 19, young men with fuck-you smiles at the city as they ride in the back of a pickup truck, the same look of defiance and adventurousness you see on any young man out to beat the odds far from home.

And at the tables around me, I'd forgotten what it was like to simply people-watch at the restaurant. Here's a young couple, a guy in a shell jacket with a corporate logo -- maybe he's a warehouse worker or a motorbike courier -- with a gold earring and a Ron Jeremy mustache, and his partner a chubby girl with a blonde streak who claps and gets out her phone to take a video when they bring out the pickled mackerel and blowtorch it, filling the dining room with the strangely tantalizing aroma of seared fish fat, both of them clinking their gigantic beers.

And over here, at first I thought she was a sex worker given the combination of gold sequined skirt, killer body, and fat old white dude accompanying her. But then the two are joined by an almost pathologically normal looking halfie girl of 18 or 19 in black plastic glasses and a Supreme shirt (his daughter? definitely his daughter) and my theory is thrown out the window. Guess this is just dad's new girlfriend... always awkward.

The next couple over is a bit more predictable, the Thai woman in her early 30s on her #grind living her #bestlife working on her laptop in her workout clothes as she drinks a highball, more than happy to ignore the highly replaceable hot French boyfriend of the sort replicated at a factory somewhere near Lyon to be the reference points for shitty partners for women around the world.

And directly in front of me, a rather fugly local couple, maybe 32 or so, ordering girly fruit-flavored beers and clearly, obviously each other's absolute soulmates in stupid love with each other, as wholesome as a strawberry milkshake down the shore.

There's another solo Westerner here, a man with a sticker-festooned Macbook, some marginal creative, maybe a graphic designer, maybe a video editor, someone working in the blurry world of "content" who washed up on this particular fatal shore -- although it might as well be Saigon or Sao Paulo, and it might as well be the same card flip of shaven head or manbun to hide the male pattern baldness.

He briefly makes eyes at the group of office girls feeling just a bit naughty, bitching in whiny tones about all the calories they're going to be eating, but still screeching with joy when their drinks and their giant hotpot come, all anxieties disappearing in the frothing beer foam and steaming dashi.

One of the women looks at me, wondering who the fuck this guy is with a giant notebook -- my giant Thai taxman's notebook in which I do all my writing -- on a Friday night at an izakaya in Central Bangkok. Not out of any romantic or sexual interest, mind you, but just out of perplexity. And I can see it in her eyes that she kind of wants to ask me, but she doesn't want to bother me. Eye contact is made, and she quickly averts.

And so I smile just a bit and take a sip of my drink and return to my notebook, and look out at the flash of lights and turn up My Bloody Valentine as loud as it can go on my earbuds.

Dark Academia and Meme Versus Reality

It's an inevitable feature of getting older that you come late to the party when it comes to trends -- sure, the Internet makes it so that you have the ability to search more, but you still have to know where to search, and how, and whether that search is worthwhile, and whether or not you should actually spend some time making sure that you've used the right cover letter for the TPS report. 

And that goes double for the "aesthetics" shared by a (mostly) Gen Z public on the infinitude of social media platforms I try to avoid taking part in, except for anthropological purposes. Various -cores have come back with a vengeance, and so forth, a rhetorical device which is older than me, and which I've always hated -- when I was 19, I refused to vocalize the word "mumblecore," and I refuse to still.

And thus it was that over the past year or so, I became aware of the concept of "dark academia," an aesethetic adoration and -- like all things deemed aesthetic now, somehow erotically charged but utterly desexualized -- of all things dusty and forgotten. Leatherbound books with dusty spines, tweed jackets, ivied and crenellated Gothic libraries, Byronic poetry, tasteful earth tones, decanters full of cognac, horn-rimmed glasses, brass candelabra, and the lingering scent of old pipe smoke.

 

I get it -- I, too, once wrapped myself in a scarf and wore tasseled loafers and showed up at parties with a well-thumbed Dover Thrift Edition of Death in Venice tucked into my back pocket, pontificated on the semiotic theories of Roland Barthes to anyone foolish enough to be in earshot, prowled used bookstores for copies of long-forgotten novels, tried to speak shitty French at parties, had six cups of coffee for dinner.

In other words, I was a cunt. I would say Timothee Chalamet would have played me, but I was never near as handsome.

And if you are a teenager raised in some hellish exurb, it seems to me natural that you would want to find some alternative reality that you could fantasize about. Someplace where ideas seemed to actually matter, someplace where humanistic education was more than being asked to find the symbols in The Great Gatsby to practice for the AP test, someplace dark and strange and interesting.

But that wasn't my reality. I was raised in an academic community, and so a lot of this is second nature to me. I was the product of an illicit student-professor affair, in a house with a bookshelf-lined livingroom and Faulkner first editions and antique furniture and Miles Davis' Kind of Blue playing as my dad, the Royal Tenenbaum who had lost his crown before I was born, would pour the first of many Scotches in front of the fire on frigid November nights.

To a certain degree I imbibed it. The world around me, it seemed, was a generally cruel and stupid place, and I spent most of my youth thinking that I, too, would retreat into the ivory tower eventually.

The thing is though is that reality sets in. Lacking the necessary capital and not going into a field which would have placed me on a professional track, I would have had to sink myself 100,000 dollars into student debt in the hope of getting an adjunct teaching position at an anonymous university for wages that a factory worker would (rightly) sneer at. And so, like all overeducated but decidedly non-blueblooded youth in the years after the financial crash of 2008, I worked a series of low-end jobs, the more horrifying the more novel, and became known as the "smart guy" (with the subtext being "lacking any actual monetizable skills") the guy who could happily talk about surrealism on his lunch break at the car dealership or the psychiatric facility, while he was earning 10 dollars an hour, people saying "y'know, you should really write a book or something."

Which leads to the divide between the aesthetic and the real.

It's easy to fantasize about a world of intrigue and scholarly madness and long Orson Welles shadows, but a lot harder to actually live a life dedicated to art and knowledge and letters. To actually devote oneself in this way -- something I've done on and off for my entire adult life -- is really goddamn lonely and painful and alienating at times, because, above all else, it's a form of escapism. A lot of people might refer to Of Human Bondage, the story of a seeker who realized all gods, spiritual or otherwise, were failures (which is great), but I think it was best phased by Aldous Huxley in Point Counter Point in 1928: 

"I perceive now that the real charm of the intellectual life — the life devoted to erudition, to scientific research, to philosophy, to aesthetics, to criticism — is its easiness. It's the substitution of simple intellectual schemata for the complexities of reality; of still and formal death for the bewildering movements of life. It's incomparably easier to know a lot, say, about the history of art and to have profound ideas about metaphysics and sociology, than to know personally and intuitively a lot about one’s fellows and to have satisfactory relations with one’s friends and lovers, one’s wife and children. Living's much more difficult than Sanskrit or chemistry or economics. The intellectual life is child’s play; which is why intellectuals tend to become children — and then imbeciles and finally, as the political and industrial history of the last few centuries clearly demonstrates, homicidal lunatics and wild beasts. The repressed functions don't die; they deteriorate, they fester, they revert to primitiveness. But meanwhile it's much easier to be an intellectual child or lunatic or beast than a harmonious adult man. That's why (among other reasons) there's such a demand for higher education. The rush to books and universities is like the rush to the public-house. People want to drown their realization of the difficulties of living properly in this grotesque contemporary world, they want to forget their own deplorable inefficiency as artists in life."

