Detectives, Shutting Up, and Haunting Yourself
I kind of wish those were all classes offered in my high school. Alas.
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I just got done talking to Jonathan Ames
It was in an interview for the show. You’ll hear it - I don’t know - in a few weeks. HOLD YOUR HORSES. Jonathan is an author and sometimes TV show maker and a monologist. If you’ve seen the HBO series Bored to Death, he made that. It’s about someone who decides to be a detective.
And for the last several years, Jonathan has been reading exclusively detective novels. Just loves them. And he’s now two books into a series he’s writing about a Los Angeles detective named Happy Doll, who goes by Hank because he’s embarrassed by his name and then goes back to Happy because he stops being so embarrassed.
Happy Doll has a lot of pain in his past from childhood abuse, a bad family situation growing up, some years being a cop on a Navy ship, some years investigating missing children, and then several years as a detective.
It got me thinking about the detective fiction genre and the things it’s known for:
Detective with a painful past
In a shitty office/apartment
Drinks too much
Hangs out with other broken confidantes
Usually has to overcome people even more broken than he is
And it’s such a wildly popular genre!
I think we see the detective as us at our broken points. The detective externalizes and symbolizes our view of ourselves. Then they have to go out and solve a huge mystery, often getting in dangerous situations along the way. And then we KNOW that at the end of the hour or two hours or 300 pages or whatever, THEY’LL FIGURE IT OUT.
That’s why we like them.
“Here’s an idea,” says Science, “Why don’t you shut the hell up?
Because it would be good for your mental and physical health to be silent. “Wanna stop being crazy? Shut your fucking trap for five fucking seconds,” the scientists say but not really.
The article is paywalled like crazy (guess it should be more silent and thus less crazy!) but it references Norwegian explorer Erling Kagge.
Here he talks about it, which of course ruins everything:
HEY YOU KNOW WHAT MY FATHER’S FIRST NAME WAS?
ERLING!
YOU KNOW WHAT MY MIDDLE NAME IS?
ERLING!
I’M SHOUTING NOW, WHICH CAN’T BE GOOD!
Kid mental health bad but computers
The New York Times has a thing about the situation with young people and mental health, which is an extremely dire crisis. “Oh on account of the pandemic,” you might say. Well only kinda. But it goes back further than that.
According to a recent paper published in JAMA Pediatrics, “Between 2016 and 2020, there were significant increases in children’s diagnosed anxiety and depression.” In 2019, Pew Research found that “the total number of teenagers who recently experienced depression increased 59 percent between 2007 and 2017.” Then the pandemic came along. According to a meta-analysis across 29 samples including over 80,000 youths across the globe published in JAMA Pediatrics last summer, “youth mental health difficulties” during the pandemic have “likely doubled.”
Part of it is society just waking up and realizing that mental illness is a real thing and can happen to children. Here are some other parts of it: the fucking planet is boiling, politics has become terrifying, and parents and society placing enormous pressure on shoulders too small to handle it.
But yes, also, DEADLY PANDEMIC.
The author of the piece, Jessica Grose, suggests there is help available:
There are resources you can use at home, books and online programs, that can help your family. The online resources that come most recommended are often rooted in Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (C.B.T.), which “usually involves efforts to change thinking patterns,” according to the A.P.A. Patricia Frazier, a distinguished professor of psychology at the University of Minnesota, has, along with colleagues, studied the effects of internet-delivered C.B.T. programs (I.C.B.T.) on university students and found that they were “feasible, acceptable and effective.”
These I.C.B.T. programs tend to be a combination of text, videos and exercises that help explain the roots of anxiety, then encourage users to identify what may be triggering overwhelming feelings, and then offer exercises to help address these feelings. For example, the free app MindShift C.B.T., from the nonprofit Anxiety Canada, allows you to log your daily feelings and then write a short journal entry about the reason behind the feeling. You can also list symptoms you may experience, like racing thoughts, chest tightness or nausea. It gives you a series of tools to use, like guided audio for calm breathing or test anxiety, or “coping cards” that provide affirmations like “Learning to sit with some uncertainty will help me worry less.”
I don’t know why I like the name Anxiety Canada as much as I do.
Speaking of remorse and regret and being destroyed by your past
(wait, were we speaking of that?)
(we are ALWAYS speaking of that.)
Here’s a game where you need to run around, collect things, and advance to new levels BUT you’re always being followed by your past self and it threatens to destroy everything.
It’s called TIMELOOPER.
A lot more than 120 Minutes
You can make playlists on YouTube! Including a playlist of 2,512 videos of songs played on MTV’s influential 120 Minutes from 1986 to 2013. So if you’re nostalgic and have JUST SO MUCH TIME AVAILABLE, you can hit play on THIS.
Finally, That Petrol Emotion fans. Your time has come.
Ooh: