Latest Thoughts

I was eighteen years old in the summer of 1993. I was standing in a Galeria Horton department store off the pedestrian mall in Hildesheim, Germany, waiting for my sort-of girlfriend to figure out which sneakers she wanted to buy.

I heard a familiar song and looked over in its direction, where there was a small television set playing Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers’ 1985 classic, Don’t Come Around Here No More. And I had a moment of revelation, maybe, or call it satori, or epiphany, or enlightenment. But remember what the Buddhist monks say about enlightenment: it is only enlightenment: nothing holy.

Petty says the inspiration from the song came from watching Stevie Nicks and Joe Walsh break up. One of them chased the other out of the house, screaming after them, “don’t come around here no more!” Several of the song’s other wham-lines also came from that epic rock-and-roll breakup.

As I watched it, I couldn’t help but feel like I’d just been broken up with. Not by my sort-of girlfriend, but by everything in my past. My childhood. My home town. My high school. My everything. It was all one giant relationship that not just wasn’t working, but it had never worked out, and I had been perched on the brink of calling it quits with my past that there was Tom Petty, calling it quits with me, on behalf of my past.

Once the song ended I turned around and walked the aisles of shoes, trying to find her. I was thinking of Lord Dunsany’s preface to The Book of Wonder:

Come with me, ladies and gentlemen who are in any wise weary of London: come with me: and those that tire at all of the world we know: for we have new worlds here.

For we have new worlds here, I thought a moment before I rounded the edge of an aisle and almost ran into her.

For I had a new world here, and it was good, and I would no longer be looking to come around the old one any more.

1990: I begin to show signs of major depressive disorder. I was fifteen.

1995: I’m certain I have major depressive disorder, and like an utter moron, did nothing about it. If you learn nothing else from my saga, try this: don’t do that.

About 2000: I develop adult-onset chronic iron deficiency anemia. In one of life’s cruelties, the symptoms exactly mimic MDD. Am I tired? Yes. Damn depressive disorder. Am I easily fatigued? Yes. Damn depressive disorder.

2000–2025: My anemia gradually worsens until my normal daily hemoglobin level is so low I have to massively curtail physical activities. I continue to blame MDD, of which I’m in an especially bad spot. (As a psychiatrist told me, “your brain was chronically starved of oxygen: were you expecting your MDD to get better?”)

2025: I develop a spontaneous hernia and don’t notice it… but my upper intestinal tract sure does. I develop an internal bleed. I lose even more hemoglobin that way. Further, iron deficiency anemia can — in severe cases — affect blood clotting (hemostasis), so it’s quite possible this bleeder bled for … a really long time.

Memorial Day, 2025: I present to the emergency department with a blood hemoglobin of 4.8 grams per deciliter (below 6.5 is generally considered “inconsistent with life”), a spontaneous hernia, and a massive blockage in my upper intestine composed of fecal matter, bile, and coagulated blood.

Surgical intervention was necessary, as was massive amounts of transfused blood.

Prognosis: recovering from long term oxygen deprivation is hard. When your blood O2 is at levels “incompatible with life”, to use the gloriously anodyne phrase I heard in the hospital, you begin to accumulate damage throughout your entire body at once. I’m fortunate to have dodged brain or cardiac damage, but my body is still weak as a kitten. I have a lot of rehab ahead of me.

The MDD is noticeably improving as my hemoglobin levels rise.

There you go. That’s all of the story I’m making public.

With respect to Elon Musk and Donald Trump’s blowout, I can do no better than to quote Martha Wells: “The sense of urgency just wasn’t there. Also, you may have noticed, I don’t care.” Two malignant narcissists with more money and power than kindness or good sense want to get into a useless pissing match, well, that’s one more thing I don’t need to pay attention to. I highly recommend not paying attention to it yourselves.

Some people are making a big deal of Trump’s threat there will be “serious consequences” if Musk supports any Democrats in response to their blowout. Yes, the idea of a President threatening a U.S. citizen for their peaceful exercise of their First Amendment rights is troubling, but no, not in the case of Musk. I’m pretty sure he can afford a good civil rights attorney. Afford every good civil rights attorney in the nation, come to think of it. Trump’s talk is useless bluster, as useless as the rest of him.

The Kilmar Abrego García case is revealing people’s profound ignorance of logic. We are being constantly presented with a binary choice between Abrego García being a bad guy who deserves to be in an El Salvadoran secret prison, or an undocumented immigrant innocent who’s being horribly mistreated by the government.

