My vacuum caught one of my loose socks last week, a white and heather gray bamboo fiber Cariloha athletic ankle sock. They’re $15 a pair, one of my rare indulgences because they’re extremely comfortable and don’t slip under my heel while walking. The sock had fallen from a pile of laundry and was just out of my view, under the edge of the bed skirt. The Dyson sucked it up, wrapping it tightly around the roller brush.

I lost my shit.

Why?

After all, this was a fairly minor inconvenience. But it was one more exasperation atop a compounding series of increasingly stupid and frustrating events and occurrences and mishaps, some my own fault but many far beyond my control.

I filled the air with what polite society would call blue language, some of which rhymed with “Jesus fucking Christ goddamn motherfucking bastard cocksucker fuck you” near the top of my voice, a vulgar and guttural animal snarl as I pounded my fists into the mattress and pillows.

What an absurd and stupid scene, no? Embarrassing.

My nature isn’t violent. I abhor that sort of frightening outburst, which I normally reserve for Cleveland Browns games on TV. I deeply dislike losing control. My demeanor normally is measured, calm, jovial. I want to make people laugh, and to like me. I’m all about libertine pleasure and joy and delights. Romance, lust, and love. Jokes and japes and clowning. Literature, writing, poetry, music, art, history, food and drink, the grape and grain, naps and nature, and mind-altering substances. There’s too much anger and violence and ugliness and greed and selfishness in the world. Why should I add to all that? But I did, even if on an insignificant scale while alone.

Worse, the exterior of my wooden bedroom door still has a fist-shaped dent where some prior resident punched it in what I imagine was some terrible scene of domestic violence decades ago. I’m ashamed to think of myself contributing to anything like that, even if I was alone with a vacuum on a random Thursday.

A day later, having long calmed down from my stupid outburst, a quote from “Apocalypse Now” occurred to me as I was reflecting on my embarrassing, disturbing episode: “Every man has got a breaking point. You have and I have them. Walter Kurtz has reached his. And, very obviously, he has gone insane.”

If a vacuumed sock was my breaking point, that feels pathetic and weird, frankly. But in that moment it was a straw, hopefully but probably not the last one, in the aforementioned litany of mounting frustrations. Rarely is it the major catastrophe that sets us off. Instead, it’s the millionth trivial annoyance that frog-marches us into insanity and oblivion and up the Nùng River to a fortified Cambodian jungle outpost where we all read T.S. Eliot aloud.

The sock incident didn’t make me actually insane, at least not for more than a few ferocious pillow-beating seconds. While I’ve not thought too deeply about it, there’s probably not been half a dozen moments in my half-century (plus one) on this planet that I’ve been that angry. And they were bad … one, the taste-of-gun-barrel-steel bad … but thankfully rare.

I do not Hulk-out easily, but I worry that may not remain the case.

For me, and most people, it’s unheard of to get so livid during my Zen-like moments. Vacuuming is one activity that creates a sort of inner serenity. It forcibly enjoins my mind to automatically perform a familiar task, but it also segregates my brain from the tragedies of the news and my myriad personal failings. My mind wanders to random places and memories while my body is engaged in the task. It’s also relatively simple housework that leaves immediate visual evidence of minor but important achievement – something that’s vital to my strange and demented mind because outside of writing, I’ve not really been fully employed for two years while trying to finish a novel. Clean carpets give the verisimilitude of genuine, if temporary, real-world accomplishment.

It means I did something other than sit at a keyboard and stare at the tyranny of the blank page.

It’s not a particularly difficult chore to vacuum, except perhaps for the precarious balancing act required of my aging knees with the Dyson on the carpeted stairs. We have black carpet in several rooms and the stairs, so lint, hair, and my cat’s Pretty Litter crystals are more easily seen than with typical beige carpet. I cannot abide visibly unclean carpet – it’s my Lt. Bligh coconut obsession, perhaps. Prior to moving into this house 13 years ago, I’d never lived anywhere with black carpet. Now I know why it’s uncommon and belongs only in funeral homes and dim-lit whorehouses. You see EVERYTHING and it requires constant cleaning. I vacuum almost every other day and have both an upstairs vacuum – the dutiful Dyson Ball – and a downstairs vacuum that’s a much older model that probably needs to be replaced. They’re heavy and expensive, so they will endure, like Boxer the horse, as long as they suck shit up.

The vacuums proved last week that they can still hoover up a sock in barely a second, before I understood what was occurring or able react. It took me several minutes of straining to pry the sock loose, a brief span of time in which the air was again filled with colorful profanity. Sweat beaded on my forehead as I sat next to the bed, wrestling with a sock and vacuum and hating life.

