On Cancel Culture

The following disorganized, heavily-footnoted, obscenity-filled wall-of-text began as an attempt to wrestle with my mixed feelings about the “culture warz” conflicts that now pervade so much of our societal discourse and to help me find catharsis in the aftermath of a particularly traumatic, demoralizing period in my life. The end result is a psychotic map of my cognitive dissonance, a confessional thinkpiece devoid of moral lessons or calls to action. If, after reading, you feel the need to do something, pity me. That’s all I intended.

Two truths and a lie:

1. What we call “cancel culture” or “wokeness” or, classically, “social justice activism” is mostly vicious opportunists, unhinged ideologues, arrested development cases, trolls, and straight-up children¹ bent on annihilating art, culture, and lives in the name of an amorphous, incoherent, and, ultimately, completely impractical set of ideals that don’t hold up to even mild intellectual scrutiny.
2. All of our institutions² are irreparably broken. They brutalize outsiders and the disempowered and anyone not willing to, ah fuck it, suck dick for cash. In spite of some half-hearted, mostly tokenistic attempts to address this, they’re especially cruel to women, LBGT+ people, and people of color. Among people of color, black people have it especially bad. Addicts and the mentally ill have it even worse. The poor have it worse than anyone.³ The vast majority of the human population lives in a state where their worth goes unacknowledged, their talents are ignored, and every day is an agonizing struggle for physical and emotional survival. And they have to watch assholes who were born with so much more privilege⁴ and so much less ability thrive. They have to beg and crawl and suck up to these people. And it warps them. It fills them with rage or anxiety or despair. Or they just surrender to learned helplessness. It’s fucked, fucked, fucked, fucked, fucked, fucked, fucked.
3. The previous two points are fundamentally incompatible and cannot be simultaneously true.

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I thought it would be therapeutic to write about the conflicted, resentful detritus, both personal and cultural, that has been accumulating inside me for the past few years, about my growing dread and uncertainty, but as spring approaches and my anxiety rises and I become increasingly, seasonally emotionally unstable, I find that this project is more than I can handle. It’s suffocating. But I don’t want to abandon it. I’ve always been a sucker for sunk costs. So, here’s my compromise with myself: I’m going to go through and complete it with editorial notes like this one. All of my additions to the text from now on will be set off by brackets so you can see where I got stuck and where I gave up. Sorry.]

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Joss Whedon is cancelled. I fucking hate Joss Whedon. I’m ecstatic. I’m conflicted. 

I am, on the whole, a big fan of schadenfreude, especially where my personal and imagined enemies are concerned, and I honestly think that Whedon has played a pivotal role in the ubiquitous prestidigitation of art into formula, auteurism into algorithm, and culture into content,⁵ a trend that I rail endlessly, tediously against, online and off.⁶

But celebrating Whedon’s fall, his forthcoming unemployability,⁷ the deluge of celebrity renouncements, the day he’ll hesitate, maybe just for a moment, outside of a dilapidated gun shop or with his hand around a bottle of Clorox in an antiseptic supermarket aisle—that would make me a hypocrite, right?

In retrospect this seems like a rhetorical sleight of hand to me. I would have intentionally obfuscated the clear distinctions at work here—the difference between the contents of an artistic work and the behavior of its creator, between private indiscretions and workplace misconduct, between personal impotence and institutional power—so that I could elucidate them later, a trick that would make it seem like I was making meaningful discoveries while I wrote instead of just endlessly circling around in the undertow of the same clogged societal toilet.

Then I would have said some bullshit like “But there’s something else that troubles me!” and went on to discuss my personal discomfort upon reading Charisma Carpenter’s statement, how unsettled I was by the descriptions she and others offered of Joss Whedon as a boss: His gleeful, vicious contempt for the feelings of those working under him. The joy he apparently took in making one of his writers cry. (She was his subordinate—her financial security was largely dependent on pleasing him—this isn’t playground shit; this isn’t about taste or teasing.) His alleged skeeziness with the women on set. Carpenter’s claim that he berated her about her weight when she was pregnant.] The insinuated insinuation that maybe she should consider an abortion.⁸ [The implication, true or false, that perhaps he had her fired exactly when it became legally safe to do so, when it could no longer be easily spun as a punishment for her valuing her desire to be a mother over his masturbatory⁹ aesthetics.] [This is vile stuff, right? Gag reflex shit. And it’s familiar too. It reminds me of every job I’ve ever had. Every school I’ve ever attended. Bullies constantly rise to power and institutions shrug.]

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Shouldn’t our own suffering make us empathize with others instead of driving us to want to accumulate victims of our own? Fuck shoulds. Of course it should, but it doesn’t. Most of us, myself included, would not hesitate to destroy the lives of those who have hurt us. The pain of being bullied makes us more, not less, likely to become the bullies ourselves when the opportunity arises. Give me the cancellation gun and tell me there will be no consequences if I pull the trigger, that I will always be a victim regardless of my body count, and watch how many bullies get blown away.]

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Gina Carano has been silenced. Update:¹⁰ Gina Carano [is no longer silenced? has been replatformed? is louder than ever? I couldn’t find the right words to make this rhetorical device work, but my point was going to be that Carano’s firing over stupid tweets, which was all-but-immediately followed by a movie deal from The Daily Wire is evidence of just how crass and misguided all this bullshit actually is. Yes, on principle, I think it’s bad if someone loses their job because of their political beliefs, even if those beliefs are offensive or conspiratorial or insane, because what qualifies as offensive, conspiratorial, and insane is usually more a function of groupthink than anything else, but even if you think your ideological enemies should be driven from public life, this shit always plays out in the same dumbass way: the person exiled finds a new career in the world of partisan media, everyone’s biases are confirmed, we become more entrenched in our hatred for each other, our collective madness grows.]

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Since I’ve started writing this, I’m seeing this shit everywhere. [This sentence would have been followed by a list of recent, largely unrelated events that would fit under the rough, meaningless banner of “cancel culture”: the new documentary series about the child sexual abuse allegations against Woody Allen,¹¹  The Guardian fired British Southern dandy–cum-gadfly Nathan J. Robinson¹² over some joke tweets about the US government’s financial support of Israel,  there was some internal strife at The New York Times that I remember finding alarming when I first started writing this piece but that I’ve already almost completely forgotten about, Gimlet Media is eating itself alive after Reply All ran a series of episodes about the implosion of Bon Appetit¹³ that apparently made some of their staff feel that a similar dynamic existed in their workplace, I got an email from a contributor who said he was afraid to promote his writing because he didn’t want to face repercussions elsewhere in his life,¹⁴ an editor at Slate was suspended for defending a journalist from a The New York Times who left the paper following a scandal involving his use of “the n-word,”¹⁵ multiple publications are facing scrutiny¹⁶ for how they rushed to report on an allegation of racial bias by a Smith College student that later turned out to be factually flawed, multiple Dr Seuss books are being retired from publication¹⁷ for racial insensitivity, and …] [Christ, what the fuck was my point? None of these incidents have anything to do with each other. It’s the outrage fog machine. We can’t see anything clearly. Everything looks the same. And we’re terrified, though, unfortunately, not of our own blindness. But I think I was originally going somewhere else with this, since I wrote:] Have we arrived at some sort of cultural cancellation inflection point? Has the end of the Trump administration and the beginning of the Biden era accelerated these stories, spurred on the arrival of crises that simply didn’t have ______? [Have what? That underlined space is my original draft. Obviously I didn’t know what the fuck I was trying to say.] Is this [the] violent death rattle of the end of the last age of  ____  [Once again, who knows what would have filled that space.] Or is this just a function of _____ bias? [“Confirmation” seems like the obvious point here, but since I’ve forgotten what argument I was planning to make and it was probably reductive and fucking dumb anyway, we’ll never know.] Am I forming a pattern here out of my desire to see one? [Yes, you absolutely were, me. You absolutely were.]

