Helen H. Moore's Blog, page 907
December 31, 2015
The birth of “extreme cinema”: “The Revenant” is an endurance test of suffering for Leonardo DiCaprio — and moviegoers. But for what?
In “The Revenant,” suffering is an extreme sport. No character in film history has been put through quite as much pain and turmoil as Hugh Glass, Leonardo DiCaprio’s nearly wordless protagonist, endures over the course of two-and-a-half blood-soaked hours. Let us count the many labors of Leonardo DiCaprio (major spoiler alert): Survives being mauled by a bear Groans in pain as his tattered body is stitched back together Almost dies but then doesn’t Witnesses his son being stabbed to death in front of him Nearly drowns in a river while fleeing the arrows of an angry horde of Native Americans Drives his horse off a giant cliff and hits a very tall tree, falling 60-ish feet to the ground Stays alive by eating twigs and rotting meat Takes shelter in the carcass of a dead horse Has his ear bitten off and his hand stabbed during an altercation Did we mention he has a dead wife and that the film also features a scalping and castration by shotgun? In one scene, Glass lights a fire to cauterize the wound on his neck with gunpowder, lifting a nearly identical scene from "Rambo III" where Sylvester Stallone illustrates that he doesn’t need medical care. He can tend to his own injuries! To further prove his unassailable manliness, Rambo also gives himself stitches in “First Blood.” In “The Revenant,” every scene is that scene—except instead of suffering for his masculinity, DiCaprio is killing himself for the sake of “art.” The set for the “The Revenant,” directed by Alejandro González Iñárritu, wasn’t any friendlier. “Given cinematographer Emmanuel ‘Chivo’ Lubezki's decision only to use natural light, there was a short window each day when the production could film,” said the Hollywood Reporter’s Kim Masters. Because the film takes place in the tundra-like conditions of French Canada in the 1820s, Lubezki and his team were forced to film on multiple continents, constantly chasing the most appropriately snowy conditions to shoot in. DiCaprio was forced to eat raw bison liver and wade through frozen rivers, reportedly risking hypothermia and even death. Those might seem like absurd lengths to go just to film a movie, but in today’s cinema, the extreme is becoming commonplace. In a crowded marketplace, filmmakers are being pushed to increasing extremes to stand out. After all, “The Revenant” wasn’t the only 2015 film that pushed its actors to the brink: In “Mad Max: Fury Road,” director George Miller reportedly shot more than 400 hours of footage in the harsh conditions of the Namib Desert; the production was forced to relocate from New South Wales after an unusual amount of rainfall made the landscape too lush—not a great stand-in for the post-apocalypse. Let’s not forget that the action itself was a nearly impossible feat to pull off. “Fury Road” consists of what is nearly one unbroken chase scene, most of which takes place on enormous two-ton rigs, complete with heavy metal guitar players blasting enormous flames as they rock out. If film critics called “Mad Max: Fury Road” a miracle, that’s because on top of being one of the great films of the year—or any year—it’s a wonder the movie ever got finished at all. Miller has been working on the damn thing since it was originally planned as a TV series back in the mid-'90s. It’s been in production so long that it was delayed both by Heath Ledger’s death and Sept. 11. These past few years have witnessed the birth of an “extreme cinema,” where filmmakers like Miller and Iñárritu are increasingly testing the boundaries of the medium. To make “The Walk” and “Gravity,” Robert Zemeckis and Alfonso Cuarón had to invent their own technology to take us on a tightrope across the twin towers and deep into the darkness of space, respectively. Richard Linklater’s “Boyhood” rewrote the rules of what film narrative could do by condensing 12 years of a life that appears to unfold before your eyes. It’s impossible to divorce these films from the way they are made. When viewing a film like “Boyhood”—or even Iñárritu’s own “Birdman”—you are taking part in an experiment as much as you are watching the action unfold on-screen. But what makes “Boyhood” so effective is that its process serves a distinct purpose, other than drawing attention to the filmmakers’ craft in pulling off the stunt. Film critic David Edelstein put it best in a review for New York magazine. After seeing “Boyhood,” he wrote: “I know movies can do something that just last week I didn’t. They can make time visible.” “Boyhood” makes extreme cinema into a form of poetry, but too often process-oriented films do more than let the ends justify the means. The means are the only real justification for the film at all. In an acute example, let’s take “The Human Centipede”: What is the purpose of a movie like “The Final Sequence,” the third and final entry in Tom Six’s unlikely ass-to-mouth franchise? The only reason it exists at all is to top previous entries in the series, staging a 500-person centipede as massive as it is horrifically appalling. Why make “A Serbian Film” or “Hostel Part II”? But the torture porn isn’t alone in struggling to transcend its process. Last year’s “Birdman”—the reigning Oscar-winner for best picture—is a film entirely driven by spectacle. The film appears to unfold in a single, uninterrupted take (aping one-shot movies like “Russian Ark”), seamlessly edited by Emmanuel Lubezki (again) to give the appearance of continuity. It’s a gorgeous ballet of virtuoso camerawork, and star Michael Keaton told Entertainment Weekly that the filming put an enormous burden on the cast and crew. “Anything—a misremembered line, an extra step taken, a camera operator stumbling on a stair or veering off course or out of focus—could blow a take, rendering the first several minutes unusable even if they had been perfect,” he said. All of that effort should be in service of greater meaning. What are Lubezki’s cameras searching in Broadway’s backstages? For a movie that intends to say so much—about celebrity in the age of social media and our desire to be remembered—it’s a commentary on the entertainment industry that’s surprisingly short on commentary. Although Gawker’s Rich Juzwiak called the ideas in “Birdman” “muddled,” even that’s a bit charitable. Because the film is constantly in motion, it never takes the time to stop on any of its many themes—presumably because meaning is somewhat beside the point. In “Birdman,” a message is attached to the mirror in Riggan’s (Michael Keaton) dressing room: “A thing is a thing, not what is said of that thing.” Therein lies the problem with extremophilia—at its worst, it not only says nothing but insists that it’s not the film’s responsibility to say something. In Iñárritu’s world, the artist’s job is to push boundaries, not to ask questions; he goes for broke instead of wondering why something is broken. I agree that not every film needs to be a grand statement on man’s purpose (if every movie were “The Tree of Life,” I’d throw myself off a cliff with Hugh Glass’ horse), but the form should have some kind of substance. Otherwise, why bother spending $135 million to trek into the wilderness in 40-degree below weather? If “The Revenant” has a theme, it’s about as intelligible as most of its protagonist’s dialogue. For all the poetic, haunting images captured by Lubezki’s arresting gaze, Iñárritu adds little of his own poetry to the mix; the movie basically amounts to a really arty episode of “Running Wild With Bear Grylls.” When Iñárritu described his filmmaking process to the Hollywood Reporter, he said that he knew it would be controversial (many on set quit while filming), but the extremity would prove worth it. “When you see the film, you will see the scale of it,” he told THR. “And you will say, ‘Wow.’” It seems that 15 years into his career, Iñárritu has learned to say little more as an artist than one word. If he’s going to keep making Leonardo DiCaprio and Michael Keaton suffer for our sins, he needs to eventually tell us why. 
