pretty much the whole story of my hospital adventure told in WhatsApp screenshots and journal entries
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Dear Cary, I hate my family of origin. I recently discovered that I grew up in a mostly narcissistic family, with a narc mother who subtly but persistently projected her own guilt and shame and anger about her situation onto us, her six children. During those childhood years, we – my siblings and I – felt so much compassion for her suffering. It seemed like almost overnight our...
Dear Reader, I wrote “The Psychedelic Madness of Covid-19” for David Talbot, founder of Salon.com, and I think it’s the best piece I’ve written about my recovery from Covid-19. Read and enjoy! The podcast started out as an honest homage to David Talbot, but ended up being all about me, me, me! How I ended up working at Salon.com, how I learned everything I needed to know...
This is not an advice column. This is commentary. Robert Aaron Long, 21 years old, of Woodstock, Georgia, was arrested Tuesday in the murders of eight people, six of whom were women of Asian descent working in massage parlors. Initial media reports indicated that he claimed he did it because he was a sex addict. Sex addiction is not a trivial matter. But right now his claim feels like a...
Dear Reader, I’m doing it again. I’m going long. In the past, in my blessed twelve years writing the advice column five days a week for Salon.com, the most commonly remarked-upon flaw in my work was my tendency to overwrite, to write long, to repeat myself, to go off on tangents (see what I mean?). My friend and mentor David Talbot, bless his soul, never gave me much trouble about it, perhaps...
Hi Folks! Wow, was I insane! This week’s podcast dives deep into the fantastical delirium I experienced in the intensive care unit of San Donato hospital in Arezzo, Italy. I’ll be publishing a longer prose version soon and will let you know when that is available. Also, this is the January 12, 2021 Smithsonian Magazine article I mention at about 1:20 into the podcast. But for now...
This story is all in the comments below.–CT
How do you reach a point where your conscience is overwhelming and you must make the leap?
How do you get to that point?
… where the conscience … blooms, and all the fear subsides, and the conscience floods the spirit, floods the mind, floods the brain, and gives one the courage to just do the right thing. Just fucking do the right thing!”
Full podcast:
Dear reader, This week I made two podcasts. This first podcast, “I cry for My Country” emerged from relentless self-interrogation: What am I feeling about America? What is the origin, the heart of this vague tangle of feelings and evasions that is hovering about me? How can I stop taking refuge in trivialities? What needs to be said? What is urgent, important, necessary? And then, the...
There is a sign in the mess hall that says, “You are being watched.” We laugh about it because we have never known anything else, not since we were babies left alone perhaps for a few hours. I have glimpses now and then of that early me, the one before the training, before the constant surveillance, before the surrendering of all self to the company. It feels alien to recall that before I stood...
EPISODE 5 OF AANYA’S “THE INSIDE SCOOP”: the world’s only kid-run advice podcast for kids. Dear Reader, When you’re a kid, even a really smart, “advanced” kid, you’re basically defenseless against the warped, psycho, indecipherable, nutty, clichéd, reckless and indefensible advice you’re likely to get from adults. Like, “Don’t...
Every once in a while a curious feeling would come over me, while walking in the woods that bordered the inn, or sitting in my room doing paperwork. People don’t realize how much paperwork is involved in a job like this. They think it’s all shooting people and running through the woods with dogs chasing you, but that’s only a small part of it. We also gather intelligence, naturally...
We went up high in the mountains where it was quiet. There was an unused cabin up there, off the grid, not on Google maps, strategically hidden from the satellite scans, with no cellular footprint, having been lead-shielded from the start, no phones ever used up there, no trace of anything, just our analog trail, our knowing that it was up there, and we went up there, just a few of us, after the...
Do you feel like life will never return to normal? Does the future seem like a dim, unending nightmare of isolation? Do you fear that the habits we have acquired will forever dampen the bright spontaneous spirit of social life? Does despair feel like the only realistic response to world conditions? I know many people feel this way. I myself, having survived the COVID-19 disease, having spent...
Dear Reader, Because I fear being misunderstood, because I care what you think of me, I want to add an addendum to yesterday’s podcast but I don’t want to do it via podcast because while in one way a podcast is less work, i.e. all I have to do is talk and let the talk wander where it will, that method can lead pretty far afield, and this requires some precision: So I was watching TV moments...
NOTE: This is my podcast made the day after the the January 6 2021 attempted insurrection. On the podcast I get the date wrong; I say it’s January 7, 2020. I think that is because, as you can hear, my voice is still hoarse, as I was just three weeks out of my five-week stay in San Donato hospital in Arezzo, Italy after my catastrophic illness. NOTE: This is my podcast made the day...
How to balance our grief about the pandemic with the desire for happiness and normalcy? How to remain whole and vital and strong when the world seems to be falling apart? Where is the line between staying informed and obsessive news-watching? I ponder these things in this week’s podcast. If I were bodily able and living in the States, I think I would feel the need for action: volunteer at a...
Right before we left I had to stop on the stairs to tie my shoe, and I had a spell of dizziness, and couldn’t remember how to tie my shoe, and I felt panic wash over me, the kind of panic that I used to feel as a young recruit, those first few months, barely out of the blanket, barely out of that big black limousine that had carried me away from my home, down that snowy road in winter so long ago...