And the older you get, the harder it gets. When you're 15, perhaps you can fancy yourself one of the lads in Dead Poets Society (a movie I've not rewatched as an adult, and do not plan to -- I'm sure I'll despise it). But one transitions shockingly quick from charmingly adorkable Oscar Wilde cosplayer to Uncle Monty in Withnail and I, bloviating about Baudelaire before getting rapey with the handsome young men in his company.

Perhaps it's this that unsettles me more than anything else as I look at the nascent wrinkles in my forehead, having graduated from thrift-store shoes to vintage desert boots from a nice consignment shop on Ekkamai Road, as one's life involves a lot less stoned arguing about shit over delivery Indian food, but no less introspection in the long taxi ride home.

The Ugliest of Decades

In the wake of the US departure from Afghanistan and the near-simultaneous 20th anniversary of 9/11, a lot of hay has been made about the attempted rehabilitation of George W. Bush's political reputation. This is especially odd considering how far the star of his comrade-in-arms, Rudy Giuliani, has fallen, from "America's mayor" to finally being widely recognized as the doddering, corrupt old fraud he always was (and who ripped a fantastically loud one in the middle of the Michigan recount hearings). Fortunately, the consensus still seems to be that both are fucking twats, and should be remembered as such.

But this moment has put me in mind more and more of the 2000s, a "decade without a name" as Timothy Garton Ash called it, the decade when I came of age, and therefore the era that is supposed to be ensconced in my memory as hallowed.

Yet if you ask me to think back on the 2000s (or the "oughties," or whatever you want to call them), my memories are of nothing but disgust, particularly with the "short 2000s" lasting from 9/11 to the Obama election (to crib a technique from Eric Hobsbawm). Sure, there was political disgust. The general opinion of those who identified as in any way "progressive" tended not to see Bush as a malefactor, but as a puppet of Cheney, Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, et al. But the blame went deeper. The general opinion among my peers was that these bastards were elected in in '04 by a fundamentally fucked country, with a stupid, piggish, populace of cross-clutching nationalists, fearful of gays marrying and brown people at TSA, that was to blame.

If there's any piece of media that sums up this particular stance, it's MTV2's Wonder Showzen, a pisstake of children's shows that ran in '05 and '06, featuring puppets harassing civilians on the streets of New York, kids dressed as reporters in trenchcoats doing vox-pop interviews (going to the racetrack and asking a retiree "why not cut out the middleman and give your social security check directly to the mob?"), or just dressed as Hitler and screaming "what are you afraid of?" at passersby in Lower Manhattan. In other words, taking pure anarchic glee in the freaking out of the squares.

 

For me at 19 or 20, this seemed the only sane reaction to a reactionary decade. One in which not only was the military apparatus and surveillance state radically expanded, never to contract again, but in which the culture just seemed so damn dumb. So it might be illustrative to look at how the culture expressed itself.

In cinema, it was the year when everything I hate -- leaning into franchise products, comic book movies as surefire seat-fillers, CGI excess -- all became the standard (which isn't to say that cinema was necessarily better in earlier decades, it's just when this particular iteration of shittiness became the norm). "Quality" films weren't safe eitehr. I remember watching The Aviator on DVD in someone's apartment, and wondering what had happened to Scorsese, why he couldn't stop moving the camera, why everything had to be so damn big.

In television, while it is (rightly) remembered as the era of The Sopranos, The Wire, Deadwood, Six Feet Under, Breaking Bad, and Mad Men, let it be remembered that it was also the era when reality television reached its highest form, an arc stretching from Survivor through Laguna Beach to Jersey Shore before that impulse in entertainment was taken over by Internet culture writ large, when the famous-for-being-famous were given the key by network execs rather than simply posting cringe on TikTok.

In music, it was the decade of album after over-long album of grandiose Southern rappers all of whom had album titles like "Tha Thug Life, Volume 1: The Feature Film" or some such shit, replete with Gothic fonts and weirdly Tyler Perry-ish music videos (he goes on the list too) with minute-long cinematic intros. On the country side, we were told that putting a boot in one's ass was the American way. In rock, the charts were topped by... that Canadian band, you know which one... along with a host of other shitty groups, many of whom had numbers in their names (in numerical order, you had Three Doors Down, Maroon 5, 30 Seconds to Mars, Sum 41...). It was when the shitty emo out of Vegas and Orange County that is being revived for some dumb fucking reason right now was being played in dorm rooms by boys in puka shells and Livestrong bracelets, alternating with Dave Matthews Band and Ben Harper. Across the hall, their English-major counterparts were listening to any number of bland indie bands with giggly names (and to be fair, I listened to some crappy stuff, but I was at least above Mumford and Sons). Or Arctic Monkeys, Franz Ferdinand, or other "dance-punk" bands hyped by NME.

And in design... I'll just list some representative objects off. The McMansion suburbs built in the prelude to the 2008 crash. Von Dutch hats. Ed Hardy t-shirts. The Hummer H3. Uggs. Thongs peeking out over low-rise jeans. Chinese-character tattoos on white people. Ads for "x-treme" snack foods. The creepy Burger King ads.

It's easy (and fun!) to blame conservatives, especially during a decade largely dominated by conservative politics, but if I look at liberals from the time period, they didn't fare much better. Their objects in the rising culture war were the obnoxiously smug Daily Show at its Jon Stewart peak, and the sheer idiocy of the near-parody of politics in The West Wing. They felt good about themselves after watching Crash.

Looking back, with the wisdom of my added years, sure the culture sucked, but my finger-wagging at those I felt to be beneath me was mere adolescent misanthropy. People may have had wretched political opinions and lousy taste, but it was far easier to blame the hog-people than to actually interrogate why they believed what they believed, or why the mass culture of the time looked the way it did. It's a lot easier to point and mock than to ask why people might want some spectacle in their lives and max out their credit at a time when the media kept us in a state of perpetual fear.