Please, Jeb, stop talking: Losing the primary will be a mercy for him and his big mouth
Economic apartheid: Explosive report shows how rich Americans have their own “private tax system that saves them billions”
American economic apartheid was made perhaps most evident when a rich teen got off of manslaughter charges by claiming he suffered from "affluenza," or having too much money. Yet the problem runs much deeper, and pervades the political system itself, the new report shows.
"We do have two different tax systems, one for normal wage-earners and another for those who can afford sophisticated tax advice," a legal expert told the Times. "At the very top of the income distribution, the effective rate of tax goes down, contrary to the principles of a progressive income tax system." The rich have their own "private tax system that saves them billions," the publication explains. This separate, private tax system exists for just several thousand Americans, out of a population of 320 million. Wealthy Americans have access to institutions and opportunities that are rarely available to the working class, such as tax courts and even private negotiations with the IRS. They see it as an investment. A political scientist told the Times the rich "pay millions of dollars for these services, and save in the tens or hundreds of millions in taxes." This "sophisticated and astonishingly effective apparatus for shielding their fortunes," as the Times calls it, is referred to as the "income defense industry," and consists of "a high-priced phalanx of lawyers, estate planners, lobbyists, and anti-tax activists who exploit and defend a dizzying array of tax maneuvers, virtually none of them available to taxpayers of more modest means."The rich use wealth management firms called “family offices” to minimize taxes as much as possible. Family offices were created by the Rockefeller family in the late 19th century, and surged in popularity during the rise of neoliberalism in the 1980s. The strategies family offices use to avoid taxes are complex, but they often rely on simple methods:
They convert types of income into other types that are taxed at a lower rate. They re-organize businesses as partnerships, which pay no corporate income tax and are taxed by individual, not as a whole. They put their income in charitable trusts, which give them tax deductions. They use life insurance policies and hedge funds to pass down their money to their family, tax-free. Many of these strategies are legal, the Times reports, while some are "in a legal gray area." Yet, even when the tactics are illegal, the Internal Revenue Service is often unable to step in. A former IRS official told the Times the tax agency lacks the resources needed to catch these complex tax schemes. The IRS has faced large budget cuts and intense political pressure in recent years. Another former official said "IRS enforcement is either absent or diminished." Unsurprisingly then, as time goes on, the rich are paying less and less taxes. In the 1990s, the 400 richest Americans paid close to 27 percent of their income in federal taxes. As of 2012, they were paying just 17 percent — about the same tax rate as a family making $100,000 annually. Furthermore, from the beginning of 2009 to the end of 2012, federal income tax rates on individuals did not change, but taxes paid by the richest one-thousandth of Americans dropped from an average of 20.9 percent to 17.6 percent. "Whatever tax rates Congress sets, the actual rates paid by the ultra-wealthy tend to fall over time as they exploit their numerous advantages," the Times reports. On average, the richest 400 Americans each made $336 million in 2012. They did not take this money in the form of a traditional salary or wage, however, instead using these complex loopholes, making their income much harder to tax. The Times study shows the rich are not just economically powerful; they are politically powerful too. Not only do corporate elites save billions in taxes; they use their money to buy influence in the political system. Industry groups spend exorbitant sums of money lobbying government officials to keep taxes low and to safeguard loopholes. The ultra-rich donate to right-wing groups that "have attacked virtually any effort to raises taxes on the wealthy," the Times reveals. "The inheritance tax has been a primary target," the publication notes. Rich families have poured massive resources into pushing for the elimination of the inheritance tax -- a policy that is now supported by the majority of the Republican presidential candidates. Many of these rich elites are libertarian-leaning, and donate to Republican politicians, but some donate to Democratic politicians as well. The wealthiest 400 Americans have provided a large chunk of the funding for the presidential candidates in the present campaign.
Viral video shows how two young white girls react to getting black dolls for Christmas
Netflix’s last great gift of 2015: A New Year’s Eve for earlybirds
December 30, 2015
My neighbor from hell
We're re-running this story as part of a countdown of the year's best personal essays. To read all the entries in the series, click here.
Last January I was at a party when my wife texted that our walls sounded like they were raining. She wasn’t on LSD. She was at home with our two children, and it was much too cold for rain. I asked her to feel the walls to see if they were wet. They weren’t. I told her I’d listen when I got home, then forgot all about it. Later, when I passed my neighbor’s door, I heard the rain and knocked. No answer. I looked outside for my neighbor’s car, but it was gone, so I did what seemed the neighborly thing and called the guy. When he didn’t pick up, I left a voicemail suggesting he check on the noise. My wife nodded, and I fell asleep.
Two or three hours later, I heard banging on the front door. My neighbor was angry. His entire apartment was flooded. Why didn’t I tell him? I pointed out this was exactly what I’d done. I should have done more, he told me. Everything was ruined! I apologized, but this only emboldened him. He got angrier and louder. Eventually, my wife told him he was going to wake our kids. She closed the door, but because she was half asleep, she closed it with me outside, so I stood eye to eye with my accuser. It occurred to me he might punch me in the face. Some people need an antagonist, and I was the person he’d sought. My neighbor was older but wiry. He ran regularly, though with a notable limp, as if one leg were shorter than the other. I wished him the best before anything more happened, returning to my dry apartment.
My wife and I had been living in this apartment on the Long Island edge of Queens for almost five years. There were things we liked, such as the public transportation and public schools and parks and trees and variety of food. We also liked that we were paying less for more space than we’d had during the preceding years in young, sexy Brooklyn. One of the things we didn’t like was our neighbor, who embodied a non-optional mandate toward friendliness. If you didn’t stop to chat about who was visiting whom, if you didn’t comment on the weather (really, the weather!), there was something off about you. Probably you thought you were better than everybody else, especially if you arrived with subtle signs of foreign invasion: different diction, a smile that didn’t last long enough, unfamiliarity with the things that matter.
He seemed not to like me right away, which was okay because I didn’t like him either. Specifically, I thought he was a fake, that his commitment to all matters local masked a judgmental streak that seemed the driving animus of his life. When you live above somebody for five years, you see things; more to the point, you hear things, and never have I heard a more aggrieved human being. Every evening he paced the shared hallway or porch, cataloging to his brother or ambiguous girlfriends/friends the people who had wronged him. I was hardly alone in earning his ire, which was comforting, except there’s nothing comforting about entering the orbit of a man who believes there’s a right way to act, knowing you don’t act that way. Worse, the neighborhood was with him. People congratulated us on acquiring such an enviable neighbor. He’d lived in the building more or less forever, so there was little hope of him leaving.