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And, of course, none of this has anything to do with art. [Actually, some of it does. The Dr. Seuss situation, for example, is explicitly about the publication and distribution of “problematic” art—though that may have developed after I wrote the previous sentence; I’ve become unstuck¹⁸ in time; causality is dead—and some of the other subjects have to do with those involved in the creation of art (Allen, Carano if you’re being generous), but I think my point here was going to be something along the lines of … No, you know what, I have no idea what my point was going to be. Moving on.]

It’s simple when artists are dead. [I do, however, know what my point was going to be here: There’s absolutely no good reason to eradicate the works of dead creators because of their beliefs or behavior. They’re fucking dead. They can’t benefit from their art anymore. There’s no moral conflict here. Let their work bring insight and meaning and joy to those who appreciate it. And let those who think it sucks criticize it. Just don’t try to erase it.] [I would have followed that point up with the more challenging question of how to handle living artists who have been accused of bad shit, since they still stand to profit from the sale and consumption of their work. I’m going to level with you: I have no idea and, honestly, I don’t really care. There’s obviously a tricky ethical balancing act here, but, I, for one, am going to keep blissfully enjoying art by problematic people. Would you really expect anything else? This is Misery Tourism for Christ’s sake.]

I won’t give up Louis CK. I won’t give up Jesse Lacey. [A third example would have gone here, had I been able to think of one. I actually dislike the work of Allen and Cosby. Most of my problematic faves are corpses.] There’s no moral argument powerful enough to get me to give up art that I love, art that comforts me.

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I wonder to what degree—and, yes, I’m about to assume that a machiavellian maliciousness underlies some corporate or institutional actions, in defiance of my belief that most human behavior is just fucking idiots doing and saying dumb shit—the drive to police expression, to insist that it be done sensitively, that it be done right, is a tactical attempt to condition artists towards risk aversion.¹⁹ Existing IP can be done “right” fairly easily. The template is already there. Original concepts are trickier, more dangerous, potentially inflammatory.

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Rush Limbaugh is dead. I just heard the news. I wonder to what degree he started all of this. The innovator of outrage. The instigator of the Great Culture War. Certainly he was ahead of his time, right? Or is this all bullshit? I’ve never listened to talk radio in my life. To live is to speculate—ignorantly, futilely—about shit you don’t understand.

Maybe we need to be more accepting of the profound human need to say dumb-ass shit about people and things we don’t understand. The reverse—where we act with empathy and restraint, eager to better comprehend each other—seems to be fucking impossible.If you don’t believe me, find a tweet where someone is lecturing about the value of empathy and (involutionary muscle spasm of revulsion) education. Go to their profile. See how long it takes you to find hilariously ignorant and prejudiced shit. Probably shit that you, personally, know to be absolutely false.

They’ll have a justification for this hypocrisy of course. There are always exceptions. People unworthy of being understood. People for whom compassion and consideration are to be withheld at risk of immediate banishment, complete and unequivocal social ostracization. And that, of course, is rationalized as a kind of empathy. Because words have no fixed meaning. Because words are music. And don’t you dare tell us not to sing.

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Some part of me admires Milo Yiannopoulos. Maybe in another life I could have been Milo Yiannopoulos: vicious, cutting, narcissistic, nihilistically unconcerned with truth or consequences, building brand constantly, unrepentantly, grinding, grinding, grinding in every sense of the term, equiped with a provocative opinion on every mundane stupid trivial thing, spinning the irrelevant into outrage and outrage into profit—like another enterprising little grifter with an unpronouncable name—and, yes, sure, eventually every con must run its course, but how satisfied he must feel, how satiated, sitting on his repossessed throne, atop his pile of debt. 

But in this world I’m anxious and shy, horrified by social situations, plagued by doubt. I question myself constantly. I do not believe anything for long. I cannot believe in anything, not even for profit, not even for fame. I certainly cannot believe in myself. My bottomless self-love is balanced by an equal (or, more often, greater) weight of self-hatred. I vibrate with anxiety. I’m anxiety’s vibrator. I tell myself equivocation is a virtue, that everyone else has succumbed to the madness of certainty and that we are now seeing just how pathological that madness is as half of society is consumed by moral panic and the other by conspiratorial paranoia. But, no, I envy Milo. I’d take his life over mine in a second, even now, even in disgrace, financially bankrupt, morally bankrupt. Give it to me. Give it to me, and my first act would be to enjoy the simple pleasure of lifting a glass to my lips without my hand shaking.²⁰

But, OK, let’s try to get back on topic here:²¹ Is Milo’s decline evidence that deplatforming works? That’s what they’re saying. Twitter banned Milo and he just disappeared. The attention dried up. No one gave a fuck anymore. He was neutered. He was forgotten. Ineffectual. Impotent. Flaccid.

That story is bullshit, right? Isn’t it? It’s not what I remember, at least.²² What I remember is that Milo was on his way towards becoming a culture war superstar, twitter ban and all. He had a book deal.²³ He was interviewed by Bill Marr. He was booked to give a keynote at CPAC. And then someone dug up an interview he did for some obscure YouTube channel. An interview where he joked²⁴ about sex with minors.²⁵ And that was fucking it.²⁶ He was dropped from CPAC.²⁷ Fired from Breitbart. Banished. Deplatformed. For real.

He had lost his audience. He was no longer welcome in the (robust, thriving) parallel ecosystem of reactionary media. Not because of a twitter ban.²⁸ Not because of his participation in social media harassment campaigns. Not because he orchestrated a dubious²⁹ scholarship fund for white men. Not because of any hateful statement or dishonest act. Because of an offensive joke.³⁰ That was the indefensible act.

I’m tempted to speculate about whether this played into ingrained stereotypes about predatory gay men that might have may him unpalatable, especially to his right-wing audience. But there’s a simpler explanation, of course: they didn’t think he was joking, or playing out an absurd hypothetical for shock value, because they took him seriously all along. They hadn’t been laughing with, or at, him. As obvious as it was to me that he was a troll and a clown—and as obvious as I suspect that probably was to Milo himself—he was being taken seriously, uncritically, at face value. The whole time. How. God, we’re all so dumb. God, we’re all so angry.