Now, don’t get me wrong: I enjoy a solid, well-timed curse word(s) deployed at the opportune moment. Vulgarities can relieve stress. They can sharply focus attention – your own and that of your audience – onto a target deserving rich, colorful ire. Or they can provide levity. I have several favorites including motherfucker and especially dipshit. The venerable Paris Review a few years ago published an elegant tribute to “dipshit.” It’s among the English language’s finest words. Last week, I was the dipshit swearing over a sock.

Profanity is a tool. I like to think of myself as a master craftsman of expletives. Tools are great when you know how to use and control them. Last week, I used them while not in control. More importantly, I used them in a violent fit that thankfully was against a bed. That’s alarming. It feels weak and wasteful to roar these excellent and useful words involuntarily and beat an innocent and defenseless pillow. It reminded me of the scenario where you bring your dad a flathead screwdriver when he asked for the Phillips-head, and he gives you the “Goddamnit, does that look like a Phillips-head? Don’t be so careless!” with a look of frustrated disappointment in his failson heir. You slink away in shame. It’s been a week, and I still feel ashamed about it, but thankful I was alone.

Will I be alone the next time it happens? The way things are going, a next time feels inevitable.

What was responsible for my sudden lack of control and fist-pounding that left the warm air of my bedroom sodden with wasted profanity? Obviously, my own lack of self-discipline, but in my feeble defense and as the movie quote above says, we all have breaking points even if they’re imbecilic petty moments.

It’s probably zero surprise that the relentlessly bad political news of the moment was a major contributor to my brief breakdown. The second Trump era has been worse than imagined. It’s all ugly, evil, cruel, vulgar, cheap, tacky, and extremely stupid. These are bad people doing bad things and it feels helpless and hopeless as we watch our flawed democracy further ruined by unaccountable and arrogant racist grifters, bigoted drunks, fascist perverts, replacement-level media Vichyites, mindless Confederate Gestapo brutes, sports meathead misogynists, monstrously corrupt oafs, anti-science conspiracy theory morons, sleazy techno-fascist oligarchs, paranoid McCarthyites, depraved segregationists, and various other miserable Orwellian shitheads and charlatans whose obituaries cannot come soon enough.

The time for rifles and Molotovs may be closer than we think, I fear. And I know from personal experience what that looks like elsewhere. Outside of thermonuclear apocalypse, there’s no worse scenario than a civil war in a nation of 340 million people with more than enough guns and resentments to turn this country into a vast dystopian graveyard. Most Americans have no idea how close “Nineteen Eighty-Four” or our own version of The Troubles really are.  And no one is coming to save us. Count me among the klaxon-sounding doomers rather than the lotus-eating oblivious.

So a trivial incident like the sock set me off and I took it out, enraged, on my pillows. All of my coal mine canaries are madly squawking, feathers everywhere.

Atop the vile political news are various personal struggles and growing frustrations that are none of your business, and those are intensified by the minor stupid mistakes and random accidents that fill all our lives.

Here’s one universal struggle I will share: I’m trying to drop 15 pounds (with five successfully shed) before a trip next month to Las Vegas and Los Angeles, two places where I have specific goals to eat whatever the fuck I want. I’ve not been to Vegas, that neon orgasm in the desert, in a decade and I intend to celebrate my return and blow off steam in classic Hunter S. Thompson style. The era of $2 buffets is a distant memory but there’s plenty of decent food to enjoy while pissing away my meager (mis)fortune on Double Diamond Deluxe slot machines. Staggering along The Strip seeing that weird tableaux of humanity with a chemically-altered brain is the only way to fly. And West Hollywood beckons with In-and-Out Burger and the exquisite spaghetti Bolognese at the Chateau Marmont. Maybe this time I won’t have to pay off a maid to help me clean up blood. The Marmont always delivers.

I’ve committed to using the hotel gyms to work off some of the culinary sin, sloth, and gluttony while out there. Maybe this time it won’t be a lie I tell myself. Eating gives me momentary pleasure during this shitty epoch, and I plan to indulge while stoned, but I do not want to relapse back to my poor physical starting line. I’ve dropped almost 70 pounds since 2019, and it was hard work. But goddamn does a couple of slices of pepperoni pizza at the Rainbow Bar & Grill on Sunset Boulevard sound like a Dionysian dream.

Pleasure, I have learned time and again, comes with costs. There’s always a butcher’s bill to be paid. In these savage, unnatural times, nothing is free, and inflation is rampant.

