The trouble with being me is that everything is meaningful. That might sounds fun, a kind of mystical place where each thing I posses and every moment I experience is suffused with a kind of mystical potential that diffuses slowly into the fabric of my existence each time I reach out and touch them. This is not, in fact, the case. The case is that every moment is, in some way or another, a moral referrendum on how I’m living my life. Writing, the most embattled and in some ways important, piece of my life, is no different except in its extreme.

I can write with one hand tied behind my back, but I am not pushed, not drawn, not compelled to do it. At least, not in a productive way. Perhaps I am in purgatory, neither in possession of, or in the possession of my demons; still close enough to them to hear their taunts from behind me, but not far enough away from them that I can see them for the angels that they are, the angels who, with proper application of the magic word (the secret name of God perhaps, or my own true name, revealed to me by an as yet unmet master, or maybe discovered in a moment of ecstatic metaphysical transparency), will do my bidding, carrying me up to heaven for wordless dialogue with god, speaking with only our souls, engaged, as he did with Israel, in physical combat of the spirit.

This is, I hope, a statement of the mental health, the emotional strength which I have been hoarding, scraping together every day like drops of water for a thirsty man, except that the thirst is really ennui, distaste for the situation I find myself in. But I am afraid it is not, that any progress I have made is an illusion, that I am no further from the taunts of said demons than I was a year ago, or three. I know that it can’t be true. I am healthier in the rest of my life than I ever have been, taking care of myself emotionally and physically, with a steady kind of compassion that, five years ago, I wasn’t even aware was possible, much less was capable of practicing. And yet, here I sit, whinging about how I don’t have the drive to write.

This is, ultimately, the same old lament: talented but not driven, prepared but not passionate. The trick, though, in the transfiguration of fallible humanity into true self-loathing is to take that lack of passion and turn it so that its presence is proof of my lack of special status. I am not favored in the eyes of God because the single thing that I am good at, that matters above and beyond getting it done or just getting by, seems to have somehow sputtered out over the last 8 years and I haven’t, in all my wit and wisdom, been able to find a way to consistently rekindle it. This lack of passion is a failure on my part, and that failure is a stain on my otherwise spotless (haha) resume.

I wish I could just get up and write everyday: carrying water, chopping wood. And yet the simplicity, the rote-mindedness of that somehow robs it of its significance. If writing is just a daily chore, then why do it at all? I am in the middle of the specialness conundrum: How can something be special if I do it everyday? Even, especially, when I don’t want to do it? Why do I do something if it’s something that I don’t want to do? And again, the reflection of myself against some perfect pursuit, such as mastery of writing, or perhaps even more grandly, mastery of myself, that I am not hero enough to endure, to withstand, to triumph over.

It is a measure of my ability to subtly and consistently undermine myself, wordlessly rob myself of efficacy, allowing my doubt to dissolve my certainty every morning, waking up myself again, powerless without some external advocacy, some outside agent to draw me forward into motion. Without the threat of deadline or disappointment I am difficult to motivate, and that speaks to me of blockage: dysfunction or dis-ease or some sort or another, but no spiritual practice or god that I have sought have been able to diagnose or dispel it. So I am left with myself and my sneaking suspicion that it is my lack of piety or endurance that is at fault, my inability to transcend the mortal plane and pierce into the godhead and encounter the divine (and thus somehow lend validation to my being, my thoughts, experiences and fruit of loom and loin); left with these blunt tools whose unsubtle blows I rain down on the unforgiving surface of my life in seemingly fruitless attempt to shape it to my liking; left with this clumsy likeness, a crude homunculus whose ugliness drives me to distraction rather than to perfection.

And I know that there is no shortage of perfectionism in this paralysis. That I am obsessed with knowing the outcome before I even begin the endeavor, and I know that kind of certainty has no place creativity, that the heart of productivity lies imperfection, and that in order to achieve the beauty I seek, in my life or in my work, the key is revision. But can you blame me if that doesn’t excite me? If slavish rewriting of my life is somehow less than motivating? Probably, I know I can blame myself for anything.

Taking one step back (to find yet one more way to criticize myself) this cannot be fun to read. I imagine that, despite the well-crafted prose and the mildly surprising vocabulary, that the fulminations of a would-be writer at his erstwhile impotence makes for less than engrossing entertainment, especially when that’s all he writes about. I am not sure which is worse: the writer who cannot write, or the writer who only writes about how he cannot write.

I have worn glasses for as long as I can remember. I know that this is only the fault of my poor memory, and that before fifth grade I didn’t need glasses. I have no first memory of glasses, but the the image that most clearly captures onslaught of spectacles for me is one from fifth grade, in which I have been saddled with a pair of black-framed reading glasses at least two sizes too large for my head. It is not a pretty picture, this ill-dressed aspiring intellectual trapped in shorts and a purple cougar-emblazoned t-shirt. It is the kind of angst that they write mediocre first novels about in MFA programs across the country.

I did not have much of a chance when it came to eyesight. Both of my parents are myopic. My father, for as long as I have known him, has favored highly-unimaginative square frames with a double bridge and translucent plastic nosepads. In the days of my youth they were heavy glasses that left distinct indentations in the bridge of his nose that still feel uncomfortable even in memory. I don’t know how long he’s worn that style, that badge of industrio-bureaucratic middle management, which, though he has studiously avoided that level of responsibility throughout his career, my father fits into perfectly: off brand polos and khakis, comfortable loafers and a pocket full of cheap pens. His glasses are utilitarian, a tool to help him see clearly, and to that end they are durable and dependable. He cannot see them as an object of design, as a symbol that lends his character a certain dead weight and inflexibility.

My mother, on the other hand, has always opted for contact lenses. She, like me, is blessed with an astigmatism, and as such has always worn hard-lens contacts. For those of you who’ve not known the joys of rigid gas permeable contacts they are thin sheaths of stiff plastic that float in front of your pupils. In theory they are so thin as to be unnoticeable, but in the element of the eye, whose tightly controlled mechanics have been carefully honed over thousands of years of incremental evolution, they feel, at first, like trying to gently tuck hockey pucks under your eyelids. Every blink knocks them off center just a bit, and I find the milliseconds of readjustment irritating. My eyes water just writing about it. I have tried wearing hard lenses regularly, but it exhausts my eyes, so I have settled for the occasional discomfort of wearing them during sports, since as I focus on the event my body forgets I’m wearing contacts until the action is over. I do not know how, or perhaps more importantly why, my mother gets up every morning and puts them into her eyes, but one of the consequences seemed to be that her eyes were always bloodshot.

It is hard for me not to read something into everything; my world is nothing if not a long list metaphors and allusions. This is pathetic fallacy writ large: everything has a meaning; As above so below. So it is impossible for me not to see my weak eyes as the reason that I cannot see the right in the world, as the cause of so much anxiety. Extend that metaphor another generation, perhaps, and say that it is inherited, that I had no choice over how I grew up and learned to see the world, that my weak eyes were learned as much as inherited. It is hard for me to walk in the world and see it as a happy, safe place. The ‘realist’ in me shouts out: It is not! The world is dangerous and frightening place! Didn’t you read this? Haven’t you heard that? But I have worked hard to ignore this voice and have learned to some degree a new way of seeing. Still, even when I am not afraid that my son will be snatched, it is hard for me to be positive. I see a car and think only of the greed, exploitation and pollution inherent in the automobile rather than its ingenuity and beauty. I see a plastic bag and think only of the litter and the waste, rather than the beauty of living in a place where everyone has access to clean, healthy food.