When I recounted the flood story to my friends, they eagerly took my side. It wasn’t my fault his pipes burst. What did he expect? This was the question I couldn’t leave alone. While I didn’t feel as though I’d done something wrong, I didn’t feel as though I’d done something right either. I mulled a more genuine apology or, better, offering to help in any way I could. In the end, I did neither. It would be uncomfortable. Plus, I was annoyed. I concluded I didn’t owe this man anything, just as he didn’t owe me anything in turn.
*
There’s a lot of talk about neighbors in the Bible. Here’s a line you know: Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself. There’s a lot of talk about neighbors in children’s programming, as well. Won’t you be my neighbor? But I’m not a Christian anymore, and I’m not a kid. I’m an adult with neighbors who sometimes challenge me in ways I don’t feel like being challenged. Whereas I feel like I have to endure the challenges my closest family or friends present, I don’t feel the same way about my neighbors. I’m not even sure what "neighbors" means.
My grandfather, who implausibly supported a family of six by raising chickens and selling eggs, had to know his neighbors. They were his livelihood. But my day-to-day existence no longer relies on neighbors. My income comes from a university. My food comes from supermarkets. My interests come from all over the place. I can talk to my friends from home or school or wherever on any number of electronic devices. I can have a face-to-face conversation with my brother in Japan from my computer. The "Jetsons" future so many of us waited for so impatiently has arrived.
If I don’t need my neighbors, and they don’t need me, why should I place a premium on a relationship dictated by chance? The last time I did that I was getting a physical before school, and the other kid waiting for the doctor started talking to me, or I started talking to him—I don’t remember. It was 30 years ago. I stopped making friends that way when I turned 5.
I understand the need for decency. I understand being nice to my neighbors in the way I understand being nice to anyone I have a superficial relationship with, like the person buttering my bagel. But if the person who butters my bagel moves next door, should our relationship grow deeper?
This mindset, I recognize, separates me from others, potentially for the worse. Many people’s best friends are their neighbors. My parents were these people. Some of my happiest memories from childhood are of my parents drinking and laughing with the neighbors. We had family nearby, so it wasn’t out of desperation that my parents befriended the neighbors. My parents genuinely liked them, and the feeling was mutual. After many years away, my mother eventually moved back to the neighborhood; indeed, she moved in with the neighbors, who still treat me as part of their family, even though they have two children and six grandchildren who live closer than I do. This was the example I grew up with, a meaningful one I carried into adulthood when I formed my own family.
The first places I lived on my own--Charlottesville, Iowa City, Ann Arbor--all felt a long way from rural New England. Small towns with large state universities are famously good places to meet people who look and sound different from you, to nurture self-indulgence and self-righteousness, to try on and discard different personae. Upon arriving at college, I permanently ditched what remained of my Boston accent. (On the phone, my mother told me I sounded like a snob.) I also made some of my best and most enduring friends. They were my neighbors. My first-year roommate performed my wedding ceremony 11 years later. I loved the people I lived with as much as anyone I know loved the people he or she lived with at school. Eventually, I moved to a neighborhood in Brooklyn, where like many parts of New York, it’s normal not to talk to the people around you. So I didn’t. I never felt like I was missing something.
*
After the pipes burst, my neighbor stopped trying to be nice. It was sort of a relief but mostly annoying and, for my wife, frightening. My teaching schedule allows me to be home most days, but the days I’m at work, I’m at work all day. She didn’t relish an angry man stomping around while she was alone with two children. And was he angry!
In fairness, living below a family with kids is a bad deal, particularly my kids, who learned to walk early and never stopped moving. Like many kids, they enjoy screaming, apropos of nothing. My neighbor’s schedule as a bartender in a city where bars close at 4 a.m. could not have been less complementary with our schedule. For a while, my son woke at 4:30 a.m. His graduation to 6:15 was viewed in our quarters as a major achievement, but that difference couldn’t have seemed like much of a gift to my childless neighbor. He’s one person, and we were two people and then three and then four. Plus, we would throw parties sometimes. We rarely invited him. We didn’t want him there.
Neighbors might turn out to be people you would voluntarily spend time with, but there’s no reason to expect this. The biggest thing my neighbor and I had in common is that we’re guys. We didn’t come from similar places, and we didn’t do similar things for work or pleasure. We didn’t read the same books, or listen to the same music, or drink the same beer, or follow the same teams. One might rightly protest that there’s value in spending time with someone unlike you, and I agree. But I don’t want to spend time with everyone: I want to spend time with people I like, whether that’s easily anticipated or a complete surprise. Never for a minute did I like my neighbor.
It occurs to me that maybe I’m thinking about this the wrong way. Maybe the concept of liking someone or something has gone too far. I criticized my neighbor earlier, but I sit in quiet judgment of people who obsessively like photos and posts on Facebook. In my fiction writing workshop, I admiringly quote Nabokov, who warns against readers who have to like characters. The high school version of myself would recoil at the very word likeable; perhaps the current version of myself should too. Maybe my inability to befriend a neighbor I don’t like represents a personal failing, a narcissism that demands everyone I spend time with share my little corner of the world.
On our last day, my wife told our neighbor she wished it had gone better. He sort of grunted, unwilling to cede the high road he walked alone. He wasn’t surrendering the personal injustice he nurtured for anything she was offering. I didn’t say anything to him, and he didn’t say anything to me.
*
In a parallel universe, I rub my eyes and say, Let’s get to work. I return to my apartment, but instead of going to bed, I grab a bucket and towels. I spend the night dealing with the pipes and dealing with my neighbor. Possibly, I call the landlord. Get over here, I say. We need your help. We’re all in this together. If my pipes ever burst, I know implicitly that help will arrive. Knee-deep in water, exhausted, I look at my neighbor, who is still internalizing all that’s been ruined. He can see from my look that I feel for him, and he’s grateful. Now he is the one who apologizes. He knows he came off hot earlier, and perhaps he hasn’t always been the easiest guy to live with, but he appreciates my being here.
In the universe I inhabit, I come home tired. I have my own apartment to worry about, my own family to take care of, my own problems to ignore. I don't want to spend my night dealing with another person’s flooded apartment, a person who doesn’t even like me. I might want to be the kind of person who does this, but I’m not. I want to go to bed, so I do.
Shortly before my wife and I moved out, we received an unmarked envelope. It contained a sarcastic note thanking us for being such good neighbors. One of us was called a peach. I showed it to my wife, and as I watched her reaction, I understood this was the breaking point. Perhaps our neighbor designed the anti-thank-you note this way.
