Dear Friends:
Today is my school’s first day back after Fall Break. I spent it reading books about monstrous, terrible, and ugly people for a future course I’m designing. Its thesis is that Keats’s ‘Beauty is truth, truth beauty’ is a lie beauty tells. Michelangelo’s David would insist you look good in that top, e.g. The truth more often than not is ugly. We rarely want to hear it.
I’m drawn to uglinesses. The other week I told my therapist I was coming to ‘the ugly part of my story’, and she said that calling it ‘ugly’ disparages something that’s real, that’s a part of myself.
She meant it as a gentle corrective, but ‘ugly’ isn’t a slur, or even a judgement. Let ‘ugly’ define the set of things it’s in our nature to turn from. Like genocide. Inequality in effect. Piles, plural, of human shit on the sidewalk. Heterosexual PDA.
Okay that last one’s my little joke. It wasn’t all ugliness last weekend. I also made runzas for dinner one night, and my sister Jenny’s vegetable soup the next. The former ended up a little ugly, tbh, but the latter was divine.
Yours:
Dave
Endorsements
1. San Francisco League of Pissed Off Voters
My final SF-election endorsement this fall goes to this volunteer-run, grassroots-not-astroturf group of SF politics nerds who’ve worked since 2004 to help get progressives elected. Regardless of your politics and voting plans this fall (ballots are out! vote early!), the League deserves your support. They put out a voter guide of endorsements based on (a) questionnaires sent to all candidates,1 and (b) open, public meetings where League members discuss and debate every candidate and ballot measure. Second only to free elections, this kind of open forum is the closest thing we have to democracy in practice.2 You’ll note they’re not called the League of Satisfied Voters, or Smug, Victorious Voters; what has made the League pissed off for 20 years is how—despite progressives winning some district supervisor and judge positions—SF consistently puts moderates in office, or rallies money to recall progressives quickly after they get elected by the people. SF elects D.A.s who push to put more kids in prisons. Our current mayor shuts down safe injection sites despite their efficacy. Everyone lies about crime being up when crimes are at historic lows. If you, like me, find this fucking infuriating, check out the League’s 2024 endorsements.
2. J.R. Ackerley, English memoirist
Here’s how his last and best book, My Father & Myself, opens:
I was born in 1896 and my parents were married in 1919. Nearly a quarter of a century may seem rather procrastinatory for making up one’s mind, but I expect that the longer such rites are postponed the less indispensable they appear and that, as the years rolled by, my parents gradually forgot the anomaly of their situation.
If you don’t love that voice for all its fussiness I likely can’t convince you to read Ackerley, but MF&M—it’s central question = How am I a part of whoever the man my father was?—is one of the best memoirs of the 20th century, a modernist masterpiece, cousins to F.M. Ford’s The Good Soldier. I just taught Ackerley’s My Dog Tulip in my grad seminar last week, which tells the story of trying to give his dog3 a full life, which to Ackerley—as out a homosexual as one could be in pre-1967 UK—means a sex life. Somehow, this very queer-as-in-strange memoir becomes a very queer-as-in-give-us-rights-you-bastards memoir. He’s a personal hero, and I’m surprised it’s taken so long to endorse him. Here’s a photo of him with Queenie:
How to Stop Spiraling
Spirals in my life come in two forms. I spiral about shame and I spiral in rage. Let’s take them alphabetically.
Rage Spirals
Some injustice starts it, some wrong I didn’t, or just can’t, make right. Someone at work is stubbornly making things more difficult for others. Someone on the bus is watching TikToks without earbuds. Someone online calls tenants rights groups ‘NIMBYs’ and accuses them of worsening our housing inequality.
R A G E !
The spiral starts when I get into an argument in my head with some imagined person, or some imagined version of the person whose actions caused this anger. It’s a form of self-soothing, maybe, assuring myself I’m not the bad person here, I’m not the one causing problems, I’m not the sociopath. The soothing comes in the form of ever-honed, airtight arguments.
That’s the spiral: I make in my head a killer point, the imagined other person gets a counterargument, I make a better point, I find some hole they might pick at, some accusation, I go back and revise, there’s another counter, and it goes on and on and on.
(I’ve never written about this before. Writing it out is worrying me: Am I alone in this? Do any of you rage spiral in this way? Is this public-service Shenny ending up as a confession, to be used as evidence in some distant trial?)
Here’s the problem: I am alone in these spirals. I’m inside myself. Whoever I want to shout at argue my rational points with is not around, so there’s nothing to be done about the problem at this spiraling moment.
That’s step one of getting out: Realize this is not the time or place for your anger to be of any use.
Step two is kissing your angry self goodnight.
