[whispers] don’t take this the wrong way, but … do you have halitosis? you see the size of this room? everyone in this room can smell your odor. it doesn’t smell like body odor though, so i’m just wondering … halitosis? bad breath? if so i have some of these breath strips, you put them on your tongue and … hey, i’m talking to you! this is very important. you’ve disrupted the perfectly fine air in this room with your rank breath. i know, it’s hard to deal with halitosis, but if you expect us all to put up your terrible stench you have another thing coming, mister. life isn’t fair, okay? life deals us these terrible cards that we have to live with for the rest of our lives. life gave you halitosis, you have to deal with that. life gave me an itchy pussy, that’s what i have to deal with. no STDs or anything just it itches all the time, my gyno can’t figure out what’s going on.  so every time i have sex with a gentleman occasionally i have to tell him to hold on while i scratch my labia. sometimes i make him angle his dick so he can scratch my vaginal canal with his penile head. look the important thing is that your problems are yours and yours alone–they are not ours. so get your stinky breath out of here and get some listerine or something. come on man!

ultimately i am a bad friend. i apologize for this. it’s because i value silence and alone time. i make the excuse that i need the space to create but the truth is that i have a suspicion of how other people view me–namely, that they think i’m boring or annoying or whatever–negative things, all of them, and enough to keep me indoors and in front of a computer screen. i’m a bad friend and a worse boyfriend. i’m sorry. i’d change but that would require change, and now i can just be a lazy loner. it makes me sad. i’d love to change, i feel the desire bubble up in me occasionally but it’s hard to rip deep seated roots out of the earth. “he had such promise,” i hear characters say in my head. i look up an article that says that jon hamm didn’t achieve success until his 30s. but he worked hard. he worked hard for a decade to get there. i haven’t. i took classes and made myself a pseudo-expert in a field most people don’t care about, a field that requires people to care about it. a field that desires warm bodies in a small room to generate lasting heat. so what the fuck? where is my desire? why do i not want to see anyone? why do i refrain from going out? why am i such a bad friend and boring boyfriend? she said “you’ll find someone better for you” and i thought “where?”. i’m ruining myself just thinking about it. how do you think so positively? where does it come from? how do i find it? give me your secrets, let me delve into this world. i need your naive love for mankind. it’s like a booster shot i don’t want but desperately need. i have depression flu. i gotta have that flu shot.

dead. they’re all dead. jesus christ. what the fuck happened here? central, if you can hear me, i’m about fifty meters inside the shell and it’s chaos here. people are dead left and right, and their body parts strewn around like they were blown apart. i can’t even count how many dead, it’s … tremendous. most look like they were just dismembered, there are torsos and arms and legs. oxygen level outside the shell is normal, but inside, it’s 45% more saturated. i haven’t had contact with the other crew since 0400, i don’t know if they’re still alive. central, something fucked up is going on in here. these body parts were in the shell before it attached, nobody has been in here besides me as  far as i know … there’s blood everywhere. central you gotta get marines here, ASAP. this room’s making me feel woozy, like .. maybe it’s the extra oxygen or something. i’m gonna leave. i have to leave. this is–oh fuck the entrance is closed. central can you hear me? central? captain shiver to central, come in. please come in central, i’ve got a serious problem here, i have a SERIOUS PROBLEM– [sound cuts out. static]

you go through slumps. it’s not easy. it looks easy, sure, because what you see is the end result. you see the glitz, the glamour, all that lovely stuff. sometimes e or tmz or whatever the popular gossip outlet is now will show you the more seedier stuff, but the public eats that up too. they love it. but what you don’t see is the grueling hours of rehearsal, the constant waiting, the disappointment when you study an audition side for days and then head into a casting office and you look in their eyes and know immediately that you’re not getting the part. see, film, tv, that acting is all here, in the eyes, in micro expressions, because the camera is right there. you see brad pitt’s face up close and it’s fifty feet tall on a screen. you can see everything, and when you study film acting, you start to pick up on those nuances. you also, i mean, mr. watson talked about this briefly in high school–stanford-meisner technique is, a lot of it is just sitting in front of your acting partner and describing them. like, their face, their facial expressions, and reacting to what you perceive as their mood. i was always good at it because i spent a lot of time analyzing dad’s face, since he was always so deadpan all the time. so, you know, if i told a joke and he liked it, i’d see his eyebrow raise up a little bit and that’s when i’d know.