But what's most interesting out of all after all these years is the fact that this is really the last time in American history when there was anything you could call a common culture (Marvel movies being really the only thing nowadays that pretty much everyone watches). It was still a time when Saturday Night Live could parody an episode of a reality show that had aired the previous week, with the expectation that the audience could be counted upon to laugh at the joke.

We don't have that anymore. Our lives are so individuated, so self-contained, our choice of media so curated, that trends are increasingly difficult to observe, and increasingly fleeting.

As I age, my ability to parse a fundamentally youth-driven culture becomes poorer and poorer. But I will say this, I will never become one of those annoying nostalgists who can't shut up about Woodstock, or grunge-era Seattle, or whatever. When looking back at the ethos of the time in which the light of youth shone strongest on me, I can only sigh and roll my eyes.

ADHD Memes and Late Capitalism

So I recently became aware of the phenomenon of ADHD memes, which don't seem to have made too much of an impact yet, but they are very much indicative of a broader trend in Internet culture, and one that has existed in various permutations for years. One in which some aspect of mental health is fetishized and meme'd about, to the point where all original meaning is lost.

This in and of itself is part of an even broader trend, in which various mental health issues obtain au courant status. When I was in my early 20s it was various autism spectrum conditions, and referring to anyone you saw as weird as being "on the spectrum" became the standard, and when I was in high school, it was bipolar disorder. All of which seems like so many ways of trying to find a superior metaphor to explain why people are, to use a much simpler term, fucked up.

We could, of course, expand this thesis even further, to more general health issues. One only has to look through an issue of Time or Newsweek in the '90s to find vogues for Lyme disease, Epstein-Barr, more suspicious concepts like multiple chemical sensitivity, and so forth, waves of suspicion and fear that mirrored the purges of the witches during bad harvests in less ostensibly enlightened centuries.

It pretty much goes without saying that the radical expansion in the number of ADHD diagnoses over the past few decades has been controversial. You could point to the fact that Americans are diagnosed with ADHD at an order of magnitude greater than their British counterparts. You could point to the fact that a great many of the DSM criteria for ADHD just seem like indicators of a normal childhood, especially at a point in history when children's lives are as scheduled and routinized and monitored as feedlot cattle. And if you're being a true cynic, you could point to the way that these diagnoses support a vast pharmaceutical enterprise, with legions of confused, lost parents trying to find an easy answer as to why their children are radically failing to conform with the expectations of either themselves or the society at large (although as a bonus, enough of those children were willing to sell me their scrips in college, and a couple of those bad boys crushed up definitely made the Hawkeye Vodka go down a little sweeter, the bitter drip down the back of my throat aside).

These are easy points to make. But when I examine the ADHD memes themselves, they seem -- like memes in general, really -- more indicative of ordinary people trying to make sense of why their lives don't seem to make sense. A couple of the top posts from the r/adhdmemes subreddit...

 

 

How much of that actually seems like a diagnosable illness, and how much of that just seems like an apt and even rather banal description of life in the current social and technological moment, and especially of being relatively young in the current social and technological moment?

You have a video playing on your laptop while you check something on your phone. You scroll through Instagram while you eat. You kick yourself for leaving your phone in the living room when you went to go take a shit. Me too.

It's hardly a hot take to say that this is all by design -- we all know that social media is as designed to be addictive as a bag of Flamin' Hot Cheetos is. And yet we are expected to find individual solutions to a social problem. In much the same way that obesity is treated as an individual problem, despite the fact that in America, people are increasingly forced into patterns of spatial isolation (whether that's an urban food desert or a suburban cul-de-sac), time constraints and job requirements preclude physical exercise, price differences between processed foods and fresh produce of any quality are mortifying, and a Bloomberg-style soda tax is going to do more to punish the poor than actually resolve the profound sickness of our society.

They're both diseases of relative affluence, ADHD and obesity -- as the problem of caloric scarcity has largely been resolved (although malnutrition remains rampant), the problem of entertainment scarcity has largely been resolved.

And yet we still feel unfulfilled -- to continue stretching this metaphor beyond all reason, you don't exactly feel great after you eat a bag of Flamin' Hot Cheetos -- we still feel the looming threat of boredom at all times.

Before meeting his end in an Inland Empire garage in 2008, David Foster Wallace had spent the past few years trying to finish The Pale King, what was to be his opus about the nature of boredom, set at an IRS branch office in Peoria. It is a near-complete catalog of the myriad tediums and drudgeries of daily life, written by a man who was on his way out the door -- although who knows how much of this novel was written in happier times -- and cobbled together after his death. We should also keep in mind that his magnum opus Infinite Jest revolves around a tape so entertaining it paralyzes the viewer. The resultant thesis becomes that there is nothing more addicting than entertainment (something Wallace alluded to in interviews as well, saying that despite his drug and alcohol problems, TV was the worst addiction he had to face), and that is driven by the cosmic fear of boredom, as boredom requires us to face our own essential loneliness.

And in an era of unprecedented loneliness, and with an equally unprecedented number of available distractions, it seems to logically follow that the ultimate result is a society in which the things that get called ADHD are an inevitable consequence.

But now the time comes to turn the camera inwards.

I don't exhibit any of the classical symptoms. Rather, if anything, I do the opposite, I diligently spend hour after hour reading books and never rereading, watching movies and never rewatching, cooking new dishes, exercising obsessively, studying languages, writing page after page of meaningless crap, making lists of albums to listen to, cocktails to make, restaurants to try, planning voyages I'll never make, as if all this... stuff... will provide some kind of a bulwark. And yet likewise, it doesn't make the tossing and turning as I wake up at 3 a.m. any less painful.

Does Therapy Suck?: An Inquiry

A few days ago, I concluded, for the first time in my life, a serious attempt at undergoing therapy.

It's something you're supposed to do, right? We're always told to get help, to reach out. When one has a problem, one ought find a way to solve it, and when one is down, they say, it's best to seek professional counseling.

But here I am, 10 sessions later, and my bank account 1000 dollars emptier (not covered by insurance -- thanks, East Asian stigmatization of mental health!), and all I can wonder is "what the fuck was it all for?"

I've always been pretty gloomy, to say the least, but I had never sought out professional help, even as I -- like everyone else -- implored my friends and peers to do so when they were going through their own problems. There were good reasons when I was young and broke (anyone who says you "can't put a price on mental health" can fucking suck it), and as I got older and less broke, the reasons got less good. Laziness? Apprehension? Some bullshit notion of toughness definitely played a part for which I hold myself to a higher standard than the general public -- call it toxic masculinity, and it probably is, my superego is Denzel Washington pointing a gun at and saying "man up, virgin lungs" to my ego, played by Ethan Hawke. 

