A lot has happened in the last two weeks so I fell behind on writing about falling behind. This is all to say, this is old. But isn’t everything eventually?
Since my cat passed, the question “what’s new” has been adjusted to “how you doing?” but not the way Matt LeBlanc’s Joey asks on Friends. There’s no suggestion of flirting. It’s a somber question with a dump truck full of subtext. I can tell who knows about my cat and who doesn’t just based on what they ask and how they ask it. Amongst all the sadness, it’s been sweet. People will surprise you. Lose someone close to you and you’ll learn about people’s relationship to death and loss. Some people keep it at a distance. Others run straight for it. Some people fight it with offers to party and hang and set the roof on fire. While others embrace it, coming in close to let you cry. It all works. It’s all fine. I’ve appreciated all of it. Even the distance some people put between is fine. I know for me I have trouble communicating with people. I’m sensitive and wear kid gloves probably more than I should. I just want to make sure someone doesn’t feel like they have to have their guard up around me. When I was in middle school, my frenemy (a term that’s a little silly, but has never been more appropriate) shouted at me in front of everyone during a passing period that no one liked me. It wasn’t unprompted. I’m sure I was giving him shit for something, though I don’t remember what. I do remember I was wearing khakis and a short sleeve plaid button up. He immortalized my self-image in that moment. He said that I think I’m so cool, but really I’m a dick and I make fun of everyone and everyone is sick of it. I don’t know if this was true or not. I didn’t follow up. No one backed him up, but no one rushed to offer a counter. This had a profound effect on me since this friend of mine was often the least liked person in our friend group. He had a temper and was super competitive and his parents had enough money to make sure he always had the first and best of everything. He bullied and mocked and always looked for a way to win. So if he had some insight as to me being intolerable, then I should probably take heed.
At thirteen I was pretty sure I was clever (though I was not aware that most teenagers think this is true and most are wrong), and that was something I didn’t want to abandon. I was not athletic. I didn’t have money, and I was not the hot one of the group. That was Chase. Chase was a fox. Sense of humor was all I had going for me so I wasn’t about to give it up. So I aimed it at myself. I became self-deprecating. It worked. People liked me. Men found me disarming, and women would mistake it for confidence. He must feel pretty sure of himself if he’s willing to point out all his flaws. The truth was I was anything but. I had no clue about anything except how to make a joke. Twenty years of that disfigured me. Tell yourself you’re an idiot for long enough and not only will you believe it, you’ll actually become it. I positioned every conversation to put me at the bottom and someone else in a position of comfort. It made communicating a lot of work for me. It still does.
It’s not a bad thing necessarily. I’m quite sure it’s what makes me an effective teacher. I come in with the position of authority and the knowledge base, and then I make sure everyone feels secure enough to take part and learn. Or at least that’s my intention. But with loss and grief, it’s such a uniquely specific experience for everyone who goes through it, there are far too many landmines to navigate. Some people want to laugh, some people don’t. Some people want to be reassured, some want acknowledgement of how awful it is. Some want to feel taken care of, some want to feel hidden. Some don’t know what they want. And of course there’s every nuanced feeling in between. I’ve always tried to make sure that the person grieving or the person I’m talking to, or teaching, doesn’t have to do any work on my behalf. I don’t want what I say to be something they have to tolerate, endure, or worse, hold, so that I don’t get upset. I want to take away, not add to their plate and with so many factors that can feel paralyzing. So I’m ok with the distance. I’m ok with the gestures. I’m ok with the talking and with the silence. And maybe that’s still me working to be liked. Maybe that’s what I need. To feel like I can control the proximity or distance of my relationships to others because my relationship to one, to Lemon, is more permanently fixed at a tangible distance.
And I know that it’s not. I know I can keep her in my heart and think about her every day and look at pictures and listen to audio recordings and watch videos and tell other people about her, but she is gone. That loss is immeasurable but very real. If it wasn’t, then death wouldn’t be a big deal, and we all know that death is a huge fucking deal. It’s among the hugest deals we can be dealt. With a pet, the caring for was simple. Keep her safe, keep her fed, and keep her close, except for when she wants space. I could do that. I never felt more confident in a relationship than in the one I had with her.
I’m at about 60% now. That’s what I’d like to tell people when they ask how I’m doing. I’m not doing well. I’m not doing bad. I’m just doing about 60% of what life asks of me. My routines, writing, exercising, reading, working, sleeping, playing, laughing, they’ve all been reduced to 60%. It feels manageable. Except of course when it doesn’t.
I’ve applied to foster cats. And I’ve also looked for one or two to adopt. I think I might be destined to be a forever cat dad. Parenting seems like a commitment too intense for me. I’m not sure I have the relationship with myself to accept fucking up someone I brought into this world. And that’s part of the contract. You will fuck them up. I know that’s ok. If not parents, someone will. Life fucks you up. But I can’t do that. I can’t carry that. I can, however, feed a cat, scoop its poop up and provide it a lap to lay on. That I can do. Or rather I know I’ll probably fuck that up too. But I can see it through and always compensate with treats.
