Depression rolls down hill

I have in mind two approaches to life. One is a life that exists as a blank canvas to be filled by the owner of that life through conscientious objective setting. The standard view of this is boiled down to the Latin word tabula rasa, meaning 'blank slate.' While socially and psychodynamically 'anemic' this view does have a powerful hold over some political views with regard to self-help and other-help. More importantly, to the thoroughly self-coached individual this term can reflexively motivate someone to achieve potential success.

Another approach to life familiar to people, which grounds different political philosophies of self- and other-help, sees it as a cloud of influences some of which the individual was simply born into. The word that sums up this view is borrowed from the German philosopher Martin Heidegger. That word is dasein, roughly meaning 'being on a trajectory.' Or to put it in more colloquial terms, "you are where you are thrown." While it tends to frame a 'fatalistic' approach to existence, that is not the point of the term. It is originally used to frame a phenomenological approach to existence, which is bracketed by the time contained in an analysis of an individual with dotted lines leading into that individual's past as a means of situating sufficient understanding. Heidegger suggests that personal histories as well as world histories are interwoven with current existence.

Without setting up the full philosophy and politics stick figure playset and engaging in make-believe debates among them I'll simply end this point by saying that behind any one of those views is a person. For the sake of this discussion that person is me and my dogged attempts to both impose and succumb to one or the other views toward life.

Without further ado, let me begin.

I do this occasionally. I look up people. First, it takes me a while to remember their whole name, but alas, that wonderful search engine technology can do so much like the operators of yore to patch you through to the "right party." God bless them little algorithmic Marys and Barbaras.

And search as I do I find.

I had a long conversation with a cognitive psychology PhD back in my salad days of academe in the hallways outside the hovel we called our graduate student offices. The lore indicated that the room once held mummies. I suppose it still does the way I embalm the past. Well, that gal got her PhD and parlayed it into a Denver-area job at a place called Corona. I am sure it secures her adequate living for the Mile-High city. I had a crush on her that was about the size of her two pert breasts. This was an opportunity missed. And it accurately characterizes the kinds of "obviously beneficial" opportunities that I deep six all the time.

I had met this woman after a required course for a Science and Technology Policy Certificate I was pursuing. She was doing the same. After talking to her about my interest in fMRI she pointed me to her boyfriend, who was the one skeptic among a small group of Cognitive Psychology researchers who, along with their professor, comprised the fMRI research group, which held meetings about their research and their findings. Through her I met her boyfriend, got a lowdown on the research process and the technology, and quickly joined their discussions in an ethnographic role, researching researchers.

A Star Trek title comes to mind, "Who Watches the Watchers?"

Well, in the vein of all things meta- I was doing just that, trying in vain to implicate the researcher in the researched by researching the researchers, which boiled down to a 'rhetoric of scientific artifacts' replete with questions about how I could use the very language of their research to interrogate their research conduct and presentation angles. Auto-academic asphyxiation to the last, it was.

Well, that got me nowhere, but I tried for a bit. I much preferred to play games during that time. And this game playing became an expression of my complete and total disinterest in the identity and conduct of a PhD candidate. Instead, I played at becoming a soulless and vacant personage of the PhD candidate going though its motions. That lasted a few years before it fizzled out.

Before I lose track, allow me to present my roommates. Because where I got lost in self-aware bullshittery about identity and its attendant action taking each one of these people, along with the one mentioned above, went through motions, sometime mindfully and sometimes under routine self-enslavement. But hell, behind all my sneering about my own self-aware habits those folks shut that off and made it to a perceivable goal, one that signals progression, maturation, matriculation, adulthood, responsibility, new identity, transcendence. Me? Hell, I'm still that kid who threw his cookie on the ground, wallowing in his own self-pity.

My first two roommates are both tenure-track professors within state university systems, one in Pittsburgh and one in San Francisco.

My third roommate is a tenure track professor at a small, private Catholic university in Iowa. And by her credentials she sticks out from the faculty's mostly MFA cast.

