So it’s been a minute.

I’m kind of back. At least, I’m writing essays again, if nothing else, and, well, I have a blog, so… I might as well put them here.

Some of you might be wondering what happened to me that I went basically dark for three years. A lot of my readers are close friends, so they know a lot of this. But I have got to the point where I feel ready to talk about it. The wounds are basically closed. I want to make this really clear, I don’t want and am not seeking sympathy. I don’t want or need pity or concern. I’m fine. Really. But to get to how I got to fine I kind of need to walk through when I wasn’t and what that meant to me.

So let’s start in 2016. In 2016 I suffered from a pretty serious bout of depression. It wasn’t politically related – I’m susceptible to depression, I had a young child and was living in a slummy apartment in a city that I felt was chewing me up. On paper life was really good. My daughter. I had the best job I’d ever had to date. My novel had been published a year ago, and I was as successful as an artist as I’d ever been. But I felt kind of trapped and really miserable. I tried to change things up. I went back to school, I did another post-graduate professional certification, studied for and sat an incredibly difficult exam. And then nothing really changed except I experienced extreme burnout.

My depression led to me making some bad choices – I tossed in my job for one that paid more but was doing work I was neither morally comfortable with nor really properly trained for. I got it on the basis of my hard-won professional certification but then found that it wasn’t the work I had studied to do. And the burnout wasn’t getting better. I lost my job.

At the same time I lost my job, we were moving out of the slummy apartment and into a condominium my wife and I had put a lot of money into pre-construction. Only, we couldn’t secure a mortgage with me on EI and were looking at potentially being on the street once the apartment closed. Closing kept getting pushed back by the developer and I was just…

Broken.

Completely broken. This was spring 2018.

We made the hard decision to leave Toronto. I found work subcontracting for an IT company and working for the Federal Government. I moved out to Charlottetown and stayed with my best friend while we sorted out the housing situation. We got a beautiful house on the edge of town adjacent a horse farm. The pace of life slowed. I buried myself in family, and started healing from those psychic wounds that I’d accumulated over the last two years.

But I started getting headaches when I tried to read.

I hadn’t been reading much during my depression. It’d been a symptom of my depression, and as these things often are, this symptom fed back into those painful feelings and left me paralyzed. Having come out the other side I kind of wanted to start reading again. But I was walking (and later driving or being driven) to and from work instead of taking transit. My daughter was growing and made more demands on my time. I was working. And when I tried to read I would feel tired quickly and there were those headaches.

Eventually it came to pass that I discovered I needed glasses. It was 2019 and I was 40. These things happen.

However I was still struggling to read. Fiction wasn’t clicking with me. “Show, don’t tell,” had gone from a piece of craft advice to a stone in my boot. Having healed I was getting more concerned with politics again beyond a sense of unending despair, but I felt a sort of anxious urgency to speak and be spoken to clearly and without dissembly. The contradictions inherent in fictive text had bugged me for a while. I was writing about that in 2016, a few months before I burned out and fell into depression, and I’d talked about it depth at the 2015 Spec Fic Colloquium a year previously when I’d dug into the concept of, tabula rasa rebellion as a form of ideological neutering. But what was a nuisance in 2015 just grew and grew until it made it very difficult for me to enjoy anything but the most strident and didactic books. I turned to works in translation largely because people outside the anglosphere were more likely to say what they meant and mean what they said in their fiction.

These days I mostly read French books. So that “works in translation” thing kind of stuck I guess. But I’m learning French too so a few of those book aren’t in translation and that’s really cool. But I’ll get to this.

Ok, so we’re into the home stretch here. Things were definitely on the up-swing for me. I had glasses, I was working, had a beautiful red house that was mine in a nice neighbourhood with a whole bunch of little girls near my daughter’s age with whom she made fast friends. My wife had finally found a position worthy of her talents and she was working and happy too.

I’d left the Federal Government job – it’d always been contract – but I’d moved seamlessly into another position. I had a direct report who I’d the best relationship since the good job I’d left at the start of my depression.