Even writing this I can hear the sarcastic, biting voice in the back of my head: Yeah, access to potato chips, candy and tabloids, real fucking great. This cancerous voice clouds my vision, attaching itself to everything I see, blinding me to the beauty that I know is in the world, but which I struggle so hard to find. I think the worst of everyone I pass, judging them on the car they drive, the bags they carry, how they say hello. It is too easy to say I look around and see a world full of half-empty glasses; it is more accurate to say I live in a world of broken glass wondering with a smug certainty which of them will cut me.

It is possible, perhaps even likely, that the idea that my vision is flawed is part of having flawed vision, that this is a never ending catch 22, a downward spiral of negativity and self-loathing, one which I never seem to tire of exploring and charting with a sadistic kind of accuracy. I don’t rationally believe that the world is one way or the other. I rationally believe that to a great degree I create the world that I live in. That isn’t a physical truth, but a metaphysical one. I do not experience the world as the world, but through the sensory input of my physical body that’s run through the filter of my mind, which translates the physical impact of hard edges and loud sounds into something resembling my experience while simultaneously adding an unconscious narrative, the unceasingly negative commentary to the director’s cut of my life.

Learning to see the world as it is, both beautifully and horribly, takes a lot of practice. The world doesn’t change, it’s always been beautifully horrible and horrible beautiful: contrast the beauty of the Psalms with the pessimism of Job. I cannot change my physical eyes. Okay, I can, but I’m not ready to cut into my eyeballs with frickin’ lasers, no matter how safe they promise me it’ll be. Eyeballs don’t grow back, people. But I can change the way I see the world. It’s not easy; I’ve grown accustomed to my biting pessimism. It is an easy and safe way to live. I know its curves and corners in a way that is intimate and unconscious. Choosing optimism and happiness is hard; it disagrees violently with what I ‘know’ and what I read and hear; it paints the world Pollyanna and I see myself as a rube, a mark and a sap, naïve and trusting. Deviate even a fraction from my pessimism and the world is suddenly an unsafe place. That’s backwards perhaps: the world is an unsafe place, and to deviate from that belief is therefore dangerous, but that’s the way that bad old ideas stay in place, because of the implicit truth that disobeying them is dangerous.

My the warp in the way I see the world is the metaphysical embodiment of my boundaries, the edges of my vision and my ignorance, and therefore the shape of my superstition. My vision of a dangerous and degraded world that I must move through with great care keeps me safe, but it keeps out new and fresh ideas, novel exploration and unexpected inspiration. The world over has been thoroughly mapped, but I can be an explorer merely by challenging my own boundaries, trying a new restaurant, walking down a new street or going somewhere I’ve never been, and in doing so push back the edge of my fear.

I don’t know that I’ll ever see the world as an inherently good place. I have spent a long time believing otherwise, being taught over and over again both that fear will keep me alive, and that I am powerless to change the way things are. I know, rationally, that this attitude is as dangerous as the the world it attempts to describe; that moving through the world wrapped in fear and mistrust generates those things in the people I pass. I know from experience that being able to be open to the people I pass by and interact with generally brings out something nice. I work hard everyday to look the people I pass in the eye and say hello, but it is always work, and that says a great deal about the way I approach the world outside my door. And that may be all it will ever be, a layer of habit layered awkwardly over a deep vein of dark pessimism, and if that’s the case, so be it. I may never reshape my eyes, but the glasses I put in front of them compensate for their deformity, so I might well consider my artificial happiness a corrective lens for my soul.

One of my least favorite parts of my job is coding for Internet Explorer. Why would I code a website just for Internet Explorer (abbreviated IE), you ask? I’ll tell you! Unbeknownst to most folks every web browser builds (or renders) the code of a web page differently. In some cases these differences are so slight you might not even notice them; this is the best case scenario. The worst case scenario is Internet Explorer 6 (IE6), a primitive web browser by today’s standards that’s still being used by .5% of people browsing the web. That .5% statistic can be misleading, however, since browsers vary distinctly by topic. High technology websites like cNet or Apple won’t have any IE6 hits at all, while LOLCatz and quilting websites tend to have a ton. One of my clients still has around 15% of its traffic coming in on IE6, despite doing everything it can to persuade them to change browsers.

So, despite my desire to quit coding IE6 and save myself, on average 3-5 hours per site I do, I must endure. Thankfully the client has told me that IE6 doesn’t need to be pixel-perfect and only needs to render as a basic website, which is an order I follow as closely as possible. It still irritates me to leave a site in a knowing state of neglect as I often must do with IE6, but IE6 is so full of bugs and my client’s deadlines are so urgent that many things are left imperfect. Still, as I’m unraveling the series of CSS and HTML bugs that IE6 parses in its own quirky way, I often wonder what the people still using this archaic browser think about my web design. I wonder if they wonder why any professional corporation would leave in some of the imperfections that sometimes get passed over. I personally believe that people surfing the web with IE6 generally don’t have a choice of browsers; they’re using antiquated computers on a public library in some podunk town uninterested in that internet fad, or they’re at the mercy of a particularly autocratic and technophobic employer. Still, there must be some folks out there who still don’t know what a web browser is, or why the internet looks so shitty. They are, in short, people without the ability to question their lens.

Our browsers, be they Firefox, Chrome, Safari or IE of any flavor, are essentially the lenses that we use to examine the code of the internet. I don’t want to get too Matrix-y here since I don’t personally know anyone who can read code and compile a visual image in their head. Even as a professional who’s been writing HTML and CSS for years, I still have to see the code in the browser before I can be sure of what’s going to happen once I type it in. So I’m dependent on the browser to see the code for me, and hope that the people who built the browser focused it well and that it renders the code as closely to the vision of the writer as possible. Thankfully there are people advocating for just that: that all web browsers render as equally and clearly as possible.

It is, of course, the same with people. The video I posted the essay from Google was stunning to me the first time I saw it. How, I thought to myself, can these people live in the world, use the internet on a regular basis and NOT know what a browser is? Some of them must use it every single day and yet they’re totally at a loss for how to describe it. A big part of that is simply vocabulary: the pieces of the computer we know how to use are intuitive to us on a private and personal way from years of practice, but we often learn to use computers through trial and error, and not through descriptive instruction, thus the names of the parts of a computer beyond the keyboard, mouse and monitor may as well be in a foreign language. Coaching my mother and various clients through the contrived and awkward vocabulary of the typical Windows desktop is a painful and fruitless process. Trying to get a lawyer’s wife to remember the difference between a shortcut and a folder was truly daunting, never did I dare teach her the subtle differences between the quick launch bar and the icon tray.

The point is that everyone in that video knows how to use a browser to get what they want out of it, but I suspect that the moment they want to do something beyond navigating to a web page directly, buying something online or finding it in a search engine most of them find themselves neck deep in unfamiliar territory and terminology. In the same way, all of us have learned how to get by in life in one way or another. If you’re reading this you have your life together to a degree decent enough to have access to a computer, the internet and the time to read about a web designer trying to bullshit his way through a bad metaphor. That’s saying something; the ability to function on that level doesn’t come easily to everyone.

