august 19 aot
I reread yesterday's post a few times today and was happy at how well it held up. Sometimes when I write at night it comes out feeling all good and clean but when I revisit it the next day I see all kinds of little mistakes that no one else notices or cares about but which make me want to throw myself into a quarry. Yesterday's post, and the things so many of my friends texted me today, pushed me even close to the idea of writing a short collection of essays about television. Not, like, in the hopes of becoming a Shea Serrano-style success but more in the hopes that getting some of the things I think about a lot out of my head and onto the page might help me sleep at night.
That said, I'm old enough to remember that when Serrano was on the come up, he self-published and sold a group of essays about Scrubs whose title is a reference to "My Screw Up" (Scrubs S03E14), arguably the show's best-ever episode.
I watched the first five seasons of Scrubs via a series of DVDs my former roommate had with made out of episodes he torrented. I myself never put anything I torrented onto a DVDs because I (correctly) assumed that optical drives were here for a good time, not a long time. That said, this was in 2008, when thumb drives couldn't hold terrabytes of information.
I remember my first real watch-through of Scrubs as clearly as I do because I watched a metric fuckton of television between October 2008 and June 2009. The TL;DR is that I was badly injured and lost the use of my right arm for about a year and also got diagnosed with a chronic pain condition colloquially referred to the suicide disease.
I am not telling you this so you think I'm tough. I tell you this so that you know that I know what it is like to pray for death. It didn't happen often, but it happened, because severe pain makes otherwise smart people both desperate and irrational.
This brings me back to "My Screw Up," which is about things including but not limited to how pain makes otherwise smart people both desperate and irrational.
As it's now time to land this plane, it merits mention that pain can also help focus you and make you better. You've got to want it, but it can happen. For too long I didn't want it. I'd say I wanted it, that I was committed to doing the work, but I didn't because I wasn't. Obviously this story has a happy ending or I wouldn't be telling it, but if you're looking for any kind of overarching message here, all I've got is that you only have to let the soft animal of your body love what it loves and be okay with where that takes you.
🌲 gonna bonus
🌼 go points
🌱 touch for
🌳 grass Mary Oliver
🌷 now reference
Be good to yourself.
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