*
My wife and I started looking at houses, something she’d long desired and something I viewed with ambivalence. Now we were in agreement: We couldn’t stay. We liked the first house we looked at, a small ranch. Nobody living upstairs, nobody living downstairs! We couldn’t exactly afford it, but we’d figure it out, and we did.
Even before buying the house, we began to meet the neighbors. We were, at this point, prepared to do whatever it took. We didn’t just smile and wave. We chatted. Eventually, we brought over our kids and asked questions and nodded. Between our making an offer and closing on the house, one neighbor erected a new fence.
The other day my wife and I were in a different neighbor’s house. This neighbor was showing us pictures of her children while our children ran around, nearly breaking everything. This neighbor seemed happy. I offered, preposterously, to help her move heavy things. A few days later, she came over with a magnet of the town’s recycling schedule. It doesn’t have to be hard.
We’ve lived here two months, closer to my office and far enough from our old neighbor that there’s a good chance we’ll never see him again, which feels strange because there were few days over the past five years that I was home without being aware that he was home too. Some rooms and times I could hear him better, but I always knew when he was there. When he left town, the space felt different, not just quieter but also more peaceful. I never saw the inside of his apartment beyond what I could view from the hall when his door was open. He never saw the inside of my apartment either, yet he was as much a part of my experience in that place as anyone outside of my wife and children.
Someone that ubiquitous, it seems clear, deserved better. Except when I try to imagine what I could have done differently, I have no idea. I wouldn’t have been happier sharing drinks with him on the porch. I tried: It was awkward. Nor do I think being more confrontational would have improved things. What would I have said? I want you to be more respectful of my efforts. He might have responded, quite reasonably, I want you to be more respectful of my ceiling.
Now I have a desk in my basement, where it’s theoretically quiet, except I can hear everything above me, the running and yelling and dropping and picking up and crying, crying, crying. I have high-powered headphones, into which I blast piano sonatas, and still I hear other people living their lives.
“I should be among the dead”: Young, white, and economically advantaged, I was hungry for meaning and found heroin instead
My last shot was at my parents’ place in the suburbs of Chicago. That morning I was scheduled to board a plane to Minneapolis for a long stint of rehab. Naturally, I wanted to retain a long high, which is in fact part of the virus’ composition: Every next shot will be the forever rush; chasing the chimera. Though in the end, you end up chasing away everything, even yourself.
On that bright and humid May morning, like every other day, I awoke from a non-slumber. When you’re on heroin, contrary to the prevailing image of the lethargic nod, you don’t actually sleep. Heroin users merely simulate the activity of sleep through nods. Where one wakes up in the morning refreshed—moving seamlessly through the stages of sleep—someone with a habit will wake up in a cold and sweaty fog, shaky for a shot. After fixing comes not so much refreshment but a drawn sigh, a gentle slip back into that dreamless atmosphere.
At this juncture, shooting heroin several times daily on and off for a few years, I was actively avoiding being awake. Consciousness, as I perceived it, was a great error. But I came to discover that humanity, even on heroin, is inescapable. I was still acutely conscious, no matter how much heroin I shot. I was wide-awake and everything hurt: my skin, my stomach, my sore arms, even my nose hairs.
By the time you’re 22 and forced to live at home, you shouldn’t have a room that you identify as your room. Any alleged room of yours ought to be stripped of what is essentially you. So I scurried from what was once my room into what was once my bathroom to open a literal junk drawer. The mark of me in these rooms was hidden from plain sight. Clear plastic baggie containing less than one half of a gram of greyish powder; needle, cooker, and cotton; belt strewed across white tiled floor, tiny droplets of blood left from the night before.
The moment following a morning shot you’re more or less a philosophical zombie: a wobbly, stumbling mass of bones barely qualified to be called conscious. The contents of the mind are only elementary needs: a cup of coffee, lots of cream and sugar; a cigarette, menthol. A combination, by the way, that marries so fucking good with an opiate rush.
When I did that morning shot in my old bathroom, I did not honestly think it was going to be my last. But it was. That flight to Minneapolis two hours later turned into over three months living inside an in-patient treatment facility. It cost a college tuition, and deserves a story all its own. After that long stint I moved to St. Paul for an even longer saga of sober living residences. And by the age of 24 I moved back to Chicago to finish school in a city once home to my abject catastrophe of early 20-something-hood. This is what the trajectory of addiction treatment looks like when countless financial and social resources are thrown at it, treatment devastatingly out of reach for most.
*
In October 1991, six years before beat writer William Burroughs died, he said in his famous "Deposition," “The junk virus is public health problem number one of the world today.” As a young man, Burroughs went abroad to study in Vienna to become a physician, but became distracted, the story goes. For what little medical training he received, his interest in heroin and addiction lay in the cold, hard physical. Personality and emotions, one’s existential situation, were of no interest to the failed doctor.
“Addiction is an illness of exposure,” Burroughs believed. “By and large those who have access to junk become addicts . . . There is no pre-addict personality any more than there is a pre-malarial personality, all the hogwash of psychiatry to the contrary."
Contra Burroughs, I see not so much a virus present as I do a kind of Americanitis, à la William James’ neurasthenia. What I mean by this is, in America, there is a prevailing miasma, an irreducible, un-diagnosable discontent among the living. It deals in vanished meanings, subtly functioning beyond human volition. After all, no one willfully becomes existentially sickened to the point where it looks advantageous to blot out consciousness with constant heroin shots.
That’s the assumption, at least, when I look at the mortality figures from the CDC, which reveal death en masse from opiate toxicity. The death is far too vast to analyze at the micro, individual or neuronal level. There are over 600,000 heroin users alive in the United States. To say that we’ll rewire 600,000 brains is idiotic, not to mention impossible. So we’re led to believe this figure is climbing. The demographic data show the group responsible for the sharp uptick is 18- to 25-year-old, mostly white kids.
I’m left wondering why heroin is so alluring for the hegemonized, modern-day consumer subject. I want to attempt to get near this why, while also wondering if there is a why at all. I’m interested in this particular why mainly because I should be among those dead and quantified. During the summer of 2012, I kicked heroin at the age of 22. But saying I did the kicking would be inaccurate. Heroin did most of the kicking.
*
Experientially, Burroughs’ exposure theory (getting hooked because it’s there) rings true for me. At 17 I had unlimited access to a never-ending supply of 80 milligram OxyContin. One arbitrary day I recieved a phone call from a kid saying he has a bottle of 100 OCs, straight from the billionaire manufacturers, Purdue Pharma. They were stolen from a pharmacy with loose security. My few friends and I pooled our funds and bought all 100 for $2,500. We did this weekly for nearly a year. We would rip through the 100 pills each week. Our scheme was out of Capitalism 101: selling some pills for marked-up prices (up to $80 per pill) and snorting the rest for free. This enterprise came about prior to Purdue being juridically spindled into creating an abuse proof reformulation. From 2008 to 2012, it was heroin, only. The switch was effortless. After all, the two opiates are chemically twin sisters.