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Donald J. Trump, the former president of the United States of America, has been ruthlessly deplatformed. They banned the quote-unquote “leader of the free world” from every conceivable form of social media. And it worked.

You have no idea how much it pains me to say this. How completely it runs contrary to every principle I hold, every theory I have about the relationship between speech and power, between the illicitness of speech and its desirability, between—Hell, my point is that I [I didn’t finish this tortured, run-on sentence, but I think you get what my point was: My priors have been checked—checked right into the fucking plexiglass by some big fucking Swede (or something). Their teeth are scattered everywhere.]

He just shut up.³¹ And he’s happier now.

But hold on. Trump[‘s ability to spread discord wasn’t dependent on social media]. I had multiple 70+ year old coworkers who had only the vaguest sense of how to operate a computer, but who would [watch] Rachel Maddow³² [every weeknight and come to work every day dismayed and horrified about the state of American politics, who would say they had never felt so ashamed of their country, so scared of the future]. My grandmother, who has CNN on in every room in the house³³ and who only uses her ancient desktop to play Mahjong and place orders on Amazon, has been furious about politics for as long as I can remember.

And then, as a (clumsy) segue, I might have said something along the lines of, “Perhaps all of this bitching about the mainstream media reminds you of our former president’s rhetoric. Maybe you think I voted for him.”]

I didn’t. I didn’t vote at all.³⁴ If I had voted, I would have voted for Biden. Not because I was terrified of another four years of Trump.³⁵ Trump mostly just exhausted me, left me feeling enervated and annoyed whenever the subject of politics came up.³⁶ No, I would have voted for Biden because I like him. [I don’t like him because I buy into his moderation or respect for old-fashioned institutional politics.³⁷ I don’t like him because I think he’s going to be a successful, if imperfect, advocate for working class Americans. I don’t like him because I think he’s a proficient dealmaker or a master architect of grand legislative compromises. I like him because he’s a socially awkward, visibly tired old man whose life has been a nearly unbroken series of embarrassments and tragedies. And yet, in spite of it all, his narcissistic hope³⁸ endures. And yet, in spite of it all, his ego endures. I feel that.]

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My own biases are showing here a bit, but I don’t know how to frame this issue in a way that’s honest and concise. The truth is that how polling questions are asked have an influence on the outcome, but, beyond that, there’s this weird tension where people seem to be simultaneously economic populists and small-c conservatives, hesitant to make major systemic changes, so proposals that seem like more egalitarian versions of existing policies (e.g. raising the minimum wage) tend to poll better than dramatic reforms (like my beloved UBI). 

Meanwhile, wokeness is unequivocally disdained by a huge majority: white, black, and brown.³⁹ And this trend holds for specific social media/justice causes du jour. Hispanic individuals prefer that term (or, less frequently, latino/latina) over Latinx by massive margins. Native Americans are challenging to poll for genocide-adjacent reasons, but it seems like they really do not give a fuck what the Washington football team is named. 

We can’t escape the horror of history through tact. Can’t absolve our guilt through politeness. Language fixes nothing. We accumulate tokens, listen exclusively to the minority voices that have earned prestige, warped themselves through institutional self-mortification, and imagine that everyone without a platform, without power, lies (to you, to themselves). The hatred grows and grows. 

And I’m afraid of where this is headed. I’m afraid that the palliative effects of outrage will eventually wear out. I’m afraid we’re going to start killing each other.

For all the railing against institutions I’ve done in this piece, I have absolutely no desire to witness the collapse of the United States government in my lifetime.⁴⁰ I have no utopian illusions about what would happen next. I have no comforting ideas about the benevolence of human nature, about what we could build together if only we were free from the vile, corrupt establishment. We, as a species, are awful. It would be a slaughter. So many people would die. I might die.⁴¹ I have no interest in dying, for this or any cause.⁴² The forces that ruthlessly oppress me protect me from you, reader, and I’m more scared of you.]

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Prior to essentially every edition of Misery Loves Company, a weekly online reading series we host for other “outsider and transgressive”⁴³ authors, the zoom call is invaded by middle school age trolls who blare latin rap and call me a faggot. We post videos of each reading on YouTube, where one commenter described the affair as a “lisp support group” and instructed me to “[g]o Epstein [myself].”

You can decide for yourself if my transgressions qualify as harmless fooling around, the compulsion to play with taboos that’s common among most humans, an extreme example of the ageless tactic of winning friends with dirty jokes, or evidence of some terrible vacancy in my soul.⁴⁵ (It’s both, of course.)]

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I want to believe the culture wars are over, that we’ve been shocked out of the mania of egocentric outrage by existential horror. By twelve months of unrelenting death.

Last year I lost an elderly friend and former co-worker⁴⁶ in January, a grandmother⁴⁷ in April, an author⁴⁸ I knew and admired in June, a cat in July, and my favorite aunt⁴⁹ in November. None to coronavirus.⁵⁰ It’s the cat I can’t get over. He was my roommate’s cat. I only knew him for seven months. He had advanced, inoperable cancer. There was nothing we could have done. I want to cry as I write this. I’m so sad. I’m so angry.

I’m so tired of thinking about this shit constantly. I’m haunted by the discourse, haunted by hypocrisy. Can’t stop thinking about twitter nonsense. Bullshit that has nothing to do with me. Can’t stop thinking about a job I haven’t worked for a year and a half; the boss that’s dead, the boss I wish was dead.⁵¹ I’m possessed. This is an exorcism.

I need to move past all of this noise. It deranges me. I’m supposed to be writing a novel. That has been my dream, my primary ambition, for years, decades, and I finally have the space and time and security to do it. But I agonize. When it comes time to write, I’m all insecurity, no passion. I drag myself through each overwrought, tortured sentence. I can’t see the words or the world. Can’t give a fuck about the themes or characters. Even my daydreams about the work leave uninspired; my fantasies are flaccid. Only this shit gets me going. Nothing but resentment and rage has the power to make my calcified synapses fire.⁵²

I’m hoping that maybe if I write this I can move on.

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Meanwhile, I’m not writing. I don’t know where I’m going to stick this section in the final version, assuming I publish this at all, but currently I’m still trying to finish filling out the first section of my original draft. I’m almost done with Joss Whedon. God, there’s so much left. Please let me feel better when I finish this fucking thing. Please let me move on.]

