BOILING THE FROG

I'm just wondering why I feel so all alone
Why I'm a stranger in my own life?
– Sheryl Crow

Marge, I agree with you in theory. In theory, Communism works. In theory.
– Homer Simpson

A year ago I was a different person. I know, I know, major cliché...everyone is a different person today than they were a year past, or six months ago, for that matter. Life is change, usually slow and cumulative, sometimes fast and violent, but regardless of the speed or the tempo, who you are never stands still. Call it entropy or call it growth, we're all shifting infinitesimally from one moment to the next: our bodies, our minds, our outlooks on life. Still, there are changes and there are changes, and some of them are fairly dramatic.

A year ago tonight I was sitting in the very spot where I sit now, moodily writing in my journal. At that point in life, the diary I've kept for the last twelve years, which used to be a source of humor, ideas and reflections, had become a litany of complaints and morose observations. A single passage will give you a sense of the mental atmosphere in which I lived:

“The day was a slow one. I couldn't wait to rocket out of (work), but when I got home, I didn't have anything to eat that I wanted, so I foolishly went to (the local diner). With the exception of breakfast, which they do well enough, I am almost always disappointed there, and today was no exception. Not terrible food, just bland and served at a sluggish pace by a girl with way too many eyelashes. I came home overheated, sweaty and in a restless bad temper: as a result, I had no choice but to change and head over to the gym at eight-thirty. I did 37 minutes on the elliptical machine whilst watching a replay of the old Lawler – Condit (UFC) fight, then did a few short rounds on the heavy bag, but by that point I was sweated-out and exhausted. Spirit willing, flesh weak (and fat). But it felt good. I'm still not in what you'd call a happy humor, but when am I happy, nowadays? The frustration I feel over my life and career saps me on a daily basis. More and more I want to escape, but where would I go, and what would I do when I got there?”

If you don't mind, pretend you're a forensic pathologist and take a scalpel to my soul. Go ahead. Really look at this passage. Dissect it, Doctor Quincy. Now, I dunno what you see here, but here's my take on our subject's state of being. The very first sentence indicates boredom and discontent. The rest are full of self-criticism, disappointment, powerlessness, and desperation. The one positive comment – that punching the heavy bag “felt good” – is like a single raisin in pounds of gray dough. If I wanted, and you had the desire and patience, I could bury you under countless pages of identical gloom. The average size of one of my yearly journals is 300,000 words, which in layman's terms means three full-length novels, and if I had to estimate, I'd say that at least 100,000 of those words were written in the same cornered-rat vein. 365 days ago, today, I was in the Pit of Despair, the Slough of Despond, the Black Hole of Calcutta. Mentally fucked.

Depression's a weird thing. My entire life, I thought that depression meant sadness – deep, abiding, unremitting sadness. I had no idea that depression – real depression, clinical depression – is more like a chronic illness than a case of the deep blues. It makes you feel like complete, utter shit. The sadness is, in a sense, a kind of side-effect of physical misery – numbness, weakness, anxiety, nausea, insomnia. When my neurologist told me, on March 27, after a long battery of tests, that there was nothing wrong with me physically, that I was depressed, my main reaction was surprise. Me? Depressed? How could that be? My life, on paper, looked pretty goddamned good. I was living in the city that I had wanted to reside in since my first visit there in 1999. Against all odds, I had broken into the entertainment industry, and was making more money than I had ever made in my life. My debut novel had collected two awards and was in contention for others. I got to work with enormously talented people and meet actors and athletes and celebrities, many of whom I had idolized as a kid. Friends and family were readily available. I lived in a clean, quiet, safe neighborhood in a location that was equally convenient to wild hiking trails in the mountains or the Walk of Fame in Hollywood. I could swim outdoors in February, for God's sake. In theory, I was living the dream. But as Homer Simpson so wisely once observed, “In theory, Communism works.”

I'm a writer by trade and by passion and by identity, too. An imaginative person. I am at my happiest when I'm creating something. It might be a historical or genre novel. It might be a short story. It might be a screenplay or even a graphic novel. It might be a crime story, a WW2 tale, horror, erotica or fantasy. I don't discriminate. I'm bad at a lot of things, good at a few, meant to do precisely one. I know this, and yet the pressures and seeming necessities of life constantly interpose themselves between me and my reason for occupying space on this troubled planet. In this, of course, I'm no different than most others. In the matrix in which we are condemned to exist, the demands required simply to keep a roof over your head and food in your belly occupy most of our time and energy and thought, leaving only crumbs and gristle for our métier: but a human soul is very much like the human body it occupies; if you don't feed it, it withers and dies. Scraps won't do. This is the paradox of modern existence: to remain human, and not degenerate into Morlocks, mere office or factory drones out of a Mike Judge movie – sexless, obedient, without ambition – it's necessary to feed said soul, and yet any given moment is more likely to find us paying bills, sitting in traffic, staring at the ceiling or standing in line. As the character of George Bowling observed in Orwell's “Coming Up For Air” – “There's time for everything in life except the things that really matter.”