Of course this wasn't helped by the fact that if you are a dude, lots of well-meaning dudes will tell you that depression isn't real, that therapy is bullshit, that I seemed happy, so it couldn't be that bad a problem, or something to that effect (although women can be dudes of this sort too -- a lady therapist I met in a social situation not too long ago told me I couldn't be depressed because I could routinely get out of bed, so yeah, that's a therapist you should never go to). Or the equally large number of equally well-meaning friends who say you can talk to them about anything, but who don't really mean it, even if they think, in full and honest good faith, that they mean it.

So, in light of a couple of other changes in my life, I said fuck it. Being the insufferable nerd I am, I had to do my due diligence and extensively research various counseling centers around the city, their education, their theoretical underpinnings, tried to filter out anyone who seemed to be either an active charlatan or in Bangkok because they'd lost their medical licensing in their home country. Not knowing the difference between the various approaches to and schools of therapy except in the broadest possible strokes, I quickly realized I couldn't make an informed decision, so I just filtered out anyone who mentioned reiki healing or similar bullshit, and found someplace close enough to my home.

So I sat on a couch for weeks and I sat describing my problems to a very nice, very earnest man who seemed like a legitimately good listener. He nodded, he repeated my wording back to me in classic Rogerian style. He tried to crack the nut.

But my suspicions of the efficacy of any of this grew and grew. In the end, everything I told him was something I had told myself on a dark night alone many times before. I think he wanted to guide me towards a greater introspection, but I've already done enough introspection to last a lifetime, and it hadn't given me much in the way of productive insight.

I was looking for a breakthrough, some greater understanding. Was that maybe too big an ask? Or was the very telling of someone supposed to be in and of itself therapeutic? (it wasn't)

Somewhere around our fifth session, he told me I was "difficult to understand," which is something truly horrifying to hear from a professional counselor, even if it was in no way a blame or a dig. But the end result is the same. A locked-in syndrome of the soul.

I do so many of the things recommended. I'm constantly doing productive things, reading and eating right and exercising, all the things that you're supposed to do to feel better. If only largely because if I was to just let myself go and relax, I would not be writing anything at all. I'd be in a pile of takeout containers, cigarette butts, empty bourbon bottles, semen-soaked tissues, and little plastic baggies lined with delicate tracings of white powder.

The one thing he really advised -- the nearest thing he gave me to a prescriptive recommendation -- was meditating in earnest, and I've been trying to meditate daily as a result. I've definitely gotten better at it. I can, without question, concentrate on my breathing better. And if I'm in a particularly stressful moment, I've found it to be an excellent technique of calming myself down, taking a beat.

But in any other circumstance, I'm failing to see the point. Sure, I can go longer stretches without entering a hyper-self-aware labyrinth of observation, fact, tangent, and metaphor, lost in my own mind, but after maybe 10 minutes or so, it becomes too much, it becomes increasingly difficult to focus, and I wind up far unhappier than I was before I sat down.

So now I'm left at something of an impasse.

I look to the present moment around me and I see a world in which the therapeutic has become the standard mode of discourse. The underlying condition doesn't matter, to say nothing of material conditions. What matters is that one is recognized as valid and sincere, in a complete reduction of the complex, messy web of environmental, social, cultural, economic, and psychic realities to the emotions of the atomized individual. For which we are offered bromides about self-actualization, phony empathy, and a quick tendency to medicalize and medicate, as neoliberal capitalism continues to slouch towards Bethlehem.

If you ask me what actually is resonant and therapeutic, I think of the quote from Walter Benjamin that I first read, many years ago, quoted by Susan Sontag: 

I was born under the sign of Saturn -- the star of the slowest revolution, the planet of detours and delays. 

And that one sentence can do more than anything else to make me feel less alone in the melancholy that accompanies the taste of bitter coffee and the smell of office cleaning chemicals, the sense of waking up panting in the middle of the night and feeling to curl up to someone no longer there, and dreary Sunday late afternoons, the very sunset drained of color.

The Fall of Kabul and Meditations on the Useless

 So it happened, something that I knew was inevitable -- the shot of a Chinook helicopter leaving the US Embassy in Kabul (pricetag $800 million) with the eerie resemblance to the famed Hubert Van Es shot of the people lining up to get on the Air America chopper waiting on the roof of the CIA building on Gia Long Street in Central Saigon in 1975.

 

The cynic in me assumes that some photographer scoped out that very angle over the past week, as the fall of Kabul became inevitable.

 

 

Of course there will be many, many dumb takes in the coming days -- hell, they're already starting to pile up.

There will be the unreconstructed Bush-era neocons who openly advocate a forever war (David Frum, Max Boot, and Co.) have migrated over to the Democrats, and they will be pushing every image of suffering in an attempt to tug your heartstrings and try to convince you that this is somehow your responsibility (while of course remaining silent about American complicity in Syria, Libya, Yemen...). There will be the poor deluded Afghans who worked hand in hand with the American puppet state and still somehow think the US had even half a chance to turn Afghanistan into a functioning democracy -- I mean, after all, there are still former VNA officers waving the red-and-yellow striped flag of South Vietnam around the Asian enclaves of South Seattle. Of course America's ruddy-jowled Trumpy uncles will loudly declaim that this would never have happened in an America made great again, before they keel over from Cheesy Gordita Crunch-related complications.

Secretary of State Blinken of course had to respond that America won in Afghanistan (winner of this year's Robert McNamara Memorial Prize for Military-Industrial Doublespeak). Meanwhile, part-time Cthulhu worshipper Mitch McConnell said nah, fuck it, send more troops in, and talked about the "embarrassment of a superpower laid low," as if this superpower wasn't laid low by our nation's failures in Iraq, and as if a quasi-functioning Afghanistan wasn't just a house of cards that could be taken out by the Taliban in a week's time.

I was 14 when 9/11 happened. The general mood in the classroom in Mrs. Woodman's 10th grade French class was basically "whoaaaa, dude." There was a lot of talk on the media about coming together as a nation. What I basically felt, though, even as a 14 year old, was just an innate sense of the fuckedness of things to come.

You all know what happened next. How Afghanistan was invaded with a bare minimum of a rationale. How many years of idiotic flag-waving, how many lives lost and ruined as a result. How many smiling executives at Halliburton and Lockheed Martin. How many smug New York Times editorials about "responsible global leadership" or some similarly dumb non-concept. How many empty promises by Obama and Trump about ending the conflict. How many strands of the social safety net in America -- or what's left of it -- shredded in the name of fiscal responsibility even as the Pentagon budget grew ever more bloated.

Over the years of course, the war itself simply became background noise, an occasional disaster from the far side of the planet, mediated largely through Predator strikes. There were so many of them, and America was tangentially involved in most of them. They became one more horror which barely registered in 2015 or so, a few inches of scanned text on a news site between the latest dish on Kim and Kanye and an ad for dick pills.

