Catching up
Now that I have one-hundred subscribers, I can delude myself into a reverse parasocial relationship in which I imagine that you all care deeply about my personal life and want some account of my short absence.
Well, as I implied elsewhere, just before I took a break, the Feds asked me to rebrand as a right-wing Twitter figure, “Leadbrah,” evangelizing about the benefits of lead exposure for the development of proper masculinity. In collusion with Big Pharma, the government tried to ban lead and pathologize its strong, masculinizing effects as “violent impulses,” “criminal behavior,” and “mental impairment” to produce a generation of weak, feminized, unleaded boys, easy to manipulate and control, etc., etc. I posted photos of my Brita pitcher to the TL with a chunk of lead where the filter would go and quote-tweeted videos of goofy zoomer boys with the tagline “Unleaded behavior.” It went okay, and I’ll have a minor crime wave named after me like a hurricane in five to ten years.
Assignments from my handlers came in one after another. To radicalize the alienated youth, I had to post on incel forums about how much skinny white girl pussy I got in my early twenties from performing slam poetry in Philadelphia bars: I’m a grad student / rad student / fucked your dad in drag student / left your baby in the car while I went to get the bag student. I parlayed the experience into a writing credit on an upcoming Taylor Swift song for contributing the lines: I’m your dark academia daydream / Reading books is amazing. Both jobs deeply validated my Ph.D. in English. But I couldn’t relish my achievement for long because I had to create a series of Instagram Reels telling men it’s normal to have gay thoughts from time to time. It isn’t, and we did create blackmail out of anyone who responded affirmatively. Not before I slid into their DMs. As my grandfather always said, Turn ’em then burn ’em.
It’s a bit of a blur after that. I interrupted a BLM rally with pro-circumcision activists, flooded Brony Discord channels with hand-drawn donkey porn, and caused a detransitioner to relapse on estrogen.
In short, the 4HL never ends. You just have to take it one day after another. But for now, I have time to write again while I’m on standby until June. At that point I’ve been ordered to alter Wells Fargo’s Twitter name ever so slightly and tweet out the message, We’re proud to reclaim the word this Pride Month. Nothing but time until then.
What I was NOT doing
Catching up on my reading list
Taking on more work after my coworker’s retirement
Withdrawing from Lexapro
What if it doesn’t hit the same way?
The original draft of this post spanned 3,000 words, with an additional 1,500 cut out, exclusively discussing American and online politics. I threw out the draft because I promised myself that, as an act of mercy toward both of us, I wouldn’t write about politics this year. It also turned out that other people were on a similar beat, which sucks. Still, for the sickos in the audience, I thought I’d preserve the major points of the original:
It’s the internet, stupid
Perhaps only in retrospect, the early Trump years had a delicious intensity to them. No matter where you stood on the political spectrum, you had a buffet of strong emotions always within reach: joy, vindication, sadism, depression, self-righteousness, fear, anger, indignation, suspense, horror, etc. It was also the period when the internet came alive—tweets became headlines, podcasts filtered into everyday life, guys in the back of class became incels—and when we say that the internet is dead now, this is the period we’re measuring it against (or at least the crest of the wave from the years immediately before it). For a certain type of person (examples 1 and 2), regardless to whether they admit it, Trump’s promise or threat has nothing to do with the achievement of his political goals, but whether he can make the internet feel fun again. And that seems unlikely. Show’s over.
The reactionary mind reconsidered
I went into a distended discussion of an incredibly minor, self-described (because God knows I don’t use this word) based Catholic man on Instagram who said that leftist culture forces you to live under its thumb by fearing cancellation, going to college, and working a job you don’t love to provide for yourself and your family. This led me to reflect on Corey Robin’s whole thing that conservatism isn’t a coherent ideology of its own but a pattern of reactions against equality and emancipation. Thing is, I’m not even sure the latter is true anymore.
I’m not a left-wing apologist—just a cool, non-ideological book guy you can’t ever get mad at—but it takes non-Euclidean geometry to suss out the connection between living under left-wing tyranny and working a boring job. My best guess: Andrew Tate suggests that 9-to-5 jobs are part of the soporific effects of the Matrix, which is the reality that the left-wing coerces people into in order to control them. (I’m really at the point of begging people to read Adorno.) Or perhaps that leftists outsourced meaningful jobs to China and replaced them with bullshit managerial ones that promote, instill, and/or mandate corporate-leftist values??
In any case, the point I’m trying to make is that the logic of reaction, the movement from A to B back to A, is barely visible anymore. Contra Robin, the Right seems to react not to Left’s political project, such as it exists, but to the liberal-left as a vibe. (Arguably, the only thing the Right has going for it is that it isn’t the Left—which ain’t nothing and, in fact, may even have the appeal of an emancipatory project.) Tellingly, a certain stripe of right-winger or “heterodox” pundit uses “leftist” the way leftists use “neoliberalism” as an endlessly plastic pejorative, i.e., anything I don’t like = leftist. This means that everything is potentially leftist, which causes the Right to sputter and flinch at random shit. Ultimately, it may curtail the Right’s political force, which is likely to diminish in the middle term anyway as boomers die, but it redounds to the Right’s growing indie media ecosystem, which requires endless grist to turn into content.
The based Catholic convert also posts videos where he fat-shames priests. I just can’t take your homilies as seriously if you’re out of shape. Lmao. Converts, man—no chill.
Modern trad life
I know I should dismiss it as a banal ideological inconsistency typical of youth, but I keep toying with this contradiction I see all the time in the right-wing zoomer gym guy space: They watch Fight Club and seem to want both the IKEA apartment and getting hit in the face by their hot male friends. They love the line about society forcing them to buy shit they don’t need, but they also need to become millionaires—billionaires, ideally—asap. They want Tradition but also the free market. Religious orthodoxy but not indoctrination. Truly, the children of Evola and Calvin Klein®.
The Christian spirit
From an early draft: “Even though [Corey] Robin’s thesis explains it, there’s still something so incoherent to me about such people. [Madison] Cawthorn’s the sort of person whose Christian principles are undoubtedly compatible with sex on the first date, but never homosexuality, even in unbelievably hot circumstances, e.g., you’re in the locker room after practice and the team captain, two years older than you, comes up to you fresh from the showers, the only thing clinging tighter to his skin than the smell of Old Spice (Fiji) is the too-small towel around his waist and he leans close to you and you try not to admire the dip between his pecs, the thin hairs growing there, and he says you should come over to his place later to blow off some steam so your head’s in the game before the big match Friday night and you want him so bad you can’t even breathe or say yes but God you want him like your lungs want air. Not that hypocrisy is new to Christians, but does Christianity mean anything to him or is it purely a symbolic attachment? It doesn’t seem necessary to even provide the moral foundation for reactionary politics, which liberalism withholds.”
Proof that I’ve read a book before
Roberto Bolaño’s Nazi Literature of the Americas, as tedious as it is to read, does feel like the most fitting book for our moment. It’s a compendium of fictional far-right writers and illuminates something about the current Right: its fanaticism, its bizarreness, its lack of cohesion. Bolaño’s post-ironic satire raises the correct questions; among them: How are these people winning? Wait, are they? Would they even know?
The end of metapolitics
I’m beginning to suspect there’s a movement within the Online-ish Right, beneath the spectacle of the culture war, to give up on Gramscian metapolitics—gaining political power by winning over culture—and turn toward a kind of secular, often individualized Benedict option to create a subculture in lieu of a constitutionally impossible national divorce or institutional domination. All you can do is refuse to submit to whatever arbitrary cultural erratum you determine to mean submission.
*
What’s that like, 800 words? Whew.
The takeaway
The thing is, there will be no collective return to sanity. This fantasy hinges on the 20th-century phantasm of the mass society, which won’t return, such as it ever existed, and the conceptual obsolescence of which we have yet to fully fathom. Its shadow looms over us like a dead god. The problems we say are of the moment—tribalism, misinformation, culture wars, endless takes—have no solutions outside of severe censorship, the destruction of the internet, or collective epiphanies and should be regarded not as temporary sicknesses but as permanent features of contemporary life, “the new normal.” Which is depressing as hell, so you really have to learn to be discerning or find a girlfriend or maybe, idk, a cute 6’3” book guy who lies about being vers or something. I won’t say that politics are pointless, but I think it’s unclear, or perhaps just hard to accept, what outcomes still even exist.
The Porch Life
No more of that.
My new thing is to spend as much time on my porch as possible—which has been a challenge and a necessity thanks to all the rain in New England over the past month. I grew a few plants that supposedly ward off mosquitoes and bought a zero-gravity reclining chair on sale. Now I vaguely watch the squirrels and think. I ruminate on the Trump years. I make half-hearted resolutions to jerk off more. I rewrite that Honor Levy short story in my head to see if it might be salvaged if every instance of “is canceled” were replaced by “gives cunt.” I contemplate whether my Turkish neighbor, whose porch abuts mine and who sometimes passes weekend mornings there, would mind if I sunned my balls. I imagine him joining me, both of us sitting in perfect silence with our balls out, him smoking a joint and me reading a book on our respective porches. Harmonious male companionship.
