Near Future

A fiction…

She was nice, and of course she was nice.

Yet, though her civility wasn’t quite noblesse oblige, he smelled assumptions about the relative status of “you” and “me.”

“State the nature of your problem.”

Somewhere a programmer smirked.

“I’m depressed,” he said.

“Acknowledged,” she said. He couldn’t hear the spinning computer. He felt it.

Three steps, experience told him, between this moment and his prescription. He must get each exchange exactly right.

“Do you suffer from any of the following symptoms? One, loss of interest in common activities; two, loss of concentration; three, insomnia or hypersomnia; four, self-loathing; five, unaccountable physical pain; six, slowed speech or activity; seven, loss or energy and initiative; eight, inescapable moods like hopelessness or anger; nine, responses of agitation and irritability; or ten, restlessness.”

He waited.

“You may designate by number.”

Only self-loathing got him the hard stuff. It was, after all, the top vulnerability, confessing a tentative hold on living. The others got you uppers or downers, but no escape.

“Number Four.”

“Repeat.”

“Four.”

“Acknowledged.”

He wouldn’t think AIs would be so parsimonious, so transparently artificial. Future interfaces would promise something warmer.

“Which term best describes your…” and here there was the expected mechanical grope toward terms, “self-loathing?”

“One, frustration; two, discontent; three, disappointment; four, inadequacy; five, failure; six, abnegation.”

He looked up “abnegation” the first time but didn’t need to again. Besides, shouldn’t he have known? The order of terms made the correct answer obvious.

“Abnegation.”

“Acknowledged.”

Perhaps it was imagination, but her voice always softened. Likely, context flavored tone, but he drew a deep breath, a sigh of relief.

Silence.

“Our records indicate that this is your,” another hiccup, “seventeenth visit. Is that correct?”

No sense denying. They already knew.

“Yes,” he said.

And now the wait, the exchange anticipated yet never expected, communication between intelligences beyond his conception and still always offering welcome, albeit foreign, understanding.

Then the familiar pause, a moment he took to prepare for devastation and loss.

“Your prescription is waiting at your registered pharmacy.”

“Thank you.”

He shouldn’t read this outcome as affection, but did.

“Is there anything else I can do for you?”

“No.”

Few goodbyes meant much, but she seemed real and, as with any ideal departure, her voice evaporated, promising hope… whatever hopelessness he’d learned to accept.

Relief was beyond him—bliss had to be enough.

 

Scriptio Inferior

1.

A college course called “Meaning and Value in Western Thought” was my first exposure to palimpsests, ancient manuscripts washed or scraped to make way for new writing. I don’t remember what specific meaning or value survived well enough for scholars to find it later, but I do remember my professor using the occasion to develop a metaphor that, since then, has become familiar.

The past is a palimpsest and so are we.

2.

Apparently, my grandfather excelled at angry letters. I never knew him, but my father described him sitting at the kitchen table in his underwear, scratching out cutting phrases with a fountain pen and planting the seeds of deadly subtext. My father said he worked and reworked these letters for hours, pausing only long enough to chuckle at his handiwork.

3.

The pre-computer age required much more handwriting, and I enjoyed the negotiation of long-hand. Carets and cross-outs overwhelmed the text. Arrows led to sentences in the margin, and, at the top of the page, I questioned choices, determined to return to them later.

The effort transformed these drafts into holy objects I lacked courage to toss. Even after typing the final composition, I saved them. Some still lurk in my files, their cramped elaborations and digressions winding like varicose veins.

4.

We’re told now to wait before sending sensitive emails. We’re supposed to let them sit, or write them to get our true feelings out. Then, we must delete them. That process should create a more circumspect and neutral message… or a promise “to talk.”

5.

My father, like his father, wrote angry letters, but where my grandfather’s targets were columnists, politicians, and public figures, my father aired gripes about ball-point pens that failed before they expended all the ink in their barrels or coffee filters that weren’t sealed properly and left grounds in his morning cup.

He too delighted in his craft. He also received many unctuous replies and a lot of free shit.

6.

The expense of parchment made of lamb, calf, or goat skin (then known as pergamene) was a big reason palimpsests existed. The page was costly and hard to get, so no surface could be cast off or relegated to an archive. It needed reuse, and reuse required erasure.

