Category: Uncategorized

I was talking to someone the other day about suicidal ideation, as you do. Well, not suicidal ideation, per se; we were actually talking about the impulse to throw yourself off a very tall building or some other impressive height and the way it just seemingly happens, at random, without warning. I made some half-joke along the lines of, I don’t really get that because I don’t want to kill myself, and was told in a two-part statement that was at once entirely correct and impressively incorrect that (a) the urge to throw yourself into the air from a great height isn’t really an attempt to kill yourself, actually, and also (b) everyone wants to throw themselves off a tall building, anyway.

The first part of that is very true; it’s called — somewhat darkly — “the call of the void,” and it’s apparently a very common variation on the fight-or-flight response to the inherent danger of being in a position where you might fall to your doom: why not just take matters into your own hands, instead? (The “call of the void” name apparently derives from the original French term, which of course sounds much better: “L’appel du vide.” Who doesn’t want to have some l’appel du vide, when you put it like that?)

It’s the second part that I had the problem with, because I’m someone who still feels nervous walking the (impressively fenced) bridge over the highway on the walk home from one of our local movie theaters, despite the fact that I do it multiple times a year for, essentially, the entire decade-plus that I’ve lived in the city. I certainly have no desire to throw myself off a tall building, and everything being equal, I don’t even feel comfortable being in any location where that could conceivably be an option, anyway.

I’m explaining all of the above when my brain suddenly remembers, no, that’s not entirely true: there was that one time earlier this year. I was standing on the top floor of the Seattle Convention Center, right at the edge of the floor in front of a floor-to-ceiling window and watching the traffic move past five or so stories below and I did actually feel that unavoidable but what if I jumped moment. At the time, I was deeply uncomfortable and moved away from the window immediately, making a joke in my head about I know the year has been shitty so far, but come on now or the like, but it stayed with me for a couple of days afterwards, that sense of “why did I feel that?” before I looked into it and found out about the call of the void.

That said, part of me almost wishes I had tried it, mostly because what would have happened wouldn’t have been me falling to my death, but instead me faceplanting against some very thick glass before coming to my senses and moving on far faster, all things considered.

It’s taken me a few weeks — in my defense, I’ve had both the death of a pet and being consistently overwhelmed by work, to the point where it felt as if I was only able to stay at my desk for roughly 90% of the time I was awake for days on end — but I am finally at that point of the year when I’ve remembered that fall and winter are my favorite times of the year. I’m hedging my bets by naming two seasons, but what I really mean is, the stretch between October and December.

What underscored the realization for me was walking home from the movie theater the other night. It’s a point now where it’s dark pretty much from 4pm onwards, making the night feel at once omnipresent and endless, and also oddly magical and unknowable. That felt especially true that night, which was one of those weird Portland nights that are both warmer than you’d expect and oddly misty, so that everything feels hazy and somehow welcoming as you wander past everyone going about their business.

It was late enough that people were flocking to the many bars I walked past (and I could hear the various types of music flooding out from the doors as they opened when I walked past: shitty techno, muddy guitars and twang, echoing jazz-pop), but also early enough that I was walking past families and couples as they left all the various restaurants after their meals, huddling together and laughing, talking, conspiratorially. Maybe it was the darkness or the supposed-cold-of-it-all but it all felt like end-of-the-year behavior, as opposed to people walking through the streets in summer where they take up more space and interact with everything around them more. This time of year is for people to hunker down and lean in, appearing and disappearing from the fog and suddenly illuminated by passing cars as they walk before vanishing.

All of this was soundtracked by the crunching of leaves underfoot, and surrounded by the orange glow of living rooms in houses as I walked past. I was reminded of how much I love to walk around neighborhoods during the holidays and see the colors of Christmas Lights everywhere. How the lives of everyone in those houses feels like it bleeds outside during this time of year, and what should be this dark, lonely, cold thing becomes so much warmer than it should.

It’s not just the night itself, when we had to decide to put Piggles to sleep. That was hard enough, even thought we knew it was both the kindest option considering the circumstance and what felt like the inevitability of it all. She was, after all, 18 years old — officially very old for a cat — and we’d been noticing that she’d been breathing heavier in recent weeks, but not to the point where it felt like it was a pressing issue until it so very, very much was.