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My boss killed himself a few years ago.⁵⁴ I was working in an administrative position at a tiny non-profit and he was the president and CEO. [I just realized while editing that I had planned to include a description of the events that motivated my boss’ suicide, but never did. I’ll try to be brief and vague. There were financial irregularities. Money was mishandled. Reports that should have been filed never were. Other reports were doctored. The non-profit was in serious financial distress. Donations were drying up. We lost our 501c(3) status. And absolutely no one knew until one day subpoenas went out and the next day he didn’t show up for work. His body was found five days later. He had hanged himself.⁵⁵]

He had a wife and four kids. I don’t know why he committed suicide. Worst case scenario, he was looking at a couple of years in jail. Much more likely it would have been bankruptcy and fines, community service, possibly a divorce. Seems so small compared to the irreparable damage his death did to his children, the oldest of which, I think, was just starting high school at the time. I guess he was afraid of the shame, the public humiliation. But I’ve already written more about him than I hoped.⁵⁶

Yes, I knew something was wrong. It was obvious the non-profit was in financial distress, though I had no idea how serious the mess was. Yes, I wish I hadn’t been too scared, too selfish, too worried about my own security to walk into his office, sit down, and ask him what the fuck was going on. Yes, I do think, rationally or irrationally, that it might have been within my power to save his life, to save his family so much agony, to rescue four kids from the hell of growing up fatherless. But that’s not what I can’t let go of, not what I want to write about. What fucking kills me is what happened after his death.

One of their first acts was to appoint a former board member—yes, the same board that was then under investigation by the state AG’s office for, to borrow one of my dad’s favorite phrases, “sitting with their thumbs up their assess” while a single sick, troubled man razed his life’s work to the ground, put the well-being of his employees and clients at risk, and, eventually, left his wife and children with permanent psychological trauma—as our new executive director. I have no idea what, if any, consideration was paid to the (fucking obvious) ethical and legal questions raised by this decision, but I can say that no consideration was paid to the concerns of the staff. No attempt was ever made to get our input. Not only that, but we were immediately welcomed into a rigidly hierarchical environment where this man (who we barely knew, who had no experience working in a non-profit, let alone running one, and who had hilariously little understanding of our day-to-day operations) was our unequivocal and sole superior. He had periodic meetings with our new parent organization’s COO, but no one else in the organization had regular contact with anyone who had the power to hold him accountable.

You know where this is going. You’ve read enough stories like this that the broad outline of what happens next is clear. The only question is, “Well, OK, but what exactly did he do?”

Here, you can have a bulleted list:

• Within the week or two after we returned to work, he started joking⁵⁷ about my boss’ suicide. He joked about the condition of his body, which had gone undiscovered for five (agonizing) days (“must have been pretty ripe!”). He joked about how my boss was a coward who wasn’t willing to “man up” (yes, really) and take responsibility for his actions. He told these jokes exclusively to me and another male coworker. He was always careful to make sure there wasn’t a woman within earshot.
• He would ogle and comment on the bodies of any traditionally attractive woman we encountered (coworker, volunteer, pedestrian, it didn’t matter). A lot of “I’m a happily married man, but …” shit. He frequently invited me to join in, and on a couple of occasions after I demured he asked if I was gay.
• Early in the transition, a few members of the old board called a meeting with the staff, headed by our soon-to-be executive director. One staff member raised a number of valid concerns⁵⁸ during this meeting, and, as a result, she wasn’t invited to future meetings between the staff and the board. I actually received an email asking me not to inform her of the next meeting, which was planned for a day and time they knew she wasn’t scheduled to work. She found out about the meeting and quit shortly thereafter. Later, after we were fully absorbed by the larger non-profit, another employee was issued a formal warning for circumventing our executive director and sending an email to HR complaining about our working conditions. It was extremely fucking clear that any show of discontent would be met with retribution.
• Since our services were provided free of charge and our mission was to serve economically distressed and disabled seniors, we had an income threshold that we used to determine client eligibility.⁵⁹ We rejected one woman’s application to become a client because her retirement income put her over this threshold. Unbeknownst to us at the time, she was the aunt of one of the parent organization’s major donors. He complained (of course) and someone from our parent org that outranked my executive director sent him an email about the situation. He immediately called me into his office and said we needed to rethink our income guidelines. We ended up completely revising the formula we used to determine eligibility, which resulted in raising our income threshold, which, of course, resulted in the donor’s aunt becoming eligible. My boss called her himself to tell her, and apologized for our mistake.
• When it was determined that the rent at our current office was too expensive and we would have to downsize to a smaller location, a decision was made somewhere in the chain of command that no movers would be hired and that we should handle the move ourselves. We had a tiny staff, many of whom were actually pseudo-volunteers assigned to us through a senior work retraining program. Our parent organization had a multimillion dollar budget. The decision was transparently exploitative. Transparently dangerous. I watched one staff member fall and injure his leg twice. I watched the hands of another, an older woman with a nerve disorder, shake violently while she struggled to carry heavy wooden shelves. I watched multiple close calls involving a commercial freezer weighing a literal ton balanced precariously (and completely unsecured) on a tiny dolly. I took my boss aside and told him this was nuts. Told him I was going to look for other work. He was putting lives at risk. I told him that, aside from me, every one of our staff member was over 60 and in tenuous health. “That’s not true,” he said. “I’m 59.”
• He had me sit in on the firing of another employee, a Vietnam vet who oversaw our warehouse and had suffered a stroke and multiple heart attacks. He had been forgetting things, leaving the warehouse dirty, neglecting some routine tasks. Pretty minor stuff, but my boss had heard complaints from other tenants of our building (owned by the same parent organization as us) about the order and cleanliness of our space. We were always viciously understaffed, so there was no flexibility to have other employees help him with his workload. However, there was also a strict firing policy, courtesy of our corporate-style HR department, that dictated that an employee had to receive three official warnings before they could be fired. So I had to sit and witness as my boss issued this poor, nice, visibly disabled old man two warnings in one meeting, for extremely similar trivial offenses, just to expedite his termination. “Be careful,” my boss warned me, “Don’t say anything connecting his performance to his stroke. There are laws about that. We can get in trouble for that.” (No shit. He actually fucking said that. Or something very similar.) Of course, since this unfortunate old guy—who was similar in so many ways to the disabled seniors who our organization existed to serve—was fired “for cause,” he missed out on pay for any of his accrued vacation days or any of the other benefits that I got when I gave my notice a few weeks later. (“Firing [name redacted] was the last straw for me,” I told my boss later. “Yeah,” he said. “That was hard, but it had to be done.”)
• There’s more. There has to be more. There was a constant, daily, pervasive feeling that at any given moment I would be asked to do something I thought was gross or stupid or immoral, that the person who would ask me to do it was a vile douchebag, and that I wouldn’t even be given the resources to do it properly. I’m tired of dwelling on this shit. Wasn’t this supposed to be about Joss Whedon?]

He was kind to me though. He gave me rides to work a couple of days a week, since I don’t drive⁶⁰ and since the new office location was no longer easily accessible by bus. He said he wanted to “mentor” me. He took me out to dinner with a bunch of men from his church at a barbecue restaurant where the servers kept bringing us every conceivable kind of meat (and only meat) on skewers and you had to tell them to stop, an admission of defeat. He even took my opinions seriously when they didn’t conflict with his pathological need to be respected, to satisfy and impress his bosses at all costs, to degrade himself and exploit those who depended on his mercy for their livelihood in the hopes of sating his insecurities.⁶¹ And I hated him. I still hate him.