When I was a boy, my father owned a hotel in the center of a medieval town in the Alps. And something happened, I still don’t know what, or if it was just a dream, but I remember that news came over the radio and my father packed us all up and told us we were going to live in the hotel for a while. He had the driver come and pick us up, and had a van packed with all our things, and he, my mom and...
October 4, 2020 (the week of his Covid-19 diagnosis, the day before we left for Rome) I’d like to stop thinking about Donald Trump. I thought about him all day yesTERDAY and the day before that and it’s getting kind of ridiculous. I would like to get to the point that I don’t care if he lives or dies. But I keep watching CNN. I would like to stop thinking about what other people say about Donald...
October 11, 2020 The hills north of Rome are green. There is a farmer in a field of sheep squatting over an animal, apart from the herd, lying in the grass. The Tiber river, or Tevere as they call it, snaking slow and low under an ancient stone bridge. The sky that is the blue of Michelangelo. Plowed fields. A house on a hill. The colors of brick and stone and marble. Well-tended vineyard. Old...
October 25, 2020 Oh, gee. I’ve got these notebooks. For 25 years I have been keeping a journal. Since 1995. There were the bleak streetcar years when I rode San Francisco Muni’s N Judah, and then the L-Taraval, across the 7 miles from one side of the peninsula to the other every morning, grabbing the single seat and hunching over my notebook. Through my dark years as a minion at Chevron through...
A short podcast for this Christmas Eve. I continue to heal. My wish for you, as we all endure the shocking tragedy unfolding before us, is that you can find a way to enjoy a little holiday spirit, and remain safe and protected in the days to come.–ct
Hi folks, after five weeks or more of relative silence I wanted to let you know where I am and what’s happening. So I did a short podcast on Buzzsprout. That’s all for now. Be well, hang in there!
Dear Cary, I used to read your Salon column religiously and was sad when it stopped. Frankly I had no idea you were still doing advice via your own website, so I am thrilled to have discovered this! I have a question about apathy. For years it has been my most loyal companion. I have dreams, visions, I have talents – all of which fall short because I simply do not get around to anything. Most...
Being a poll worker was one of the best things I’ve ever done. If you’ve ever thought about doing it, here’s my advice: Give it a shot! Poll workers were under attack four years ago and they’ll be under attack this election too. It’s a hard, complicated, sometimes boring but wonderfullly rewarding experience. Democracy doesn’t work without poll workers...
Dear Reader, Usually I write an advice column and then I make a podcast from it. But this week, what I needed to say was better just spoken. So … I’d ask you kindly to just listen to the podcast … Speaking of which … The Since You Asked podcast is now available on the following platforms that might be favorites of yours: Spotify Stitcher Podcast Addict Podchaser Deezer...
Dear Cary, I was born in San Francisco six decades ago. I lived through the Cuban Missile Crisis and the Loma Prieta earthquake and have been close to a couple of street shootings in SF and New York City. I’m not a nervous person by nature but I am full of fear and anxiety now. I couldn’t listen to the first presidential debate because I knew it would upset me too much and, with the...
Dear Reader, I heard the news this morning that President Trump and the first lady have been diagnosed with COVID-19, or SARS-CoV-2. I felt bad about the confluence of events but that is history in the making, so here’s the column which I began yesterday before the news and am finishing today after the news.–CT Hi Cary, So, the comedian and talk show host Bill Maher says that...
Dear Cary, I’m a long-time reader, since the Salon column, and a first-time writer. I’ve always appreciated your willingness to empathize with the people who write to you, observing the human condition alongside them rather than talking advice at them. It’s a beautiful thing to do. I’m writing about a frustration that no one I know–including my spouse, family, and...
When I was a child I must have seen somewhere, maybe in a comic book or one of our many old illustrated books, maybe it was a William Blake engraving, souls rising from graves like mist in the evening. Souls rising like sleepers in white sheets, out of the old tumbledown graves of our local cemetery. And throughout my angry rationalist phase and my pretended atheism which I was just not rigorous...
Dear Cary, After reading “The voice inside my head is being mean to me” I decided to write about a recent experience that has quietly devastated me. I went to art school in the eighties, where I fell in love with art. I was in a few shows and was well on my way to developing an identity as an actual working artist but then the student loans ran out and I had to learn how to survive in...
Dear Cary, You get a lot of unusual letters so perhaps you will not be shocked to receive one from me. I know you quite well, well enough to know there are many things that you conceal from me. But rather than talk about my problem, as most of your letter writers do, I would rather like to talk about your problem. Or problems. I know you have them. And I am in a privileged position to know about...
Dear Cary, I miss writing and I miss playing the ukulele. When I was divorced and single, I made a life for myself by working, going to school, caring for my son and mom. I took weekly writing and music classes and I learned how to be completely independent. However, I missed being in a loving, close relationship to share life with. Dating became like a part time job, but eventually I found my...
Dear Cary, What do you think about Covid and Black Lives Matter in terms of historical perspective? I think that the Black Death in the Middle Ages paved the way for the Renaissance. Is what we are going through (radical changes to social protocol) likely to result in a similar revolutionary change, and if so would future historians regard this change as a good or bad thing? Just Wondering Dear...