(We’d made the decision and felt the paralyzing mix of regret and grief and sadness and uncertainty over have we done the right thing, is this the right thing to do? and then, soon after, were told that she couldn’t even be brought out of the oxygen tent to be intubated easily; knowing that felt like a strangely horrifying gift: if she was suddenly having such trouble breathing, we were definitely being kinder, saying goodbye that night.)

Nonetheless, we’d been — or I’d been, at least, all I can say for certain — unrealistically optimistic that she had longer left, that she was breathing heavier because of the weather or maybe it was arthritis because she was so old or any number of things that would allow us to pretend that, sure, she wasn’t a spring chicken anymore but she still had a lot of time left with us. She was Piggles, after all; she was, until the end, this tiny little cat with an oversized presence who was at once affectionate and demanding and ever-present. Life without her seemed unthinkable.

And that’s what I mean, when I say it’s not just the night of saying goodbye to her, and hoping that somehow she could tell through our head-scratches and cuddles that we loved her so fucking much. It’s been the afterwards of it all: her not being there when I expect her to be, the absence of her on the couch, or yelling at me when I’m in the kitchen, or running towards me when I get up in the morning because she wants to say hello and get breakfast. (Feeding her was the first thing I did when I got up every day, and the last thing I did before bed each night.) It’s her not being around when she was always around.

Even now, it feels like she’s around. Just not in all the ways I wish she was.

November is the start of the year breaking down, in the best ways possible. Sure, there are drawbacks to this time of year — think about how cold it is at all times seemingly, how sluggish it can feel to get up when everything is so dark first thing in the morning, or that nagging feeling in the back of your head that there’s only so much time left before the holidays and/or the end of the year and you’ve got shit you need to do — but at its best, November is when things start to slip and fall apart and the structure of the year begins to unravel just enough to let us breathe a little easier.

Occasionally, I admit, I get exhausted by the fact everything just keeps going: the work week is what it is, and then the weekend happens and that’s just enough time to catch up on everything and prepare for… the work week again. More than once, I’ve told people on Sunday night that I’m lowkey mad that I’ve finally got my head straight after the last week only to have to face up to doing it all over again the very next day; there’s a Sisyphian feel to the whole thing for 10 months out of the year… and then November arrives.

Part of it is because the holidays are around the corner, and that means that we get some time off for Thanksgiving here in the US, and then the Christmas and New Year breaks (or, if you’re me, one long extended break between the two) come along and it’s a glorious chance to step off the roundabout for a period. It’s a chance to decompress a little before the whole thing starts again in the New Year.

For the past couple years, however, I’ve had an additional boost to the system collapsing just a little bit: I’ve been so bad at taking PTO at work that, somewhere around the middle of October, someone has to take me to one side and politely remind me that I need to take a lot of time off in the next two months or else I’ll lose the hours I’ve accrued… and so, this year like last year, I get two solid months of three-day-weekends at the shortest. It feels decadent and indulgent and something I feel no small amount of guilt over, but I can’t deny that it also helps me relax and feel human in a way that I truly appreciate.

Sure, I could always use my PTO during the rest of the year so that I don’t feel so stressed and oppressed in the first place, but if I did that, I wouldn’t have any ability to take so much time off as the year ends and everything gently, wonderfully, unravels and gets slower and easier.

Here’s to watching movies on planes, which is where no less than five of my October watches come from — and Sorry, Baby, at least, was the kind of thing that makes me thrilled to have been trapped in a flying metal tube, given that I wouldn’t have likely watched it for any other reason but I utterly loved it. Elsewhere, let’s enjoy the abandonment of the traditional horror focus for the month and the return of two camp favorites to finish October off: Phantom of the Paradise and Beyond the Valley of the Dolls. Sometimes, you can’t beat the classics.

One of the things my therapist talked about early on in our sessions — and something that I didn’t quite get for awhile — was how things felt. I thought she was talking about emotions, because this was therapy and surely that’s what you talk about in therapy, but no; she was talking about how things felt physically. She’d ask me how my body felt after particularly stressful or emotional moments, and I’d offer some variation on, I don’t know, I wasn’t really paying attention, and she’d come back with her own variation on, well, can you start because that would really be helpful, thank you.