On the other hand, many of the ways we’ve learned to get by in life have been the same way those folks learned to use their web browser without knowing it was called a web browser: trial and error. And life is a hell of a lot harder to learn to use than a computer is, since in many instances we’ve had to learn to do exactly the opposite of what we were told to do. Most of life is learning to read between the lines, knowing which rules to follow and which ones we can break. All of our families had these rules, most of them weren’t written down, and fewer of them were ever talked about. We learned those rules the hard way, and in doing so we unconsciously formulated the lenses through which see the world. Learning to describe those lenses is key to being able to change things about our lives that we’re unhappy with, and a major part of describing thos lenses is creating our own personal vocabulary to name those lenses. I’d argue that the kind of introspection that has been necessary for healthy change in my life hasn’t been just about passive study of my incredibly unhealthy technique, but about actively creating a name, a container and a level of accountability for that technique.

I have a lot of voices in my head, a lot of incessant, negative, critical, voices in my head that question my choices and actions almost every step of my day. I am plagued by doubt, fear, scarcity and downright loathing. At some point I chose to consider these voices demons, negative influences that were outside of my control. But, as a magical acolyte in training, I also know that the most powerful magic in the human repertoire is naming. Over and over again in fairy lore, from Genesis to Rumplestilskin if you name something it is yours to control. So, in my own act of reclaiming and magical hommage, I opened a text file on my computer and saved it under the name ‘My Own Personal Goetia’, in reference to the Ars Goetia section of the Lesser Key of Solomon.

Every time a negative voice would pop up while I was working, I would open the document on my desktop and describe it, then from that description I would give it a name, and in doing so I named the demons that I was plagued by. Once I was able to name most of them, it was easy to quickly identify them when they appeared, and once I was able to identify them, it was easier to create counter-spells to negate their negative magic. The counter-spells in this case were often just recognition of their demonic influence, or something as simple as an idea that negated their negativity. One of my demons I called ‘Demon of Peak Efficiency’ and described it as ‘The low feeling that I could be working harder if I was really committed to X, X being whatever ideal is handy to make me feel like shit that day.’ To negate the idea of peak efficiency I slowly taught myself that creativity feels inefficient, that inefficiency is necessary to exploration, and that good exploration is inefficient, or rather that the most efficient creativity is through exploration, not through rigid self-criticism or procrastination (never mind that forcing me to deal with the demons is in and of itself highly inefficient; hypocrisy, deception and paradox are inherent in the demonic voice). Here is the complete list of My Own Personal Goetia:

Demon of Infinite Persecution – Always finding a way to moralize about how something I do is wrong, (file sharing, font trading, etc.) usually through fantasy scenarios of trials in courtrooms or being grilled by investigative reporters who I must assume hold all the moral right to do this. This demon also masquerades as an expert in X field, where X is an idea that I’m trying to explore or play with, to shame me for my ignorance and audacity at trying to think in this field when so many other real professionals already have.

Demon of Personal Scarcity – Turns all joys into burdens.

Demon of Inevitable Failure – All good things must end, so you cannot succeed, so why even try? Bonus tool: public failure.

Demon of Horrors Revisited – Apparently at random frightens me throughout the day with the prospect of running into someone I really fear, whom I feel I’ve done wrong to.

Demon of Random Catastrophe – A sudden fear that my wife is lying dead in bed with me and the panic of what I’d do without her. The sudden fear my son will run into the street and be hit by a car. An onset of irrational and sudden panic.

Demon of Peak Efficiency – The low feeling that I could be working harder if I was really committed to X, X being whatever ideal is handy to make me feel like shit that day.

Demon of Expectations Just Out of Reach – always leaves me feeling as though I’m not good enough.

Demon of Nothing to Say: The fear that what I’m writing has no point, purpose or lasting relevance, and is merely a clever observation I’m writing to show other people how smart I am.

Learning to deal with those voices (which I still wrestle with daily, by the way) was only possible once I was able to diagnose the fault in my browser, the flaw in my lense, to recognize that the voices themselves were not a part of the experience of living that I wanted anymore. Once I made that decision, a powerful magic in and of itself, and began to articulate just what it was that plagued me I learned effective ways to deal with the demons. But I can’t dissolve a block or heal a dysfunction until I can clearly articulate what it is; I can’t battle a demon until I know it’s name. Spending enough time with myself, either on paper or in meditation, to clearly hear what it is I want, and then articulate the things that are keeping me from achieving that desire are key to being able to change, to shift, and ultimately I hope, to heal.

Yesterday I tweeted “Mad Men + White Collar = Suits” referring to the new show on USA, Suits, but I think my equation was a little off. My first impression upon watching the pilot was that Suits wasn’t much more than a White Collar clone. The two shows share the same network, and given the success of White Collar it wouldn’t be surprsing for the ntweork to try something the same but different. The shows are highly similar: both are procedurals that revolve around a masculine duo of mismatched characters engaging with the law. Suits’ theme appeared to have ditched the White Collar’s goofy dad character Peter Burke (played so well by Tim DeKay), instead opting to split the White Collar’s Neal Caffery (Matt Bomer) character into two different characters. One, Harvey Spectre (Gabriel Macht) an intensely handsome and impeccably dressed uber-lawyer, and the other Mike Ross (Patrick J. Adams) a near-do-well with a photographic memory.

I was worried that splitting Caffery in two wouldn’t give the show much to go on. In White Collar, Caffery is a fully-fledged character that Matt Bomer brings to life as the conman you fall in love with, but never quite trust. But as the cast of Suits fleshed out in the second episode and we begin to see the patterns established I realized that I was looking at the show from the entirely wrong perspective. Underneath the hood Suits isn’t anything like White Collar, it’s actually a lot more like Scrubs. The scenario of the show is that it follows a young lawyer learning how to make it in the intense world of high finance law. The shows protagonist, Mike Ross, wrestles with his taciturn self-involved boss, Harvey Specter, whose impossibly high expectations and moment to moment vacillation about the whether he wants to be a mentor as well as a boss make life at the firm a daily struggle, and their relationship clearly mirrors the JD-Cox relationship from Scrubs.

As the cast is fleshed out we see more similarities. Rachel Zane (Meghan Markle), the thick-skinned, highly capable paralegal who shows Ross the ropes maps easily onto Carla, and the Machiavellian Lewis Litt (Rick Hoffman), Specter’s nemesis and Ross’s other boss whose schadenfreude-fueled behavior is fondly reminiscent of Scrubs’ Bob Kelso. It’s not a perfect match, but the core of the shows scenarios line up pretty well. Like pantheons of ancient mythologies we’re not hoping for a perfect match, since a perfect match wouldn’t be much fun, but rather a strong correlation between the two. Further, we can use the differences in the shows to examine what makes each one successful in its own right, in the ways that it deviates from its imperfect reflection.

Suits shifts the emphasis from the buddy-buddy relationship of Scrubs to the protege-mentor relationship between Ross and Specter. There’s still room for another strong male relationship in Ross’s life, perhaps to be developed later in the show during a detente between Ross and his estranged best friend, a drug dealer who nearly got Ross locked up in a drug deal gone bad. But the show doesn’t suffer from the shift away from friends and towards mentor-protege, and although lives aren’t at stake in Suits the way they are in Scrubs the stakes remain high.