My primary analgesic for dealing with my mounting internal and external stresses had been a nightly 20mg weed edible, specifically the “MKX Deep Sleep XXtra Strength THC/CBN Gummies” that are now under $10 for a packet of ten here in metro Detroit (my dispensary is almost within sight of my house). They work as advertised. I take one and within 30 minutes feel the pleasant relief and high of the cannabis. I am no longer stressed. Anxiety melts. Things are funny. I am happy. Donald Trump is again just a fat C-list punchline with an absurd comb-over rather than architect of a vulgar fascist putsch.

But then come the munchies. While stoned, I become ravenous. The taste of all my favorite foods is heightened off the charts. My sober mind knows I should not gorge myself, but once the THC hits and rewires my neural pathways, all bets are off. I turn into my Dyson and munch everything, then pass out.

That’s obviously a problem, particularly for a middle-aged man that struggles to keep his A1C in the normal range. I’d like to not die sooner than necessary, but I’d also like to not mentally and emotionally feel like stale dogshit because of the world is being ruined by vengeful semi-literate drunken ignoramuses that crave a reboot of the Antebellum South.

I don’t drink, mainly because I dislike the taste of most booze except lightweight fruity cocktails and I loathe hangovers, especially at my age. Drunkenness doesn’t provide the relief of being stoned. And booze killed my sister and has been responsible for a lot of heart-break in my life.

“Have you just tried not giving a shit?”

That’s a running joke in my house, and references Timon and Pumbaa from the 1994 “The Lion King” movie/Hamlet knockoff (complimentary) who sing “Hakuna Matata” to young Simba as he mourns the death of this father at the hands of his striving, sinister and extremely gay-coded uncle, Scar, who is now trying to murder Simba to ensure his ill-gotten throne’s legitimacy.

Timon and Pumbaa, who are essentially Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, are song-and-dance telling Simba to not give a fuck about the intrafamily murder and villainy that literally just occurred. It’s been a favorite internet meme for a long time. It also nicely represents an attitude foreign to myself.

Not giving a fuck in theory would be helpful. But while I’ve failed to care enough about things I should have in my personal life, and do get stoned for brief interludes, I care too much about this dilapidated, Temu-ass republic that these Trump ghouls are trying to pervert into a white nationalist/evangelical Confederate Gilead. My kids and grandkids have to live in this nation long after my ashes have been dumped on the filthy streets of Key West. I want my descendants, and your descendants and the descendants of people I don’t know and will never know, to enjoy and thrive in a better and more compassionate and empathetic place, one that finally lives up to the unfulfilled promises of its noble founding documents.

That our future looks grim and Orwellian right now makes me want to get high and eat all the time.

Dieting, however, means no gummies. I am forced to jettison the jazz cabbage. Refrain from the reefer. Move on from the Mary Jane. Get around the ganja. Go grass-free. Be hopelessly dopeless. Dodge the Devil’s Lettuce. Boycott the bud. Devoid of dank. Hide from the herb. Clear of chronic. Duck the doob.

Before continuing, I’ll take full responsibility for the painful stupidity of that last paragraph. I was not stoned while writing it, so I have no excuse. I apologize without reservation. And yes, it sounded like something a white New York Times op-ed columnist would have written trying to be hip and funny in 1992. Or 2025. I am ashamed. Moving on …

But no. I retract my apology. Fuck that, I am not sorry. I wrote that to make myself laugh, and I did chuckle. We all deserve to laugh, even if it’s at something so frivolous. I write for myself, to keep myself sane and to keep from filling glass bottles with petrol and burning rags.

When I am spiraling, it’s because it feels like everything that gives me pleasure and relief is taken away or somehow ruined or has a Faustian price.

No one needs to tell me this essay is the lame moaning gibberish of a Midwestern white guy born into privilege. Hell, I am headed to Vegas and L.A. in a few weeks, so it feels shameful to complain about anything. I was born into the crudely American version what Orwell described as “lower-upper-middle class”  – an economic strata rapidly disappearing – and I am deeply aware that billions of my fellow humans are worse off than me. Trump’s Confederate Gestapo will haul me away after most others. But this isn’t a Misery Olympics. Someone always will be worse off. I feel shitty because it’s people that look like me that are, and always have been, doing terrible things to people that do not look like me. And now they’re rolling back any of the incremental progress we have made.

So, I am mad and frustrated and complaining while we’re still free to do so. What I am doing to combat our rising tacky authoritarianism, aside from writing, is not something I will be putting into print until after we get through these dismal times. But for now, I am struggling in my head and it alarms me.