All of this is prelude to telling you that I can tell when I’m stressed these days because my lower back aches.

I think this is one of those things that I’ve actually known before I knew it, if that makes sense; I’d noticed over the past couple years that the first day of any given convention will end with me in the hotel room feeling a sudden pain in my lower back that temporarily makes me think, oh fuck, it’s finally happened, I’ve thrown my back out until it subsides and I blame it on walking around all day with my laptop in a bag. (This, for some reason, always seems to happen when I’m standing up after writing for awhile, hunched over the computer, and suddenly realize I’m hungry and should do something about that.) The laptop isn’t to blame; my age isn’t, really, either. It’s that I’m inevitably more stressed than I’d admit at the time.

I’ve come to notice the warning signs, and realize the lower back is one of two places I hold all my stress. (My left shoulder is the other; why the left and not the right? Would that I had an answer.) It’s like realizing that when I feel sad, I can feel it in the back of my neck and as a headache before the emotion makes its way to the bit of my brain that can name things. Or noticing that I feel happiness in the back of my head first. (Nope, I can’t explain that; don’t ask me to.)

Other people’s bodies, according to pop songs, are wonderlands. Much to the doubtless satisfaction of my therapist, I’ve finally realized that mine is just early warning signs.

I think everyone is at least familiar with the concept of having run out of fucks to give, right? It’s internet shorthand for all bets being off, for nothing holding anyone back, and the idea of someone being freed from whatever constraints they’re normally under, whether societal or otherwise. We’ve all thought, at one point or another, that it would be wonderful to have no fucks left to give, or complained whenever we’re feeling pushed to some imaginary limit that we’re getting close to that point.

Or, at least, that’s what I used to think it meant.

For a multitude of reasons — none of which were inherently bad, I hasten to point out — I found myself utterly exhausted by the time Friday rolled around last week. I was feeling a little bit sick, but also run down by a work week that was particularly heavy (and also my first full five-days-of-regular-work since the start of the month, thanks to New York Comic Con); there were also visiting family members, which was at once a welcome thing and another reason why I just felt “on” continually from waking up until going to bed all week… and then I got to Friday, and I realized that I genuinely had no fucks left to give.

But I don’t mean that in any angry or even energized manner. I mean it very literally; I was so tired that I struggled to care about anything I was doing, whether it was for work or for myself. Everything felt particularly flat and rote, as if I was going through the motions before I could make it into bed and collapse to re-energize myself a little bit. It’s not that good things didn’t happen on that day, because they did, it’s that I looked at them as if through a microscope: that’s good, I thought to myself very calmly and dispassionately. I should remember to be excited about that later. I was simply too run down to do anything else.

If there was one upside to this unfortunately thin day, it was that my head started making plans for what to do when whatever could be described as my mojo was suitably regained, thinking of ways to be indulgent and comforting in the face of the cold, wet weather and the lack of sun in the sky for the next few days. It was entirely unintentional, but instinctive, as if my subconscious was declaring, this behavior cannot stand. We’ll come up with a way to safeguard against it in future, if we can.

All things considered, I’d rather have had a few fucks left in my back pocket, though. Just to see me through.

Traditionally, in the aftermath of a New York Comic Con, I find myself wandering the streets of the city without purpose, enjoying the anonymity — no-one is going to ask for my help! — and the New York-ness of it all; in 2024, I wandered the streets for hours, listening to music and feeling at one with everything in an indefinable, utterly necessary manner. (It helped that I’d had such a bad few days prior that just not speaking and exercising alone felt really good, to be honest.) This year, that wasn’t really an option — while I had the time, I didn’t have either the raincoat or the umbrella.

Instead, I ran between awnings and storefronts and tried not to get too wet on my way to, and then returning from, brunch with a friend. And in the process, I has this strange, my-mind-is-clearly-overworked-and-going-places, thought that appeared unbidden in the forefront of my head: I think the city is trying to talk to me.

What had actually happened was that I’d noticed just how ubiquitous language is in Manhattan. There are signs everywhere: storefronts, ads, building names, fliers, graffiti. Everywhere you look in the city, there’s writing and it’s all colorful and eyecatching and ever-present, this cacophony of words that’s at war with each other: buy these bananas and STOP and this mobile plan is better than yours and by the way have you seen how cheap these burgers are. As I was ducking in and out of small places of shelter, the idea of, “what if there’s actually a hidden connective thread in all of this that I’m not seeing?” popped into my mind.