The strongest difference between Scrubs to Suits is in the Kelso/Litt character. On Scrubs Ken Jenkin’s Bob Kelso was a curmudgeonly tyrant who took joy in torturing the doctors under his command (and especially his lawyer Ted Buckland played by the endearingly hapless Sam Lloyd). In Suits Lewis Litt doesn’t have Kelso carte blanche, and as such adds a creepily seductive quality to his arsenal of manipulation. Kelso was rarely subtle and often brutal in his approach to getting what he wanted, where Litt allows his victims enough rope to hang themselves. Where Kelso bellowed and berated, Litt insinuates and implies. It’s a strange but powerful twist to the character, and I look forward to seeing how Hoffman develops him, since he’s quickly become my favorite of the cast, a down and dirty schemer who’s not afraid to get the job done, and is unapologetic about both his ambitions and his methods.

My only complaint thus far about Suits is how little Gina Torres has been used. She splits the Kelso role with Hoffman, since she’s the Big Boss, but lacks Litt’s oily mischievousness. She is ultimately a beneficent character, but not one who will lose sight of her top priority: the Firm. My hope is that her character will play more of a role as the season(s) develop, since letting an actor with that much talent languish underutilized on such a good show would be a crime.

Certainly Scrubs is not the only influence on Suits. There are strong veins of Madmen in its tempo and temperament (intense conversations between between well coiffed smarty dressed men on the nature of trust in relationships), as well as quite a bit of Entourage’s male wish-fulfillment, though in Suits’ case from the bottom up rather than the top down. If the end of the second episode, where Mike Ross gives his boss Louis Litt the comeuppance he’s been begging for all episode, is any indication, then it’s no doubt that the show will be filled with small but golden moments of the talented little guy overcoming the malicious big guy.

Given its influences, its cast, its network and its success to-date, I’m hard pressed to see Suits not doing well this season and next. It’s hard to screw up a procedural, then again that didn’t stop White Collar from taking major missteps in season 2 that completely turned me off. Its saving grace was the incredibly charismatic cast and its consistently snappy dialogue . Suits has started much less ambitiously than White Collar did, and I think its slower start will serve it will in creating a problem free, long-range arc, with many an enjoyable episode between here and there.

I have believed for a long time that one of the greatest influences on American Gen X/Y culture is an older Japanese man by the name of Shigeru Miyamoto. His name may be unfamiliar to the majority of the people that he’s influenced, but his fingerprints are everywhere in American culture. Most of us know his creations far better than we the man himself: Mario, Luigi, Peach, Toad and Bowser. You might also know Donkey Kong, Link, Zelda and Yoshi. Miyamoto-san is the creator of Super Mario Brothers, Donkey Kong, Legenda of Zelda and their many, many sequels.

The influence of these games on the imaginations of the world is hard to underestimate. The amount of fan generated material in response to Mario and his various iterations is stunning, not just in its amount, but in the quality, effort and detail that’s been put into them. Just logging into YouTube to find the examples for this piece I was caught by an entire YouTube channel called The Warp Zone, whose logo is a series of green pipes sprouting out from the words, a highly recognizable reference to various warp zones in the Mario Brothers franchise.

What’s most intriguing to me about the influence of Miyamoto and his oeuvre is just how simple it is. Like Woody Allen, Miyamoto’s greatest successes use the same story over and over again: the bad guy takes the girl and the good guy gets her back. In Donkey Kong, where Miyamoto first introduces us to Donkey Kong and his owner Mario, the gorilla steals Mario’s girlfriend and Mario gets her back. In Super Mario Brothers the plot is the same, though the roles have shifted: a dragon called Bowser steals a princess and Mario has to get her back. In The Legend of Zelda the villain Ganon steals princess Zelda and Link must fight to return her. It is a credit to Miyamoto’s ability to craft such fun and engaging games around such simple, straightforward situations since the hallmark of his games isn’t their surprising plot lines, but their enjoyable and easy to appreciate gameplay.

While that gameplay has been endlessly copied, given the timeless nature and simplicity of Miyamoto’s plot lines and their influences (Miyamoto cites Popeye, Bluto and Olive Oil as well as, obviously, King Kong) it would be incredibly difficult to accuse anyone of copying his stories, since they’re not even stories, but scenarios that play very differently in game after game. That said, I think one of the great beneficiaries of Miyamoto’s brilliance, intentionally or not, has been the Cartoon Network show Adventure Time created by Pendleton Ward. The show is based around two friends, Jake the Dog and Finn the Human who adventure together in the far off land of Ooo.

As the plot develops over the first season we find our hero Finn is infatuated with the Princess of Ooo named Bubblegum, that the land of Ooo is filled with tiny happy candy people, and that Finn’s nemesis, the Ice King, is generally scheming to kidnap Princess Bubblegum (or really any of the princesses in the kingdom). This note more than the others, that the Ice King is crazy about kidnapping royalty, is what shifts the show from similar to Mario to hommage a Mario for me. The Ice King’s predilection for princesses is highly reminiscent of the now infamous line from Super Mario Brothers: Thank you Mario! But our princess is in another castle! Bowser, it would appear, has a fetish highly reminiscent of the Ice King’s. In Super Mario Brothers alone Bowser kidnapped at least 8 different princesses and stashed them in his various castles all over the Mushroom Kingdom in the same way that the Ice King can’t stop himself from abducting the princesses of the Land of Ooo.

Adventure Time might be the most brilliant Mario homage that’s been created, since it’s so visually dissimilar to anything that Miyamoto’s created and to anime and manga entirely, but embodies everything the game has come to represent: adventure, bravery, danger and fun. It also emulates the Miyamoto style in that the show is immediately accessible to a new audience since the plots are simple, but the world is filled with visually fascinating reinventions of old themes (pirates, robots, vampires, video games, demons, unicorns) in the same way that the Super Mario Brothers was easy to pick up and learn. The combination of simple, imaginative visuals, absurd non-sequitir plots based around the simple, flexible scenario of bad guy takes girl are traits of both Miyamoto’s games and Adventure Time. What’s more, both effortlessly channel the spirit of fun throughout their various manifestations.

But to claim that Adventure Time is only a Mario homage would do disservice to the brilliance of the show in its own right. Ward has taken Miyamoto model and infused it with a Western tang, threading it through with layers of cool that the master may never have dreamed of. Finn and Jake’s easygoing banter, Marceline’s cooler-than-though exterior, the Korean speaking Lady Rainicorn all add layers of depth and character that the Mario Games (and certainly the Mario Brothers cartoon) can only dream of. Without this layer of effortless sophistication over the structure that Miyamoto made famous, Adventure Time would fail, being remembered only as a vague articulation of Gen Y cultural stereotypes; an awkward melange of post-D&D fantasy, video games and electronic music. But Ward’s brilliance lies in his ability to infuse all of those elements into the basic structure without ever losing touch with the simplicity of his Quixote-esque adventurer.