Presented with all of this, what do you think they wanted to ask me about? The gay shit, of course. They assured me that, in spite of the fact that they were a Catholic organization, they were accepting of people of all sexualities and orientations. They wondered how my boss, hailing as he did from a corporate background, could be so oblivious to the taboos (my word, of course) surrounding inquiring about someone’s sexual preferences. They suggested (no shit) sensitivity training. They largely glossed over or evaded my other concerns, you know, the ones about endangering the elderly and contriving a flimsy excuse to fire a disabled veteran, the fucking shit that still evokes such guilt and rage that my brain only produces clichés: “keeps me up at night,” “makes my blood boil,” “drives me to despair,” “makes me question everything I believe,” etc. etc.

And here’s the thing: I didn’t give a shit about that at all. I included that one detail—and only that one detail—not because it bothered me, but because I thought it my improve my case, my get their attention, because I had been conditioned to think it was the sort of thing that matters to HR types, the type of thing that would make my grievances more damning. I honestly didn’t give a fraction of a fuck if he thought I was gay. Reader, I don’t care if you think I’m gay. Or straight. Or bi. Or asexual. Or really into feet. Or golden showers. Or BDSM. Or furries. Or problematic age gap relationships between legal adults. I don’t fucking care. This world is full of so much injustice, so much horror. Call me a faggot. Call me a faggot every day for the rest of my life. Call me a faggot with undisguised, vicious disdain. Just don’t call me into work.

********

My final week at work we received an email from the COO [warning us that the diocese was about to release a list of all the priests in our diocese who had been accused of sexually abusing children. We were cautioned that the press might try to contact us, and instructed not to comment.⁶² What a demoralizing read. I don’t need to tell you that nearly every one of them got away with it, were shuffled from parish to parish for years, only to die quietly at some church home for elderly diddlers. You know this shit already. It has been national news for years. That’s why they released the list. They had exhausted every other outlet for redemption. It shouldn’t have surprised them that forgiveness could only come after a full confession of sins. (Nah, I’m just wallowing in cute literary bullshit here. It was a desperate PR move, of course.) 

And here’s something I don’t have to say, but will anyway: Looking at the names of all those (unpunished) dead (alleged) pedophiles, I experienced a moment of clarity. All the penny-ante pain I had experienced over the course of the preceding months was given meaning through the lens of history. I got it.

And now, in a turn so cutely symbolic that I would resent it in fiction, the Boy Scouts are selling dozens of Norman Rockwell paintings to pay the debts they’re incurred through thousands and thousands of sex abuse claims. I attended a single boy scout meeting. In the car on the way home, I told my dad it was boring. I was an altar boy for a few weeks or months before dropping that as well. I wonder what horrors my laziness delivered me from. Who’s the patron saint of sloth? Let me offer them my thankful prayers.

The grad school I dropped out of after a year also turned out to be harboring and protecting a predator. I probably don’t need to tell you why I bailed. Yes, I was unstable and insecure. Yes, the institutional culture disturbed me. You can decide which deserves more weight. Am I a resentful nut, seeing oppressors everywhere to excuse my constant acts of self-sabotage? Or am I unwilling to be socialized into callous, indifferent subservience to organizations that are fucking evil? Or maybe I’ve just had a very bizarre streak of anti-luck and keep slapstick stumbling into terrible situations, more Forrest Gump than martyr?

Maybe the conspiracy theorists are right. Maybe every institution can be reduced to a powerful man raping a child in a dark room. Maybe that’s the irreducible, impenetrable nucleus around which all human civilization spins.

Or maybe I’ve spent too much time online. But, Christ, the world out there is so much fucking worse.]

********

And then I finished it and I panicked. All I had to do was figure out how to order the sections to make it slightly less schizophrenic, to allow the reader to grok the arc of my mental health crisis, obfuscate a few details that were too revealing, and, of course, fix christ only knows how many typos. But I couldn’t. I became paranoid. Restless. Got that primeval “there’s a predator watching you” feeling. Was sure someone would track down my old employer and there would be … drama. Certain I’d be bombarded by emails from contributors angry that we’d gone ideological, in spite of our promises to the contrary. Positive that I had revealed things about myself that were so vile that it would do permanent damage to my reputation⁶⁴ and to the community of artists I’ve worked to cultivate and support.⁶⁵

So I did the only rational thing. I turned to twitter. I outlined my concerns in an overwrought, eight tweet thread, and the response was gracious. Multiple authors who I respect and admire offered to read the piece and gave me detailed feedback.⁶⁶

And then the weather got cold again. And the time changed. And I got sick.⁶⁷ Spent days lying in bed, playing Dragon Quest XI on my Switch. There were two mass shootings.⁶⁸ I lost more and more time. New cancellation controversies emerged, and the ones I had written about were quickly being phased out by planned outrage obsolescence. I thought about scrapping this entire fucking disaster and moving on.

But then I woke up yesterday, and I found that I wanted to return to the document. No reason. No reason. So I spent most of the day doing the editorial work I should have done weeks ago. At some point during the process, my grandmother⁶⁹ called. She told me she’s watching less CNN now that Trump is out of office. “I just don’t feel like I have to anymore,” she said. “It doesn’t feel urgent. I’m not as scared. I knew I couldn’t do anything before, but I had to watch. It was like having a toddler. I was afraid that if I took my eyes away, something terrible would happen.” 

Right now it’s 75 outside and sunny. As soon as this goes online, I’m going to take a walk.]