You will recall I used the word “powerlessness” to describe how I felt on January 4, 2018. But in regards to my own behavior, the proper appellation is “passivity.” The attitude I had adopted toward my own life was a resigned one. I meekly, tiredly, sadly accepted a situation that had sucked the enthusiasm right out of me: even when I tried to take action, in the form of exercise, it was in a posture of submission, of reaction (“I had no choice”) rather than assertiveness and strength. Here's a non-rhetorical question: how the fuck did that happen?

The technique by which all my aggressive, assertive qualities were reduced to a formless, subservient mush of despair and self-pity is known as “boiling the frog.” When one wishes to serve fresh “cuisses de grenouille” – frog's legs – one takes live frogs and places them in a pan of lukewarm water on a stove, and then, by installments, turns up the heat to the boiling point. If properly executed, this method will kill the frogs in so subtle a manner that they will never even try to escape, but will sit quiescently until they are cooked through. It is often the same with people. Had I been suddenly and violently assailed by circumstance, I would have grasped I was under attack and either fought back or run away, like a frog thrown into already boiling water. But life is a subtle opponent and opted instead to gradually turn up the flame, so that I was quite content to stew in my own juices until it was very nearly too late to save myself.

2016 was a banner year for me. I released three books, traveled to San Francisco, Vancouver, Chicago and Washington, D.C., and spent almost every waking hour that I wasn't writing or promoting my fiction, swimming or hiking – my journal for that year records 99 hikes and 95 visits to my excellent outdoor pool. I even stole away from the Book Expo America to watch my Cubs flatten the Pirates at Wrigley Field, where I hadn't been in probably 30 years. I was fit, tanned, productive, and adventurous: I spent New Year's Eve on a mountaintop in a rainstorm, shouting Cliver Barker's poetry over the empty, shimmering canyons (I'm melodramatic like that).

2017 was, for me, the year in which I got boiled. The method life used to do so was a variation on “give and take” which might be described as “give and take more.” In January, I was healthy and happy, coming off a strong and adventurous year. In February, I sustained an injury which left me with a chronic condition, tinnitus – a persistent ringing in the ear that makes sleep impossible without judicious doses of white noise. In March, my first novel was named “Book of the Year” by Zealot Script magazine. In April, I visited Britain and France with my family. In May, I was working a job I detested and suffering acutely from physical symptoms that sucked all the quality from my life but which no doctor could even diagnose, much less cure. In June, I was given an offer for enormously higher pay in an extremely competitive field, but by July I hated the job worse than the one I'd left to take it. So on and so on, with ups following downs just often enough to give me the illusion that things weren't so bad. The trend, however, was going in only one direction – south.

This was the pattern of 2017. It fed me just enough to keep me on my feet, but starved me of what I needed to thrive. And the deeper I went into the year, the less return I seemed to get in my investment of time, the less inspired I felt, the less productive I became. My energy waned, and with it, my workout routine. Tanned skin paled. Hard muscles softened. A trim waist began to puddle around the button of my jeans. I didn't want to look at myself in the mirror, and I didn't want to admit that this was the case – I wallowed in denial. Denial that my body was turning to pudding, denial that my work ethic was doing the same. And it was a damnably easy feat of self-hypnosis to perform. Money was flowing in. IMDB credits were piling up, I was being invited to the houses of celebrity actors and attending cons and shows which not long ago would have turned me away at the door, and I had the stability that comes with a steady job. I kept trying to anesthetize that part of my soul which was shrieking in pain because I wasn't doing what I showed up on Earth to do. But the more anesthetic I applied, the more comfortable – if I may presume to quote Pink Floyd – my numbness became. Well, perhaps not comfortable; perhaps just endurable. Things were hot, but not hot enough for me to jump out of the pan. That was the way I saw it, week after empty lonely sterile week, month after boring tedious unproductive month. In the mean time, I cooked.