Clearly no one can argue that Pendleton Ward owes Miyamoto any royalties, but in terms of thematic content and entertaining intent Adventure Time has not merely benefited from the world which Miyamoto helped create, but is clearly the bearer of its banner for a new generation of cartoon and video game fans. Combining the whimsy, ironic innocence and visual simplicity of shows like The Misadventures of Flapjack with a hipster sense of adventure and ennui and mixing in the timeless ease of a love triangle made ubiquitous by Miyamoto, Adventure Time is clearly the beneficiary of and champion for the culture that Miyamoto, however unintentionally, helped to bring about. Every time Finn and Jake rescue a princess abducted by the Ice King they’re also furthering the journey the little Mario began when his angry ape absconded with his girlfriend and whisked her away to the top of an unfinished skyscraper.

I have a hard time with science. It was never a subject I paid much attention to in school, mostly I presume because it wasn’t one that excited my imagination, to the point that I did the exact same experiment for my 7th and 8th grade science fair. The trouble I had with science then is the same trouble I have with science now: it doesn’t give satisfying explanations for things. Why does a plant grow? Why am I conscious? Why is the universe here? Science purports to explain these things, but never seems to get around to doing it. That’s part of why I love mythology: it plugs all the holes. Why is humankind here? A big cow licked us out of an ice block. It doesn’t make sense, but it’s immensely more satisfying than ‘an unexplainable large explosion.’

I think the reason that I can live with unexplainable cow and not with an unexplainable explosion is purely motive: The cow has motive, the explosion does not. The world is filled with things that happen seemingly without motive: The wind moves, the grass grows and the waves crash all seemingly without motive, but that’s not the way I see it. Science has taught me to believe that the grass has no motive in growing, nor the bee any motive in nourishing the flower, but I see motive all around me when I look at life: the grass reaching toward the sun, nourished by his glowing golden energy, the bee seduced by the flower to nourish his hive and spread the flowers seed. It’s a great and beautiful drama all powered by motive, the desire to live. The problem I have with science is that it asks me to check that experience at the door as it is biased, fallible and untrustworthy and trust only in the dead measure of its instruments rather than the mellifluous cacophony of my own.

The exclusion of the human experience makes me uneasy with science. I’m always left feeling that science wants me to believe that I live in a universe where my experience in the anomaly, so it would be best if could just politely ignore the bizarre, completely unexplainable phenomenon of human experience and trust that the rest of science is purely rational. And if you can’t let go of the idea of human experience, don’t worry, we’ve got a pill for that. I know that I am dangerously generalizing the scientific community and that basic ignorance of scientific truth is a big problem. Although science has explained a lot about the history of the universe, its explanations still leave me unsatisfied.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m not arguing for creationism. What I’m arguing for is a little humility from science and just a bit of possibility that it might be possible that might be God. I think part of the problem in asking this of science is purely nomenclature. When I say God it conjures up images of a bearded old white dude and his rabid rabble of lazy ignoramuses. I found this to be the case when I began my elementary exploration of atheism: it continually rejected a god I had long ago abandoned, and its arguments were aimed at a Christianity that was inconsequential to me. Atheism had no arguments against a God who didn’t conform to the middle class Christian norm, and therefore had no boundary that I could push against in order to clarify my own belief in God, and I think science has the same God problem. In its fear of embroiling itself over and over again with superstitious young-earthers and creationists they’ve closed the door to god and spirituality altogether, and I think in doing so they’ve closed themselves off from a vital piece of understanding ourselves and our world.

This all came rushing back to me again when I picked up this week’s ‘New Scientist’. I don’t usually read science magazines because they don’t spark my interest or imagination, and I’m always left with a residue of discomfort that something is missing. But this issue was labeled ‘The Existential Issue’ and the cover promised to tackle a lot of the questions that I think science handles poorly and mysticism handles well: How could our cosmos have come from nothing? What’s the origin of my consciousness? Sadly, but perhaps not unsurprisingly, the magazine fails to address the basic questions. The first article, ‘Why is there something rather than nothing?’ raises the question ‘what came before the big bang?’ but gives no answer: ‘Unfortunately at this point basic ideas begin to fail us; the concept “before” becomes meaningless. In the words of Stephen Hawking, it’s like asking what is north of the north pole.’ It’s this chasm that science as currently constructed can never bridge. It views these questions are dead ends rather than rich beginnings, sees them as pointless questions rather than tempting koans, and is the fertile bed of matter where mysticism takes root. The article goes on to question the validity and texture of nothingness, and I couldn’t help but be reminded of Kaballah’s elegant tripartate levels of nothingness contained in the concepts of Ain, Ain Soph and Ain Soph Aur.

The kind of science that Hawking is doing is little more than a detailed exploration of our most ancient history; he is a quantum archaeologist doing deep study into the origins of our existence, but it is wrong to confuse this with an explanation of where we come from. It is no closer, despite his claims, to explaining where we came from or how we got here if it cannot explain the primary mystery of consciousness and its origins. That doesn’t in any way mean that there’s not a place for science in our world. I like science and I’m glad it’s here. I’m grateful for my medical care and for the glasses I wear. But science doesn’t answer the big questions, as much as it would often like to claim it does. Science as we practice it today is important, but perhaps not as important as it would like to think it is. I think ultimately what I’m trying to say is best summed up by this sequence of XKCD cartoons that I came across when I was trying to define the limits of science for myself.

I am anxious this evening.  I am finding it difficult to keep from reading any articles about the impending financial meltdown.  The Wife receives the Economist every week, and the narrative that’s been building over past few months has been one of increasing financial turmoil in Europe, and now the even the United States is beginning to discuss the prospect of defaulting on its loans, conjuring apocalyptic visions of a Greater Depression, bank runs out of ‘It’s a Wonderful Life’ and generally the end of everything.

I wish I could get angry about this.  I wish I had the energy for a righteous fire in my belly at stupid selfish people who literally control the fates of nations who have at best allowed this to happen and who at worst have caused this to happen.  I wish I had any faith in my government to put the good of the nation as a whole first, rather than the good of their campaign donors or their Harvard rowing buddies.  I wish there was one person I trusted in the government besides my brother and he doesn’t make too many influential decisions yet.  I wish there were some guarantees that I believed in, but there aren’t and that makes the evening bleak.

My mother and I often talk about the differences in our approaches to the media and the government.  She was raised a farm girl in a small Midwestern town, and part of her upbringing was to trust what the folks on the TV and the radio said, and to believe what the government told her, and to have faith that what they were doing was in her best interest.  To this day she still finds that her first instinct, often to her chagrin, is to believe what she reads, sees and hears without questioning the slant of the media she’s reading or the bias of the official making the statement, and she is either admiring or taken aback by what she reacts to as my ready cynicism.

But my education was different from the one she received.  In college I learned the tools for questioning the media and the messages as well as my own bias and privilege.  While those tools have served me well to some degree, it is also disorienting to continuously carry views of myself from a position of strength and power as an individual while tempering that with my knowledge of the privilege and status that I enjoy as a white male in a white male dominated society.  I simultaneously love and loathe myself, unable to see the third path of compassion and understanding.  I cannot escape from the privilege that is inherent in the society in which I live and which is reflected by my physiological appearance, though even this is not entirely true.  I could escape it, and I’ve tried to escape it.  I’ve spent years living voluntarily near the poverty line, working unrewarding jobs in an effort to escape my privilege.  I could, I suppose, flee and bury myself away in some god-forsaken backwater, but I’m beginning to suspect that fleeing in and of itself is part of privilege, and that as long as I am running I will always be at the mercy of that which I seek to avoid.

