Life gets in the way, sometimes
So much for schedules...
One reason I started The Miscellanies was discipline. Specifically: I wanted a regular regimen of writing. The easiest way to do that was committing to writing for others on a regular schedule.
Life, though, has a way of fucking up the best of schedules. Which is what happened on Sunday. I was cleaning my bedroom. I decided to move a piece of furniture in order to make cleaning easier. This is where my decision to wear open-toed shoes was regrettable. I slammed my big toe against the furniture and injured it to a fare-thee-well.
I’m stubborn, so I bulled through the pain and blood in order to finish cleaning*. That wasn’t the wisest decision. I probably injured myself worse doing that than if I’d stopped what I was doing and gone to the doctor immediately, but society and the patriarchy has trained men like me to ignore pain, to persevere in spite of it.
It’s been two days since that happened. I’m currently sitting down, my foot in a surgical boot, looking up podiatrists here in New York City. I don’t think I broke anything, but we’ll find out. Anyway, between this and my modem deciding to take an unscheduled vacation from connecting to the Internet, it’s been a stellar start to Halloween Week.
With that in mind: welcome to The Miscellanies.
As the physician assistant (PA) at CityMD here in my neighborhood took a look at my foot, she asked if I had a primary care doctor. I laughed mirthlessly, and said no. It’s 2019, and the idea of having a primary care physician (PCP) — a doctor that I see on a regular basis, who practices general medicine — seems as dated as rotary phones, pay phones, and even flip phones. I can’t remember the name of the last doctor I saw on a consistent basis; to be honest, I probably haven’t had one since at least the time I served on active duty, and probably not since I was a child.
The idea of having regular medical care is alien to me. On some level, I’m lucky to have access to it. Because I’m a disabled veteran with a qualifying disability rating, I can visit the Veterans’ Affairs medical center - the VA hospital - and see a doctor. VA healthcare is actually quite good; here in New York City, the residents and interns are students at NYU Langone Medical School, an excellent medical school. The wide variety of medical conditions one finds at a VA hospital provide rich teaching material to the students. On the flip side, VA healthcare benefits from the fact that they don’t have a profit motive, which means they can concentrate on healthcare delivery.
So why don’t I take advantage of it more often? Mainly because in my experience, VA healthcare isn’t oriented towards prompt delivery of medical services, and it’s heavily focused on treating chronic conditions for patients who are older than me. I can’t remember the last time I’ve visited a VA medical facility and not spent hours waiting to be seen. Which is fine if you’re retired, and you’ve got the time to burn; I am not, and I do not.
That’s where CityMD - or other urgent care facilities - come in. I enjoy the fact that I can be seen promptly, and get treated with a minimum of fuss. But they’re not a substitute for a doctor who knows you, who can reference all the visits you’ve made in the past, who can recall what they treated you for and how. For a while, I had access to OneMedical, which is a step up in service from CityMD. But still, then, I had no chance to forge a relationship.
It doesn’t help matters that I’m legendarily bad at taking care of myself. I ought to be seeing a therapist to receive treatment for depression, anxiety, and PTSD; I’m not. None of the therapists that are in my insurance network are accepting new clients; the few that are, refuse to accept my insurance, preferring that I handle that particular hassle. And so I’ve simply stopped looking. I fail to see the sense in spending $550 an hour discussing my problems when I’m going to be feeling every bit as miserable after that hour as I did before.
It’s not a smart thing, at all. I do not recommend it. But the sick economies of our twisted health care system force us thus — and I am someone with “good” health insurance.
It is the same with my ailing foot. I call around; I leave messages; and while I do that, I soak my foot in warm water, watching my injured toe with morbid fascination. I doubt very much that I’ll get a call-back. Even if I do, will I want to take time off work to go see a podiatrist? I already know the answer; the remorseless logic of a working culture that treats people as disposable units compels me otherwise. I had to leave work early today, in order to be home to greet a repairperson; to “make up for it”, I skipped my normal lunchtime, thinking I’d be able to eat slightly later.
You know what happened instead: I didn’t eat lunch at all, and because the repair technician didn’t arrive until the very last possible moment of their two-hour window, I ate dinner instead. There’s no point in being mad at the repairperson; their arrival time isn’t their choice There’s no point in raging at my internet provider; whomever I talk to isn’t responsible for this state of affairs. There’s no point in being mad at myself, or my colleagues; we’re all doing the best we can, making the best choices we can in a system designed to eliminate good choices in favor of least-bad ones. At some point, having outlived our usefulness, we will be tossed away. And so it goes.