I optioned a pilot and published a book. Not recently. This was all a few years ago. In fact, it was two years ago my book came out. I’ve sold over 1000 copies of the book and I bet at least eleven have actually been cracked open and read. This sounds like bragging, but just hold on. Between optioning a pilot and publishing a book, I made $98.01. Earlier I mentioned sharpening my self-deprecation. And perhaps this is more of that. Or maybe it’s the industry deprecating me. I carry around a lot of self-pity and shame over what feels like a financial failure. And if it weren’t for the writer and actors strike I may have never disclosed that information. I tried to write about it a while back because I wanted to tell people that companies investing in you is not always the cool thing you think it is. But I was embarrassed because I thought it was my fault. I was naive, ignorant, stupid, gullible, pathetic. I somehow had let myself be scammed in desperation. I had undervalued myself and then been taken advantage of, thereby making my undervalue actually properly valued. Not to mention I went through a crowd funding publisher so I asked a lot of people for money, which is a little gauche. I felt like I had scammed them unknowingly like some sort of Multi Level Marketing but for prose about my personal life. “I sell some words to you, then you bundle them and sell sentences to someone else, who bundles those and sells them as paragraphs to someone else.” All of which has some truth to it. But the larger truth is the system is not only set up that way. It’s the primary function. Not only do artists create the art, they also have to pay for the privilege of having it produced and distributed. It doesn’t matter if you’re a writer or actor or musician; the people producing your work on a mass scale will take everything because they know they can. Then they’ll make you feel stupid for handing it over to them and that shame will keep you quiet. Big tech, big content, publishers, studios, and any company dealing in art distribution that trades publicly, inflates their own purpose so we all believe we can’t exist without them. But we can. There are artists and there is an audience. And the internet makes connecting them very easy. But capitalism tells us we have no worth until a corporation or big business tells us we do. The only problem is our worth goes right to them. They tell us we have worth so they can take it from us. But if we recognize we don’t need them to tell us, that we have the worth independent of them, then we can be forever invaluable and accessible to anyone who wants to compensate for the opportunity to experience what we produce.
Last thing. Like I said, I’ve been operating at 60% which means I haven’t gotten back to finishing my tournament of Wick Offs vs Try Hards, which based on my reader numbers probably only matters to me. But I did write a little something that brought me a little joy. I recently got John Wick Chapter 4 on Blu-Ray and in Lemon’s final days, I would stay up with her, my back resting against the refrigerator so I could pet her as she laid on a little bed she made for herself out of old paper bags, and just cycle through the John Wick movies. It was some sort of Groundhog Day and I felt both insane and very relaxed. I felt like I had my foot in two very different pools, action-movie aficionado and cat dad. Since her passing, I’ve still been winding my evenings down like a psycho, watching John Wick dispatch hundreds of bad guys with everything from guns to pencils to nun chucks to knives to swords to horses. It’s been cathartic even if a bit loony. After watching the knife fight in John Wick Chapter 3: Parabellum for the thirtieth time, I wrote this:
Which bad guy in the antique knife fight got it the worst n John Wick Chapter 3: Parabellum?
This is defienitely my take on a Shea Serrano essay. Now that we got that out of the way, on to the biggest winner of losing to John Wick. There’s the guy who takes an axe to the head after pulling a knife out of his body. There’s the guy who John Wick slowly stabs in the eye. Then there’s the gut that gets a knife pounded into the top of his head. Don’t forget about the guy crawling away to grab a gun that John Wick throws half a dozen knives into. Or what about the guy who John Wick throws four knives into with the last one going right into his face.
But I think the guy who gets it the worst is the guy who John Wick uses as a human shield, taking two knives in his back before falling to the ground and having John Wick throw a knife into his dick.
I’ve never been stabbed. The closest I’ve been to getting stabbed is when I was eight and I got a Swiss Army knife from my grandpa. I tried to open it with one hand, an impossibility even if you don’t slice your thumb by pushing the blade up with it. But that’s what I did. I also built catapults with my friend Gary and we launched a stick into my eye. It thankfully missed the ball and sliced the lid. I imagine all of those Triads got it worse than my self-inflicted pain. So since I can’t relate to dying by knife wound, I have to go off of what I know. And what I know is that any type of physical harm to your body hurts more on your dick. The other thing I know is humiliation. The guy gets used as a shield. Twice. Not only did he not kill John Wick and get himself killed, he helped John Wick not get stabbed. On top of that if that guy has any hint of self-conscious insecurity, then when that first knife went into him, he probably thought “Did my coworker throw that knife without thinking about hitting me? Would he do that with everyone or just me?” And then when the second knife hit him in the back, he most certainly thought (assuming he’s a limp little noodle like me, which I don’t think Triads typically are but again lets go with what we know), “OK my coworkers definitely don’t respect me. Because they stabbed me once and that could be forgiven, an accident, but to throw another knife after the first one hit me is like saying, I don’t even see this guy or even if I do, Literally stabbing him in the back is not something I should feel bad about.” That guy was dealt a hefty dose of shame before his lights got turned out. Then he got stabbed in the dick.
If there’s a henchman hell, that guy is still getting shit for his death. Even the guy John Wick kills by slapping a horse so it’ll buck up and cave the guy’s head in is pantsing ol’ I-died-from-two-of-my-friends-knives-in-the-back-and-one-in-the-dick.