The problem with this logic is simple: that’s not how binary choices work. A binary choice does not ask us to choose between A and B; it only asks us to accept or reject A. The moment you introduce alternatives it stops being a binary choice, and I can’t believe I have to remind people of that.

This is my longwinded way of saying: yes, we mistreated him, denied him due process, and shipped him to an evil and ugly place in violation of our binding promise to him we wouldn’t. That doesn’t mean he’s a good guy or that he shouldn’t be deported or anything else: it only means we wronged him.

García is being extradited back to the United States to face federal charges which, if found guilty of, will qualify him for the express train straight back to El Salvador… and, I have to be honest, I’m fine with that. He’s got a huge amount in his legal defense fund and will have his pick of fine attorneys and all the criminal protections found in the Constitution: if the government convicts him it will only be by the overwhelming weight of evidence, as it ought be. And if, either subsequent to conviction or follow-up immigration court proceedings, he’s ordered out of the country, I’m fine with that, too.

Trump is mobilizing 2,000 California national guardsmen and, it’s said, a detachment of active-duty Marines so that he may “restore order” in a lawless Los Angeles where about two dozen people are actively resisting ICE raids. Mark my words: in the next 24-48 hours the State of California is going to head to federal court to get an injunction against this, as federal law doesn’t authorize the President to take the lead on state-level rebellions.

(Well, maybe it does. See 10 U.S. Code § 12406, which is written so broadly as to arguably be unconstitutional.)

Rather, the Constitution says the opposite: the President is required to support the state governor in putting down the rebellion, which means that without a declaration of rebellion from the state governor there’s nothing for the President to do. But this is a level of Constitutional analysis that a reasonably bright middle school student could understand, meaning it far escapes the President’s meager facilities.

Short version: experience not recommended.

About two weeks ago I lost the ability to stand. It wasn’t that I didn’t want to: I did. It was that my muscles were laughing at me when I told them to move. Having been diagnosed with major depressive disorder, this is the sort of thing that happens sometimes—psychomotor retardation being one of MDD’s major symptoms and all.

After a few days I realized I wasn’t getting better. I talked to my friends and we agreed I’d go into the psychiatric ward voluntarily, without fuss. My good friend Eugene stopped by to help clean my place while I couldn’t, and my physical condition scared him to death. He realized, correctly, I was in a major complex medical crisis.

On Memorial Day he and another friend, Chip, woke me up at eight for an intervention. I was still unable to get up, so the fire department took me to the emergency department where it was discovered my blood hemoglobin level was 4.8 grams per deciliter.

Hemo is the chemical that carries oxygen to your cells. A “normal” level is hard to define, human variation and all, but most authorities say a 14 g/dL is normal, below 10 is an immediate medical concern, below 7 justification for immediate blood transfusions, and below 5 simply incompatible with life.

I was at a 4.8 and had been crashing for weeks.

So, I’m still in the hospital right now. I won’t be out for another few days. But I am recovering, and I’m grateful. I’m almost certainly going to have a stew of short-term and long-term damage from sustained oxygen starvation, but right now it looks as if I’ve escaped major neurological or cardiac damage.

My psychiatrist has warned me to be careful. Minor brain damage can do anything from destroy your bladder control to remove your ability to rhyme words that end in “-usy”. I’m going to discover the hard way what my new limitations are. He’s urging me to be merciful towards myself. I think that’s a good idea.

No, we don’t know the root cause (yet). And, to be honest, I’m not going to tell you anyway. It’s not important you know.

What’s important you know:

I almost died.

I’m recovering.

Enjoy every sandwich.

I was eleven when John Carpenter’s Big Trouble in Little China came out and wrecked me for life. Written by many of the same people responsible for The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai Across the 8th Dimension, it has that same rollicking glee, as if it were a movie of unexplored hyperlinks assembled by a brilliant teenager with unlimited creativity and a still-emerging sense of good taste.

In one pivotal scene the heroes pause for a drink in, of all things, the personal mini-bar of the immortal Chinese warlord they’re trying to kill. (I warned you it was that kind of movie.) Here, the friendly wizard Egg Shen reveals he’s brought with him the legendary Six Demon Bag —

“Terrific. Sensational. A Six Demon Bag,” one hero says dryly, unimpressed. “What’s in it, Egg?”

“Wind! Fire! That sort of thing!” Egg declares proudly…

… and we never see it get used again.

Heck of a wasted opportunity, if you ask me.

In the early 2000s I was in graduate school for computer science, and knew in the future I’d want to stake out my own personal domain. I registered sixdemonbag.org, because, hey: there are many worse things to be than an organization devoted to wind, fire, and all those sorts of things.