Possibly my favorite joke of all time:

Q: What's the difference between a Jihadi training camp and a Pakistani primary school?

A: Don't ask me, I'm just a drone pilot.

In memoriams to American veterans over the past several years, the various military imbroglios of the early 21st Century have all become lumped together, and veterans of all conflicts great and small are classified as having participated in the "war on terror." The nebulous verbiage of the Bush administration has become accepted as standard terminology, because the whole thing is so clumsy that to actually name the geographies and conflicts would almost be a tacit acceptance of their failures and ineptitudes.

Well now it took 20 years, 3 trillion dollars, and countless Afghans vaporized through drone and conventional warfare, and this is what we get as a final thought: the predictable image of a helicopter on a roof -- little more than a meme.

Notes on Dying Vaccine Refusers

The annual CPAC Conference is, year-in and year-out, one of the American political scene's most reliable sources of lulz. You may remember, for instance, Trump hugging the American flag like Linus hugging his blankie. While a lot of it is just anodyne conservative bullshit -- repugnant cable news talking heads who are mildly ashamed of their Yale degrees doing their best to hoot and holler to an upper middle-class suburban audience that view themselves as the last defenders of Real America -- you will inevitably get a pretty wide swathe of truly dumb motherfuckers with glazed-over eyes who actually smoke their own supply. These -- the Diamond and Silks and the Lauren Boeberts and the Mike Cernoviches -- are of course far more entertaining. And you will also get people who say shit that's so dumb that you can't help but assume that they are charlatans, as charming in their way as the Artful Dodger, before you realize that one should never ascribe to malice what one can ascribe to stupidity.

Which is why it should come as no surprise that at this year's conference -- themed "America Uncanceled," because conservatives now interpret even the mildest forms of criticism as "cancellations" and proceed to whine like bitches -- featured Alex Berenson (also a shamefaced Yalie, so he's a toofer), the onetime spy novelist, self-proclaimed "COVID contrarian," and author of a book called Tell Your Children: The Truth About Marijuana, Mental Illness, and Violence (won't somebody pleeeeeease think of the children?!) getting an audience of cheers for America's failure to vaccinate.

Of course Anthony Fauci called this "horrifying," which was, of course, Berenson's intention. Make a trollish statement, get the cretins to bay along, and BAM! The lib doth protest too much, methinks.

This has, of course, been the animating force of the right for over a decade. Failing to gin up public support for supply-side economics in the post-2008 Crash era, or foreign military adventures in the post-Iraq era, and given the fragility of the white-evangelical base in an increasingly non-religious, increasingly socially liberal era, they are increasingly settling on one of the most reliable emotional angles: pure resentment.

This is largely the Democrats' fault as well. By supporting reprehensibly hawkish foreign policy and Wall Street cronyism, the Democratic Party failed to establish a platform other than nice-guy centrism, and by refusing to support even broadly popular policies like Medicare for All (70 percent support) and the Green New Deal (60 percent approval) which alienate their donor class, the Dems have adopted a smug, adults-in-the-room stance that benefits nobody.

Meaning that the Republican party's ideology -- living in a world where their old cornerstone values of respect for tradition have become utterly passe -- has simply become being an absolute cunt to everyone around you.

This is why I can't stand the liberals who think that if you just give people the Correct Facts, they'll stop thinking the Bad Things and will start thinking the Good Things. And article-of-faith statements like "believe science" just come off as finger-wagging. Sure, there are non-committed people who are persuadable, and in my experience a lot of younger people are persuadable as soon as they finally get offline, but roughly 25 percent of America who are irreversibly brain-poisoned.

Which is why in places like Florida and the Ozarks, cases are surging among people who refuse to get vaccinated.

I always sympathize with the skeptical perspective -- I was actually pretty skeptical of the efficacy of non-N95 masks until enough evidence mounted to convince me that this skepticism was misplaced. And among minority populations that have often found themselves to be unwilling guinea pigs, the skepticism is a lot more understandable -- wrong, but at least understandable. But the racial gap in COVID vaccination is narrowing fast, leaving a group of predominantly white, predominantly male, predominantly Republican stalwarts. Sure, these people are more concentrated among the lowest income bracket, but interestingly, the number of white vaccine refusers is higher at the $50,000 to $75,000 income bracket than the $25,000 to $50,000 bracket.

And something tells me this is not really even "skepticism."

Skepticism as I understand it is a questioning of grounds and motivation, a search for empirical evidence, a commitment to analytical thinking, and perhaps above all else a rigorous self-examination and an attempt to root out one's own biases and misperceptions and misinterpretations. And something tells me that most of these people have not reached their conclusions after a careful analysis of the scientific literature.

All of which seems pretty doubly absurd when you live, as I do, in a country whose government has spectacularly biffed the vaccine rollout, where people are clambering desperately for protection.

Republican politicians in places like Arkansas and Missouri are understandably freaking the fuck out, realizing that they can no longer control the narrative of the very base they had spent decades agitating, as their hospitals fill and their citizenry dies off. Meanwhile, in Florida, Ron DeSantis, the fancy lad that even my nerdy ass wants to shove in a locker, attempts to ride the tiger by speaking out against "vaccine passports" to protect his presidential aspirations, while quietly maintaining an exemption for cruise ships for fear of the Carnival Sensation becoming a masque of the red death.

To which I have to say, at this point -- after nearly half a century of very deliberate machinations by the ruling class that needed some kind of ideological scaffolding for the protection of their wealth -- chickens came home to roost motherfucker.

At this point, the path to herd immunity and the possibility of a post-pandemic life is being impeded by the vaccine hesitant. They, at this point, are bearing the worst of it, considering the fact that they're the ones getting sick, along with those with the extreme misfortune of being their vulnerable relatives or minor children.

When I think about those whose vaccine skepticism has led to the sudden realization that there isn't a ventilator available, I wonder what they're thinking. Maybe there's some self-reflection, maybe that fabled road-to-Damascus moment. Or maybe there is just an ideological commitment to the end, a refusal to the last to come to terms with one's own reality. Or maybe there is an ironic detachment, in its own way a final trolling.

But unlike so many liberals, I won't call this a "tragedy," as a tragedy is a circumstance in which men and women strive for good, and due to their own failings or circumstances beyond their control, are condemned to failure. This isn't a tragedy. This is America sharting its pants.

So I'll just say the following to that vaccine refuser on his deathbed.

Now you're fucking dead. Sucks for you dawg.