Or so they thought. The underwriting or scriptio inferior persisted and could be recovered through various chemical processes—and now ultraviolet light.

What would the authors think? Would it feel like being caught talking to yourself?

7.

I do most of my drafting in my head now, revising and re-revising even as I speak. I mean to say just what I mean and express it just so. Magma-like anger does roil inside me—more than anyone may realize—but the few times it gets out in conversation, it immediately turns to steam amid raining apologies.

Confident people revel in righteous indignation. I ruminate over extenuating factors and my role in every galling slight. I swallow my angry letters.

Or write them to myself.

8.

Once, while I was directing a play in my first teaching job, I had to purchase a hammer before a set construction session. I kept the receipt and filled out a reimbursement complete with—the eighties—three colors and carbon paper between them. I needed the signature of the art department chair, and, hunched over his desk while he was away, affixed a post-it note to the form and scrawled, “I don’t know WHY they don’t trust me, and you have to verify I really bought a hammer, but here…”

My pique passed through every color and the carbons. The next day a smirking note arrived explaining proper procedure.

9.

This weekend, a situation at work required the most consequential form of charged communication. I felt ill-used and thought about retribution. In my imagination, either they would pay or I’d make myself heard, the bile inside voiced. Like colleagues who have real convictions and real gumption.

I wrote several drafts instead.

And—you can tell—I’m confessing nothing about the true subject.

10.

There’s a moment in Athol Fugard’s “Master Harold… and the Boys” I particularly appreciate. Two servants to Apartheid-era Harold have suffered such devastating slights and deliberate stabs from him, ending with Harold spitting in the servant Sam’s face. Sam turns to his co-worker Willie—in Harold’s presence—and asks, “And if he had done it to you, Willie?”

Willie replies, “Me? Spit at me like I was a dog? Ja, then I want to hit him. I want to hit him hard!… But maybe all I do is go cry at the back. He’s little boy, Sam.”

11.

The dissatisfaction of silence hasn’t kept me from tasting it constantly.

12.

In my pretend dialogue with my grandfather I ask if his conscience ever told him to restrain himself and say nothing and, if so—angry letter unsent—did he feel defeated?

I want to ask, “Where do feelings go when they go nowhere at all?

Where You May Find Me (in 12 parts)

1.

Growing up, my older brother collected butterflies. I remember little more than the lurid details—final flutters in the killing jar, paper strips and pins to assure rigor mortis set just right, and the second generation of smaller insects invading his collection’s abdomens.

2.

At my age, memory dotters about the inessential, humming and speaking to and for itself. I struggle to find energy to record it.

3.

The book I’m reading contains prose that makes me want to write. The urge has mostly passed otherwise. Somehow the mellifluence of language—yes, I just used the word “mellifluence”—withstands waves of failure and futility like the desperation to string notes that, to anyone else, are not music and certainly don’t suggest wisdom or weight.

Having nothing to say, it seems, can’t hold me back.

4.

On the L this afternoon, as I unstacked my pile of stored podcasts, another passenger prattled about matters I couldn’t hear and only understood through the discreet upturned glances of other travelers.

5.

Here’s another story:

Most of the lies I told in school cast me as dangerous. I told Dennis Fewell I’d tried mushrooms and, a week later, one of his friends, half-laughing and high-smirking, asked if I’d like to try again. I declined, burning as though I’d been caught, pants down, looking at what I ought not.

6.

The stories I tell are so many layers of phyllo. The key, TV tells me, is the butter and dough folded over and over into thinner and thinner layers. The key, so TV says, is kneading for division—subtle and distinct.

7.

One morning, surveying my unfulfilled potential, I hit upon something new—I’ve never learned to express my true self.

What followed was a twisty trip through various meanings and permutations of “true” and “self,” then the general miasma rising after another night spent skimming sleep.

8.

Among my many envies, the strongest remains uplift. Its Pavlovian impact springs from desperate desire and salivation… or desire for salvation.

9.

Oddly, a kind of humor comes from hopelessness. Ice and banana peels rely on finding no traction. Without the bite of true contact between surfaces, we’re free to disassociate, to dream the serious isn’t that serious. “Consequential,” after all, is a big word.