I was traveling for work a lot; and reading on flights. I read a couple of science fiction novels but the confused ideology of books like The Expanse series – books that wanted to be about radical, transformative, paradigmatic shifts in technology and culture but that couldn’t imagine a universe more different than what we have now, only with basic income for some – just didn’t gel with me. I was enjoying Ian M. Banks. And I was enjoying non-fiction.

I read Julie Watson’s Ghost Stories and Legends of Prince Edward Island. This was effectively a work of anthropology – a mythography discussing the stories my new home told about itself. I adored it. I also read my old, dear, friend Vanessa Brown’s true crime book about the Forest City Killer. I don’t generally read true crime, and only did read it because of who wrote it (Vanessa is one of my two oldest friends). But in these books I found what I’d been missing; I found that the clarity of conversation I was struggling with in fiction was present in these books that said what they meant and meant what they said. My return to reading came in fits and starts, but it was a start. So I suppose I should thank Vanessa for helping me overcome a pretty severe obstacle in my life last year.

It was February 2020 and I was mostly worried about my cousin who lives in Tianjin and my in-laws who live in central China. My boss, the one I liked, left my employer, and things were getting tense as COVID-19 crept over the horizon. I was in Texas in early March, when the travel ban came in. I returned home the same day that mandatory 14 day self-isolation periods for international travel were established. Soon after schools closed and we went into lockdown. Unable to travel for work, and with my American clients in disarray, work was going poorly, and somebody needed to give greater attention to our daughter, who was going a bit feral, and who was not really learning French despite being in French immersion.

My wife and I knew one of us were going to have to step away from work, and my employer offered me an out. We came to an agreement that they would lay me off, but unlike the time before when I lost my job I actually felt great. It wasn’t like I was the only person out of work in April 2020, and it meant I could be there for my daughter. I became her French tutor, and started learning French a bit myself to keep up. Eventually the lockdown eased in PEI and my daughter started going to ballet again. The weather was nice, and I really didn’t want to spend time indoors. COVID precautions precluded watching her dance, so I got in the habit of getting a coffee from the shop across from her dance studio and taking it to a picnic table, I’d drink coffee and play with my phone, read news about COVID, read about politics. Sometimes I’d pinch wifi and watch Youtube videos. I’d become fond of a few channels that talked about philosophy but I’d noticed that most of them were very entry-level. (This isn’t actually all that true, but the stuff I found first via politics focused Breadtube types was.)

I’d always loved philosophy.

If you go into my back-catalog you know I was writing about Hegel in the article about rebels. I talked about Nietzsche in another article, but it’d been years since I’d read him (my Nietzsche reading having been between 1999 and 2004) and I don’t think I fairly represented him in those writings so I’m going to leave off the link. I’d been getting pretty involved with radial leftist discourse online and was frustrated by the ML/Anarchist conflicts – which I largely saw as arising out of miscommunication and century-old bad blood.

It was by then getting to be about mid-September and I was also painfully bored. So I decided to fill one of those gaps I saw in Youtube philosophy content and start putting out some videos specifically targeted at leftists presenting ethical problems within leftist discourse and using a largely materialist-existentialist frame to address good ways of approaching these problems while hopefully side-stepping the sectarian divisions that bothered me. So I decided I should brush up on my philosophical reading.

I’d loved that stuff in university.

Fifteen years ago.

But hadn’t read much since I’d returned from China in 2007. So I eased into it by picking up The Present Age by Kierkegaard – he’d been my fave in university. Honestly I think a lot of people going into philosophy at the undergraduate level found him a bit opaque, but I’d been interested in theology as a precocious child and by the time I met Kierkegaard in university I was already well-situated to understand him. I’d found writing essays about Kierkegaard was a good way to get good grades in philosophy classes so… I stuck with that.

And when I returned to philosophy I started there and with Simone De Beauvoir – who I adore for her successful efforts to secularize Kierkegaard’s ethics and whose ethical sense underpinned my planned project. I started researching for my first video. It was getting to be the American electoral season again, and leftists were arguing about whether leftists should vote and if so how. I decided to do a video about that and read Sartre, Adorno and Horkheimer to round out my reading list. (And, of course, Marx.)