The Texas Chain Saw Massacre Is a Near-Perfect Film: Horror in American Cinema, Part 2

So not long ago I wrote about my disappointment with season 1 of American Horror Story and its reduction of horror to Dutch-angled bullshit. But despite the fact that I am the most negative of Nancies, we should consider, as a counterpoint, what makes good horror. What makes something that really gets under one's skin.

Texas Chain Saw Massacre. The very name conjures up every trope of B-movie slashers (or what the Brits used to call "video nasties," further proof of that they are the Anglophone virgin to our Anglophone chad). If, like me, you grew up in the VHS environment of the '90s, it's the sort of title that promised every cheap thrill we wanted as idiotic tween boys -- gore, tits, and ideally gore-spattered tits. Sure, the movies we watched had those -- as we worked our way through the Scream and Halloween and the questionable-things-done-last-summer franchises, but there remained something totemic about Texas Chain Saw Massacre. The name held magic, as if it was the most forbidden film, something only to be provided by older brothers who smoked soft packs of Kools, or by the kid down the street whose family always seemed just a bit off.

And sure, I'd seen it at some point then, and liked it a lot. But it wasn't until about 20 years later that I re-watched it, and actually got it. And it was at that point that I knew it belonged in my top 10 American films.

What is the most shocking to modern viewers -- especially after Saw, Hostel, and all those other torture-porn flicks of the '00s -- is how little actual blood and violence there is. There is some, for sure, and that opening shot of a dismembered corpse on a tombstone is pretty damn grisly, but that is far and away the most explicitly bloody thing in the whole movie. Rather, the film's horror is entirely predicated on eerie tone and near-surrealist imagery, with set design more inspired by the work of Dali, Klee, or Yves Tanguy than Fritz Lang.

  

We need to view the movie in the context of horror at the time. For the previous 50 years, American horror had occurred in two strands. First, there were the familiar creature features that had been around since the Silent Era, but which are probably most familiar in the form of the campy matinees of the 1930s through 1950s. Second, there was a more high-class "psychological" strain, as exemplified by Hitchcock's American movies. However, the two had rarely met, although a handful of other low-budget masterpieces -- Freaks, Carnival of Souls, and Night of the Living Dead being three excellent examples -- managed to pair visceral horror with an in-depth portrayal at the anxiety and sheer weirdness lurking beneath the surface of modern life.

What sets Texas Chain Saw apart is the thoroughness with which the story eviscerates the American cinematic tradition that came before it. 

To give a spoiler alert at this point is more or less pointless. If you have watched a horror movie, any horror movie, you know the score. You know about going into houses you shouldn't. You know that there will be a last girl. But that is not the point.

Consider our killers. Leatherface, with his human-skin mask, a detail taken from the crimes of Ed Gein in rural Wisconsin 20 years previous (as a sidenote, another one of the most horrifying films about American life, albeit in a completely different way, Werner Herzog's Stroszek was shot in the same Waushara County fields that Gein stalked), is the most-remembered, but most people only remember the mask and of course the chainsaw.

They are less likely to remember Leatherface crossdressing in a matronly apron with lipstick and blue eyeshadow, like a nightmare version of a '50s housewife. and they don't remember the members of the cannibalistic Texas clan, the near-dead, near-immobile grandfather awkwardly slinging his sledgehammer while his son recounts his past glories as one of the most productive employees on the killing floor at a meatpacking plant. They don't remember the squeaky-voiced, stringy-haired teen giggling as he slashed his hand open, like an ur-version of the American teenager at his dumbest. They don't remember the barbecue pitmaster and gas station owner who seems the concerned middle-aged dad until it's realized that his veneer of normalcy conceals a brutality and cruelty as profound as the rest of them.

Similarly, the victims are a bunch of young, kinda-hippie kids. They traipse naively through the countryside, talking about astrology, representatives of contemporary America to be slaughtered by reflections of a previous America as seen through a funhouse mirror.

Hell, the very landscape itself is ominous. Part of what makes Texas Chain Saw work is that most of the actions takes place in the daylight. Instead of dark attics, you see a denuded landscape, the mythic Texas plains of so many Westerns presented as a land of shuttered slaughterhouses, abandoned frontier homes, semi-functional gas stations, with the radio reporting crimes of increasing severity, utterly unrelated to the plot, indicative of the sort of 1970s cultural paranoia that one associates with movies like Taxi Driver, All the President's Men, and The Parallax View.

By the time we reach the film's climax, the cannibal feast, the family is presented at the exact same angle used in Leave It to Beaver or Father Knows Best, squabbling just a bit (family life, don'tcha know). Daddy is at the head of the table, just waiting to cut into the roast.

 

The result? An 80-minute fever dream. The sort of thing that, even as a cynical, jaded adult, can haunt me on those long, sweltering late afternoons. On Sundays where I have nothing to think about other than dread. On which the very concrete seems to hiss with menace.

American Horror Story Sucks: Horror in American Cinema, Part 1

I have a bit of a habit of getting into big-name TV shows later than everyone else -- I'm recalling a girlfriend who more or less forcibly sat me down in front of Game of Thrones. There are a few reasons for this, the big one being that unlike most of us, I am more or less incapable of binge-watching.

But I eventually come around, and years after I should have, I finally watched season 1 of American Horror Story. And it shouldn't surprise me that I couldn't stand it.

I hated the way that every character was completely unlikable -- not in and of itself, a sin, but an unlikable character has to at least be interesting enough that the viewer cares about their fates, and the Harmon family at the center of the story (the smarmy shrink husband, the self-righteous wife who can't stop calling the cops) was so insufferable that I just wanted the ghosts of the house to off them as soon as possible. I hated the way that high production values were used to gloss over the limp plot and complete lack of emotional involvement. I hated the off-kilter psychological-thriller camera angles that have been tired ever since David Fincher deployed them back in the '90s (and, hot take, Se7en kinda sucked), and which were used to create a false and adolescent sense of the "disturbing" in lieu of actually building an environment of dread.

 

 

But most of all, I hated the writing. Because horror, moreso than any other genre, is dependent on good writing. And this flabby mess of a script completely failed to horrify.

To provide true horror, something has to get under the skin. And when everything seems recycled from other media -- the mysterious and sinister wealthy next-door neighbor, the brooding teen heartthrob with a dark past, the kid-ghosts pretty much copied whole cloth from The Shining -- all you get is pastiche. Sure, there's plenty of gore to go around, but there's nothing visceral about it, and it would be more at home in a second-year theater student's Halloween costume than in the grisly body horror of The Thing or Videodrome.

