Herzog, skateboarding, terminology, slugs, writers, vaccines, eggs

There is delight to be had, turns out, which, yeah, sounds good.

Please enjoy Werner Herzog on skateboarding. That is, please watch this and you will be unable to not enjoy Werner Herzog on skateboarding.

Also, this is a good interview on the part of Ian Michna.

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Can one be MORE agnostic than one previously was? Thinking about that as I find myself becoming increasingly wary about a lot of words surrounding mental health. I think it’s a result of a more enlightened world view but as a writer it’s still somewhat worrisome to stop believing in certain words, especially words that are very present in one’s field of concentration.

I’ll splain, Mr. Ricardo.

Major Depressive Disorder - Everything about this changed when a therapist told me that the term “major depressive disorder” is pretty much an insurance term. A medical provider will assign it to one’s condition in order to free up treatment funds from an insurance provider.

Which isn’t to say people don’t suffer or that treatment isn’t available and real and helpful. It is a real thing. But it’s not like having a localized infection or a cancerous lesion; it’s a condition that could have emerged from all sorts of known and unknown causes and it can manifest in so many ways. It feels like a term we use because we have to use something.

And I think it can trip people up. If you haven’t been diagnosed by a psychiatrist with having this particular named condition, you could still have a darkness that interferes with your life pretty severely. But then if you lack that diagnosis, you might not seek help. If things suck, get help, don’t let insurance terms get in the way.

Depression - I’m stuck with this term but still I chafe. For one thing, there’s the mood of being kind of sad and then there’s the inability to get out of bed or see hope in the future. Then there are all the wildly disparate symptoms and effects like inability to concentrate or fits of rage that aren’t consistent with moping at all. When the same word is used (rightly or wrongly) in society to mean so many different things, it’s hard to use it in writing with a lot of confidence that people will grasp your particular usage.

Anxiety - Again, there’s the feeling of nervous anticipation that is part of being sentient and then there is the anxiety that wrecks your life. We use them interchangeably, which makes me not at all confident that a reader or audience will catch the distinction.

Disorder - I’ve been increasingly skeptical of this word because it indicates that the person has it all wrong. That the mind of the person suffering is responding in a way that a “normal” person should not. And when I look at the world today, I kind of squint and shake my head at that presupposition.

Let’s say you’re a queer woman of color working in the service industry in 2021. You live in a country where white supremacists recently attempted a coup. There’s widespread homophobia, racism, sexism, and misogyny and a system not really built on wiping those things out. And you’re exposing yourself to a deadly virus every time you go to work, for not very much money. Is it disordered to feel complete despair? To not want to get out of bed? Of course not. It’s a logical response. It’s disordered to the socio-economic model, sure, but not to the self.

Well, a newsletter shouldn’t be a guy arguing at a glossary. So I’ll stop there for now.

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Here’s some good news: the vaccines - all of them - appear to work really well. Like really REALLY well.

Here’s the key fact: All five vaccines with public results have eliminated Covid-19 deaths. They have also drastically reduced hospitalizations. “They’re all good trial results,” Caitlin Rivers, an epidemiologist at Johns Hopkins University, told me. “It’s great news.”

As Dr. Ashish Jha, the dean of the Brown University School of Public Health, told me this weekend: “I don’t actually care about infections. I care about hospitalizations and deaths and long-term complications.”

By those measures, all five of the vaccines — from Pfizer, Moderna, AstraZeneca, Novavax and Johnson & Johnson — look extremely good. Of the roughly 75,000 people who have received one of the five in a research trial, not a single person has died from Covid, and only a few people appear to have been hospitalized. None have remained hospitalized 28 days after receiving a shot.

Such good news calls for guitar solo faces.

Or a giant slug solo face.

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Recently on Twitter there was a thing going around where people started tweets with “HARSH ADVICE FOR WRITERS” and then went on and on about how your friends are really your competition and here’s what you need to do to succeed. It was all such horse shit.

I think a lot of people like to give what they think is advice because it makes them feel like successful writers. They call themselves writers to create another group of “not writers.”

No. Listen. Stop it. ANYONE who can read and write is a writer. There is no state board exam, no standard one must meet, no club that writers belong to with special jackets. It’s just literacy. Writing things down is nothing special.

Yes, some people spend a much larger portion of their time fussing about with words in order to explain a thought. And many of their efforts are read by strangers. But the writing itself does not matter. What matters is the ideas that the writing serves. If you reach millions of people with the conveyance of that idea or just a few, that matters probably in whether and how much you get paid. But substantively, a novel and a shopping list are not all that far apart.

Sure, writing is important. Words are important. And the people who arrange them well enough that other people are enlightened and want to pay for that experience, those folks should and do get paid. But when it becomes a thing where the writers want to act superior and it’s more about themselves than the ideas behind the writing, screw that.

Unsure whether to call yourself a writer? Cool. I’ll do it: you are a writer.

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Sometimes good mental health can be aided by making a wonderful fried egg. I followed the advice here and made the best fried egg of my life on the first try.

I think if I were ever to join a cult, it would be a cult based around stuff like making a perfect fried egg or pretending someone is playing a huge slug or Werner Herzog on skateboarding.