But there is something to my story beyond mere physical addiction, the getting hooked because it’s there. My idea as to what that might be has to do with time, mainly the future. When I snorted those first few milligrams at 17 I did not know I’d be taken for a five-year ride. I couldn’t have known. No one could have. When I did that last shot in my old bathroom, I couldn’t picture it being my last. Those who knew me couldn’t either.
The mind on heroin becomes shitty at doing what makes us essentially human. The heroin user operates on a four- to six-hour binary time table: fix or get sick. We cannot transcend too far into the future. Where there is no human, there is no time, said the German philosopher Martin Heidegger, who penned his magnum opus called "Being and Time" in 1928. By the time I was physically addicted, time itself became a failed construct. Every tomorrow was always already today. Think Bill Murray in "Groundhog Day": trapped in the eternal return. The future becomes unthinkable. But I believe the future, most of all seeing yourself in it, is the heroin user's only way out.
This analysis occurred to me when economists Angus Deaton and Anne Case published mortality statistics for middle-aged, working-class whites. They’re dying off in record numbers from liver damage (cirrhosis), overdose (opiates) and suicide. The two former causes are merely suicide in its slower, more painful manifestations. Dr. Deaton said that these dying middle-aged whites have “lost the narrative of their lives.”
So has the young white 18- to 25-year-old group who nod their supposed best days away on heroin. However, those of us who were born around 1990, never even had a narrative to lose. We’re an ahistorical, rootless bunch of consumptive silos. We’ve been taught we could buy the good life, that anything good is instantaneous. There is no quicker and consistent delivery mechanism for overcoming perpetual lack than heroin. Amazon’s got nothing on heroin. Heroin for Burroughs and company was a work of art that resisted conformity. Now, heroin is consumptive conformity, pure capitalism. It means giving in, it means folding.
The vanished narrative analysis was best documented in Steven Okazaki’s newest documentary called “Heroin: Cape Cod, USA.” Okazaki and I both agreed that boredom and lack of opportunity plagued the eight participants, all of whom were middle-class, white 20-somethings. Two of the participants died before the film was even finished. The kids of Cape Nod had at that time no horizon with which to cast themselves off into. There was no arc of time or foreseeable future. There were no meaningful activities, outside the ritual of preparing heroin injections, which if I’m honest was the most attentive activity I engaged in for years. Like the Cape Nod kids, that’s how my five years on opiates looked: futureless. Simply replace “Cape Cod” with Chicago’s “North Shore.” Kids tying off with white iPhone wires.
Heroin addiction is a habit where one, multiple times throughout the day, injects a solipsism so strong that it traps the user inside a forever now—with nothing and no one beyond. There is even evidence of this in recent neuroimaging studies. Best explained by neuroscientist Dr. Marc Lewis, who calls the phenomenon now appeal. En route to heroin, or any compulsion, there are functional disconnections between the striatum (part of the reward system) and the prefrontal cortex, the most evolved area of the brain said to be responsible for complex cognition (e.g. our unique ability to imagine a future), cause what psychologists call delay discounting, or what Marc Lewis calls now appeal, or what I call being futureless.
This, I believe, is what makes heroin so appealing among the young white 20-somethings of today. It nullifies the future, because any foreseeable future looks grim. Whether financially, politically or climatologically, there is doom and gloom ahead. A Republican will win the election. The environment will putrefy. We’ll watch it all happen and comment on social media. The end of the world will be mediated through our screens. Like everything today, we won’t even experience it firsthand.
Psychologically, or perhaps existentially, the only thing I can see that sets me apart from any young person using heroin today, aside from the privilege to access proper treatment, is that I no longer feel the need to blot out the future. I don’t think it looks good, yet I continue to walk forward, straight into it.
In a Marxian way, I’ve become one with my activities. The bonds I have with them are meaningful to me. I do research, trying to empirically ground post-treatment sober living settings, to keep people out of the cycle of relapse, detox, treatment and jail. At baseline I want us all to be alive long enough to find something meaningful that we can hang on to.
I also write, of course, which makes me feel alive. Though I get cynical about headlines and the quantification of the click, I put my best work out and move on to the next one. I also have a girlfriend, Logan (who’s Swedish-German family claims they’re long lost descendants of Nietzsche), who I love and who loves me. I have a family, who I know loves me, who continue to give me compassion every day despite the five-year nightmare I put them through. I can be there with them today. The amount of meaning my activities, family and Logan provide are inversely proportional to the needle. Meaning is what I think we’ve collectively lost.
And we must keep people alive long enough to find it. That means we need supervised injection facilities, places for people to shoot up and be safe. That means we need naloxone, the chemical antidote to opiate overdose, available everywhere. That means we need heroin to lose the creeping across class lines narrative. That means heroin can longer be a secret. That means we need to love those using it and let them hang on long enough to find these meanings. Meaning allows you to become your fate, to live a radically mortal life.
With meaning and a future, heroin loses its allure and life opens up.
My last shot was at my parents’ place in the suburbs of Chicago. That morning I was scheduled to board a plane to Minneapolis for a long stint of rehab. Naturally, I wanted to retain a long high, which is in fact part of the virus’ composition: Every next shot will be the forever rush; chasing the chimera. Though in the end, you end up chasing away everything, even yourself.
On that bright and humid May morning, like every other day, I awoke from a non-slumber. When you’re on heroin, contrary to the prevailing image of the lethargic nod, you don’t actually sleep. Heroin users merely simulate the activity of sleep through nods. Where one wakes up in the morning refreshed—moving seamlessly through the stages of sleep—someone with a habit will wake up in a cold and sweaty fog, shaky for a shot. After fixing comes not so much refreshment but a drawn sigh, a gentle slip back into that dreamless atmosphere.
At this juncture, shooting heroin several times daily on and off for a few years, I was actively avoiding being awake. Consciousness, as I perceived it, was a great error. But I came to discover that humanity, even on heroin, is inescapable. I was still acutely conscious, no matter how much heroin I shot. I was wide-awake and everything hurt: my skin, my stomach, my sore arms, even my nose hairs.
By the time you’re 22 and forced to live at home, you shouldn’t have a room that you identify as your room. Any alleged room of yours ought to be stripped of what is essentially you. So I scurried from what was once my room into what was once my bathroom to open a literal junk drawer. The mark of me in these rooms was hidden from plain sight. Clear plastic baggie containing less than one half of a gram of greyish powder; needle, cooker, and cotton; belt strewed across white tiled floor, tiny droplets of blood left from the night before.