There are alternatives to getting high to alleviate any depression, stress, and anxiety that affect me at times. Despite the brief ugliness of The Sock Episode, I do not feel the need for any mental health medical prescriptions. Perhaps that’s a foolish, arrogant self-diagnosis, but it’s a clear-headed observation. People close to me live with mental health struggles that make my breakdown look downright pleasant. I see how their medications make an enormous difference, and I am glad these miracles of chemistry exist.

Therapy? Absolutely. I’m seeking it. We all need that these days. I clearly need to trauma dump on a psychoanalyst so much that it makes them question their career choice. Some poor sap is gonna get a firehose of a half-century of bullshit.

In the meantime, what about avoiding the news? That, to me, is a corollary of Timon and Pumbaa’s advice. I cannot, at least not for long. While I now think social media was a terrible mistake for all of us, it’s literally my unpaid job to keep abreast of the daily terrors inflicted upon the world by these assholes. I feel a deep responsibility to know what’s going on, why, and how it affects things. I cannot look away from the imbecilic nihilism of Trump, the obscene American-funded genocide in Gaza, end-stage capitalism burning the environment, the encroachment of the police surveillance state and stupefying evil of artificial intelligence, and everything else ruining our world on behalf of rich, vindictive assholes. Looking away and being zombified by the relentless Sisyphean grind of wage labor, and drugs, video games, sports betting, porn, online shopping, reality TV, and a trillion other distractions is what got us to this point.

Besides, I cannot afford to lose my edge, and the evil news oozing from every rancid pore of this regime keeps me sharp and at the keyboard. It’s just breaking me down to do so. Yet I could not live with the guilt of desertion in this terrible hour.

I found the master sergeant
I said “Sergeant, I am hurting
I’m considering deserting.”
He said ‘Do whatever’s in your conscience”
So I tried to make a run
But I was stapled to the gun

(From ‘Army’ Dream Song by Boiled in Lead)

I do try to take mentally take note of good moments, the times I feel pretty good. I remind myself that I have a support network around me. I look around and appreciate the natural beauty of the physical world. My Eden or Annwn that actually exists is under the cloudless bright blue skies stretching endlessly over an azure sea that laps at white sandy beaches dotted with lazy palms. The flawed secular miracle of the human body is almost beyond comprehension to me, as are the infinite cosmos. The incredible achievements of humankind are staggering.

Then there are the horrors. And they’re readily available, 24-7, via the little rectangular black box in my hand that otherwise should be counted among those incredible achievements. Again, there’s always a price. My phone can immediately provide me access to all of humanity’s knowledge, but also humanity’s real-time crimes against itself and nature that are cheered on by seething mobs of resentful meatheads.

Doomscrolling is just scrolling these days. And if I am feeling this low and can get this angry, how many untold millions are worse off and even more angry and more scared and more frustrated and more despondent?

Perhaps meditation could help me? What about Zen? Western dilettantes have dabbled in Eastern thought and traditions for centuries. Hence, all the suburban strip mall hot yoga joints.

Trust me, I’ve thought about it. And I’ll probably delve a little into what it would take to enter the halls of Shambhala. But I’m doubtful that will distract me from the images of Trump’s masked paramilitary loyalist gunmen clubbing and disappearing brown-skinned people who are just trying to make a better life for themselves and their children. Or scenes of armored military vehicles idling outside the Lincoln Memorial amid a poorly manufactured Reichstag Fire crisis so that our saggy Confederate Caesar can cement autocratic power.

Sober, the only thing that currently helps relieve my tension and anger is writing.

“I haven’t found a drug yet that can get you anywhere near as high as sitting at a desk writing, trying to imagine a story no matter how bizarre it is, or going out and getting into the weirdness of reality and doing a little time on the Proud Highway.” – Hunter S. Thompson

Hunter wasn’t exactly known for his sobriety, but he’s correct that writing helps. Hence, we’re 3,000-plus words into this meandering manifesto. Writing also is draining.

Many people wonder what HST would have to say about the Trump era. I also regret we also don’t have people like James Baldwin, Gore Vidal, Tennessee Williams, Molly Ivins, Dorothy Parker, Kurt Vonnegut, George Carlin, Christopher Hitchens, Jim Harrison, Charles Bukowski, and so many others to give us their words and their art in these dark times.

I guess we have to think for ourselves now, while it’s still legal, but it’d be nice to hear the old pros weigh in.

If nothing else, if it all falls apart and we enter permanent night, I’ll have left behind a small record of one insignificant man’s scream into the endless black void, condemning these fuckers and their crimes.

That’s enough of my rambling self-indulgent prattle for now. Its been almost a week since I vacuumed, the carpet is messy, and the Dysons beckon. Once more unto the breach, dear friends, once more.

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