My fourth roommate, while harder to track, worked for the State of California's sexual assault division. He was their communications and public relations director. He was a natural born communicator and sometimes bullshit artist. His greatest strength was his narcissism. With it he was able to earn a Masters Degree without ever taking a GRE in order to get into the program. He was also quick to parlay his mother's Spanish background to claim that he was a Hispanic minority deserving of minority status. But more than anything he was smart with an equally adept interface for presenting that intellect to the public effectively and persuasively. "You can't teach this shit," I tell myself. Some are born into it. They have the proper habits of mind and body, the proper attitudes, and the right drive for the right goals, in the right place at the right time.

My fifth roommate was last seen holding a faculty position at a university in Switzerland. She married a man who was Assistant DA in Boulder during the week and worked Snow Patrol in the mountains on the weekend. He went from his DA position to becoming a CIO of a newly started airline to becoming a JAG officer abroad. She divorced her advertising executive husband from Orange County to get with her second husband who I casually referred to as Peter Etcetera because he looked like that seminal member of that band named for the Windy City. The portmanteau was intended to shed light on my fifth roommate's habit of serially marrying and divorcing alpha males. I was forced to listen to them have sex, and all I could wonder was how this guy could get it up with so much high-powered shit on his plate. Some are born into this I guess. 

My sixth roommate when I was at the University of Colorado, Boulder is Vice President of a Mergers and Acquisitions firm in the Dallas-Forth Worth area. While we're close to the word, I wonder what he's worth? His mom had a hair-dressing salon and used her earnings to put him through elite private Texas schools. Like the character in Rushmore, he too, had written and produced a play at the same school as that character.


Each one of these individuals, to my knowledge, came from very different circumstances, very different backgrounds, and each appears to have achieved a life that, on its face, looks successful. Well, at least they're doing something with the equipment God gave them.

That leaves me. I'd say by many measures, albeit abstract ones, I was destined for great things: academic success, leadership positions, influential work, and a career. I touched their lives. They touched mine. Some stayed in touch. Others disappeared altogether. Here I sit, in a worn out chair, staring at the result of my latest cyber sleuthing to report to you something that is becoming clearer and clearer to me: depression rolls down hill.

That's a metaphorical expression for a mental condition for which I have no clinical diagnosis, but is a fitting description of how I have positioned myself spiritually and psychically for decades now. I'd like to say it all began with my mom and her 'motherly motherfuckers' when I was a kid of about three, following her around the house, incessantly. She hated this. She hated love and attachment. It was perhaps her response to having a mother who wasn't there for her because she was afflicted by a growing brain tumor that left her in dark rooms, suffering from painful migraines. She had a father who was violent, worked a violent job, and secured a violently overinflated pension for killing those trespassing and suspected of thievery along the rail lines that brought raw materials into East Saint Louis and sent finished goods out. He told me once, in a Safeway parking lot somewhere in Arizona where he retired while his second wife was purchasing milk that he'd often kill a man and leave him in the weeds to be found later to save on paperwork. He could have been lying, but on its face, that's how he presented his life to me. He reveled in tails of guns and ammo. The man was one part Bing Crosby and one part 1980s action hero. I recall him arriving from Arizona in about 1985 and laughing all through Commando. The man had a special place in my youthful heart then. That was the man who raised my mother, who fought with my grandmother, and remarried just months after burying her.

I digress.

It all began as I followed my mom down to the basement as I followed her everywhere as a kid. She'd cuss because I was invading her pot-smoking time. And I recall quite vividly a very early moment of self-pity at my mom's malicious attitude toward me following her everywhere. I have a somewhat distinct sense of my actions in light of my mom's response to me following her down that first flight of stairs to the landing out to the back patio before turning 45 degrees to the second landing just three steps from the basement floor. She said very specifically, "You're like a five-o-clock shadow." And I recall thinking to myself that I was being criticized for my action. I was three or four. I don't know how or why I thought this or why I even remember it, but I do. And in that agglomeration of memories of following my mother down the steps to where she sat at a green vinyl high chair near the ironing board and smoked a joint I recall feeling sad for myself. I had an Oreo cookie in hand, and I distinctly dropped it on the ground as an expression of my pity toward myself. In my own dime-store psychoanalysis I had, at this moment, took control of the pain I felt by inflicting it upon myself. And as a three-year-old the only means of doing so was to take a cherished sweet and have it fall out of my hands as if as a cry for help and a cry for pity that ultimately became a self-induced moment of pain.