The moment following a morning shot you’re more or less a philosophical zombie: a wobbly, stumbling mass of bones barely qualified to be called conscious. The contents of the mind are only elementary needs: a cup of coffee, lots of cream and sugar; a cigarette, menthol. A combination, by the way, that marries so fucking good with an opiate rush.
When I did that morning shot in my old bathroom, I did not honestly think it was going to be my last. But it was. That flight to Minneapolis two hours later turned into over three months living inside an in-patient treatment facility. It cost a college tuition, and deserves a story all its own. After that long stint I moved to St. Paul for an even longer saga of sober living residences. And by the age of 24 I moved back to Chicago to finish school in a city once home to my abject catastrophe of early 20-something-hood. This is what the trajectory of addiction treatment looks like when countless financial and social resources are thrown at it, treatment devastatingly out of reach for most.
*
In October 1991, six years before beat writer William Burroughs died, he said in his famous "Deposition," “The junk virus is public health problem number one of the world today.” As a young man, Burroughs went abroad to study in Vienna to become a physician, but became distracted, the story goes. For what little medical training he received, his interest in heroin and addiction lay in the cold, hard physical. Personality and emotions, one’s existential situation, were of no interest to the failed doctor.
“Addiction is an illness of exposure,” Burroughs believed. “By and large those who have access to junk become addicts . . . There is no pre-addict personality any more than there is a pre-malarial personality, all the hogwash of psychiatry to the contrary."
Contra Burroughs, I see not so much a virus present as I do a kind of Americanitis, à la William James’ neurasthenia. What I mean by this is, in America, there is a prevailing miasma, an irreducible, un-diagnosable discontent among the living. It deals in vanished meanings, subtly functioning beyond human volition. After all, no one willfully becomes existentially sickened to the point where it looks advantageous to blot out consciousness with constant heroin shots.
That’s the assumption, at least, when I look at the mortality figures from the CDC, which reveal death en masse from opiate toxicity. The death is far too vast to analyze at the micro, individual or neuronal level. There are over 600,000 heroin users alive in the United States. To say that we’ll rewire 600,000 brains is idiotic, not to mention impossible. So we’re led to believe this figure is climbing. The demographic data show the group responsible for the sharp uptick is 18- to 25-year-old, mostly white kids.
I’m left wondering why heroin is so alluring for the hegemonized, modern-day consumer subject. I want to attempt to get near this why, while also wondering if there is a why at all. I’m interested in this particular why mainly because I should be among those dead and quantified. During the summer of 2012, I kicked heroin at the age of 22. But saying I did the kicking would be inaccurate. Heroin did most of the kicking.
*
Experientially, Burroughs’ exposure theory (getting hooked because it’s there) rings true for me. At 17 I had unlimited access to a never-ending supply of 80 milligram OxyContin. One arbitrary day I recieved a phone call from a kid saying he has a bottle of 100 OCs, straight from the billionaire manufacturers, Purdue Pharma. They were stolen from a pharmacy with loose security. My few friends and I pooled our funds and bought all 100 for $2,500. We did this weekly for nearly a year. We would rip through the 100 pills each week. Our scheme was out of Capitalism 101: selling some pills for marked-up prices (up to $80 per pill) and snorting the rest for free. This enterprise came about prior to Purdue being juridically spindled into creating an abuse proof reformulation. From 2008 to 2012, it was heroin, only. The switch was effortless. After all, the two opiates are chemically twin sisters.
But there is something to my story beyond mere physical addiction, the getting hooked because it’s there. My idea as to what that might be has to do with time, mainly the future. When I snorted those first few milligrams at 17 I did not know I’d be taken for a five-year ride. I couldn’t have known. No one could have. When I did that last shot in my old bathroom, I couldn’t picture it being my last. Those who knew me couldn’t either.
The mind on heroin becomes shitty at doing what makes us essentially human. The heroin user operates on a four- to six-hour binary time table: fix or get sick. We cannot transcend too far into the future. Where there is no human, there is no time, said the German philosopher Martin Heidegger, who penned his magnum opus called "Being and Time" in 1928. By the time I was physically addicted, time itself became a failed construct. Every tomorrow was always already today. Think Bill Murray in "Groundhog Day": trapped in the eternal return. The future becomes unthinkable. But I believe the future, most of all seeing yourself in it, is the heroin user's only way out.
This analysis occurred to me when economists Angus Deaton and Anne Case published mortality statistics for middle-aged, working-class whites. They’re dying off in record numbers from liver damage (cirrhosis), overdose (opiates) and suicide. The two former causes are merely suicide in its slower, more painful manifestations. Dr. Deaton said that these dying middle-aged whites have “lost the narrative of their lives.”
So has the young white 18- to 25-year-old group who nod their supposed best days away on heroin. However, those of us who were born around 1990, never even had a narrative to lose. We’re an ahistorical, rootless bunch of consumptive silos. We’ve been taught we could buy the good life, that anything good is instantaneous. There is no quicker and consistent delivery mechanism for overcoming perpetual lack than heroin. Amazon’s got nothing on heroin. Heroin for Burroughs and company was a work of art that resisted conformity. Now, heroin is consumptive conformity, pure capitalism. It means giving in, it means folding.
The vanished narrative analysis was best documented in Steven Okazaki’s newest documentary called “Heroin: Cape Cod, USA.” Okazaki and I both agreed that boredom and lack of opportunity plagued the eight participants, all of whom were middle-class, white 20-somethings. Two of the participants died before the film was even finished. The kids of Cape Nod had at that time no horizon with which to cast themselves off into. There was no arc of time or foreseeable future. There were no meaningful activities, outside the ritual of preparing heroin injections, which if I’m honest was the most attentive activity I engaged in for years. Like the Cape Nod kids, that’s how my five years on opiates looked: futureless. Simply replace “Cape Cod” with Chicago’s “North Shore.” Kids tying off with white iPhone wires.
Heroin addiction is a habit where one, multiple times throughout the day, injects a solipsism so strong that it traps the user inside a forever now—with nothing and no one beyond. There is even evidence of this in recent neuroimaging studies. Best explained by neuroscientist Dr. Marc Lewis, who calls the phenomenon now appeal. En route to heroin, or any compulsion, there are functional disconnections between the striatum (part of the reward system) and the prefrontal cortex, the most evolved area of the brain said to be responsible for complex cognition (e.g. our unique ability to imagine a future), cause what psychologists call delay discounting, or what Marc Lewis calls now appeal, or what I call being futureless.
This, I believe, is what makes heroin so appealing among the young white 20-somethings of today. It nullifies the future, because any foreseeable future looks grim. Whether financially, politically or climatologically, there is doom and gloom ahead. A Republican will win the election. The environment will putrefy. We’ll watch it all happen and comment on social media. The end of the world will be mediated through our screens. Like everything today, we won’t even experience it firsthand.