Perhaps I’m afraid to admit that I’ve abused my privilege as a white male more than would be politically correct of me to acknowledge.  I know that I’ve made some horrible and hurtful decisions in my life, and I’m doing my best to admit them and make amends, but none of these ever felt like abuses of my privilege, but perhaps they were and I am merely too cowardly to admit it.  I once tweeted that it is the responsibility of privilege to critique privilege, and I still believe that, but what’s difficult for me is to examine and critique the privilege within myself and without punishing myself for it.  My punitive reaction to any trace of privilege, real or imagined, never feels healthy, but it seems to be the only response I have to whatever feels like a trace of gain from something I didn’t personally earn, so in an act of enthusiastic self-destruction I sacrifice myself on the altar of self-sabotage in the name of eradication of privilege, ultimately leaving me too drained to know if anything I’ve done has had any effect at all.

The truth is that I do not feel committed or dedicated to the eradication of racism or sexism in our society in a way that I feel is authentic or effective.  The very thought of trying to understand or act on any one of those issues, much less all of them at once, exhausts me; and as soon as I feel that exhaustion and want to give up I start to chastise myself for not using my privilege to dismantle privilege itself.  Which brings us back to the financial crises: it’s just too big.  Sexism, racism, and global financial instability, poverty, and starvation all rise up over me in a gigantic black wave of despair, threatening to crush me to a gooey pulp and leave me paralyzed and helpless.  They’re all WAY too fucking big to even comprehend, much less effect, leaving me with little choice but to retreat, withdraw back into my hole, stare at something shiny and long for simpler times.

This is a cycle, I know, the awareness, the self-loathing, the big picture, the exhaustion and the withdrawal.  I know it’s a cycle, and I know that I’m still tired from my long journey home two days ago, and that with that kind of exhaustion balance is nearly impossible, and so the dire articles I read the in Economist and the reports of willful congressional malfeasance unbalance me completely and leave me open to my darkest apocalyptic fears, nightmares in which I am unable to feed my children and we are left to wander without country or ally.  These are my darkest fears, that I will be unable to provide for my family, and it breaks my heart to even consider it, and only when I’m tired am I subjected to it.  Even now I can feel the demons prying at the edges of this essay with the sentence, ‘No one should have to worry about feeding their families, and yet I know that there are people who do everyday.’

That sentence is the beginning of the next cycle, the precipice of an exhilarating, nauseating plunge into the dark fantasy of self-loathing and powerlessness that play off of each other until I have to retreat, exhausted and defeated.  The trouble with these thoughts is that they are absolutely true on one level: there are people starving to death and I could do something about it.  The hook in the worm is that it exploits the flicker of idealism that I’ve managed to smuggle out of my twenties while simultaneously activating my self-loathing for being a spoiled, privileged white boy from the suburbs with no useful talents or true worth as a human being.  I am, it appears, particularly vulnerable to this self-loathing/altruism spectrum, measuring my worth only on a scale of concrete charitable accomplishment, of which I must confess I have very little.

It is both difficult and telling that I am writing this the day after I was so stoked about P!nk and ‘Raise Your Glass’.  It is difficult to go through so many days where it feels so fucking hard to just to be me, just to care so much and feel so completely helpless to change a single goddamn thing on this wholly fucked up planet.  And really the only thing to do is put the damn song on again, turn my headphones up literally as loud as they will go to tune out the negativity (ignoring the voice that tells me that I won’t hear my son if he calls out) and dance.  Close the blinds, shut the door and dance in my office (ignoring the voice that reminds me how fucking stupid I look) and just move my goddamned body, punch the fucking air, push away the demons and get out of my head and back into my body.  Dance like it’s fifth grade and it’s Milli Vanilli and I still don’t know any better.  And in between verses I start to cry and I don’t know why and that’s still beautiful and right and good and pure.

I dance and I push back the darkness, if only just the edge of my reach, the edge of the room, the light pouring out of my heart, through my limbs into a cocoon, an egg of warm, bright, vibrant energy shielding me from the darkness and depression that have threatened to engulf me all day.  And then I sit down and try to translate this into something rational and useful and constructive and all the darkness there waiting for me again on the other side of the music.  And the temptation is to believe that having a good time is pretending that it’s going to be alright when the big bad reality is that it’s not.  The temptation is to believe that this music, this dancing, this energy is just a useless and distracting illusion that has no real power or influence over the way I feel or the state of the world, but I know, my dancing self, my beautiful self know that darkness is a big fucking lie, that music and dancing and poetry and love do have power, they do have the power to energize, the power to motivate, the power to inspire, and that without this energy no action can be taken against anything, no good can be created without the raw energy necessary to craft it and care for it.  The black voice, full of icy fire, shoots back, “Ha! You’re responsibility is to cheer people up with pitiful words about superficial music when people are starving to death?  That’s pathetic.”  And it’s true and it’s not true, and it’s so hard not to succumb to the allure of its grit and its gravity, but there is a malevolent edge in its intent that I recognize and negate.  Yes, tonight, this is my goal, to listen and dance and create.  To cut my way out of my darkness and to teach myself how to do it again and again and again.  It is my responsibility to get up every day and understand that everyday is an incantation, the words of which I am learning to master every moment that I struggle against that succumbing to the darkness that is waiting for me on the other side of love.

I often feel at the mercy of the world. Today is one of those days. I am depressed, and I mean that in more than one way. Yesterday I had the privilege of coming home from three days in the south of France with some of the best friends that the world could have provided me with. I am lucky and blessed to have the means and the ability to spend five days of my life in surrounded by beauty, consuming luscious food and fabulous drink. The comparison of the weekend was that the seven of us, including the kids, sharing a three bedroom vacation house for three days were far better off than the royalty that had once inhabited the drafty, dirty castle.

Now, after 12 hours of travel with incredibly patient, well-behaved children and a wonderfully resilient wife, and after a long but insufficient night of sleep in my own bed, I am recovering, and I am depressed. It is not clinical, but a come down from the highs of an incredibly beautiful and intense weekend spent among people who know me and love me for who and what I am, and who not only tolerate but relish all the otherwise awkward things about me: my intensity, my curiosity, my spirituality, my drive to know myself and others on a fundamental level, my belief that it is not what we believe, but how we act on that belief that defines who we are.

So when I heard P!nk’s ‘Raise Your Glass’ this morning I wanted to cry. I want to feel the way that song feels all the time, I want to feel the way I felt this weekend all the time. I want to be unapologetic for who I am. I want to stand proudly in my skin in a way that honors who I am and what I’ve done; in a brilliant, true, honest way that lays bare the agendas and expectations of others, and is unfazed by them. Leave it to a codependent to turn a moment of intense inner truth into a referendum on the way that other people make him feel, but hey, we’re all to some extent at the mercy of the world that way, and having the energy and the ability to recognize, evaluate and accept or dismiss the desires of others for our energies and abilities is a key tool for the safe and healthy passage through the world, and being able to do that starts with my decision to stand proudly in who I am and not compromise the core parts of myself for the convenience of others.

The trouble is that I can’t do that until I know what the core parts of myself really are. That is a process that I will, to some extent, always be going through. The review and evaluation of what ideas, beliefs and actions are still relevant and useful to me is part of being a centered and engaged human being. My difficulty is that I’ve never settled on and powerfully articulated those core beliefs for myself, since I feel incapable of doing so. I don’t believe that I have the power to define myself, but am waiting for something to define me: My parents, my peers, my spouse, my deity. That wait to be ratified is the essence of codependence. My looking to outside sources to validate the things I feel about myself is completely at odds with the power of truth, confidence and stubbornness that I feel at the heart of ‘Raise Your Glass’.