Think for a moment. Setting aside the obvious, i.e. food, water, shelter, sex, and family, what is it that you feel you cannot live without? The thing or things you do which trigger a sense of happiness, contentment, justification, satisfaction, and pleasure? The things without which life seems pointless, dull, or even painful? For me, as with many others, the answer isn't as obvious as it may seem, because what I enjoy and what I actually need are sometimes different things. I enjoy training in the martial arts, drinking whiskey and beer, watching combat sports on television, listening to Old Time Radio programs, watching old movies on the big screen...but I could probably go the rest of my life without doing any of these things if I had to and not feel as if I had a hole in the center of my being. Reading and writing I cannot do without. I need them to live. And yet in 2017, I read infrequently and wrote hardly at all, because I allowed myself to believe that “adult responsibility” (making as much money as I possibly could) trumped the innermost needs of Miles Watson the human being. In our society it's an easy mistake to make, because we're trained from infancy to associate financial success with happiness and even virtue. It's a bullshit ethos, probably invented by Satan in one of his more fiendishly ingenious moments, but it's hard not to drink it in with your mother's milk. In this case, it wasn't until my body began to strike back at me for neglecting my spirit that I grasped how hot the temperature of the water was around me.

“Positive actualization” is a real thing. So is its inversion. The heavenly courses we set for ourselves, we can follow if we believe that we can follow them; but the hells that we imagine – the disappointments, the frustrations, the left-handed compromises – can also be willed into existence. Everything in life has an opposite. If there is a will to power, there is also will to powerlessness, and the first step in overcoming it is recognizing it exists: that we all have a tendency to convince ourselves that shit is sugar, that theory is practice, that communism works. A moment came in the spring of '18 when I confessed to myself that the water around me was boiling, and the time had come for me to jump clear. Fate gave me a shove in the right direction by getting me laid off from a job that was poisoning my soul, but getting back to who I had been before I'd hit the water in the first place was another matter entirely. It actually began a month or so before the layoff, when I forced myself to go back to the gym. It sounds trivial, but the hour I spent there between 4:30 and 5:30 PM went a long way toward sweating out not only the actual toxins I was absorbing into my skin every day, but the spiritual toxins I had accumulated over the previous year. The human body is designed for movement, and when you move it, after some protesting squeaks, it generally begins to reward you, not only by looking better but by releasing endorphins which make you feel better. The truth is, however, that whether my workouts were effective or not on a fitness level, they represented a return to the discipline which I needed to feel like a man and a success. Failure, like excellence, is a habit, and I'd developed a way of thinking that dragged like an anchor every time I tried to move forward. To cut that chain took – takes! – conscious effort, and to slacken even for a moment invites backsliding. And in fact, even with conscious effort I have discovered that I will never again come to exactly the same place I occupied in January of 2017, because, as I think I already pointed out, life is a jetway. We are constantly transitioning from who we were to who we will be. But again, this can be a positive as well as a negative. I am different not only because of the emotional and spiritual scars I bear, but because I'm wiser and tougher than I was before – in other words, better, despite my previous misery. After a lot of work, a lot of self-scrutiny and self-care, I find myself more positive in outlook and more productive in fact than I have been in several years. I'm writing like mad. I'm submitting like crazy. I've picked up another literary award. I have another interview scheduled. My diet is kicking ass, and when I was injured in a hiking accident a week ago, I didn't sulk but shrugged and found ways to keep exercising despite a bum ankle and a torn rotator cuff. The future is bright, but only because I've brightened my future. I am no longer a stranger in my own life. But -- and here's the crucial thing -- I may be again if I'm not careful.

As you all know by now, I work in Hollywood, and if there's one thing Hollywood taught me growing up, it's the idea of the climactic battle and the "happily ever after" which follows the slaying of the dragon, the destruction of the Death Star, or the defeat of Voldemort. But in real life, our only true climactic battle is one we lose -- the one in which we die, I mean. All the battles prior to that one merely lead to more battles. I described life as a jetway, but it's really more of a gauntlet, a trial by combat, an elimination tournament in which every victory is followed by a fresh challenge. The idea that one decisive moment will turn us around for good, steer us into "ever after" territory, is bunk. As Hannibal Lecter told Clarice Starling: "You'll have to earn it again and again, the blessed silence. Because it's the plight that drives you, seeing the plight, and the plight will not end, ever." The brutal fact is – and I say this as a friendly warning – that the chef is always beneath us, holding his pan and saying with a smile, “Come on in – the water's fine!”

Whether we go swimming is up to us.