It was earlier today that I realized that for the last two months, I've been experiencing the worst depression I’d experienced since I began this project two years ago. I was biking in one of my regular public parks. I adore public parks - I don’t know how any urbanite can stay sane without them, and I’d happily spend a few hours in one every day. If London is my favorite city, it’s in no small part because 40% of the city is parks. Baltimore has a number of beautiful ones that are only dangerous after dark. And as I biked around the lake of this particular park at about seven-o’clock, I was doing my best to shut my brain off. There was simply far too much emotional stress in the preceding two weeks, and if I want my brain to function like something resembling a normal adult, I need those rides to calm down. After three laps around the lake, I saw the exit to the connecting main road, and slowed down so that my split-second decision as to whether to take a fourth lap could become a five second one. Within those five seconds, a hyper-athletic biker careened right next to me at at least four times my speed. I didn’t see him coming, I only heard him screaming in the second before impact as I turned toward the main road. By some miracle, he dodged me with what must of been only a tenth-of-a-second to spare. He kept biking, I shouted “Are you OK” to him, and he gave me his index and middle fingers as though to make a peace sign.
The other biker didn’t seem too shaken up. He looked quite macho, and had probably been in many close calls before, and maybe a few real crashes too. Perhaps he took this near-accident as a badge of honor, or at least a nice adrenalin rush. This was hardly my first close call either. I’d nearly been hit by a Jeep on the one day I’d forgotten my helmet, he screeched to a halt and barely brushed against my calf. A few months ago I reached for my water bottle during a downhill ride and broke too suddenly, my upper half careened in front of my bike and the bike landed between my legs. I gave myself a bruise the length of my entire inner thigh which didn’t heal for a month.
But it was only on this particular close call that I felt discouraged enough to entertain the thought of quitting biking. I’d long since realized that when riding a bike, my daydreamer self is a moving target for cars. Why try to live when every attempt ends up feeling like living death? This was just another in a series of rather pretty terrifying disappointments. For the last two weeks, I’d barely spoken to family because of another in a long series of rows, and thus have no work to do during the day. In the last week, I’d had ample reason to feel unappreciated by friends and harried at my regular musical job. For reasons passing my understanding, my phone had stopped working since Saturday, my laptop no longer had a working chord and had two minutes of battery. My apartment remains an unconquerable mess, the tics which periodically make me look like a freak are asserting their control of my face, and my hands and arms tremble for no reason. I have daily pain in my chest area which two cardiologists over the last five years have assured me is not heart pain, but even if it isn’t, my heart constantly races at the slightest exertion, I have low blood pressure which results in vertigo-like symptoms, and I have a constant shortness of breath which is either caused by a light social smoking habit or the massive amounts of food I find myself unable to stop ingesting due to it being the most reliable pleasure in my life. By this evening, any sense I’d developed that there are consolations in life which balance out the daily disappointments had nearly vanished.
I had already determined that I was the most depressed I'd been in two years when I arrived at my parents’ house around ten o’clock to check email, only to discover that in the intervening day, my email account stopped accepting my password and my blog had apparently been deleted. Furthermore, since my phone wasn’t working, I couldn’t access my verification code. Eight years of writing is stored on that email account with nary a backup - blogposts, potential blogposts, notes for books and novels I’d be lucky to ever finish, tens of thousands of of personal correspondence documents, deeply personal letters to and from me which I’ll always value, deeply meaningful emails and recorded g-chats which I’ll remember to the day I die.
And I wanted to die tonight. I wanted to more than merely die. I wanted to blot out any trace of my existence. I wanted no one to remember the most important drama of our time: The Humiliation of Evan Tucker - The Brilliant Moron, a comedy laughed at uproariously by everyone but him in which he has the intelligence to move in circles where he can watch nearly everyone he knows seem blessed with all the joys of work, love, and family, but be utterly incapable of any of that himself. If the blog had disappeared, nearly every trace to the world that I’d done something meaningful with my adult life would disappear with it. If my emails had disappeared, nearly every trace to me that I’d done something meaningful with my adult life would disappear with it. I would have definitive proof that any and all striving I do to create a meaningful life will inevitably come to nothing. The world is what it is.
I doubt it could ever be any great tragedy to anyone but me if this page vanished without a trace. I’m a good writer, and there’s no sense in pretending I couldn’t do what many famous writers do, and maybe I could do it a little better. But I’m not a great writer, and I doubt I’ll ever be one. A great writer has a humanity which I lack. It’s there somewhere in me, but that humanity seems too poisoned by anger to surface often enough to make it to the page in a meaningful way. My life has made me too narcissistic, too cynical, too despairing, to have much which is hopeful to say, or to like human beings enough to think that they deserve hope.