I suppose that’s why it’s so important to me to be kind and gentle to others. On my way to my place, aching, my foot throbbing with pain, I switched seats with a small boy and his guardian, simply because it would make the boy happy. It wasn’t a grand gesture; it was just what I could do in the moment to brighten his life, if only for an instant. Exiting the subway station, I swiped in an older man so he could catch the train.
I said previously: Cruelty is everywhere. Life today is shot through with it, large and small. The incentives are tilted so that cruelty and viciousness — in short, being an asshole — are richly rewarded. I mean, look at who the president is! And it’s not just him. Barstool Sports, for instance, is entirely dedicated to appealing to people’s worst instincts through the vehicle of sports. And so on.
I’m under no illusions here. To live in 2019, to be politically and socially conscious in these times, is to feel — really, to viscerally know — that things are awful, and will only get worse. That what we do can only accomplish so much. I suppose this is why we flock to stories where Good prevails; because we know that in The Real World™, Good doesn’t prevail; Evil does. And that even if you give voice to your disapproval of that evil — as 50,000 Washington baseball fans did on Sunday, when *President Trump showed up to Game Five of the World Series — other people are going to wring their hands and bemoan the Death of Civility™.
The really galling thing is that the Evil is so dumb, so stupid, so banal. Today, the best sports writer on the Internet got fired. Barry Petchesky was Deadspin’s best writer and editor; and the current owners of Deadspin, G/O Media, fired him because they want the site to “stick to sports”. Barry refused, because sports is an indivisible part of society, and you can’t “stick to sports” any more than you can breathe without taking in air.
“Stick to sports”. God, I’m so sick of that phrase. I’m so sick, so tired of people yawping that bleat whenever the fragile scaffolding of their world is threatened. “Stick to sports”, the man says, whenever he’s faced with the inarguable reality that Sports™ isn’t the unblemished meritocracy he’s compelled to insist it is. Yes, inarguable: because “sticking to sports” isn’t an argument so much as it is a denial that there’s anything wrong with the world, and that simple decency demands we do our best to fix it.
No, I love to tell you, you cannot fucking stick to sports, because sports is a reflection of the society we live in. The fact that professional sports were segregated for decades was fucking intrinsic to American society. Major League Baseball didn’t have a color line because Black baseball players were somehow worse than white ones; it had one because until 1946, the systemic racism of American society militated against integration. And the same goes for football and basketball and hockey, which waited until the late ’40s and ‘50s to integrate. The inherent sexism of American society is why women’s sports receive a fraction of the attention that men’s sports receive. It’s why we had to pass a whole-ass section of the U.S. Code to deal with funding inequities, among other things.
To quote my erstwhile colleague Graham MacAree:
“Sports teams exist as an expression of local and national culture, and while the Astros are a particularly stark example, they’re still mostly an expression of the way sports works.
It’s tempting to suggest that a winning-at-all-costs mentality is to blame, but with half of MLB in tear-it-down-who-gives-a-shit mode these days, such an assertion would strain credulity. Rather, there’s an expectation that sports exist in its own world, untroubled by the buffeting and blowing that might exist elsewhere. “Stick to sports,” or so goes the refrain. As we’ve seen with Colin Kaepernick and the NFL, intruding into that bubble is a sin.”
Deadspin didn’t stick to sports. They used it as a launching pad to talk about and dissect the society reflected by those sports. Seeing it get gutted by a bunch of private equity herbs who want to stick to sports because anything else is fractionally more uncomfortable is a goddamn tragedy.
LINKS IN THE CHAIN
Cory Booker wants to hire a social media producer. Maybe that’s you? Apply.
Speaking of social media, Indivisible wants someone to manage theirs. You know what to do: apply.
Black Voters Matter wants you to be their comms director. This one closes on FRIDAY, so APPLY NOW NOW NOW (PDF).
The DNC needs a Battleground Press Secretary. This looks like a job for you, I think. Anyway: apply.
A great look at the inauthentic nature of tourism
I’m going to borrow a page from Anne Helen Petersen — this is this week’s “Trust me, read THIS”.
Finally, yesterday was National Cat Day, so you should follow Cinderblock the Cat as they try to lose weight and live a healthy life.
Here’s my little guy Hobbes to take us out.
Thank you for reading. As ever: I’m here for you. If you like The Miscellanies, please click the share button, and if you haven’t signed up, click the signup button. Thanks!