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.