S03E03: 'David Madden's Day Off'

Dear Friends:

Greetings from age 46! Young people may have their Jesus Year, but this week I start my Jerri Blank Year:

At 46, Jerri—a boozer, a user, and a loser—went back to school to get her diploma. I’ve spent 85 percent of my life in school, so how might I celebrate? Let this be my year of certain truancies.

Starting with this letter.

Yours:
Dave

Endorsements

1. Local Vyntage T-Shirts
Peoples was the drugstore in Herndon, down the bottom of the hill from our house. Dad sold fireworks in its parking lot every summer, and I’d sometimes help, and when I needed a bathroom I’d walk into Peoples and they’d let me use the employee one in back. I bought Big League Chew there and learned about makeup by standing around as my mom and sisters shopped for it. Peoples looms literally large in my memory—20 aisles easily, 40-foot ceilings—but in truth it was just a small drugstore. But it was our drugstore, long lost to time’s passing. Except now. Enter Local Vyntage, the unfortunately spelled website that prints shirts with logos of defunct stores from the eastern U.S. in the 70s and 80s. They’ve got Caldor shirts and Hechinger shirts and Jamesway shirts and Phar-Mor shirts. Jenny got a shirt from Penguin Feather, the record store across the street from our church that once got raided by the feds. I picked up these three:

Bradlees was like a higher-end K-Mart where I bought my records and Mom got our Cabbage Patch Kids on layaway. I never realized how much of my youth is rooted in that store until I saw the old Bradlees logo on Local Vyntage’s website. Nostalgia may be a sickness, but I don’t have anyone to hang in a locket just yet, so for now I’ve got deeply associative logos to wear close to my heart.

2. Haus of Decline
Haus of Decline is a series of web comics that’s very funny and very queer; for a long time all the characters were just icon-ic body shapes with hardons who’d stand and talk to each other, but a couple months back, Alex, the artist, came out as trans, and now many of the comics are about her journey:

There’s still plenty of the old zaniness as well:

Anyway, you should sign up for the Haus of Decline Patreon, where you get a new comic in your inbox every day (or so). They never disappoint.

David Madden’s Day Off

Couple months back, a new fantasy started lurking in the corners of my mind. They were the brighter corners, I think, of a mind lately addled and darkened by … well, I didn’t call it depression, not at first, but then my therapist one day suggested I return for an extra session that week. ‘You’re exhibiting signs of serious depression,’ she reported, and it was like being told I was part Swiss. Oh?

The fantasy went like this: What if I woke up and left the house all day with no plans or obligations? What would I do?

It was a fantasy of having nobody to answer to, while also not being in isolation. The thing is, I wasn’t feeling sad or suicidal or self-loathing; I’d kept up my routines, delivered Shenny on time, even finished the introduction to the memoir. I got out of bed every morning—though there were some mornings I didn’t want to, where the better idea seemed to be staying under the covers, the blinds drawn, the door locked so tight a ghost couldn’t slip in. The wish I kept returning to? Pushing everyone and everything away, like a physical shove: Get the fuck away from me.

I didn’t enjoy people anymore, and I didn’t like much else. Where had I gone? The Day Off fantasy was one way I might answer that question, and remind myself of some things I’d forgotten.

As fantasies go, it was easier than most to realize.¹ The Monday after Commencement, I woke up with only one plan—leave the house by 8am—and a few rules: I couldn’t go to the office or the gym. I couldn’t do any writing or Shennying. I couldn’t come home before 5.

First, I wanted coffee and something to eat, so I walked down to the village of Glen Park, to patronize neighborhood establishments I’d never patronized in the now 3 years we’ve lived here. The coffee was good but the bagel sandwich was a disappointment, and quickly, not even 8:30, I hit my first obstacle: Bathrooming.

When you don’t spend your day just steps from the private or semi-private bathrooms of home and office, finding a place to relieve yourself takes mental energy. This common problem was only exacerbated by my having made baked ziti for dinner the night before, which contains not one, not two, not three, but four different kinds of dairy.

Neither establishment had a bathroom for customers, and the library wasn’t open yet, then I realized nothing was open yet but breakfast places. I couldn’t go to a store or a museum, and the bathroom at the nearby BART station was being cleaned, so I hopped on a train and took it to the Embarcadero, near the Ferry Building, which had clean, noisy-air-dryer bathrooms I could park myself in for a while.