Psychologically, or perhaps existentially, the only thing I can see that sets me apart from any young person using heroin today, aside from the privilege to access proper treatment, is that I no longer feel the need to blot out the future. I don’t think it looks good, yet I continue to walk forward, straight into it.
In a Marxian way, I’ve become one with my activities. The bonds I have with them are meaningful to me. I do research, trying to empirically ground post-treatment sober living settings, to keep people out of the cycle of relapse, detox, treatment and jail. At baseline I want us all to be alive long enough to find something meaningful that we can hang on to.
I also write, of course, which makes me feel alive. Though I get cynical about headlines and the quantification of the click, I put my best work out and move on to the next one. I also have a girlfriend, Logan (who’s Swedish-German family claims they’re long lost descendants of Nietzsche), who I love and who loves me. I have a family, who I know loves me, who continue to give me compassion every day despite the five-year nightmare I put them through. I can be there with them today. The amount of meaning my activities, family and Logan provide are inversely proportional to the needle. Meaning is what I think we’ve collectively lost.
And we must keep people alive long enough to find it. That means we need supervised injection facilities, places for people to shoot up and be safe. That means we need naloxone, the chemical antidote to opiate overdose, available everywhere. That means we need heroin to lose the creeping across class lines narrative. That means heroin can longer be a secret. That means we need to love those using it and let them hang on long enough to find these meanings. Meaning allows you to become your fate, to live a radically mortal life.
With meaning and a future, heroin loses its allure and life opens up.
Teen Beat ruined me: Rob Lowe, Duran Duran and my sexy, screwed-up Gen X adolescence
I cut out hundreds of pictures from the teen magazines, and I taped them up in my bedroom. During one industrious phase in fifth grade, I covered every inch of the available wall space. Centerfold posters: Michael Jackson, Duran Duran, Rob Lowe. Stamp-size cutouts to bridge the gaps between: George Michael, Tom Cruise, Ralph Macchio. The men in those magazines have pillowy lips and carefully tousled hair and very few secondary-sex characteristics. Somewhere in those years, an older woman told me Mikhail Baryshnikov was very sexy, but he icked me out. That bulge in his tights, like a viper flicking its forked tongue underneath a doily bed. No way. I liked feathery lashes and sparkling eyes. As for what lurked beneath the loose khakis, I did not care to know. I was hoping that anatomically, those guys might be like Ken dolls. For much of my early adolescence — my tweendom, as it’s now known — I lived inside the golden mists of a fantasy where I dated these man-boys. I was no longer a sensitive egghead invisible to the male population at her school but a pretty teen star who drove around Malibu in the passenger seat of a Corvette convertible. Little kids often create imaginary friends, but I had imaginary boyfriends. Even at 10, I knew there was something incredibly embarrassing about all this. 
Very few girls are featured in those magazines. Madonna, Nancy McKeon from “Facts of Life,” later replaced by Alyssa Milano from “Who’s the Boss.” Those were the girls the boys liked, because they could hang. I hoped I could hang one day, but in the real world, my life was a girls-only slumber party for a while. I had been exiled from my older brother’s room, and my father was the silent Finnish type. My study of men began in those pages. Flipping through them now is more than a little disturbing. They are a hectic collection of random data points: His favorite hobbies. (Watching football, video games.) His favorite color. (Blue, green, but usually blue.) One profile on Menudo lists the band’s shoe and pant size. The stories — culled from press releases and questionable interviews — are meant to offer intimacy, but instead become a case study in how little can be used to spin a story. Didn’t matter to me. As a young girl, I studied those data points, because they formed the secret treasure map that led to being The One. The Corvette and the pinup boyfriend and the enmeshed romance that would greet me when I made it through the blue valley of those middle years. I watched James Bond films because they were a favorite of John Taylor from Duran Duran. I learned about PETA because River Phoenix was passionate about the cause. And this is how I thought grown-up love would work: I learn your favorite color, and then you learn my favorite color. I study you, and then you study me. Won’t this be fun? 
Fantasy is a tricky game. It can rescue you from harsh realities. But if you stay too long inside the magic factory, you can become increasingly disappointed by the world. I was 16 when I got a real, live boyfriend. I could say a million wonderful things about that guy, but back then I also liked to list his failures. Why did he never ask my favorite color? Why didn’t he think more about my needs? It was a colossal frustration to discover men’s brains did not operate like mine. I’d spent a decade cataloguing every one of my crush’s likes and dislikes. What they ate for lunch. What music they liked. And meanwhile, guys had just been … watching football and playing video games? On Valentine’s Day, he bought me roses and gave me a card signed in his adorable chicken scratch. I squealed with delight, but some part of me was sinking. Roses? That’s all you’ve got? I bedazzled homemade photo albums for him. I dug through Dumpsters (metaphorically) to find just the perfect gift, which was a waste of time, because this holiday meant nothing to him. I would have been better off bedazzling my own photo album, and showing up with a gift certificate to Taco Bell. 
I had a lot to learn about actual men. In college I started flirting with this guy who told me he liked porn magazines. I remember the conversation clearly, because it shocked me so much: Guys really look at those? Those magazines weren’t for, like, pervs? I felt creepy-crawlies across my belly. I said something like, “It just makes me think that when you’re with a woman, you’re thinking about the women in those magazines.” And he said, “Anyone who would be in bed with a warm, naked body and still think about a picture in a magazine needs help.” I never dated that guy. I didn’t date much, for multiple reasons, but one very powerful reason is that guys never lived up to the story I’d written in my mind. 
College and early adulthood rubbed some of the cartoon hearts from my eyes. I stopped expecting anyone — ever — to ask my favorite color. (Blue.) My sweet, sensitive teen pinups stumbled through years of scandals and multiple addictions. If there is a drug more powerful than fantasy it might be fame. But a few of them made it to the other side. Hats off to you, Rob Lowe. High five, John Stamos. The teen magazines I loved weren’t so lucky. Teen Beat's long gone, and Bop folded their monthly last year, another victim of a technology age in which the gold bullion they once sold exclusively became pebbles in a stream. Like Playboy and Penthouse, they lost their monopoly on pleasure. Tumblrs and Instagram and TMZ offer way more to your average Belieber and 1D fans than the corporate candy makers ever could. 