point is, you go into those casting calls and you can see immediately when the casting director doesn’t want you for the part. their face falls, not in a big way, just … you can see the creases in the corners of their mouth turn so slightly downward. you see their eyes narrow. “i’m wasting my time,” you imagine them saying, but you say your lines anyway because that’s the dumb social contact acting has built up over the past few centuries. and this happens all. the. time. especially in los angeles. acting, performance, creation, it’s all built on the fiery embers of failure. actors are failure personified, little whiskey-filled phoenixes who have to crawl out of the ashes of their own demise. we’re retarded. we’re insane! we’re foolish. at least you knew or had this sense of your path in life, teddy. sure it wasn’t great but it was solid and you maintained it, you knew your place and you kept at it, you knew your faults up front and didn’t fight against them. i think that takes a lot of guts. i really do. i spent a lot of my life hiding behind this acting persona so that i wouldn’t have to deal with this soul-crushing sense of constant defeat. i kept climbing out of the ashes again and again and again. you’re just loving the ashes. i gotta respect that.

god, i can’t even. i can’t even anymore. i literally cannot even. i think i could even at one point but by this point i absolutely cannot even. i can’t. i can’t even. i mean, it’s just so, it’s so very, i can’t even, you know, i saw it, i mean, i saw it, i saw it happen and then trevor said something and i was like i can’t even right now and left. i can’t even, when i think about it i can’t even. i can’t. i can’t. i can’t even. can you…? could you even if you tried? cause i tried. i tried to even and i couldn’t, i laid on the ground and just tried to even and i couldn’t. i spent a week trying. a whole week. turned off my phone, went out into the woods, laid on a bamboo mat in a log cabin built by my grandpa in the summer of 1936. they, my grandma and him, had run off to montana to escape the depression and live off the land. they had a bunch of seeds, a .30-06, some bullets, i think that was it. ate nothing but stuff they killed at first, had to eat everything so they wouldn’t starve. just eating meat doesn’t have enough nutrition, you see. that gun is still there, covered in cobwebs. everything was covered in cobwebs. i spent a week just cleaning the place and setting up rat traps and stuff like that. and then, you know, no TV, no radio even. no smartphone. i was off the grid. i brought a bunch of luna bars and firewood for cooking. groceries and whatnot. i didn’t know where to put them because there wasn’t a fridge or even an icebox. how the hell did people keep their produce fresh back then, you know? i ended up cooking a lot for the first couple of days, after i cleaned, i mean. i cooked up stews and chili and stuff that i could put in tupperware and live off of for a couple of weeks. i wasn’t thinking of the long term, i just wanted a few days alone in this cabin, to think, to rest, to recuperate. and … i did. it felt like i did. it was sunny the whole time, clear skies, i was about a hundred feet away from a brook, like an actual babbling brook. it was gorgeous, it was so quiet at night, kind of scary, but i was literally in the middle of nowhere so i wasn’t scared. not of people at least. maybe bears. but it was so serene, it made me feel so peaceful, so connected to the earth. some nights i would just lie in the little, stiff bed in the single room of this cabin and i’d stare out of the window at the trees rustling in the breeze and i would just cry, i’d cry for hours, cry about shit that happened to me and shit that hadn’t, cry about the future, and cry-laugh and laugh and get angry. i had all these feelings that did not need to hide behind anything anymore. no people to judge me, no crazy, extenuating circumstances that lodged stress in my chest. it was glorious. no makeup, no need to “prepare” myself for anyone, men, women, anyone. i’d go hiking in the morning and eat stew in the afternoon and nap and none of my worries were worries anymore. then, on sunday, i packed up all my things and drove back into town, watching the woods slowly dissipate, replaced with the urban jungle of skyscrapers and people. i saw an old man with a walker waiting to cross the street and i cried so hard for him my chest hurt. he was so lovely, just a little old man being beautiful and gentle. and even then, after all that time spent alone in a cabin in the woods, i still can’t even. i can’t. i can’t even. i just seriously cannot.