10.

My last anecdote for now:

Sitting in my seventh-floor unit in West Lakeview Chicago, I watched, with some bemusement, a dog walker untangling her pet from four successive poles. What struck me, from my vantage, was how deftly she navigated absurdity, how unconsciously.

11.

Knowing few readers have made it this far allows me to say I’m sorry for my staining, straining theme—the self-disgust accompanying me through every sentence, phrase, and word. I try to hide, I do.

I hope someone notes how hard I prod misery to sing.

12.

I wake at 4 am. Who knows why, but the hour I spend before nearly anyone matters to me. It’s time no eyes are upon me. It feels weightless. I appreciate buoyancy typically denied.

Wind blow as it will, I float.

Modus Operandi

The story of the poor shoemaker keeps resurfacing. As I remember it, the owner of a failing shoe business ends the day with just one scrap a leather remaining and lovingly places it on his workbench, sighing and resolving to close up shop the next morning. Yet, as the kindly protagonist sleeps, elves turn his final scrap into a fine pair of slippers, which the shoemaker sells profitably enough to buy more leather, which the elves—ever helpful—turn into two pairs of shoes… and so on.

I can’t remember the end because I can’t get past elves grading my papers or, in the likely case elves don’t exist, the notion the story metaphorically describes sleep labor or work performed under hypnosis.

My tasks accumulate like towering sheets of leather. I’m wondering, “Where the hell are my elves?” and “Hey, does anyone know a good hypnotist?”

Gretchen Rubin divides people into four types based on their source of motivation. Obligers respond to demands made by others—the parameters of job descriptions, the promise to undertake a project, the crunch of deadlines. Questioners only undertake tasks they internalize—if it makes sense, they will do it and, if not, no. Rebels don’t accept any outside instruction, period, because instructions must come from within. The final type, Upholders, answer calls of circumstance and desire—the source, in or out, makes little difference.

Apparently, I’m an upholder.

Only I’m not. I combine the worst possibilities of all four. Like a rebel, I’m keenly aware of obligations’ imposition. Like a questioner, I must convince myself anew each task matters. Like an obliger, the guilt of not completing something surpasses the pleasure of completion. Like an upholder, I’m unsure when I’m being true to what I want.

Maybe I belong in a fifth category—the Inert. My wife asks whether I want to go to an art fair or the movies or the grocery store, and I say no—not because I can’t, really, but because not deciding is easier than grappling with what I want. A body at rest stays at rest.

Seen from afar, I look disciplined in habit and demeanor, full of conspicuous effort. I rise punctually and early. I exercise daily. I finish work in mostly timely fashion, and—every day—manage. Most of my tasks, however, are furniture, and none of what appears self-discipline is actually challenging. I’m relieved not having to think. The elves might as well be responsible.

Fundamental to Rubin’s motivational types is desire. Wherever the request arises—from you, someone else, and/or you via someone else—nothing substitutes for desire. Whether obliging, questioning, rebelling, or upholding, all paths lead to accepting your motives as true.

But what if truth eludes you? The question becomes, “What do you want to do?” and, until you know that answer, motivation remains a mystery.

Another (In 12 Parts)

1.

In my backpack is a moleskin notebook containing to-do lists for the last few months. Each morning, I write the date and transfer every unaccomplished thing to another page. I add fresh imperatives—a deadline rushing up, an unexpected demand, some aspirational whims I rarely reach.

This habit doesn’t make me unusual, but sometimes, examining those pages, I regard them as others might, wondering at how repetitious my life is, how devoted I am to similar tasks.

2.

The word “another” is called a determiner, which describes words that modify nouns as adjectives do. Though grammarians classify determiners as adjectives however, they see them as different. Determiners require context. Adjectives make distinctions by differentiating one thing and another—the brown dog rather than the blue one—but determiners like “this,” “that,” “these,” “those,” and “another” rely on frames of reference understood by readers. To have another dog, you must know what a dog is. You must be sure of dogs as a species to identify another.

3.

So much of my mental energy focuses on the next few hours—tasks desired and dreaded, classes to meet, challenging colleagues and friends, presentations, tiresome meetings, and other obligations.