The real reason for BARTing to the Embarcadero was that I thought it would be nice to kill some time sitting along the waterfront, looking at the Bay Bridge, and reading some of the book I’d put in my backpack: Hooray for Homicide, the novelization of two different Murder, She Wrote episodes. I was 6 chapters away from the end, and I couldn’t remember whodunit.

It was a distracting experience, many watchable people going past, including a middle-aged hetero couple jogging in matching UMich ballcaps. Dorks, I thought, ungenerously. Was it working, this whatever restoration? HfH was the treat book I gave myself after finishing Moby Dick, and the only thing reading it revealed was that I liked Murder, She Wrote, perhaps more than I ought to. But why did I like M,SW? What did it mean that I liked M,SW?

After the bell in the Ferry Building clock tower struck 10, I walked back to the bathroom for what I hoped was the last time, and treated myself to a Gott’s dairy-free soft serve on the way out, towering over a horde of lined-up schoolkids fore and aft of me. Treating myself, I had an idea to treat myself again, and I thought: Mani Pedi? I hopped on the Muni train to the Castro. On the Muni train to the Castro, I sat next to a man who filled the air around him with an ammoniac filth and carried three bags of groceries, with a small beagle-like dog following behind. The dog was wearing a princess dress in blue and pink sateen, and I wish I’d snapped a photo. I don’t love animals any more than the rest of you do, but something old and complex happens in my heart any time I watch a dog watch its owner, that look in its eyes.

Now put that look in a sateen dress.

At the nail salon, I hit another obstacle once I hopped up into the pedicure chair. For advice, I googled ‘Should I get a pedicure while I have athlete’s foot?’ and a not-authoritative website said, DON’T. So I just got a plain manicure, no color this time, and looking at my cuticle beds I left feeling like I’d achieved something. It was just after 11. Six more hours to fill.

Achievements were worth noting. Another goal for my day off was to hit all the letters in the PERMA acronym positive psychology has put together to identify aspects of a flourishing life:

P - pleasure
E - engagement
R - relationships that fulfill you
M - meaningfulness
A - achievement

I’d been working PERMA as a way out of my depression, if that’s what I had. Things felt different from the last time I fell into a depressive episode, around COVID’s shut-in Christmas, Dec 2020. I was drinking a lot then, even for me, and one night, drunkenly watching another Hallmark movie, I started to hit myself in the face. I used my fist, hitting hard enough to hurt, but not so hard to draw N’s attention from across the room. Hitting myself felt that night like the best idea, long overdue, a tough-love corrective to being a lifelong terrible person.

The next morning, the memory of what I did lingering like a sour stomach, I emailed my therapist to schedule an emergency session. Her suggestion was to get outside and walk, once a day. It seemed like a stupid idea—touch grass! or some shit—but as we lived at the time across the street from Golden Gate Park, it was also easy to do. She told me to take notice of one thing on my walks, so one day I noticed the crows, then a fern in the AIDS Memorial Grove, a mushroom the size of a volleyball, graffiti etched in cement.

Funny thing was, it worked. Noticing the world outside, my small bad head had to let it in.

With PERMA in my pocket, I was asking stuff like, how might I take Pleasure in something today? What can I do to feel Meaningfully connected to something greater than myself? Etc. etc.

Engagement was a hard one; I’m easily distracted. For example, after my manicure, on the way down Market to the consignment store I like, I passed a car parked along the sidewalk where a Vin Diesel–type was sitting naked in the driver’s seat, a hardon the size of a tallboy rising from his lap. I kept walking, wondering if that’s what I really saw, and what he was up to parked there at 11:30am on a Monday. It was my day off, and I didn’t have anywhere to be, or anyone to be, so why not be a pervert?

Or maybe he was the pervert, and I was the audience every pervert wants? I turned around and walked back, and looked into the window, and yes: fully naked dude, hardon. He wasn’t touching it, but he was recording it on his phone propped up on the driver door armrest. I could see a little replica of my face and T-shirt on the screen.

My guess is this was for his OnlyFans, and as I kept walking it occurred to me that once the video was uploaded, his audience would see me look at the camera, then come back to look again. I’ve seen enough exhibition vids in my day to know this is a thrilling moment—someone noticed!—and I was happy to give it to him / them / us.

Did this count as my M for the day?

Lunchtime. I had tea leaf salad and salmon donburi at B Star in the Inner Richmond, then bought some books at the Booksmith in the Haight, where the clerk put out clear queer vibes and I found myself hoping to impress them with the books I was asking about.² At Comix Experience, I talked to the owner as he sold me my copy of Dan Clowes’s Monica, which he pointed out had a signed postcard inside. Then I went to a bar, The Mad Dog in the Fog,³ where I sipped a Drake’s 1500, and chatted for all of one minute with the bartender about how the bar used to be in the Lower Haight.