I planned to do a second video about whether a state could be ethical, and picked up Foucault. I had encountered him in university but had been generally unimpressed. I wasn’t well situated to see much profundity in him then, and he’d never been a difficult author for me so I just saw him as being another overrated postmodernist. This was a position that I rapidly erased upon reading Society Must Be Defended, which is an exceptionally easy to read and engaging series of lectures regarding the relationship of the discipline of history to the structures of state power that surrounded them. In this book I found the lynchpin to the questions about the state I wanted to ask. And between these two books, I rediscovered my ability to read for pleasure.

The flood gates opened. I started grabbing up books as fast as I could learn about them. In November and December of 2020 I read Mark Fisher, Frantz Fanon, I started in on another Foucault book (Discipline and Punish), started re-reading my favourite graphic novel (The Invisibles) and also reading Valerian L’Integrale volume 2 in French, my literacy in that language having improved sufficiently to handle it since the start of 2020. I read Gilles Deleuze, whose essay, Postscript on the Societies of Control, is possibly the most singularly influential thing of the lot of my Q4 2020 reading. When you occasionally see me reference, “the search for new weapons,” I am quoting this essay. I also started listening to podcasts, particularly Acid Horizon, and through them learned about a host of other philosophers (Felix Guttari, of course, but also Simondon, Lyotard and Bataille). I revisited Derrida and Nietzsche and found my opinions on them had, in fact, shifted since university. Bataille’s The Solar Anus was nearly as influential for my recent WandaVision essay as Fisher or Adorno were, albeit more for the stylistic freedom that I felt in it. And I should note that this massive glut of books, essays, poems and commentaries was all stuff I was reading and listening to between October 2020 and now. At the end of November I found another job which is operating fully remote, and I set up a home office that has come together as a very comfortable space to work, create, read and have a good think in.

I am reading again. And eventually my reading overflowed into writing. I’m not sure I can write fiction where I am right now. If I do, it’ll have to be a pretty substantial break from what I wrote before. But Adorno and Deleuze, Bataille and Fisher have reignited my fondness for criticism and I have more reading on deck as I’m set to read Anti-Oedipus, The Weird and the Eerie, The Rebel (you can see hints of Camus peeking out of my recent review of Star Trek Discovery Season 3) and Critique of Dialectical Reason vol. 1 after I finish with Discipline and Punish.

My research specific to the question of the state is almost done and has left me more certain than ever that the main things separating modern state Socialists from Anarchists are semantics over the definition of what a state actually constitutes. I am excluding various online malcontents from this discussion. Frankly I think most Marxists would do well to tell Stalinists and Gonzalo Thought proponents to jump off the nearest pier just as I think most anarchists should remain on guard against eco-fascist entryism. There will be a Youtube video for the ethics of the state in pan-leftist discourse at some point.

And that’s where I am. It’s a long way from 2016 where I went through burnout, depression and loss of basically everything in my life but my family to here, healthy, happy, bespectacled and with a renewed vigor for my passions. Not everybody makes it through depression. Fisher didn’t. If you go through the biographies of my reading list, it’s not precisely the perfect-picture-of-psychological-health-and-wellbeing-club. But I did. I came out the other side stronger, if weirder.

That urgency to speak and to listen to clear language remains. I do worry about the state of the world; who couldn’t after the year we’ve been through. And I think part of the attraction of theory over fiction is in looking for solutions instead of deferments or temporary escapes.

2020 was a hard year for everyone.

2021 is going to be another. And we’re going to keep having hard years until we get up and do something. I don’t have the answer to these big questions that face the world. Climate change, plague, the political instability of late capital: these are vast problems and no one person will solve them. They will require everybody to work together. I’m not even sure how we could begin to accomplish the sort of transformations we need to undertake to start making the world a better place.

“The old world is dying, and the new world struggles to be born: now is the time of monsters,”¹ and it feels strange to be talking about how good I feel personally in this uncertain time compared to the relative stability of four years ago. But I think it’s because I’ve been through change and transformation. The only constants in my life are the relationships I carried with me through darkness. I am a process of change. The world is likewise. I got better – if stranger. The world can too.

_{1: Antonio Gramsci as paraphrased by Slavoj Žižek.}