1. I mean this literally. A nontrivial number of the people whose takes you’ve ruthlessly dunked on lied when twitter asked them if they were over thirteen.
2. I’m not just talking about political and civic institutions here. This applies to essentially all corporations and major non-profits, the media, etc.
3. I’m taking a stand here: Anyone trying to tell you otherwise is fetishizing their own suffering. There’s no horror like poverty.
4. I cringe as I type this word but IT’S FUCKING TRUE
5. No single film has played a larger role in the Disneyfication of all media that The Avengers, which Whedon, of course, directed, but my hatred for his transparently calculated “obnoxious banter + visually uninspired action sequences + emotionally manipulative plotting + if you squint you can almost make out some superficial social commentary so this is real art” crowd-pleasing formula has deeper roots than that.
6. Wait, no, there is no “off” anymore. There hasn’t been for months. My mistake.
7. Well, this remains to be seen. Whedon is such a proven revenue generator, and his style so perfectly suited for market saturation, that I wonder if he might be allowed to perform some perfunctory penance, go on a brief sabbatical from filmmaking, and return, rehabilitated, just in time to direct—I don’t know. I was going to make some easy “reboot of a reboot of a reboot” joke, but even making fun of this shit is tiresome at this point.
8. [This sentence, which stood completely alone in my original draft, reveals something shameful about my writing habits: I’m enamored with pretentious turns of phrase. I’m in love with them. I will sacrifice truth and meaning to find my way back to them, twist the entire universe of my prose into a path to their doorstep, and I don’t regret it.]
9. [In every sense of the term, of course.]
10. It’s mandatory that you imagine this being delivered in a Tourettes Guy “WHO GIVES A SHIT ABOUT BIGFOOT?” voice. The old internet ruined me. I’ll never feel at home now that the frontier has been colonized, civilized, and domesticated. Web 2.0 can suck my dick, or cock.
11. [I watched the first episode a week or so ago, but was mostly bored by it. It felt like it was largely structured to manufacture as much drama and tension as possible. A lot of attention was obviously paid to pacing, to what details should be withheld for maximum dramatic effect. The episode even ended on a fucking cliffhanger. I know this is going to sound like a joke coming from me, but it felt exploitative, given the subject matter. Manipulative. I’ll probably watch the remaining episodes eventually. I was hoping for more insight. I thought Leaving Neverland was fantastic. especially in the way it probed the brutal cognitive dissonance experienced by Jackson’s victims, as they tried to reconcile their childhood adoration of him and their appreciation for the opportunities he gave them with the fact that he took vicious advantage of them, that he raped them. (It got so deep inside my head that it inspired me to make a shitty game.)]
12. Full disclosure: I once got into a mild twitter pissing match with Robinson because he wrote an article critical of prophet-of-uncertainty Nate Silver. (Notice me, senpai!)
13. I listened to most of the first two episodes of the series in the car with my roommate, who is a huge Reply All fan and dismayed at the prospect that the podcast has lost its co-host over this weird, insular pseudo-scandal. Here are a few inconsistent, kneejerk impressions based on what I heard:

    A. The decision to exclusively include interviews with Bon Appetit employees of color (what a mouthful—sorry) seems like contrived ideological signaling that ultimately undermines both the journalistic completeness and rhetorical effectiveness of the reporting. I don’t even mean this in a “both sides” sense, as I have no doubt that the magazine’s workplace culture would have still seemed profoundly dysfunctional if they had allowed the white editors to share their perspective. This sort of framing just guarantees that the story told is going to be less nuanced and that some people (possibly the ones whose preconceptions would otherwise be most challenged) are going to immediately say, “oh, OK, I know what this is” and hit skip on Spotify. (I would have if it were my phone, and my car.)

    B. But I’ve seen exactly the kind of unspoken racism the interviewees describe in my own (limited) professional life. One of the warehouse staff at my former workplace (the same one I angst about elsewhere in this piece) was a Pakistini immigrant who had previously worked as an engineer but was unable to get hired to any comparable jobs in the US. He was, without a doubt, one of the hardest working, most dedicated employees we had, and yet, on the multiple occasions that I recommended that he be hired to fill better-paying open positions within the organization I was always told that he “wasn’t a good fit” on the basis of concerns about how he would interface with the volunteers. It was pretty transparent. (I’m just going to stick to this one example, because this supposed to be a fucking footnote, but this wasn’t an isolated incident. I’ve encountered comparable shit multiple times.)

    C. Having grown up poor in a poor town in a poor county and having worked in a non-profit where all of our clients (and many of our support staff and volunteers) were poor and knowing the constant degradation and insecurity that poverty entails, my appetite (I swear to god I am only catching these after I write them) for stories about the plight of graduates from elite universities who work for major publications that almost exclusively serve an upper middle class and rich audience is pretty god damn limited. Maybe this is the class equivalent of “I’m tired of hearing the opinions of white people!’ but, Jesus Christ, I don’t care. It makes my skin crawl.

    D. Fuck Bon Appetit. Fuck Slate. Fuck The New York Times. It would be in my best interest and in the best interest of all the writers and artists who have been pushed to the fringes of our cultural discourse—all the outsiders; all the people I actually love and respect—if these publications burned to the fucking ground. I don’t want more inclusive institutions. I want new ones. I don’t want to see myself and my friends better reflected in the people in power. I want to see myself and my friends in power. Period. Full stop.
    