When I read real masters: masters like Chekhov, or Turgenev, or Chaucer, or Shakespeare, or Willa Cather, or Philip Roth, or Saul Bellow, or Kafka, or Wordsworth, or Tennyson, or Frost, or Montaigne, or Stefan Zweig, or Eric Hoffer, or Isaiah Berlin, or many more I haven’t read yet, I see exactly what I lack, as all competent writers would. I see it because reading true masters like them gives me hope that I’d otherwise never have - hope that someone, somewhere, understands what it’s like to be me. There are a number of things which give me the strength to keep writing, but there must be a reason that writing’s become my definitive activity rather than something else - there must be an example powerful enough to move me to write every day.
When I began this ‘800 Words’ project two years ago, I was utterly despondent. Like a bourgeois 19th century convalescent for whom the ‘vapours’ simply weren’t enough, I was living on the side of a lake (actually a salt-pond). Until that summer, I was living ‘at home’ with my parents, and driving down to Washington DC a few times every week to party. I was working in Pikesville with my father and brother to start up an investment and real estate business. The three of us lived under the same roof with my mother, and we fought, as always, like cats and dogs. And in an irony worthy of Ionesco, the heavy plaster ceiling of our central living room which divided the part of the house where I lived from the part where the rest of my family lived was caving in. We had to move to a second house my parents had recently bought in Bethany Beach, Delaware.
At that point, I didn’t really care where I lived, and I suppose I was relieved to get away from my typical reality. There was certainly an initial shock which began to depress me two years ago (and isn’t it always the same shock...), but depression takes on a life of its own very quickly, and does so completely without warning. Depression is a second person warring for control of you, and as in any war, the stakes are two narratives which vie for posterity. One narrative is that of a sunny, well-reasoned pollyanna, who like most emotionally healthy people, goes through life giving himself the benefit of the doubt, and putting the most charitable possible interpretation on his actions. We all do it, and we couldn’t get through many days without it. The other narrative is that of the unconscious cassandra, who seeps into your life unawares, and gathers together a dossier of all those discarded thoughts of guilt and shame brought upon you humiliation-by-humiliation. Inevitably, the humiliation is your fault, not theirs. And what’s worst about this war is that all those emotionally healthy people, unwittingly putting a charitable spin upon their actions, would probably agree with you that it was in large part your own fault if your humiliations involved them.
But in retrospect, I wonder if that summer was not the greatest summer of my life. Not a single friend visited me there, but I was more at peace than I’d been in years, and probably much more at peace than I realized. Fearing a double-dip recession, my father divested himself of all his holdings, and we had very little to do from day to day in the most peaceful surroundings I’ve ever known. From day to day, I saw them all very little in this obscenely large townhouse. I was free to listen to music, to read, to watch movies, to take walks, and to bike everywhere within 15 miles of where we lived. Every day we’d have eggs for breakfast, salad for lunch, and fish for dinner. By the end of the summer, I was lighter, fitter, sun-kissed, and ready to move into Baltimore - the city of my youth, but a city I knew not at all.
It was while I was down in Bethany that I decided to begin a project that I’d long thought about but never truly went about fulfilling. I’ve kept this blog for nearly five years, but until that summer in Bethany I never used it for more than the occasional long post. I used this blog most often as a storehouse for youtube videos I liked. When I conducted Voices of Washington, I kept a different kind of blog which was closer in spirit to this one, but still far away.
I wanted to make a habit of writing. In a life with so many unfinished projects, a life that had so few constants, I wanted to keep at one thing, do it well, do it diligently, and master it before I quit. Over the years I’ve quit studying six instruments, six languages, and four college majors. I’ve quit on starting a theater troupe in college, and quit on forming a well-sustained chorus in Washington DC. I’ve quit applying to graduate school in conducting and composition, I’ve quit applying for writing jobs at magazines and newspapers both major and minor, and I’ve quit a year into graduate study in political science. I’ve quit on trying to make many relationships happen, I’ve quit on trying to make many friendships work, and occasionally I’ve even tried to quit on family. And then there are the jobs... we won’t get into that right now....
I don’t know if keeping on any of those pursuits might have saved me from an entire youth’s worth of heartache. But what I do know is that by starting this blog when I did, the blog saved me. The world is what it is, but it is a very large place, and there’s far too much of it to be curious about to always feel bad about it. I think anybody who spends fifteen minutes in my company knows that depression is an acquired quality of mine, not an inherent one. I am, allegedly, not a manic depressive, but except for when I can't, I can enjoy life as well as anybody in the world. I, of course, eat and drink with gusto, I'm excellent company if I do say so, and I'm a writer who converses basically as he writes - torrentially and openly. Depression is not the malady of those who hate life, depression is the malady of those who love it, and my love of life can only increase by the writing which you'll find here. There is always something new to write about, and there are dozens of posts still not yet completed, hundreds of ideas for posts which I’ve never yet started work, and thousands which I may yet think of. This blog has been the first thing I think of when I get up in the morning, and the last when I go to bed. The best of me is here (and, sadly, much of the worst too...), and if I ever need evidence that my life has any purpose or meaning, it’s all here. Tonight was, without a doubt, the very worst I’ve felt since I started this blog. I anticipate that the shocks of tonight will contain many aftershocks. The acid test of whether this blog was truly worth saving tonight is whether it can now save me again.
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