It is problematic, to say the least, to identify so strongly with a pop song produced and distributed by an industry that thrives on the emotional exploitation of its facile fans, but for today that doesn’t matter. Today, I like pop music that makes me feel powerful, whether that’s True or not in any real sense. I like pop music that makes me want to dance and raise my glass, that makes me feel like I’m not alone in feeling alone, in feeling awkward and at odds with the world, and in making me feel like I’ve got some power to say who I am and what I want no matter how you feel about it. So, if you you don’t like it, I don’t care, and if you feel the same, you can raise your fucking glass with me.

Having children has introduced me to a love greater than I’d ever experienced, the flip-side of which is a terror I never knew existed. There is a sudden and terrible powerlessness over the life of this otherwise helpless child that makes me reflexively more controlling than I’ve ever been about anything. A simple walk to the store is suddenly fraught with danger. The screaming from scraped knees can significantly shift the tenor of a day, but more than that, what if he runs into the street? What if a drunk driver jumps a curb while he’s running up ahead of me? The things that frighten me the most are the things I couldn’t protect him from if I tried. Disease, the absentminded or accidental cruelty of people who care for him, his unmet peers that hover like phantoms in the cloudy future, suffering. These things terrify me. The world is full of countless dangers that on a daily basis make me want to scoop up my three year old and carry him everywhere, which, given the boy he is, would fill him with bliss.

Learning to let go, then, is the most difficult parental lesson I’ve had to learn. Learning to compensate for my natural inclination to catastrophize, not to quit doing it, since I learned long ago it’s not in my nature not to imagine the worst possible thing that could happen and then terrorize myself with it for a given period of time, but to accept that the worst can happen (though it likely won’t) and if it does, I couldn’t have stopped it anyway. That temptation to protect my child from everything is completely natural and totally useless, and it keeps him from learning to take care of himself. If I erect a wall around him he loses out. He gets no opportunity to set boundaries of his own, to learn what he’s comfortable with and what he’s not. On top of that, he gets not chance to experience things, and without the chance to experience those things he cannot learn how to react to them, and ultimately, how to trust himself.

If I don’t, even now as the parent of a 3 year old, begin to teach him, and more importantly myself, how to trust himself then he will have to learn it far later in life, and like a foreign language, it’s much more difficult to learn when we’re older. So I let him run ahead of me down the hill to daycare, knowing that he is going to fall and scrape his knee, knowing that there is a tiny possibility that he will trip, roll out into the street and get hit by a car because I have to, because it’s more important to me that he learn how to trust and take care of himself than it is for me to protect him from everything. That’s hard. That’s hard every single day, learning not to be a shield but a filter. Learning to find the balance every day between allowing him the freedom to explore, try, fail, hurt and heal and keeping him close enough to protect him from the very real dangers that do exist for him, like crossing the street without looking and getting his head stuck in the telephone booth.

For all of that, for all the wrestling with myself and the world, for all the tension of being caught between an unforgiving world and a perfectly beautiful three-year-old boy there are afternoons like today when he picked up a comic book I’d finished with, sat down on the sofa in my office and started flipping through it on his own and asking me about the characters and what they were doing. For awhile we just sat together in the office, the sunlight warming the room, listening to music while he read the comic book, snuggled up against me while I drew. That, that is priceless. The creation of a relationship with my boy, introducing him to the things that I love, sitting together on the couch, explaining to him why exactly the cover of a comic book fails as a design object, then having him point something out in reference to something I said is just a stunning, fulfilling thing that makes every moment of worry worthwhile.

My teeth are big and straight, but they are not strong. It’s possible, I suppose, that my teeth were in fact strong, but that my treatment of them was so poor they were forced to succumb. I was exceedingly lucky with my orthodontics, which makes it all the more shameful for me that I haven’t taken better care of the teeth that came in so straight. I never needed braces, and my teeth could be attractive, but I don’t think I’ve ever had a dental checkup without a cavity, which may explain why dental visits are so fraught for me.

I never had just one dentist growing up. For reasons I cannot remember or explain we never stayed with the same dentist for very long, so going to the dentist was always a little scary since I never quite knew what to expect. The routines and rituals of each office differ slightly, the women in the cheerfully colored scrubs had slightly different mannerisms, the dentists’ demeanor, technique and expectations varied wildly. I only remember one dentist’s office, a sloping parking lot somewhere in the Grossmont area of suburban San Diego, just off the 8. It was a dirty brown medical office building whose stolid1960s architecture was hidden away behind a thin screen of sickly looking bamboo. In that was the first time I wore headphones at the dentist, which I thought was a brilliant idea, but one in need of improvement: I was given a knock-off Walkman and a pair of chipped plastic headphones that did little to keep out the sound of the drill.

The things that I did grow to expect were the inescapable disappointment of the dentist, and the resigned way they all had of letting me know I’d need fillings. Other things were similar from office to office too: the paper-and-chain bib, the crinkly sheet over the plastic material of the dentist chair, and its gentle hum as it reclined; the warm glare of the overhead lamp, hinged in three places, staring down at me with the unblinking intensity of an extraterrestrial inquisitor; the curious pick probing firmly at my teeth; and the antiseptic ritual of anesthetic: first the strange flavor of the topical anesthetic on the end of Q-tip, then the needle, kept carefully out of eyeline to avoid panicking the patient, and the entrance of the foreign object into my mouth, the hard pressure of the needle that hurt without hurting, and the quick onset of numbness as it spread through my jaw, often as far north as my nose, and the rough foreign sensation of someone else’s mouth temporarily taking over my own.

Then the inevitability of the drill, its pneumatic whine like a mechanical mosquito, and the pressure again, not painful, but threatening to be so as the dentist carved away the rotten tooth, sculpting a pleasing shape for the soft metal he (they were always men) would later insert, my whole body now stiff with anxiety as I could often feel the sensation of my teeth being drilled away at the edges of the numbness; the bits of tooth mixed with water that sprayed onto my face and back into my throat, and the intensity of wanting to swallow as the liquid pooled against the back of my throat despite the always-inept suction from the always female hygienist, but being unable to swallow with four hands crowded into my mouth and four eyes locked the sad state of my dental decay, the dentist clearly irritated by any interruption of his work; the long ache of my jaw as the dentist tried to pry another fraction of an inch from my mouth.

Then there’s a pause. The dentist sets the drill on the tray with a small metallic sound, I close my tired mouth, and swallow surreptitiously while the hygienist assembles the filling kit, feeling the pieces of tooth against the back of my throat as I do. Then dentist is hovering over me again, tools in hand, his request for entry implied in the eager posture of his hands: a pianist the moment before the music. I open back up for the insertion of the filling; the dentist pushing and packing against the tooth, his sharp tools clicking against my teeth, folding in the soft metal of the filling into the tiny space he’d carved away; then the strange thin material of the brace screwed in around my tooth to help the filling set, pushing awkwardly against the corners of my open mouth, increasing the discomfort in my jaw; the weird bass thump-and-shove as the dentist buffs and dries the filling. Then, finally, the release as the clamp’s pulled away and the dentist mercifully retreats beyond the glare of the overhead light and the hygienist hoses my teeth down and sucks the water and saliva out one more time before the dentist pushes the pedal and raises me slowly to sitting where I’m asked to rinse, spit repeat, dribbling pathetically on myself in the process, my benumbed lips refusing to respond. Sometimes there were additional rituals, like rinsing with fluoride. I remember gagging on the neon-tinted liquid that was served up, a kind of communion, in a tiny paper cup. I remember my brother and I hating it so much that she asked the dentist not to give it to us anymore.