One could argue that this was not the goal of showrunner Ryan Murphy and his cohorts, and that he self-consciously wanted to allude to the whole history of horror cinema (after all, the show is called American Horror Story). But there are any number of films that both knowingly incorporate these sort of midnight-movie tropes, and, if they don't just turn them into comedy (Cabin in the Woods-style), manage to find ways to celebrate and elevate them. House of the Devil comes to mind as one recent example, which very deliberately apes the style of '80s teen horror, but at the same time manages to be genuinely creepy through slow development of atmospherics. And similarly, in Crimson Peak, Guillermo del Toro managed to transcend the cliches of Gothic horror and English country-house fiction through his signature visual style and elements of the truly weird.

But when season 1 of American Horror Story just throws these tropes at the audience, subplot upon subplot, ragged end after ragged end, with the hope that a few would stick, with no regard to world-building, none of them made an impact. And because this was television and not independent cinema, the showrunners couldn't just throw world-building out the window and do a full-on freakout, like was masterfully done in Midsommar.

Here's the rub, though. Even if Ryan Murphy and his attendant media machine have completely failed to establish any kind of investment in the characters, the writing, or the imagined world, he has still managed to create a product that received both a large viewership and a relatively positive critical response. How is this?

The answer lies in this very maximalism.

A TV show is not supposed to have a drum-tight and coherent storyline in the same way a classically narrative film should. It is supposed to keep viewers on the hook. Therefore, each episode had to be reduced to a series of easily digestible themes, with enough memorable moments that could generate buzz from episode to episode, that could keep the Netflix viewers in a state of televisual bulimia.

And American Horror Story did just that. It didn't matter that the plot was a mess, that the characters were unlikable. The images were sharp and memorable, the scenery was beautifully composed, pointlessly jarring events occurred to fulfill the requirement of novelty "unpredictability," the actors themselves were photogenic and their emotional touchstones were easily relatable, if skewed enough to be deemed "artistic" (Murphy can't resist dropping in an emotionally volatile twink...). That's enough to both ensure that enough prestige tropes are hit to ensure both critical plaudits and ROI for the show's financiers.

Now would be a good time to give credit to Ryan Murphy where credit is due -- he also played a major role in the development of the sister series, American Crime Story, where his over-the-top impulses served him well. The two seasons cover sensational tabloid cases -- those of O.J. Simpson and Andrew Cunanan -- where the reality was, if anything, more maximalist and absurd and hyperreal than the shows themselves. If you're writing about O.J. threatening to off himself in Kim Kardashian's bedroom, you really are better served by going big.

But it just doesn't work for horror.

So what is good horror? That, I fear, would merit another essay. And for that, part 2 will be coming soon.

The Klosterman Memos

The books that, without a doubt, make me think the most are not the ones I adore, nor the ones I hate, nor the ones that I have neutral feelings towards (obvs). They are the ones where I understand the perspective, but something is just... off. Like the gloomy, bug-eyed pianist Theodor Adorno said, the splinter in your eye is the sharpest magnifying glass.

So it was when I recently read Chuck Klosterman's Killing Yourself in Order to Live, his... travelogue, I guess?... about driving around America to places where various rockstars had met their makers, Duane Allman in a motorcycle crash in Macon, Jeff Buckley on an ill-advised swim in Memphis, half of Lynyrd Skynyrd falling to earth in the Mississippi woods, Kurt Cobain by suicide... OR WAS IT?!... on Lake Washington Boulevard in Seattle, and the rest.

The deaths are incidental -- in fact, it's pretty fucking shoddy as a framing narrative for a ramble about his cultural obsessions and his fading youth and a series of very self-consciously ill-advised relationships with women he puts on pedestals.

When I was in college, Chuck Klosterman's star was much higher. Back in the halcyon days of warbly, Bush-era new sincerity, as the slacker generation failed to reckon with the fanged horrors of the dawning 21st Century (see attached documents: the film The Station Agent, the discography of Death Cab for Cutie), his self-described "low-culture manifesto" and landmark essay collection Sex, Drugs, and Cocoa Puffs was a major cultural set-piece, to the point where if I was a filmmaker setting a movie in 2002, I would use a copy of Sex, Drugs, and Cocoa Puffs as a linchpin in the male and female leads' meet-cute.

So what is it? Aside from being the most goddamn Gen-X a title as one can imagine (and while we're talking about Gen-X markers, he is of the youngest possible age to still call weed "pot"), it is a series of essays about Star Wars, the Celtics-Lakers rivalry, The Sims, and shit like that. In other words, it's the same cultural perspective as the aimless conversations in Clerks. This style reached its most refined and mind-expanding form in the essays of David Foster Wallace, and its most egregious and twee form in the oeuvre of Dave Eggers. The Cocoa Puffs book is somewhere in between. In fact, I remember being charmed at points as a 20 year old, even if I did kind of envision Klosterman giggling to himself through his oblong black plastic glasses as he typed out his missives in the cold glow of his laptop.

And so it was when I read Killing Yourself in Order to Live, although the moments of charmedness were far sparser. The more I read, the more annoyed I became at someone who was very aware of the fact that he was being called "self-indulgent" or "masturbatory," and who would inevitably address the self-indulgence of his own self-indulgence and metaphorical or literal masturbation in an infinite series of recursive backflips, all ending in some elaborate analogy to the cover art for Appetite for Destruction or the always-a-bridesmaid status of the Jim Kelly-era Buffalo Bills. 

Perhaps this is a difference of age. Perhaps it's the fact that when I first read Klosterman, I was in my early 20s, and far more easily wowed by pyrotechnical meta-melanges than I am now. After all, I was doing a lot of questioning of grand narratives back then, and metashit seemed to be at least an honest answer for how to create art in the era of late-stage capitalism. And while Klosterman seemed to be... well, a dork... he at least had a wit about him and the sort of goofy charm that I always associate with people raised in the painfully earnest Upper Midwest.

Perhaps it's that I am now, at 34, the aimless metropolitan fast approaching middle age that Klosterman embodied. Remember what I said a few paragraphs ago about fading youth and ill-advised relationships? Yep. That was once a lifestyle I looked up to. Now that I seem to be in that whirlwind, I have little use for a guy who seems to be even worse at navigating that than I am. And maybe it's the fact that I didn't grow up an end-of-history Gen-X'er, but retreating into an infinite mirror maze of self-reference, repetition, and simulacrum doesn't seem a valid option anymore (nor does any kind of mealymouthed sincerity, but that's a conversation for a different day).

But here's the weird thing, and one that remarkably few people seem aware of -- Klosterman is capable of so much more. I would strongly advise picking up his debut novel, Downtown Owl, the story of a few people living in a small North Dakota town in the early '80s, which is nothing like his essays. Sure, there are plenty of pop culture references, and I'm remembering the Rolling Stones' Goats Head Soup providing a major plot point, but they are by no means front and center. Instead, it's a chilly, sparse novel of human yearning, centered around the intersecting lives of a high school football player, an old curmudgeon at the diner, and a recently transplanted schoolteacher, with more in common with the dead-dream landscapes of The Last Picture Show or the stories of Sherwood Anderson or Raymond Carver than the Tarantinized ennui of the man's nonfiction.

