do you feel like i do?

I went on Prozac for the first time about 15 years ago, a few months before the big Northridge quake. The only reason I remember the start date with such specificity is that I was struck at the time by how unusually blasé I was as the ground started rocking and rolling. This was an earthquake that destroyed my tv and all the bottles and glasses in my kitchen cupboard. It cracked the walls and ceilings of my shitty second-story
apartment on Rendall place. It felt as if the whole apartment was gonna pancake on top of the first story of the building. It compelled superstitious Mexicans in my neighborhood to live in tents outside their homes for weeks afterward. It even forced a large chunk of the 10 freeway to collapse onto the intersection of Venice and Fairfax. It wasn’t the Big One, mind you. We still haven’t had the Big One that the mystics and statistics say we will. But the Northridge quake was still pretty damn big. It killed Nilsson Schmilsson for Christ’s sake! And yet, there I was, in bed, by myself (of course), getting thrown and bounced around everywhere, but it didn’t feel to me like a big deal. “Huh,” I thought. “We’re having an earthquake. How interesting.”

The wonder of antidepressants, and also the curse they carry with them, is that they act as a kind of generalized novocaine protecting you against the vagaries of life. They're a safeguard against extremities. They keep you out of the depths of despair, but also make it difficult to experience anything approaching euphoria. A friend of mine has likened his experience on meds to wearing a large body condom.





I've cycled on and off meds repeatedly since the Northridge shaker, until finally deciding a little while ago that I probably need to be a lifer. Bad things have happened during the phases when I've been off antidepressants. Breakdowns. Panic attacks. Nasty irritability and embarassing explosions of my temper. I don't really want to get too deeply into these episodes right now. Some of them are actually pretty funny in retrospect, like the time I tried to run some hipster's Galaxie 500 off the freeway...


What interests me most at the moment is the prospect of a life without much pleasure. I'm on a much, much stronger regimen of meds now than when I first started. 120 mgs of Cymbalta and 60 mgs of Remeron, every day. Enough to knock over an elephant. For a time I was mixing in a little Welbutrin as well, and my psycho-pharmacologist also had me experiment with Abilify. But now I'm back to a two-drug cocktail that seems to be doing what I need it to do. It's still a pretty hefty daily infusion. It has to be because you build up a tolerance over time and need more to get the job done. The consequence of this boost in potency is that my body condom is now made of steel. No pain. No pleasure. No fear. No joy. No panic. No ecstasy. No worry...




This may sound like a drab existence, this life without pleasure. The thing is, though, I've never really felt unmittigated pleasure in my life, even when I wasn't on meds. The happiest days of my life took place when I went to sleepaway camp every summer as a kid. I loved it. I had great friends. They liked me. For eight weeks every summer over 10 years, I would go to a place and receive the kind of validation I rarely got back home. I would play sports with my pals, swim, listen to music, and go on field trips to the Baseball Hall of Fame and Roaring Rapids. I even smoked my first joint at camp. Yet even in this ideal sanctuary, I was constantly worried about something or other. I always thought something terrible was about to happen to me. So maybe pleasure is just a mirage. Maybe pleasure doesn't really exist in any kind of lasting form, at least not for me. I have sporadic moments of pleasure - I hear a guitar riff I love; I see a great baseball game; I read an amazing passage in a brilliant book; I have an interesting conversation with someone I like and respect... But none of it ever creates an enduring state of mind. Even sex is really not all that pleasurable for me. Sex in my life is more about insecurity and worry than it is about pleasure, connectedness with another person, and the fulfillment of my manly needs. Am I going to be able to perform? What will she think of me if I fail to please her? Will she reject me? Am I doing this the right way and sticking this or that in the right place? It's really not that satisfying. I prefer beating off, to be honest. I scratch the itch that needs to be scratched and then I'm done, answerable to nobody but myself. I find the time leading up to sex more enjoyable than the sex itself. The flirtation, anticipation and seduction. But even here the pleasure is fleeting, and the sex never lives up to the flimsy promise held forth by the seduction. Sex is overrated. Pleasure is overrated. Fuck pleasure. Pleasure is akin to the observation deck at the Empire State Building. You think you're gonna see Spidey swinging from the top of the building, just like in the cartoon, but then you get up there and it's like BFD. I'll stay on the ground floor, thank you very much, because at least if I just hang out in the lobby I won't be tempted to hurl myself off the deck in anguish. So fuck pleasure. Pain is the condition of possibility for pleasure. That's a little Foucault for you. History of Sexuality, Volume 97. Forget Foucault. Fuck Foucault, and fuck pleasure. Pleasure sucks. Receptiveness to pleasure means opening yourself up to its opposite. The master becomes the slave. Fuck Hegel. Fuck pleasure. I'd rather live my life with a permanent Captain America-style shield. That is to say, I'd rather not strangle the asshole to death after he forgets to towel off the bench at the gym. I'd rather not throw my TV through a window after Luis Castillo drops an easy fly ball in the bottom of the ninth. I'd rather not yell at my friends petulantly when they're 45 minutes late for something or other. Go ahead and shit on me guys. I'm bullet proof. You can't hurt me. I didn't fall for the sucker bet. I know myself. I won't get pissed when some fox walks right by me on the street like I'm invisible. I don't care. She's already making some other guy's life miserable anyway. Fuck pleasure. You can take your pleasure and stuff it deep inside your tushy. I bet you'd get a lot of pleasure out of that! It's a paradox, or an irony, or something. My tushy is cemented shut and fortified with rebar. It won't bother me anymore when my parents suggest - without even being fully aware of what they're implying - that I haven't lived up to what they hoped I'd be. I don't even know if I''ve lived up to what I hoped I'd be. What difference does it make at this point? Hope is the expectation of future happiness, a future in which you'll be able to experience pleasure. And pleasure is for chumps. It's like the Pick 6 at Santa Anita. It's like the Lotto. You know who plays Lotto? People who don't have a fucking pot to piss in. I remember a janitor at UCLA telling me that he'd bought $200 worth of Lotto tix when the jackpot hit $40 million. I tried to explain to him, gently, that the extra tickets he bought increased his chances of winning by .000000000001%. Why did I bother? I don't know anymore. The dumb schmuck will never realize that he's getting played, and that there's a pipeline running directly from the promise of easy wealth to the reality of abject poverty. That's why he's poor. Keep mopping those bathroom floors, you fool. Make sure you get every last drop of piss off those floors. I think you missed a spot. Fuck pleasure. Pleasure is fool's gold.

So what does it all mean? What's it like living a pleasureless life? It's good, actually. It's right. It's straight down the middle. I feel nothing, and I like it.