yeah. i guess you can call it a fragile male ego. you can say that in a room with two, three dozen people in it, sure, because your words have meaning here. while i sit here, numb, chest taken by depression to the point where i’m wondering if i can get a gun easier and faster at a pawn shop than a gun shop, yes, you can tell me my sadness is a symptom of my fragility, and you would be right. because no one ever said that depression isn’t selfish. it’s very selfish. it steals a person from the world and cocoons them in their own self-doubt and numbness. it is in essence selfish, self-centered, and self-destructive. but here’s the thing, lauren: i know you. i know you well enough to know that you have these same issues. you’re just better at hiding them. so when you call me out for my “fragile male ego” do you want me to tell all these people about how when you’re sad you drink two bottles of wine and scream-sing in the bathtub for two hours? do you think every person at this restaurant deserves to learn about the weird high pitched girl voice you use when you’re talking about your depression? judging by your expression, no, nobody here does. and yet they all deserve to know about how my “ego” is so “fragile,” which, by the way, it’s not, lauren, I’m FUCKING DEPRESSED. i don’t have an ego to begin with. so fuck you and the fuck the horse you rode in on. [takes the plate of food] i’m taking this home and you’re paying for it.

joe was, i don’t know, six foot, six foot two, maybe a hundred and eight pounds. kind of a big guy, muscular, you know, he was a farm boy so he always had this big broad shoulders and arms from baling hay and such. and i … i saw him grow, you know? i saw him age, i saw him go through high school. so this accusation, it just doesn’t make sense. also, i’ll tell ya, he was on the football team in high school, the varsity team in his senior year, he was a linebacker and he’d come home from games with bumps and bruises. he’s broken his arm, not from football but from skiing. i saw it, i was there, it was up on brundage, he hit a tree, his arm caught the tree trunk and it broke his arm. i mean i saw it, saw him get in the ambulance, met him at the hospital, i saw them set the bone, and i don’t think robots have bones, mack. so i don’t know. this all seems really sketchy. i know people are scared of bots and all that but joe was no bot, so why’d he get killed, mack? i’ve never met a nicer man in my life, just a down home type of fellow, ever since he was a little boy. senseless that he was killed, just senseless. joe reynolds was a lot of things, a lot of wonderful things, but he was no robot, you hear me? and you can quote me on that in your little newspaper.

honey bunches of oats. motherFUCKING honey bunches of oats. give me a better cereal. i fucking dare you. maybe you’re a purist, maybe you eat cheerios or goddamn rice krispies. you’re a coward. maybe you’re a diabetic from eating lucky charms or cocoa puffs. but is there a cereal out there that perfectly balances sweet and savory better than honey bunches of oats? NO THERE IS NOT. the only thing i can think that comes anywhere close is golden grahams, but those are still too sweet. (fucking delicious, but too sweet.) so you come here into my house asking me for some cereal, which i am happy to give you, but then you have the GALL to BALK at the idea of honey bunches of oats, the most delicious of cereals, crunching happily between your teeth?! you come into my house…?! i can’t believe this bullshit. get out. get out of my house and don’t come back until you can respect MY cereal!

it’s like …

it’s basically like …

like you’re … in a dark room. a pitch black room, that you’ve never been in before, and you’re fumbling around for a light switch. and nothing feels like a light switch, and you’re moving your hands around in the darkness, all along the walls, you can feel the texture of the paint, but you can’t seem to find that raised plastic with the little nub in the middle. and as you move your hands around you brush up against this thing or that thing and since it’s dark you don’t know what it is. eventually, you can’t find a light switch or the door or anything, so eventually you just give up and in order to stave off insanity you start feeling the things in the room. you’re trying to make sense of the things in the room. is that a shirt? am i in a closet? what is that thing, what is this thing, you know. soon you’ve taken all these amorphous blobs in the darkness and you think you know what they are. that’s a shirt, definitely, it’s on a hanger. that’s a toy car, like an RC car. you think you know everything. but you still can’t find a light switch, or a door handle. you can’t find a way out. and now that you think you know what everything in the room is, you get a sense of what the room is. it’s a closet. it’s a basement, whatever. you’re certain of it. how could you be wrong? you smelled everything, you touched everything. and now you’re here, alone, in this room, no lights, no sounds, no door to open, no windows. pitch black. and you’re just there. and it’s like, “well now what?” you know? now what? what’s the next step? maybe you scream, maybe you scream at the top of your lungs and bang as hard as you can on the walls, just scream until your throat is hoarse, until your arms are bruised. but nothing happens. maybe you sit and think about shit. but nothing happens. you’re just alone in a dark room you can’t escape, no matter how hard you try.