When I flip through these magazines now, I feel such an odd mix of pride and shame. Why did I fall for this? When can I do it again? I know those stupid magazines warped me, and screwed up my romantic expectations — but it was so much fun. I felt such a swirl of bliss when I looked through them. Those magazines were like a treehouse built in an alternate universe where a sad kid could always feel special. I feel the same conflict about Valentine’s Day. I want to hate it. I really do. The path to enlightenment is not paved with romantic clichés bought at CVS. But I am a girl made of candy hearts and chocolate-covered delusions, and perhaps the best thing I can do is be aware of my DNA. I actually love Valentine’s Day. Because it celebrates longing. It celebrates connection. It celebrates the indescribable ache that moves a young girl to cover an entire room with stamp-size photos of boys she will never touch, who touched her anyway.We're re-running this story as part of a countdown of the year's best personal essays. To read all the entries in the series, click here. Recently, while wandering through a vintage store full of other people’s kitsch, I came across a batch of magazines that were more like a time machine. I was a lonely kid, eager for childhood to end. If I couldn’t be an adult, I could at least act like one. I read thick paperbacks with adult themes. I snuck beer from my parents’ stash. I watched “Thirtysomething” at 10-something, and I loved it. But there was one category in which I remained very much a young girl. I read teen magazines. Not fashion magazines, in which pretty blondes in plaid skirts taught you how to crimp your hair. But celebrity pinup magazines. Teen Beat, Tiger Beat, 16, Bop. Every once in a while, a male friend will speak with aching wonder about the first time he saw a photo of a woman spreading open her thighs, or pull down her bra to reveal the dark and dusty pink of a nipple. Those pages were magic, he will say. Yes, yes, I will say. I understand. I cut out hundreds of pictures from the teen magazines, and I taped them up in my bedroom. During one industrious phase in fifth grade, I covered every inch of the available wall space. Centerfold posters: Michael Jackson, Duran Duran, Rob Lowe. Stamp-size cutouts to bridge the gaps between: George Michael, Tom Cruise, Ralph Macchio. The men in those magazines have pillowy lips and carefully tousled hair and very few secondary-sex characteristics. Somewhere in those years, an older woman told me Mikhail Baryshnikov was very sexy, but he icked me out. That bulge in his tights, like a viper flicking its forked tongue underneath a doily bed. No way. I liked feathery lashes and sparkling eyes. As for what lurked beneath the loose khakis, I did not care to know. I was hoping that anatomically, those guys might be like Ken dolls. For much of my early adolescence — my tweendom, as it’s now known — I lived inside the golden mists of a fantasy where I dated these man-boys. I was no longer a sensitive egghead invisible to the male population at her school but a pretty teen star who drove around Malibu in the passenger seat of a Corvette convertible. Little kids often create imaginary friends, but I had imaginary boyfriends. Even at 10, I knew there was something incredibly embarrassing about all this. Very few girls are featured in those magazines. Madonna, Nancy McKeon from “Facts of Life,” later replaced by Alyssa Milano from “Who’s the Boss.” Those were the girls the boys liked, because they could hang. I hoped I could hang one day, but in the real world, my life was a girls-only slumber party for a while. I had been exiled from my older brother’s room, and my father was the silent Finnish type. My study of men began in those pages. Flipping through them now is more than a little disturbing. They are a hectic collection of random data points: His favorite hobbies. (Watching football, video games.) His favorite color. (Blue, green, but usually blue.) One profile on Menudo lists the band’s shoe and pant size. The stories — culled from press releases and questionable interviews — are meant to offer intimacy, but instead become a case study in how little can be used to spin a story. Didn’t matter to me. As a young girl, I studied those data points, because they formed the secret treasure map that led to being The One. The Corvette and the pinup boyfriend and the enmeshed romance that would greet me when I made it through the blue valley of those middle years. I watched James Bond films because they were a favorite of John Taylor from Duran Duran. I learned about PETA because River Phoenix was passionate about the cause. And this is how I thought grown-up love would work: I learn your favorite color, and then you learn my favorite color. I study you, and then you study me. Won’t this be fun? Fantasy is a tricky game. It can rescue you from harsh realities. But if you stay too long inside the magic factory, you can become increasingly disappointed by the world. I was 16 when I got a real, live boyfriend. I could say a million wonderful things about that guy, but back then I also liked to list his failures. Why did he never ask my favorite color? Why didn’t he think more about my needs? It was a colossal frustration to discover men’s brains did not operate like mine. I’d spent a decade cataloguing every one of my crush’s likes and dislikes. What they ate for lunch. What music they liked. And meanwhile, guys had just been … watching football and playing video games? On Valentine’s Day, he bought me roses and gave me a card signed in his adorable chicken scratch. I squealed with delight, but some part of me was sinking. Roses? That’s all you’ve got? I bedazzled homemade photo albums for him. I dug through Dumpsters (metaphorically) to find just the perfect gift, which was a waste of time, because this holiday meant nothing to him. I would have been better off bedazzling my own photo album, and showing up with a gift certificate to Taco Bell. I had a lot to learn about actual men. In college I started flirting with this guy who told me he liked porn magazines. I remember the conversation clearly, because it shocked me so much: Guys really look at those? Those magazines weren’t for, like, pervs? I felt creepy-crawlies across my belly. I said something like, “It just makes me think that when you’re with a woman, you’re thinking about the women in those magazines.” And he said, “Anyone who would be in bed with a warm, naked body and still think about a picture in a magazine needs help.” I never dated that guy. I didn’t date much, for multiple reasons, but one very powerful reason is that guys never lived up to the story I’d written in my mind. College and early adulthood rubbed some of the cartoon hearts from my eyes. I stopped expecting anyone — ever — to ask my favorite color. (Blue.) My sweet, sensitive teen pinups stumbled through years of scandals and multiple addictions. If there is a drug more powerful than fantasy it might be fame. But a few of them made it to the other side. Hats off to you, Rob Lowe. High five, John Stamos. The teen magazines I loved weren’t so lucky. Teen Beat's long gone, and Bop folded their monthly last year, another victim of a technology age in which the gold bullion they once sold exclusively became pebbles in a stream. Like Playboy and Penthouse, they lost their monopoly on pleasure. Tumblrs and Instagram and TMZ offer way more to your average Belieber and 1D fans than the corporate candy makers ever could. When I flip through these magazines now, I feel such an odd mix of pride and shame. Why did I fall for this? When can I do it again? I know those stupid magazines warped me, and screwed up my romantic expectations — but it was so much fun. I felt such a swirl of bliss when I looked through them. Those magazines were like a treehouse built in an alternate universe where a sad kid could always feel special. I feel the same conflict about Valentine’s Day. I want to hate it. I really do. The path to enlightenment is not paved with romantic clichés bought at CVS. But I am a girl made of candy hearts and chocolate-covered delusions, and perhaps the best thing I can do is be aware of my DNA. I actually love Valentine’s Day. Because it celebrates longing. It celebrates connection. It celebrates the indescribable ache that moves a young girl to cover an entire room with stamp-size photos of boys she will never touch, who touched her anyway.
Best TV of 2015: A salute to the year’s hardest-working faces we saw again and again