If there was nothing else, I was expected to get up and go home, but standing after a filling was always a clumsy affair. The appointment was clearly over, but I was never ready to leave, often still light-headed from the adrenaline rush of anxiety and the intensity of the fact that someone had just violently eroded a piece of my body and inserted a foreign object permanently into my mouth. But the mood of the room was always so workaday, so matter of fact that there was little time to come to grips with the immensity of that before they erased any trace of my having been there and the next client shambled in. Worse, there is so much to trip on in a dentist’s office, the light, the patient chair, the dentist’s chair, his tiny table littered with detritus of oral excavation, the various hoses for air, water and suction, the tiny sink, usually a plant. I remember the procedure rooms being routinely small, and I have not been a small person since I was 16. I was expected to rise and meet the world as if nothing had happened, lips numb, jaw aching, collect my jacket (but not put it on, since it would have required a flexibility and grace that even at 32 I do not possess). I would stumble out of the room in a fog, possibly schedule another appointment, ward off the chatter of the professionally perky hygienists, and find my way back downstairs out into the parking lot where I would start my car and drive home, still somewhat in shock.

Since those early days my dental health has not improved. The damage that I did to my teeth as a youth, years of not brushing and the gallons of sugared sodas, still haunts me. During my post-college years, in my journeys to and from San Diego, in and out of various flavors of shit jobs, I had no dental care. I was off my parents’ insurance and certainly had none of my own, so I went without dental checkups, which was fine with me. My teeth, however, disagreed. My second year in Berkeley I was living with the Wife, who was then just the Girlfriend, illegally sharing her dorm room since I’d been voted out of my previous house (issues with dishes and my roommates ill-disciplined dog shitting in the house), when my tooth began to ache. I ignored it as long as I could, since I was broke and hated dentists anyway, but eventually it hurt too much to ignore. One night it was so bad I drank most of a bottle of Jack to escape the pain, and ended up sleeping over toilet, too drunk to move myself to the bed.

Someone, I don’t remember who, told me about a dental school in the City that turned out to be the Pacific School of Dentistry, now the Dugoni School of Dentistry. They did at-cost dentistry for folks who couldn’t afford anything else. I made an appointment and went in. The only thing I remember about the first appointment was my anxiety about the credit check they told me they were going to do, knowing that I had no money at all, worried that I’d be rejected and have to ask my parents for more money, appearing once again just as irresponsible as I actually was. It turned out not to be a credit check at all, they just needed my financial information; they did all the dental work and then accepted payments at whatever the patient could afford, with no interest whatsoever. The only time I felt more relief in talking finance over healthcare was learning that the Wife and I wouldn’t have to pay for our eldest son’s month in the neonatal intensive care unit after he was born.

The process from there wasn’t as smooth. I was diagnosed as needing a root canal, which wasn’t great, but at least it was progress, very slow progress. I remember the tooth hurting so badly between the diagnosis and the root canal that the Girlfriend and I went into the City to try and get some painkillers prescribed, but to no avail; the only thing they could do was give me extra-strength ibuprofen or extract the tooth, but I wasn’t ready to do that yet, so I went home with the pills in my pocket. I went back a week or two later for the root canal, and it was a routine I was incredibly familiar with, only this time it took place in a semi-public classroom-sized office with dozens of other patients instead of a cramped room in an decaying building. They numbed me up and drilled down into the tooth, but when they got to the root they decided it was best to remove the tooth, which, of course, I had to wait for. They packed the tooth as best they could and sent me off to schedule an appointment with surgery. I came back to surgery a few days later, imagining it would be full of sleek, powerful technology that would painlessly and effortlessly remove my tooth. I was very wrong. It turned out to be two burly dudes with a dentist’s wrench tugging at my dead molar for much longer than I was comfortable with. I had the audacity to ask to take the tooth home and despite regulations to the contrary, they allowed me to smuggle it out. Still, that wasn’t my worst dental visit ever.

The worst dental visit I ever had happened when I was about 9 or 10 years old, and may be the only story I have about myself that involves an elephant. I don’t remember much about the dentist or the office that it happened in, but I know that my mother and I had waited a good long time in the waiting room. When we were finally admitted to the office, the dentist was really nice about it. He was kindly and joked with me, and really put me at ease. He hadn’t begun the actual exam yet when he was called away to deal with something outside the office. I don’t remember what transpired outside of the examination room, but the way my mother tells it he had some kind of confrontation with another patient of his, a woman, but what kind of confrontation I don’t know. When he came back his mood had changed, but either I didn’t notice, or I tried to lighten it with a joke about how long we had waited. Either way, whatever I said was enough to send an adult professional into a lunatic rant to a 9 year-old boy at the top of his lungs. The one phrase that I distinctly remember this man screaming was: IN THIS ROOM, I AM GOD. I AM GOD IN HERE, DO YOU UNDERSTAND? I can only assume I nodded meekly in reply.

Years later I am at home with friends working on a homework project when my mother says from the living room, “Adam, look, it’s him!” “Who?” “The dentist that yelled at you!” I walk into the living room and sure enough there he is, God in his Office, working on the tooth of an elephant in distress at what I assume was the San Diego Zoo or Wild Animal Park. It is not terribly usual, I’d wager, that most practicing human dentists end up doing veterinary dentistry, nor it is not likely that the transition is an easy or straightforward one, so I must admit that it is possible that after I left his God in his Office that day he threw down his tools and gave it all up to work on less cheeky patients.

My teeth are still not great. There is still a gaping hole in the left-hand side of my jaw where the molar was extracted that I have not had the means yet to replace. On the tooth behind it I can see decay that my British dentist has not deemed worthy of scraping off. My teeth are pretty far from white, stained a sickly yellow, I assume, by the sodas of my youth. The molars I do have left are pockmarked by metallic fillings. The filling that my British dentist, a homely woman with a light mustache, put in earlier this year is rough against my tongue and leaves the tooth feeling incomplete. In short, it is not a pretty inside of my mouth, and I decided recently that I’d like to change that. I will get my missing tooth replaced. I’d like to get an implant rather than a bridge, but they run $2 – $4000 depending on the dentist. It’s possible I could go back to Pacific School of Dentistry, but only if I live in the Bay Area again, and if I can ever afford to do that it’s likely I’d be able to pay a real dentist to do it. Beyond that I’d also like to whiten my teeth, and eventually replace my fillings with more attractive ones that don’t stand out as much. Am I deluding myself into thinking I have healthy teeth? Maybe, but I think that’s okay. I feel so much shame when I look in my mouth now, and I’m the only person who can take that shame away. I can’t put my teeth back the way they were, I’m a long time gone from being able to do that, but I can show myself some love by giving myself the teeth I’d like to have now, one way or the other.