I picture him as an activist: passionate, dedicated, fired the fuck up. And so I acknowledge him and honor those qualities. ‘You are very smart,’ I say, sometimes out loud if I can get away with it. ‘You are making so many good points! But I can’t use them right now. I’m over here trying to read this book.’
There will, I assure him, be time for him tomorrow. ‘Until then, good night,’ I say, and then I blow him a kiss as I picture him walk out of the room. Because I love him and want him to feel loved, but I don’t need him making all this noise right now.
And then the spiral is over. It’s like I pay that insecure part of me the respect he needs to feel seen, and then we can part from each other. The hard part is finding him the next day, checking in: ‘Okay, so what should we do about this whole “I’m So Right” thing?’4
Shame Spirals
Recently, I went through old notes I made for myself in notes apps, and found this one from 2014:
How do you get better at being a person? Does it always just happen over time? What if you get worse? What if you work so hard every day to become somebody and in the end you become worse? No one’s ever going to tell you, and so you’ll never know, and there’s nothing worse than a terrible man who doesn’t know how terrible.
That’s what shame looks like. Shame wants me convinced that I’m bad, or small, or abnormal, or worse than others—and everyone knows it. Oh, he’s so insensitive to others. He’s such a bore. His writing is all intellectual without ever saying anything new. He has no idea how racist/misogynistic/ableist the stuff he says is. Why does he think he can pull off that outfit?
There’s this solipsism to shame. Picture Narcissus at the pond, hating the image he sees that he all the same can’t look away from. Or picture a hall of funhouse mirrors: all you can see are these distortions of yourself.
That’s how the spiral starts, that dizzying bad self-absorption. Then it really gets going, because a neat trick about shame is how easily it shames you for feeling it: ‘Good people don’t feel ashamed of themselves all the time.’ ‘Nobody is this self-loathing, you loser,’ etc.
Down and down and down I sink. Here’s how I get out:
Step one is to say, out loud if I can, ‘It’s okay that I’m feeling ashamed.’ As I was reminded of this summer, shame isn’t this fault you can rid yourself of, like a coat that no longer fits. If I make plans and then flake on you three times in a row, feeling ashamed can help me look more closely at what’s going on with me, what my commitments are, how I want to live my life, etc.
Step two is to say ‘I should be proud that I’m even capable of feelings.’ (This one’s optional; most of you might not need to remind yourself of this.)
Step three is to picture yourself inside that hall of mirrors. It helps me to try to imagine those untrue images. Also: I try to feel the boring monotony of looking at myself over and over again, which helps turn shame into something like annoyance, like when a puppy scrambles again out of the corral you’ve built. Again with this!
This readies me for Step four, the fun part, where I get to smash the fuck out of those mirrors. Like with a Sledge-o-Matic, say.
Then, step five: find someone to text, or ask a question of, or talk to, or like their posts online, or whatever. In a shame spiral, other people are your rescue ladder. You need them to remind you that the world is so much bigger and more pretty than your mind.
I also spiral during vertigo spells, but no Jedi mind trick can deliver me from a vertigo spiral. Earlier this year, on the advice of my doctors, I did some vestibular physical therapy, where my therapist put me through an odd series of movements and actions to see which triggered dizzy symptoms. The idea was to deliberately bring them on, just a bit, and then let them stop.
So for example, if I toss a ball up in the air with one hand. Again and again and again, about one catch every second or so, then stop, my head feels like I’m spiraling down a drain. A minute later, it’s gone. Then I do it again. Spiral, spiral, spiral. Then one last time.
It helped. Vertigo is like a sauna, or bottoming: you feel like you just have to take it. But therapy had the audacity to suggest I’m in control. I can look at the room, see nothing’s moving, and understand that my mind isn’t moving either.
Which, of course, is the dream.
This week’s thing I didn’t buy at the antique store is this thermos:
Only Aaron Peskin responded among mayors this year. Moderates and neoliberals hate the League, buying into the myth that SF has had a long history of progressives in power, and that it’s somehow their policies that have caused housing inequality and homelessness to flourish.
You do need to donate to vote, so it’s not perfect.
IRL name = Queenie. His publishers felt this was too gay to admit in print, so they decided on, um, Tulip.
Bonus tip for writers: this also works for the voice in your head saying your writing is crap. ‘Oh gosh you’re smart, but let’s talk about this later, okay? MWAH.’
Loved reading about your experience with spiraling! You are not alone. I spend so much time both rage and shame spiraling (the imaginary fights felt very familiar), AND trying to figure out how to stop. I loved your tips, especially giving your angry self a good night kiss. I'm going to give it a try!