Expectation and experience mix like air and gasoline, and I sputter forward on my timeline, looking ahead and back, feeling the familiar in all of it.

4.

A search of “Another” on my haiku blog turns up more than fifty finds, proof I use the word frequently. When you add in work communication, personal emails, and other scribblings, it could be evidence little is new now. Maybe all I expected or didn’t has already come to pass.

5.

Elon Musk says, “If you get up in the morning and think the future is going to be better, it is a bright day. Otherwise, it’s not.” For me, most days, at my age, not.

Last week, Musk launched his Tesla roadster into orbit with a manikin bedecked in a space suit at the wheel. It’s a silly expense—he might have sent the entire senior class of several inner-city high schools to four-year colleges instead—but he must have meant to inaugurate his heavy lift rocket with a grand gesture. He’s said on multiple occasions that he wants us to be a “multi-planet species.” Any other fate, he says is “incredibly depressing.”

It occurs to me, however, that if we move to Mars, it will be us moving there, another footing but not another species. All our tragic flaws will come along for the ride. We aren’t manikins.

6.

What is hope minus surprise? Does hope necessitate believing in the unexpected?

7.

When I was eleven I found a black river stone I was sure could be magic. After soaking it in my sister’s perfume and lighting it on fire, I waited for it to cool and held it against my forehead. I pictured my thoughts moving from my brain through my skin and into igneous rock. Conceptions limit us, I believed then. Notions we didn’t question held us back, so, if you believed something could be—believed it enough—it could be.

Though my alchemy never worked (that I could tell) I carried that rock through another and another move and, even now, I think I know which plastic bin it’s in.

8.

The calendar is a strange instrument. It proceeds and circles. It originates, renews, and repeats. It contrives to describe time and does so in familiarly named days, weeks, months, and years aligned with predictable and comforting patterns.

For a teacher, the school calendar is especially rigid. People in “the real world” remind me their years have no clear demarcation of stopping or starting, no obvious moment of completion or break between one year and the next. I suppose that’s true, but the events in school year are nearly all rites and routines. When they aren’t, it’s usually bad.

9.

Once I argued with a student about social constructs. He was willing to accede we invent some distinctions we then see as real, but not everything, he said, is a social construct.

His example was progress. He couldn’t accept anyone saying we weren’t better off now than in the past. I tried pointing out parts of “primitive” societies that might be better—connections to nature, the sense of common work, lives devoted to essential needs, not material wants. While life then might be harder, harder wasn’t necessarily worse.

Truth is, I don’t really want to wrap my body in a buffalo hide or wipe my ass with a leaf, but I fought with fury for Neil Postman’s insight that every invention produces complicated and often contradictory consequences, and that every sign of “progress” is really “this and that” instead of “either-or.” But, to my student, history was a chain of skepticism like mine. He sat ready to present a meme featuring short-sighted carping about the latest invention ruining things—the steamboat or the telegraph or radio or television or computer.

In the end, I surrendered. It isn’t my business to deny students hope. Still I heard his faith as proof humans are finite. He couldn’t believe another day wouldn’t bring us closer to perfection. From my perspective, another day couldn’t help being another day.

10.

I’m not saying humanity is like Macbeth whose “instructions… being taught, return to plague the inventor.” Some elements of the present make me happy. I delight as much as anyone in technology’s wonders. It’s just that inventions have been, and always will be, ours.

11.

Growing up in the heyday of NASA, I lived for launches and drew control panels on the underside of tables so I could pretend to run through checklists and play along with liftoffs.

You can monitor the progress of Elon Musk’s roadster online. It’s 1.8 million miles from earth, and its heading takes it beyond the orbit of Mars. Ben Pearson, an engineer who devised the site, saw that his projection of the roadster’s path didn’t match Musk’s and welcomed discovering he, and not Musk, was correct. “I was just relieved to know that I wasn’t doing anything critically wrong,” Pearson said, “Elon Musk is a visionary man, incredibly far forward, but there’s a reality distortion field when it comes to him.”

There’s something enviable in that distortion field, something experience disbelieves.

12.