14. Sorry man, I’m sure this article isn’t going to help.
15. This situation is so hilariously circular that I honestly have no idea how to describe it concisely. You’ll have to make do with the wording here or read the article I linked to. This one scares the shit out of me, as he was basically suspended without pay for discussing a hypothetical, for arguing about an abstraction. I’m conflicted about a lot of the subjects in this section, but not this one. I don’t see how this isn’t horrible for journalism.
16.  I had to navigate to the second page of Google News results on this topic before I found an article that I thought was largely free of incendiary culture war framing on the one hand or wishy-washy apologetics for the media’s rush-to-coverage on the other. Well, there were a couple of articles on the first page that seemed promising, but they were paywalled.
17. This seems like a problem that could easily be resolved by copyright reform. The issue here isn’t that publishers should be compelled to keep controversial works in print, it’s that culturally significant works shouldn’t be disappeared (or made rare or inaccessible) based on the whims of corporate taste and social pressure. Putting these works in the public domain would allow them to be preserved without the responsibility for preserving them resting on a single for-profit entity. Also, Dr. Seuss died thirty fucking years ago. There has to be a point at which the collective good outweighs the right of corporations and trust fund heirs to benefit off the sweat of dead artists.
18. [Apologies to Kurt Vonnegut. Wonder what he would have said about all of this nonsense. Honestly, it probably would have been more embarrassing than profound. But then is there any way to contend with all this noise that isn’t embarrassing? You try to scream over it or you stick your fingers in your ears and hope it stops. Either way you look ridiculous.]
19. Had this thought thought after receiving the following message from Rudy on Skype: “Republic Commando sounds like it should be a steampunk game where you play Civil War era commandos, but it’s not and that’s gay.” I was, like, damn, why aren’t there more video games about the Civil War? And then I thought, “Oh. Right.” (Republic Commando is, of course, a licensed game set in the Star Wars universe. Franchise trumps all.)
20. How badly will it shake, I wonder, on that (purely hypothetical) day when it has to hold a gun to my head?
21. A voice within me screams, “But I’m the topic!” Going to ignore it for now. If I can.
22. Memory, of course, is eager to confirm my biases. But what can you do? Stop writing and research? No. I’m on a roll.
23. My memory is hazy on exactly when, how, and why his book deal fell apart. Was it before or after his twitter ban? Was it unrelated to his expulsion from CPAC? Shhh, form demands three examples. I’m spinning a narrative here. Rumpelstiltskin, back again so soon.
24. I assume it was a joke. I often forget that Yiannopoulos was technically a pundit, not a comedian. Not that that distinction is meaningful anymore. And not that it would have insulated him from criticism in a time when the idea that comedians should strive to be provocative and leave their audiences startled and discomforted is concerned passé at best and [x]ist apologia at worst.
25.  Just tried to do due diligence and find an article so I could get the facts right about what, exactly, Milo said. Unfortunately, the productivity app that I use to limit distractions during my designated writing hours blocks news sites. Serendipity. [Update: I just tried to do it again and was foiled again. I’ve made a note to add a link eventually though, so this footnote is probably exceptionally confusing. Not taking it out. Sorry!]
26. Worth noting that this was in early 2017. The Trump Era was just beginning. I wonder if things would have played out differently now. Partisan polarization means the risks of punishing your allies is always too high, regardless of their offenses. (Is this true? Who know. Probably not. I like how it sounds though. Fuck it.)
27.  [History has repeats itself: After I wrote this section, rapper and activist Young Pharaoh was dropped from a speaking slot at CPAC after facing scrutiny for anti-semitic tweets. The theme of this year’s CPAC was, of course, “America Uncancelled.”]
28. The banning was arguably a catalyzing event for his fame. A martyrdom. It helped him break out, rather than silencing him. I’m repeating myself. I should just delete this footnote. If you’re reading this, I didn’t.
29. Wanted to use the word “scam” here. Was scared of the legal implications of doing so. Chickened out.
30. Doubling down on my word choice here. Sorry.
31.  [This was written before his speech at CPAC, obviously, but he’s still been pretty subdued relative to his past behavior.]
32. [Please don’t think I’m just picking on Democratic media here. You could sub Sean Hannity into this sentence with no loss of meaning. I’m using an example from my real life and the vast majority of my coworkers were Democrats. I couldn’t use my Trump-supporting parents here, because they actually spend a distressingly large amount of time online.]
33. Here’s a “Where Where When?” moment for our age: Where were you when CNN devoted a sizeable chunk of prime (advertiser-supported) airtime to an empty podium as they anticipated a Trump speech (and the record ratings that it would bring)? I was at my grandparent’s house. [I remember it! The empty podium on the tiny wall-mounted television in their kitchen. The pre-orgasmic speculation of the anchors.] Or, at least, I think I was. False memories exist, after all. Maybe this is a moment that seems so important in retrospect that my mind isn’t satisfied with the thought that I (who “cut the cord” long ago—no, correction: who has never had a cable TV subscription in his life) might have missed it. It’d be an odd coincidence for it to have happened during one of my rare holiday trips home. But, damn it, I remember it so clearly.
34.  [I moved in June, and registering and voting by mail in Virginia seemed opaque and frustrating. Also, I (correctly) believed it was a safe state for Biden and didn’t know enough about the downballet races to have an opinion on them. Also, I’m a lazy nihilist.]
35. Although I did start feeling intense anxiety in the weeks leading up to the election. I remember telling my therapist that I wasn’t afraid of Trump being reelected. I was afraid he would lose narrowly and then declare that the results were invalid. I said I didn’t think he’d be able to steal the election, which was the subject of much hand-wringing and speculation at the time, but that there would be increased unrest. I was afraid of civil war. (I really said all of this! I’m confident this isn’t hindsight bias. You can ask my therapist, though, of course, he has a professional responsibility not to discuss it.)
36. And I used to love talking about politics! I remember being four years old and fighting with my grandmother about Bush v. Dukakis. I was pro-Bush. I have no memory of why. I’m sure it was a totally arbitrary choice, or maybe just some instinctual, genetic desire to pick a fight. Anyway, I was a Republican until I became a college Marxist. Now I’m nothing. Don’t ask me about my principles. Ask me about the horse race. The fate of the free world is a sporting event. Or was. Now I’m scared all the time.
37. “No shit,” you probably whispered to yourself if you’ve read this far.
38. The last curse in the box.
39.  [Saw two tweets by Nate Silver this morning that reinforce one of my (entirely unoriginal) beliefs: Wokeness is mostly a mania of the rich. This explains why it has been so enthusiastically embraced by corporations and advertisers. The opinions of poor and working class people, regardless of color, are irrelevant when cultural influence is entirely a function of purchasing power.]
40.  [There was a time in my early twenties when I considered myself an anarcho-communist. Now I just consider myself.]
41. While my classmates were playing with army men, I was fantasizing about dodging the draft. I had elaborate daydreams about sailing a canoe across the Saint Lawrence River to Canada in the middle of the night to escape the call of duty.  (The monstrously successful video game franchise of that name hadn’t been released yet at this point in time. We only had Doom, which offered no moral or patriotic pretensions to soften its graphic violence. No ideology, just gibs.) It’s probably the only fantasy I’ve ever had that involved spending time in the wilderness.
    According to a (possible apocryphal) family story, my great-great-great-grandfather was conscripted to serve in the Czechloslovakian army and got on a boat to America instead. Cowardice is in my blood. Cowardice is thicker than blood.]
42. [Here’s a dumb philosophical hypothetical I posed to my roommate recently, in the middle of a particularly spiteful rant: If you had a lever, and every time you pulled it, your life got noticeably better and the lives of every other living human being got noticeably worse, would you pull it? “I would pull it,” I said. “I would pull it, again and again, until everyone else was dead and I was happy.”]
43. Read: reprobate.
44. Let me tell you one of the most vile. I was first told this joke by a half-native kid that lived down the street from me in the impoverished shithole town where I grew up in New York’s North Country. (So many states seem to have a North Country. If you’re unfamiliar with the term, it’s where the white trash lives.) You’ve probably heard it before, maybe many times (or maybe you grew up under very different circumstances). I think it’s the quintessential American joke. The only one that perfectly (and concisely) captures the absurdity and horror of our situation. It goes like this: “Hey, did you know that I have niggers in my family tree?” *pause for effect* “They’re still hanging there.”