I recall telling myself that at my graduation where I would receive my doctorate I would tell my family I was going to go to work as a midnight manager of a gas station. I still think about it. That would be a wonderful job, in its own way. I court this kind of filth and sadness. To achieve great measures, by deed, and then to take a job fit for an alcoholic, an imbecile, or an ex-con, to me, is a fitting way to wear the shit of my psychic condition on the outside, to perform a professional suicide. And it would be a very adult articulation of the toddler dropping his cookie. Sad and whiny perhaps, but all too perfect from my premeditated planning to carry them out.

I do recognize a moment in the face of a wire mommy where the (lack of) nurture suggested that, maybe, it's not something I was born into. Then again, genetics and environment tend to cohabit, making the distinction maybe an artificial one altogether. To borrow from the manual on these things, I had, at least, a trigger. But at three? And to be so goddamn self-aware at such a young age to such a selfish and isolated gesture? But let me remind the reader that to this day the simplest of gestures or statements by others regarding me can  'set me off,' not into a rage but into a deep and brooding condition of self-hate.

Here I sit, unread, unwashed, unwatched, unwanted, perfecting the life into which I was led by a pot-smoking mom who would cuss me at three for following her where she smoked her weed. It's a mind game, to have this level of fidelity to a moment of hurt. It's a performance to keep up the ritual of self-abnegation for so long. I had a moment of promise, made my way to the top of the academic pile if only to build up the most momentum on my long, speedy roll back down to the bottom where I am now, unemployed, sometimes working as an Ironworker. And when I can, I remain alone, always alone, hungry and so goddamned sober to the reality, so that I can blame nothing, nothing, but myself, my habits, my attitude, my self-image, my shame, my filth for what I am. While something and someone got the ball rolling for me I took an ephemeral moment of selfish motherhood in the life of my childhood and turned it into a life-long preoccupation with my own self-pity.

And even when I can take a sober look at this life and what I've accomplished I must face the punishing light of day, drive around in a battered and rusted car to accomplish what meager tasks befit a man who could be another social security disability case. What momentum I built up to reach my zenith in 2006 was spent on my long descent to where I am now with nothing: no grandparents, no mother, no job, no prospects, no renown, no repute, no wife, no kids, no income, no future, no glow, no nothing. Just me and the many shit-caked mirrors I set up to gaze upon myself. What kind of skill is that? I am unsure.

Depression rolls down hill. Mine is a particularly self-inflicted and narcissistic form of performative self-abuse set into motion long ago, sometimes put into hibernation, yet always returning to the cave mouth hungry, mean, roaring, and destructive. That's me regarding the monster that is me, leading me astray of any real goal, any real ambition, any real motivation to succeed. And as much as I can justify the life I live I do so by reframing the world around me as evil and destructive and not worth joining. Fitting that I would turn the 'nurture' component into a threat and sit marinating in my 'nature' alone.


I turn on the radio and hear about a billionaire blowhard gaining the ardor and ire of many Americans who by pure, unabated narcissism, bullying, attitude, and selfishness has somehow communicated his fitness as a leader. That brash New York attitude, the only one that allows the apex predators that occupy that place to survive, is part of what forms this bullying, sociopathic attitude and gives it meaning. And then I wonder. I wonder why people place these motherfuckers on pedestals while the rest of us claw together enough just to get a meager soapbox. Some are born into it. Others aren't.

"You may find yourself, living in a shotgun shack..." - The Talking Heads

I made up a statistic a few years back about the one percent's one percent, that being those who enter the highest ranks of wealth through luck, hard work, perseverance, and plenty of et cetera. Men like Warren Buffett and Steve Jobs comes to mind. Then there's the one percent's ninety nine percent. Into that lot go the many who were merely born into riches and powerful contacts. Men like Donald Trump come to mind. When you're born into an enviable financial position you come to see yourself as special, uniquely equipped to lead a life of luxury without an iota of guilt. And into that nature-nurture divide go those born into riches, inheriting the genetic and financial wealth that contributed to the position into which they were born. Up and up it takes them. This stream roars and they are caught up in it, and no matter how many poor financial decisions they make, it appears they're unbreakable. And then there's the rest, who work their whole life for a piece of the pie and do everything in their power not to risk losing it. Hell, my dad worked two jobs and saved every penny he could. He lambasted me for going to an emergency room when I was shitting blood on Easter Sunday because the HMO where his insurance was valid was not open. Nope, I was beaten down as a liability on the balance sheet representing his comfortable retirement. I am watching my brother spend 6 days a week away from his family to secure the same. And here I am, with no family time to sacrifice for my own mostly personal financial gain. And maybe that's what all of this is about, money.

