Familiar Filth

November can be the cruelest month, too.

“I don’t like to tell customers when a job is going to be big, and in this case, it’s not big. It’s extreme,” a plumber named Paul said to me a few weeks ago after inspecting the 170-feet of clay sewer pipe that runs from our 1920 house out to the street. Paul estimated it would cost anywhere from $60,000-100,000 to fix our line and that it needed to happen fast.

“Let’s just burn the house down,” my husband suggested.

Since we don’t know how to commit insurance fraud effectively, we instead shopped around and found other plumbers who didn’t demand our first-born child as compensation. And so last weekend we went to a hotel while the pipes in our house were pulled out and replaced. We watched Netflix on an unfamiliar TV and swam in a pool with a bunch of other San Franciscans on a staycation from their lives. That trip inspired this poem.

familiar filth

hotel beds are frightening,
with their mysterious histories lurking 
beneath a corner tuck

you search for hotels with hot tubs, 
knowing hot tub water is extremely hospitable 
to brain-eating bacteria, 
who snack on sloughed-off skin cells, biding their time 
until a gaping wound plunges 
in, opening a portal 
straight to the fatty feast of your frontal lobe

your own bed – my own bed, the filth is obvious. 
no need to lift the mattress to check for droppings. 
feathers, 
applesauce splats 
and the black husks of dead ants 
scatter the wood floor below the hanging sheet. 
the mattress protector is riding up.

i don't care. not really. 
the cans lined along the square edges of the side table, 
each with a single sip removed, are my art. 

fuck off. art. trash. it’ll all burn the same 
when the sun explodes. 
the filth i create in my wake 
is the expression of how i lived moments, days, weeks ago, 
evidence of existence and a growing experiment in accumulation. 
how else will i learn how much the table can bear?

Wait. "Wait. What happens if I do pee this couch?" my son asks from the fancy divan at our feet

"Let's try not to," I say, looking over the crisp white linens of a hotel bed, tucked so carefully

there's just something about your own filth. 
it’s comforting. it's your desiccated skin particles, 
made of your poor choices and dna. 
your sheets hanging like jowls from a face, 
they're your own special crime scene.

Recent Art Creation

“Porous Armor,” Acrylic on canvas, 30 x 30 inches, 2022.

All art is for sale if you’re interested and want to donate to the “replace sewer pipes” fund.

TMI UPDATE

Kaiser’s mental health department has been on strike, and somehow in the mishegoss of all that my doctor quit, my medications didn’t get refilled, and my emails went into a void. If you haven’t heard from me in a bit, this is partially why.

I was meant to write an oped about Elon Musk for the Boston Globe but ground my teeth instead. I wanted to write last week about the white supremacist Trump had dinner with, who I wrote a whole chapter about in my book, but I watched TikTok instead. I know I should be promoting Meme Wars and trying to get it featured on end-of-year shopping lists and begging people to write positive reviews, but I just. I just. Haven’t.

For the past 18 years I’ve taken a low dose of Prozac every day, to deal with anxiety and depression, technically, but more generally to deal with the low-key pain of ~being a human~. Shit is hard. And beautiful. And remarkable. But hard. Everyone has a different version of hard and different way of coping. For me, turns out Prozac helps me not dwell on the horrible fact that this moment — and this one — and this one — is the last of its kind, that life is a nonstop barreling forward toward our own demise — a fact that motivates just about every choice I make in life. But it’s hard to get things done when you’re dwelling on that.

I’d missed a week of my meds here or there before, but never longer. A few years ago I auditioned to be the new host of “On Point” from WBUR, after Tom Ashbrook was forced out. This meant I hosted a live two-hour show. The first was about the political events of he day and the second hour was about the horror of Prozac withdrawal. At the time, I recall trying to get the editors to change the topic for the second hour because I didn’t know much about SSRI withdrawal, nor did I actually truly believe it was an important or big problem.

When people called into On Point to talk about how much they wanted to stop taking Prozac but couldn’t because of the long and terrible withdrawal symptoms, I must admit I didn’t really believe their story was common enough to warrant an hour of radio. Especially because as someone who takes that very medication and who isn’t great about remembering to take it every day, I thought my own experience proved theirs was an outlier. I was wrong.

For five weeks I’ve been unable to get my Prozac, and it’s been a not fun or easy adventure for someone who is a) bad with bureaucratic tasks and b) increasingly in a terrible mood as the medication seeped out of my system. What I learned in this period is that actually, Prozac works and Prozac withdrawal fucking sucks.

I’ve always half suspected Prozac was placebo because it isn’t the kind of drug you feel when you take it. But I have been nauseous and irritable and unable to release the scrunch in my face for the past few weeks. “I don’t like it when you make that face!” my three year old has said too many times to count recently. Both of our kids are extremely attuned to how other people are feeling, and it has taken most of my mental energy to shield them from my bad mood during this period, but clearly I didn’t totally succeed.

I’ve been rearranging the furniture in a pathetic attempt to control something, anything. I’ve been short with my children, ungenerous toward my husband, and especially unkind to myself. Apparently, according to a website Google determined is trustworthy, those are all classic symptoms of Prozac withdrawal, along with something called “brain zaps,” which I thankfully have not felt. I have been nauseous and angry and tired and sleepless and avoidant.

Yesterday, when my kids were finally back in school after the long Thanksgiving break, I spent the day avoiding my many obligations and instead desperately trying to find an activity, any activity, that would make my churning negativity stop. Finally, what worked was smoking a low-dose THC joint and driving to the Target parking lot. I locked the doors of my old Honda Accord, whose ceiling fabric is hanging down in the back seat and whose exterior has been technically totaled for years after a hail storm, but who drives just as well as she ever did, and I took an “emergency nap,” as I call it when I get in such a foul distemper that only a total reset from nothingness to waking life will fix anything.

When I woke up I got a text from Kaiser that my primary care doctor had agreed to take over my medications and had signed a refill. She even gave me three refills. Thank fuck. It will take a week to build back up in my system, but the placebo of hope is instant.

Being a human is such a fragile state. It’s ridiculous. So sometimes we have to nap outside a Target for some reason, I guess.

IMPORTANT READER POLL

The answer to why is that my book Meme Wars has an entire chapter about Nick Fuentes in it (which you can read excerpted here in WIRED) and the argument within the book helps explain why the meeting matters, but not in the way everyone has been saying. Yes, Fuentes is awful; I know this first hand since I watched about a bazillion hours of video of him to write the book. But Trump embraces him overtly is actually a sign of Trump’s diminished mainstream appeal. Mitch McConnell today said that Trump won’t win as a result of the meeting — but imho the opposite is true: Trump isn’t going to win and that’s why he met with Fuentes in a last ditch appeal to his die-hard red-pilled base.

Thanks for reading. Hope everyone gets through the final days of November unscathed.

Love you.