that’s how i feel. almost every day. and see, the days i don’t feel like that are like when there’s just the quickest flicker of light in that room, like dim candlelight, for just a second, but it illuminates the room enough that i can see that i was wrong about everything. that wasn’t a shirt, it was an old shawl. that wasn’t a toy car, it was a, i don’t know, a toy dinosaur. but i was wrong. and now i have to get that light back, because i want to be right. i know i won’t get out of this room but at least i can be right, at least i can know about the room i’m stuck in. so i wait. and then another flash of light, and i take a mental image of another object. and then i wait. and wait. and another flash, another mental image. and that’s pretty much what my life is like, when i’m not depressed. a brief glimpse into a well-lit room, in between months of waiting in the dark.

i wish i could explain it to you. the problem is, depression is such a generalized term — i’m depressed, i’m sad, i’m down et cetera — but there’s this insane fluidity and nuance to it that’s hard to explain in the moment. every time i try to wrangle why i’m depressed i end up roping a different reason, all valid. it’s about you though. about me dealing with you, i mean. you haven’t done anything to me besides ignite a small fire of affection in my heart that i am trying desperately to fan into flames. that in itself is kind of the issue, that you’re on a much higher level emotionally than i am. this depression makes me feeling like a burden, about feeling like i’m damaged goods, that there’s some guy out there who’s better for you than me. that’s a trigger point. the fact that you seem put together, happy, well-adjusted, always full of boundless positive energy, whereas i’m focused on the negative and sad shit. that’s a trigger point. and then sometimes it’s just really tiny details. like last night when i texted you that i didn’t want to go to the show and you just texted back “okay”, no punctuation even. you always use punctuation. you always use exclamation marks, especially when things are good. so when you just send me a word all i can think is, “she’s either busy, or she’s upset.” and i could ask, but then i would be a burden–you see how this can spiral?–and this illusion of confidence i seem to have gets blown away like morning fog in a spring breeze, revealing not san francisco so much as the pungent sugar beet factory stench of nampa, idaho during a week-long inversion. and all of this snowballs into a really deep depression, resulting in trips to the corner store buying whatever terrible junk food i can find. ice cream lately. it’s not pleasant, and i’d rather hole up in my dark bedroom than subject you to it. is that how relationships work? i don’t know.

people put me on a pedestal sometimes. they think i’m this great person but i’m not. i’m not. that’s not self-deprecation, that’s fact. none of us are so great as to be put on pedestals. we are all equals with special abilities but we are all human beings with blood and a heart that beats until it stops. none of us are worthy of being idolized, and we should all be treated as peers, as real people, as people who have real feelings and troubles, people who win oscars but also take horrific IBS-related shits in the toilet, people who paint beautiful landscapes while high on cocaine. we’re not perfect. that’s the beauty of the human race. my depression stems from not being worth the pedestal i’m put on, about having to force confidence because people expect it from me. rather than just being able to be myself, i have to be this larger than life figure because i literally am larger than most people, taller and bigger. but i can’t sustain it. i can’t sustain the high energy you have and that makes me depressed because why do not have any fucking energy? even when i work out and eat well, i’m still at like a 6 when you’re at a 10. you can bring me up to an 8. you should take that as a compliment.

at least i’m talking about it. with a therapist, i mean. and i’m trying to be more open in general. it’s hard because people tend not to care. i don’t blame them, we’ve all got shit going on in our lives. fuck, maybe i need antidepressants, i don’t know. but i do want you to know that when i hole myself up it’s only because i don’t want to bother you, but i would like some kind of acknowledgement that you care. i don’t mean that to sound so harsh, i just mean … i spend a lot of time alone, and when people say they care it means a lot to me, because it reminds me that i’m not alone. that’s all. you mean a lot to me and i don’t want to lose you because i distance myself from people when i feel sick. i’m working on that. i’m … working on it.