Under central banking no country can generate money out of thin air. That is what the central bank does. And they loan it to their host countries. Those countries are required to pay back that money with interest. What this does is encourage all countries to grow their economies to stay apace of a debt that grows with any instance that it needs to coin money. In a perfect world, that original loan would grow a self-sustaining economy that could generate enough wealth through taxes to repay the original loan plus interest with money left over to pay for the basic services needed to keep that society and its economy afloat. In case after case after case this does not happen. Instead countries are required to force more and more out of their populations, companies force more and more out of their labor forces, and commercial invasion and plunder occur simply to outpace that gaping hole created out of every cash loan based upon a balance sheet resting on a big nothing. Nothing. If all the countries around the world paid off their debt we would witness a liquidity crisis. There would be no money in circulation. That's because even under the most generous conditions the loan and repayment scheme would balance evenly between debts owed and cash in the economy. But every loan generates more and more fictional money to the extent that money generation, not wealth generation, occurs exponentially fast leaving the cash in circulation as a representative drop in that giant, gaping bucket of unpaid debts.

Money, debt, wealth. These things matter in our ritualistic, sacrificial economy. The slogan, "In God We Trust," emblazoned on our currency takes on a piety all its own, the piety of finance. And the space and time of that finance is warped by the dark matter of debt. This long chain from the financial houses of the world to the homes of the nations' populations is made out of money representing debt. That's a purely fictional creation made very real by everyday, ritual practice and a near-universal understanding that to have money is good and to owe money is bad.

"Why didn't you spend more time networking?" My committee chair asked me. She had vouched for me and got me a free ride to a conference in Austin, Texas where my colleagues and I were to show off our organizational communication papers. We were at a mini-conference put on by the University of Texas's Department of Communication. I was so mired in school work, as was the usual, that I spent most of the conference, when not at panels or on boat rides to watch the grand bat exodus under the Congress Avenue Bridge, at a coffee shop, reading, writing, grading papers. Research one universities are concentrations of activity. They require a hell of a lot of dedication out of the professors and researchers there to continue funding streams, seek out more, and to publish, not perish. I was being initiated into that world by taking on a load, a massive load, of work, which I obliged to do when and where I could. Conferences were simply one place where I had to practice my multitasking. Can as I did to multitask I failed to float another activity implied by my visit, rubbing elbows, self-promoting my scholarly interests, and making contacts that would bridge time and space over future e-mails and future co-authors and panel presentations. Nope, I did none of that. In fact, I spent a majority of my time watching and listening. I was interested in the sociology of it all, which was fascinating to say the least. And I was following that old Twain axiom, for it was better not to open my mouth and remove all doubt about my folly.

"You need your group." My committee chair told me. "These are the people with whom you associate, who you share your work with, with whom you collaborate." She was giving me a basic rundown of something I should have acquired in high school but that I disavowed early on as 'petty clique politics.' I was failing, four years in to my degree studies, to establish myself in and among academic peer groups. I simply had no interest in that.