There isn’t, of course; it’s a strange science fiction idea that I’m sure has appeared in something I’ve watched or read — Danny the Street in Grant Morrison’s Doom Patrol but wihout the letters re-arranging to make coherent sentences — but for a brief second, an eyeblink, the possibility was in my head like the briefest of glimpses into another world where things are just that little bit more interesting.

I was eating toast, of all things, when I was struck by a very particular sense memory. Specifically, the toast I was eating suddenly tasted like the toasted rolls I had when I was a kid back in Scotland, and I was 12 years old again and eating the rolls in the kitchen of the house I grew up in. The sensation of eating childhood food again — even though I wasn’t, or at least, not exactly — sent my brain tumbling down a particular staircase that ended up with me suddenly realizing that there are all manner of flavors I’ll never taste ever again in my life.

When I was a kid, I had very specific favorite foods; it wasn’t just that I liked a particular dish, but I liked a particular dish as made at a particular restaurant or made by a particular person. I’m not sure if this was a latent super-taster tendency that dropped off later in life or simply being a particularly picky kid, but there were things that I loved that I knew very clearly that I would love even more so if came from one specific source. (I say “restaurant,” but I was a kid in Scotland; really, I mean “takeout place.” It’s where we all went; don’t judge. There is barely any Scottish cuisine if you remove the fish and chip shops, dammit.)

I remember with the utter certainty of a surly teenager that I loved shell pies but I particularly loved the ones from a local Italian takeaway. Was it really that different, or was I just oddly particular? I couldn’t tell you, looking back, although they probably used a different fat or flavoring to make it taste slightly different in a way that I preferred; the restaurant has changed hands — and maybe closed, then re-opened, if I remember correctly? — in the literal decades since I left the country, and the odds that I’d ever be able to eat that particular shell pie again are catastrophically slim.

Same with the frozen potato Alphabites — literally, fries but in the shapes of letters — that I loved so much, same with the slice sausage sandwiches my parents made, same with so many other foods that were favorites and so central to the hellscape that was my diet back in the day. All these foods that were comfort foods, things that could make my day better in almost any circumstance at the time. They’re all gone forever.

That’s probably a good thing; I can imagine revisiting some of them now and going, oh, this is terrible and then being embarrassed that I’d ever loved it so much in the first place. And yet, I find myself mourning those flavors more than a little. They did me a lot of good, way back when.

As I write this, it’s a week earlier and I’m still days away from flying to New York for NYCC 2025. Nonetheless, it’s happened; the same thing that happens every year around this time: my body decides that sleep is for the weak.

I think what actually is happening is that I’m beginning to get stressed enough about the trip — or, really, the workload that’s waiting for me during the trip; the travel itself is neither here nor there, given how little of New York I’ll get to see that isn’t my hotel or the convention center — that I’m tense enough that something in me can’t last more than six hours a night before waking up. It’s been every night for the last week — I make it about six hours of sleep, no matter when I fall asleep, and then I’m awake. Maybe I’ll get six and a half if I’m really tired, but that’s it. It’s time to wake up.

What happens when I wake up is that I make small, ridiculous deals with myself: I won’t actually do anything about being awake before 5am, because then I’m at least trying to go back to sleep, as unsuccessful as it may be. (It’ll be unsuccessful.) I can read in bed, but anything else would be giving in to the fact that I’m awake, so I hold off. (That said, I’m writing this at 5:30.) I refuse to actually get up until 7am. All of these little things to fight the fact that, for a week or so, sleep is an even more temporary than usual refuge from everything that’s going on around me.

It’ll get worse during the trip, because my sleep always suffers during convention trips. There was one Seattle trip — Seattle! No time zone weirdness at all! — where I didn’t sleep past 4am for the entire thing, and then just had to push through based on sheer will and stubborness, just because I was on the entire time, workwise. If I’m lucky, I might be so tired because of this current bout of sleeplessness that I’ll collapse the first night, absolutely exhausted and reset the whole thing.

Yes, my definition of “luck” shifts when I’m on a work trip, why do you ask?