There’s peace in experiencing the life of the mind when you’re so dumb and all your thoughts are essentially shitposts. Back when I taught, I observed a type of student who jokes because he doesn’t have anything interesting to say; wit is a ready substitute for substance. I used to think it was an intellectual vice, but anymore, I’m like, just tell me a good joke. I’m just trying to have a good time.
But consider—
Max gives cunt. Oliver gives cunt. Kian gives cunt. Evelyn gives cunt. Gideon gives cunt. Rob gives cunt. Bryce gives cunt. Carter gives cunt. These are names of people I have met. Names of people who have given cunt and stayed giving cunt.
Lexapro, 0mg
To say I was “withdrawing” from Lexapro overstates the severity of my symptoms. I’ve been tapering from 10mg (already down from 30mg) over an eight-week period to limit the severity to chronic tiredness and failed lifts. It was necessary to stretch the discontinuation period over this length because I took Lexapro for more than four years and withdrawal from long-term SSRI use can be a bitch (symptoms include “brain zaps”). That said, no amount of SSRI discourse has convinced me that they were a bad decision for me personally. I’d say I had an 8/10 experience—some daytime sleepiness and minor dick problems on higher doses, but w/e: both were side-effects of aging anyway. Before starting Lexapro, I did have a severe allergic reaction to Zoloft, which was immensely funny to me, not only because I had so much serotonin buildup in my brain that I was effectively on ecstasy and thought everything was funny, including the ER at 3 am, but also because being severely allergic to antidepressants felt very on-brand.
Just to be clear, I understand these drugs have limits and risks, permanent ones in rare occasions, and am wary of their overprescription, but I had also reached the point where I was tired of drinking shitty chamomile tea and felt that I had learned every existential lesson there was to learn about anxiety. I also hated my therapist, who dressed like a Maxxinista and had a generic painting of snowy birch trees on her office wall that almost inspired a Dorian Gray situation. A miscommunication over scheduling led me to ghost her, which felt morally whatever.
When the opportunity arose, I was eager to try SSRIs. I was fascinated by them and saw them as both a remedy and an experiment in selfhood. Perhaps more than most drugs, SSRIs evoke a set of ontological questions about the self. In Better Than Well, Carl Elliott muses on the common refrain you hear from users that SSRIs make them “feel more like themselves.” It has several interesting implications (ignore Elliott—I’m just going to riff instead of responsibly checking my notes from several years ago). The first: the self is a feeling. The second: it’s a specific feeling, one that can be augmented or lost amid others, which are disavowed as the self despite emanating from the same sources. The third: the feeling of the self isn’t necessarily something immanent, even enduringly natural, to oneself—i.e., neurobiological mechanisms can stop producing the chemical conditions you recognize as your self—and can be invoked through external means, e.g., SSRIs. Unlike other drugs, which can raise these questions, SSRIs sustain this altered, or restored, self. And there’s something so curious about it, really: how a single pill, just twenty milligrams, can reweave the fabric of your being, sometimes in unique ways, and help to hold it there at an ontological level.
You also learn something about your psychology in the process. A strange revelation I had is that, on Lexapro, I found it easier to be meaner. No longer hypersensitive to anxiety, I wouldn’t feel the same sense of guilt from being mean to someone nor would obsess over missteps, or potential missteps, after leaving a conversation, playing them over and over and seeking out the worst possible interpretation of what I said or did, even if I didn’t intend to be mean. It was truly disconcerting to find that my sense of morality stems from a fear of repercussions rather than, like, ~character~. It was nice to live with the fiction that I did good things or avoided bad things because I had a good heart, a steadfast character, and deep respect for other people. But knowing that my morality emanates from fear, a deeply narcissistic fear, is uncomfortable and unflattering.
Like, what do you do with that insight? It’s been four years, and I’m still a dick.
I don’t have a complex reason for discontinuing Lexapro and have no grand moral tale about capitalist realism, Big Pharma, and/or gender(??) to weave out of my experience. Simply put, I suspect I no longer have the sort of life that stirs up anxiety as much as I once did. And so I’m on a curious venture back to some pre-Lexapro ontological state, just ten milligrams removed from who I have been and how I have been living. We’ll see how it goes.
Shoutout
to the one guy who sent me a shirtless gym progress pic. He’s strong and sexy and, frankly, the only one of you bitches who’s going to make it.
Maybe it was because I lived in Seattle at the time, but 2016 for me was the lowest American culture ever dipped in my lifetime, and it didn’t come up for even the tiniest bit of air until 2021ish. Things are gonna have to get really bad for me to feel the tiniest bit of nostalgia for that era.