The query above and the demand below it both point to an umbrella of activity that falls under what I would call 'entrepreneurialism.' In the broad, non-business sense of the term, the entrepreneur establish his or her credibility by meeting others, engaging in self-promotion, and establish contacts that will profit in the future. The language and outcomes are essentially the same. If I am to start a successful academic career I need to assemble the moving parts required to make it work, much as if I were to start a business. I need experts in different areas, like-minded and like-driven individuals who could inspire or be inspired to do things for our mutual benefit. And for all of that I lacked the desire to do so or at least initiate it. I've had this continuing desire to avoid this kind of talk if only because it feels disingenuous. Self-promotion is so much rhetoric is so much persuasion is so much motivated speech toward warping reality to one's interests. I wanted to occupy an orthogonal relationship to others, not ones rendered oblique to my self-interest and personal gain. Or so I believed as so I convinced myself. These behaviors and the system that supports them is one where funding for the survival of an activity requires a certain level of promotional advancement to acquire through self-interested grant writing, social networking with the right and interested parties, and discovering through informal networks information that isn't readily available: who to contact, what institutions to solicit, and at what times to submit applications to whom for what purpose. And much like the informal labor required to establish businesses the business of academics operates similarly.

As noted, I was not interested in self-promotion as such. To me, it felt like bugging people. And that was something my relations with my parents sternly taught me to avoid. Instead of asking, I'd either do it myself or simply avoid the situation entirely because for time after time through year after year the simple statement: "Mom?" or "Dad?" was responded by a "What goddamnit!" And my poor, sensitive little cookie-dropping self would tear up to that response every time. It got to the point that I stopped asking because I disliked being yelled at for no real reason other than the basic solicitation for someone's attention. All children do it. The one thing that validates their existence through their activity is a pair of approving eyes. So many children have asked me to 'watch.' I was being taught to disappear. And so by the time I had reached my early academic zenith that preemptive response had been ingrained in my affect and my behavior. In essence, I did not solicit that help or attention of others, for I had self-defensively justified that behavior as a weakness or as bad form or simply pushy self-promotion. And I had established a hypothetical notion that self-promotion is what liars do, not people who are in pursuit of the truth. And as I struggled with any notion of what it was like to dissertate I failed to ask for the needed help, struggled some more, hid in my apartment, drank myself to bed, and gave up after two and a half years of reading, writing, digging a rut out of which I had no interest in leaving. So I did what any self-respecting person of my stature did after realizing I was getting nowhere, on May 2008 I e-mailed my advisor and told here that deep inside the whole project felt wrong. So I gave up.

At that point I was spat out of the chute and headlong to a deep trough somewhere below what society calls occupations. That would have me in a bridge deck, struggling with dehydration, working against shaking arms and hands, trying to keep pace with some crazed reinforcing rodmen who ate giant dill pickles at lunch and asked me if I fucked any of my students.

No. I hadn't. And that wasn't merely a reflection of my moral fortitude but my debilitating shyness and a self-enforced aloofness to others that I practiced to avoid confronting the source of my behavior. It wasn't a good practice to either initiate or develop icebreakers and other social skills required of an entrepreneur. And simple because of that I've wasted so many good opportunities to love women whose situation presented itself as insurmountable to mine. And so now that I date I tend to date those who are equally shut-in. I bring them things. Turn the lights on and leave as my happy facade begins to degrade several hours later under the terrified duress of a need to shit and no courage to do it in others' midst. And to that extent I am disabled. But my disability, like others, is simply an identity woven out of a story that accompanies my day, frames events, systematically ignoring others, and essentially predicting the outcome of my day. That self-imposed ignorance is key to my own misunderstanding. This 'extra content' of experience that is kept outside the ambit of my conscientious decision-making is what keeps me making routine choices and very rarely breaking with a set of activities that comprise my daily living.

I dig and I dig and I dig, and no matter how many times I return to that exposed root of my self-development I can never seem to remove it in any practical manner. Metaphors, yes, these are, but what other than metaphors and brute actions do we have at our disposal for conceiving a life, its situation, and possible ways to transcend the barriers it represents? Some find a devotion to god helpful in their situation. I would call my moments of self-discipline and betterment exactly that, faith in a higher power. In my situation it was me, so as I developed and improved I lacked that ambiguity that a relationship to god can have. If I wasn't improving or if I fell into 'bad' habits then I simply had to chastise myself. My confessional and my devotional lacked the substance of a third place that included others, a community of faith and practice. I see the help in those very activities. They are very human ones. Indeed, they are the most human ones. It is the village by any other name, that archetypal social living situation required to both render parameters and meaning to an existence by situating it in the real-time events of the lives of others and the remarkable interactions that occur. Being a social isolate is perhaps the first pathology in my living situation.