I’d imagined at some point engaging in a conversation with a stranger, idle chitchat that all the same reminded us that we were connected, if only geographically. This was meant to hit my R for the day, but the only people I’d spoken to were hoping to sell me something. Maybe I wasn’t ready; I no longer wanted everyone to get the fuck away from me, but I didn’t yet need them to get close.

At this point it was 4pm. I had spent $170 so far, not counting transit fares and the Lyft I took to lunch lest I deal with the slow-ass 33 bus. I wanted to go home, not just to save money, but to end this project that wasn’t delivering me anywhere new. But I’d made a commitment, so I hopped on the 7 and rode it all the way to the Pacific, where I sat and watched the waves crash.

Growing up in Virginia, I always saw the Atlantic Ocean, where we vacationed to, as the start of the world. Here it begins. And so the Pacific has always felt like the end of the world: I watch its waters as though on my deathbed, everything I’ve ever known behind me. That’s where I wanted to be at the end of this weird day.

I watched waves crash and dogs chase balls launched by those plastic scoop-arms. A man in pants, shoes, and a polo shirt walked by, inexplicably strapped to a green parasail that lofted in the air behind him, showing a white waxed mustache design, and miles above us, I noticed one of Condor Airlines’ new striped planes flying off to the north.

I wanted, alone on the beach, to Have Thoughts, but that’s the thing with thoughts—like cats, they don’t come when you want them to. And anyway, PERMA suggests you don’t actively make your life meaningful, you connect to something greater than yourself (church, activism, teaching young folks, sex work) that gives your life meaning. Like a blessing.

I heard the waves crash. They sounded like waves crashing.

In the absence of thoughts, I made decisions. Stupid as it was, I decided my depression, this episode of it, was over, as of today. I didn’t know what that meant, I just told myself it was true, and that I could go home now.

Hooray for Homicide ends with Jessica making a decision of her own: no more mysteries. ‘Ever since I started them,’ she tells a film director she helps exonerate, ‘real murders have followed me around. And I’ve had enough of it.’ This is likely an in-joke for those of us fans crazed enough to read a novelization⁴ of an episode we’ve already seen: If Jessica really had had enough of her superpower for drawing murder like flies to shit, we’d have no show.

So it’s a crisis she’s in. The director tells her she has a talent for solving mysteries, and on the plane back to Cabot Cove, Jessica in her talent for self-interest⁵ hears the word gift. ‘It implied something God-given. And such gifts were meant to be used.’ She resigns herself to help solve future murders, should any come along, but what about her career?

Should she stick to her original resolve and forget about writing any more whodunits? Yes. Much the best plan.

Though perhaps it wouldn’t do any harm to jot down a few ideas. Just in case.

Jessica reached into her bag and took out a notebook and pencil. She thought for a moment, her eyes staring out of the window. After a few seconds her head was bent. Her pencil moved over the paper, slowly at first, and then with gathering speed.

That’s the end of the novel, not the end of the episode.

This week’s thing I didn’t buy at the antique store is this splintered child’s toilet:

1. Unlike my fantasy of being allowed to teach queer-inclusive comprehensive sex ed to middle schoolers.

2. They didn’t have any Ivy Compton-Burnett, and they didn’t have the Penguin Classics edition of Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy, and the other books on my list were still out in hardcover, and I wasn’t about to ruin my day with a hardcover. I cry over the near death of print newspapers, but I’ll celebrate the death of the (expensive, large, cumbersome to hold in one hand while reading, rigged up with a loose cover just waiting to get torn or creased) debut hardcover with my whole, open heart. Imagine new music available only on virgin vinyl, or every new movie debuting only in 70mm IMAX—or actually, no, these are false analogies because no book is made better by the quality of its materials. A hardcover gives you nothing a paperback can’t, except handache and a thinner wallet. Anyway, I left with Jenny Erpenbeck’s Not a Novel and Lorrie Moore’s I Am Homeless If This Is Not My Home, neither of which I’m loving just yet.

3. Local readers will see that I wasn’t doing the best job lining up my stops.

4. Like most novels, they’re so much better than the screen versions.

5. Here’s a woman who in 12 seasons only ever did exactly what she wanted to. Even when people insist she extend her visit to help solve a murder, it’s on Jessica’s terms. (She also cucks every cop she meets.)