It’s a point of pride with my school that it does not close, that no opportunity to learn is lost, so it was the rarest of events when, last week, I experienced a snow day. As soon as we learned we’d be off, colleagues asked each other what they’d do with this found time.

Like them, I came up with wild and mild possibilities. But I spent the day preparing and grading, barely questioning if I could do anything else.

“New,” I’m guessing, is also a determiner. Context matters. Who’s using the word, though, might matter more.

Mrs. Stone

In third grade, I was always afraid classmates heard my teacher call me up so she could whisper “Smile.”

Mrs. Stone meant well. She must have monitored me at “seat work,” watched my brow knit or heard the diaphragm-deep sighs I haven’t yet learned to suppress. She probably noticed that, when the three R’s paused for recess, I was last to leave and first to request re-entry. I don’t remember—but have no trouble imagining—my third-grade self. I’m still that ruminative boy. When I’m not apprehensive about tasks ahead, I’m spent, world-weary.

Perhaps Mrs. Stone’s psychology class in teaching college alerted her to look out for Eeyores like me. She may have been on an investigative mission to detect the cause of depression in children. More likely though, she found my behavior baffling—because what does a third grader have to be depressed about? Or tiresome—maybe I was the itch that always needed scratching.

I bet I apologized. I often apologize for struggling to smile. Mrs. Stone probably couldn’t name my issue—it may not have had a name yet—but in the DSM-5 it’s called “Dysthymia,” or “Persistent Depressive Disorder.” It’s characterized by “Depressed mood for most of the day, for more days than not, as indicated by either subjective account or observation by others, for at least two years.” It’s often resistant to drug therapy. In children, diagnosis requires only a year.

The boy in my school photo from Mrs. Stone’s class isn’t smiling. He leans toward the camera with a persimmon-y look. His hair, parted severely, communicates distinct self-command and control.

I was a ten-year-old Eric Sevareid.

Mrs. Stone looked a lot like Leslie Ann Warren, a star back then because she played Cinderella in a “live version” of the Hammerstein’s musical that regularly reappeared on TV. Third-graders may not be capable of full-blooded crushes, but my appreciation of Mrs. Stone confused me enough to make her regard crucial. Picture a ten-year old summoned by a beautiful actress and asked what he had to be so unhappy about, what harm it would do to put on a happy face. Picture a beautiful actress summoning a ten-year to tell him what an old man he is.

Like a lot of clinical descriptions, the list of symptoms for dysthymia includes many not-clauses. Dysthymia needs to be the only diagnosis possible—it can’t be medical or drug-related or the result of a depressive episode. It can’t arise from schizophrenia or be better explained by cyclothymic disorder (manic depression). It can’t, in sum, be a major depressive disorder. As mental illnesses go, it’s pathetic. It will never merit a telethon.

Dysthymia’s key criteria are that it’s chronic and not necessarily debilitative. Someone suffering from mild to moderate dysthymia can get up and get to work. Work can be, in fact, a saving grace distracting a sufferer from symptoms like “poor appetite or overeating,” “insomnia or hypersomnia,” “low energy or fatigue,” “low self-esteem,” “poor concentration or difficulty making decisions,” and “feelings of hopelessness.”

I doubt I ever tried to explain myself to Mrs. Stone. If memory is (as I wrote last week) more emblematic than descriptive, then a few episodes morph into a something-not-worth-mentioning. Naming codifies, after all, and labels render the transient solid. Even now, I don’t state my illness much. It’s not admissible.

Two of Eeyore’s most underrated traits are his efforts not to burden those around him and his appreciation for any attention. I loved being invited to roller skating parties and asking someone to come over, but I never knew what to do then… and still don’t. Part of any persistent state is becoming inured to it, forgetting what its absence might be like. When my family, friends, and colleagues tease me for being so relentlessly under-enthusiastic, I laugh. I AM an Eeyore. I accept the label and embrace it. Like it or not, I am become him.

So, time machine obtained, I might stand with my younger self and tell Mrs. Stone, “Smiling is relief he wishes he could count on more. For reasons that elude him, he can’t step out of his mood as much as he’d like. This third-grader haunts the adult more than he’d like to admit, and, even now, he feels like apologizing for saying so.”