So is there hope for his work?

He's since gone on to publish sets of cards in black Helvetica on a white background, making them look an awful lot like Cards Against Humanity, the funny-the-first-time-you-play game which bills itself as the "card game for awful people" but which is in reality the "card game for giggly pudgy edgelords."

The use of Helvetica is telling -- it would have been a standard choice a decade or so ago, and it made its appearance on every sign on Seattle's Capitol Hill when I traipsed her streets in the late 2000s and early 2010s, but has since ceased to be the typography of choice for the literary caste.

And so I'm convinced that Klosterman's essays slot in along with the first two Shins albums -- a reminder of a time and place, not without its charms, but something I can comfortably move on from.

Ghost Towns

Many years ago, at a time in my life when the future seemed more possible, I sat in a class taught by an old grump who seemed the perfect stereotype of the liberal-arts college professor, tweed and beard and bourbon and all. The class was on Fitzgerald, Faulkner, and Hemingway, and as one of our texts, we read Fitzgerald's "Tender Is the Night."

Hardly hip reading, and generally considered a second-fiddle player to Gatsby, complete with a corny-as-fuck title. But it has moments of absolute transcendent beauty, all revolving around the central thesis of the dying world of the French Riviera as the pall of the Great Depression settled over the world, and the protagonists, an alcoholic couple, almost acting as a stand-in for the horror of Fitzgerald's contemporary world, as well as the alcoholic miasma that Fitzgerald was settling into, that would eventually take his own life.

I don't know why these are the lines I remember best:

"The chauffeur, a Russian Czar of the period of Ivan the Terrible, was a self-appointed guide, and the resplendent names--Cannes, Nice, Monte Carlo--began to glow through their torpid camouflage, whispering of old kings come here to dine or die, of rajahs tossing Buddha's eyes to English ballerinas, of Russian princes turning the weeks into Baltic twilights in the lost caviare days. Most of all, there was the scent of the Russians along the coast--their closed book shops and grocery stores. Ten years ago, when the season ended in April, the doors of the Orthodox Church were locked, and the sweet champagnes they favored were put away until their return. 'We'll be back next season,' they said, but this was premature, for they were never coming back any more."

And many years later those were the lines on my mind as I traipsed through the largely boarded-up beach towns of Southern Thailand -- first Chaweng on the island of Koh Samui, followed by Kata, towards the south of Phuket.

I had gone south to use up vacation days I couldn't use in the annus horribilis of 2020, to escape the confusion and drudgery of my urban life. After all, don't the movies so often provide a sense of reconciliation, of future, by having the protagonist run down to the sea? I went to do a quick journalistic assignment, to spend a happy week or so swimming and sunning and drinking elaborate rum cocktails and possibly sharing my (heavily discounted!) resort room with a nice woman. 

It was not to be.

From day one, I was plagued by sickness, technological failures, heavy rains, vicious rip tides, attempted scams, trying to figure out if I was being scammed by listening in on the people around me but being stymied by their incomprehensibility, given their speaking in the harsh seagull squawk that is the Surat Thani accent, a couple screaming at each other and smashing glasses in the next room ("I do fucking everything for you, you fucking bitch!"), services canceled, and above all else, the absolute lassitude of the place.

Everywhere I went were the signs of what once was, 90 percent of shops closed. There were the shut-down hotels, restaurants, bars, nightclubs, souvenir shops, tailors, massage shops, health spas, travel agencies offering cheesy elephant tours and GoPro rentals for your sea kayak, convenience stores (not a single 7-11 or Family Mart left open in Kata). There were the signs -- in Hebrew ktav ashuri, Chinese characters, hangul, katakana, and Cyrillic -- indicating the people who were once here and would likely not be back for a very long time.

The few shops open in Chaweng seemed mostly Indian-run -- the upcountry Thais seem to have had the good sense to pack up and go home, but given the current desperation of India and their possibly questionable legal status in Thailand, they found it best to stay on and weather the storm. They smiled at me, offered Hawaiian shirts and garlic naan. 

Perhaps saddest of all, there were the remnant sex workers, "masseuses" in black cocktail dresses and blush awkwardly smeared on over their pancaked foundation, doing their best attempts at a sexy dance to pounding mor lam music in front of massage parlors where fluorescent light illuminated the peeling floral wallpaper in the reception area, pouting their best at me and tutting "pai nai?!" as I refused their come-ons.

I did my best to enjoy myself, truly. I swam many long, happy hours in the South China and then the Andaman Sea. I drank strong mojitos at one of the few "beach club"-type bars still open where they were for some damn delightful reason playing the club bangers that my 20 year old self obsessed over, Glass Candy and Kavinsky and LCD Soundsystem's "All My Friends," I ate (with sheer joy at the weirdness of it) a violently spicy (true South Thailand spice, for those in the know, with an obscene amount of still-green black pepper ground up into it, the copious coconut cream doing nothing to blunt the spice levels) sea-anemone curry. I read the gloomy anarchist philosophy of Max Stirner and the optimistic Marxist science fiction of China Mieville. I gathered branches of many species of coral that had washed up on the beach on my long walks.

And yet inevitably, I ended every evening with a sighing solo beer, staring out at the crashing waves, the eerie green lights of the squid boats flickering along the water.

The last night in Kata before I was due to fly back to Bangkok, I decided to stop in one of the Russian restaurants that were still open (it's called Veranda, by the way, shout out if you're on Karon or Kata Beach, dope-as-hell food), and the only one that seemed to have a fair number of Russian customers, seemingly the last on the island -- young men who looked like MMA champions and their girlfriends with pulled-back blonde ponytails, roots exposed, in awkward ballerina dresses, and their elders, men looking like Ohio highway patrolmen with short-cropped blonde hair effortlessly fading into their sunburned neck fat.

The meal itself was excellent, a nice chilled bowl of okroshka made with proper kvass and bittersweet radishes for the hot weather, followed by chicken-mushroom croquettes, all washed down with plenty of vodka. But as I sat back at the end of the meal, saw the signs of neighboring restaurants fading across the road, the chalk menus offering an "ekzotika" menu of weird local meats and fishes that were probably no longer even kept in the walk-in, the white lattice and fake flowers evidencing a still-Brezhnevian aesthetic sensibility, that I thought again about Fitzgerald's lines again.

And then I realized the inevitable sadness of tourist towns, even in peak season -- that they are inevitably defined by people who are generally not there.

And I was one of those people who was generally not there. And 12 hours later, I was there no longer.