45. [A treasured memory: My sister was home on break between semesters at an Ivy League university that I won’t name. She had heard that Rudy dropped out of college, and asked what he was doing. I told her that he had discovered a series of pro-life propaganda videos with footage of aborted fetuses recovered from Planned Parenthood dumpsters. The videos featured narration from a Richard Stack soundalike who described how each fetus had been dismembered and made comparisons to the Holocaust. Rudy would mute him, open WinAmp, and play “Hot Pants” by James Brown. He would watch the montage of varicose faces, tiny torsos, and little dead fists gripping tweezer arms while Brown shouted, “Oh! Bring it Home! Hit me! Get down!” “Jesus,” she grimaced. “Doesn’t he have any soul at all?” I knew the answer immediately. “He has James Brown.” Hit me.]
46. [She was so kind to me. Used to give me rides to work regularly. Called me her adopted grandson. Selflessly and constantly gave everything she could to everyone in her life. She was a devout Catholic, a saint. The only person who almost convinced me that there was something to the church besides institutional rot and an impotent hope to mitigate the horror of death. I didn’t talk to her for a few months after I left my job, fleeing hundreds of miles south with my fear and resentment in pursuit (imagine “Bonaparte’s Retreat” playing comically here). I finally called her on Christmas Day, 2019—after sending her a Christmas card and receiving a letter in return in which she asked why it had been so long since she heard from me—about two weeks before she died. She sounded tired and sad. She told me the situation at work had only gotten worse. I wrote a eulogy for her, but I didn’t go to the funeral. I didn’t want to see everyone again, to be reminded of everything I had finally escaped. My hatred was stronger than my grief, stronger than my love. She died of a heart attack. The last year of her life was so stressful. I wonder if I could have helped if I had stayed, if my leaving exacerbated an already tense situation, if my cowardice contributed to her death. Here’s a cliché: I could have written. I could have called. I could have paid my respects.]
47. [She had been in a nursing home for a couple of years, following a long period of physical and mental decline. She was usually confused, slept most of the time. My parents went to visit her a few months before she died, and asked if I wanted to join them. I declined. I didn’t call her either. I don’t think I spoke to her at all in the year before her death. I told myself she wasn’t lucid, that she wouldn’t understand me, wouldn’t know me. I was scared. I guess. For years she hoarded cats, until my uncle moved her into a condo, which she then filled with unopened QVC packages. She was paranoid, sure her neighbors were scheming against her. She was into progressive politics, and used to send me books by Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren. When I was a kid, she would buy me all the video game consoles that my parents were too poor to afford. Writing this, I see myself, and understand exactly what I was scared of.]
48. [He killed himself in the midst of some bullshit twitter controversy I gleefully participated in. [He got in a nasty fight with someone over some nebulous problematic lit controversy, the exact details of which I struggle to remember now, possibly didn’t understand then, and she doxxed him, dug up his arrest records, and called on the publications that had published him to disavow him. (I left her message request in my inbox untouched. One of the few moments in this piece where I can say that I did the right thing.) I didn’t reach out to him. Didn’t say anything. Started to distance myself from the situation when I saw it was getting ugly, even though I had been tweeting catty shit for days before, sniping at those who I thought were my artistic enemies, those who I considered censors and puritans. I issued a sorry-not-sorry apology that I won’t link to here, because I’m ashamed of it—ashamed of my actions and ashamed that I apologized for them—and swore to dramatically scale back my social media usage. Another editor told me about the suicide. (He, unlike me, took the time to get to know his writers. Stayed in touch. Understood their humanity.) I still don’t know how he did it. I couldn’t find an obituary. We had the same first name. I’m sorry, Will. I’m sorry, Will.]
49. [Cancer. She beat it. It came back. The first time it was slow. The second time it was fast. She was a wonderful person. Compassionate. Patient. Full of empathy. Put her children first. Put her family first. Everything you normally say in a eulogy, only this time around there’s no dishonesty. During the early months of the pandemic, before the cancer returned, she would do all the shopping for my grandparents, both in their 80s, run any and every conceivable errand for them, so they wouldn’t have to put themselves at risk of exposure. I tried to do the right thing, to not repeat the callousness I showed my grandmother. I called her when she was in the hospital. I told her we were all thinking of her, hoping for the best. She sounded so weak, so tired. It was awkward. I don’t know what good, if any, it did. She died just before Thanksgiving. I went home. There wasn’t a funeral.]
50.  Well, my grandmother died in a New York nursing home, so we’ll probably never know for sure. [Update: Cuomo now says he’s a victim of cancel culture. Poor R. Budd Dwyer. If only he had known. There’s no need to blow your brains out when you have a magic bullet in the camber.]
51. I sometimes google his name followed by “obituary.” No luck yet.
52. Well, anxiety does the trick too. Sometimes.
53. [In this context, “morning” means around 3 pm. The afternoon doesn’t start until I’m showered and dressed. My sleep schedule is a mess. Last night I went to sleep around 3 am and woke up around 11 am. I’m not working. I’m not writing. None of this is healthy.]
54.  I’m going to avoid using names in this section and omit any details I don’t think are absolutely (or at least artistically) necessary to tell the story I feel emotionally compelled to tell. My desire here is to get this shit out so maybe I can move on from it and to provide some personal perspective for my complicated feelings about the eponymous subject of this article. That said, an entry level googler could probably find all the information I’ve withheld fairly easily. If you do so, I ask that you show restraint in how you use that information, though, honestly, I have no reason to expect that you will.
55. [A year earlier I published a satirical faux-clickbait article on this site entitled “5 Places I See Every Day (Where I Would Love to Hang Myself).” It’s our most viewed piece of content ever. Two of the five places were at my office. How could I not have seen that he was suicidal? So much of my life is suicide. So much of my brand is suicide.]
56. I could write so much more. Objectively, it’s a compelling story, probably more compelling than anything I’ve actually written about here. And including the details would definitely make this piece richer and more complex, would provide a different perspective on some of the subjects and themes I’m exploring here … But I won’t do it. He’s dead, and his family has suffered enough. Even without using names, I understand that my words could have consequences and I’m not willing to risk inflicting more distress on his family.
57.  I joked about this shit  too! Except I told my jokes to Rudy (and a couple of other friends) over Skype, not at work. Somehow that shit hits differently when it’s your boss. I know, I know. This entire piece is a testament to my hypocrisy.
58.  Not going to get into the substance of them here, because I’m trying to avoid bogging this already too long section down with a bunch of detail. They mostly had to do with the organization’s tenuous economic position, whether the funds actually existed to compensate staff, and whether some lingering insurance issues might make it illegal for us to reopen at all. The board did not have answers to these questions at the time, so being asked them obviously made them uncomfortable.
59. This was definitely an imperfect system, but it was a consistent one that made it easy to determine whether an applicant was eligible to receive our help, and “easy” was important as we had an extremely tiny staff,  were constantly starved for time and resources, and had a massive client waiting list.
60. Anxiety, anxiety, anxiety.
61. He told me a story once about how his father would beat his ass for tapping a spoon against his teeth, because he hated the sound. (My own father, furious, after I talked back to him: “If I spoke to my dad like that, I’d be holding my teeth.”)
62. [One of the first things our negligent-board-member-turned-executive-director told us when we reopened was that we were not to talk to the press about anything that happened. If we did, he flatly told us, we’d be fired.]
63. [Yes, I reinstalled twitter.]
64. [LOL!]
65. [I’m taking too much credit here. Shit, my ego is showing again. Sorry.]
66. [Sorry everyone, I know most of your suggestions have gone unheeded. I just need to get this thing out, out, out.]
67. [Imagine me, talking to my therapist, trying to explain that every March, around the beginning of Daylight Savings Time, I get anxious and manic, and then, inevitably, I start to have cold/flu symptoms and end up spending like four days in bed. “Do I feel sick mentally because I’m getting sick physically?,” I ask. “Or does my mental illness cause me to get physically ill?” “Maybe you have allergies,” he offers.]
68. Is it just me, or do mass murders seem to disproportionately happen during the spring? Briefly considered writing a Swiftian thinkpiece for our April “Hoaxes” theme entitled “The Only Way to Prevent Spree Killings Is to Eliminate Daylight Savings Time.” Probably a good thing I didn’t.]
69. [The living one, obviously.]