John Zeitler

A couple months after I’d called the police, I had occasion to go to the rental office and drop off my rent check. I asked about the girls, and found that the screaming woman had moved out a few weeks after the police visit, and that the girls were safe with their real father, on the other side of the city. You had no idea the amount of relief I felt at that.

I don’t tell that story very often, if at all, because it gives the wrong impression. I didn’t call to be a hero. I don’t want to be praised for my actions, I don’t want to be lauded. All of it will feel completely hollow to me. I don’t tell the story to boost myself, I do it to shame everyone else.

Do you know how I felt in the months between the call and the revelation of the girls’ fate? I felt horrible, guilt-ridden. They were dead, as far as I knew, and it was my fault. If I had left well enough alone, if I had just let the mother handle her child as she saw fit, they’d still be alive, and could find the way out on their own. I had no business and no right to stick my nose into it. I was as guilty as the mother was, because I had triggered the fatal escalation. It was all my fault.

Every day we’re faced with the same choice. We see evil happening every day, we see darkness and hatred and fear. It’s none of our business. We have no right to intervene. What we do have, however, is an obligation. We are, each and every one of us, bound by the life we have to protect the lives of everyone else around us. It doesn’t make us heroes. It makes us human. We shouldn’t take pleasure in saving those lives. We should instead beat ourselves up for failing to save lives. That’s what our shame and self-loathing is for. That’s the only thing it’s for. When we have a real chance to do good, and we let it pass by in the hopes that someone else will come along and do it for us, that’s when we’re not good enough, when we’re not worth help or salvation.

Those girls would never have gotten out of that situation. They were falling into the worse version of the trap that I had found myself in. Probably bullied at school, they came home to try to find solace in the arms of their parents and found no quarter. Enemies were within and without, and there was no safe place, nobody they could turn to at all. Until someone deigned to notice them and reach out a hand in help, they would begin believing that they didn’t have the right to the same happinesses that all life is entitled to. They would never learn that it was okay to ask for help– they would instead learn that it was useless to do so.

Not everyone can ask for help. But everyone is deserving of it.

That night, after I’d paid my rent and found that the girls were safe, I lay in my bed, alone and in comfort. I wasn’t overly tired. I still had a day off the next day, and my plans were open. My bills were paid, my life in order. I lay there, in the dark, and I looked back at myself through the blackness.

“I did good,” I said, softly. For the first time in my life, I meant it.

I said yesterday that I was never harmed by my family. That’s true. Where I was bullied was at school and in social situations. This is also true. But I can’t help but think how hollow it is for me to say “you just need to talk to someone” when not every victim of bullying has someone to talk to. I can only imagine what a true living hell my life would have been were it not for my family’s support. Success or failure, they’ve always had my back, and they’ve always stood by me. I’m blessed to have them. But not every victim does.

It’s a horrifying problem, and it’s not one that’s helped by the current “reality” of the vulnerability of children these days. If the media is to be believed, fiends and monsters in human skin wander every street in every town, looking to snatch up children for the most vile perversions imaginable. Only the parents of these innocents should ever be trusted with the child, regardless of how many times the father comes home drunk to beat his daughter for not cleaning up properly, or how long the mother leaves her son starving in a filthy apartment while she spends her money on alcohol and drugs. We’re sickened equally by these stories. But we can do nothing but react to these conditions. If you try to guide a child away from a lethal home environment, you’re painted with the same brush as those with sinister motives.

When I moved into my current apartment, I would notice with increasing alarm and dismay that on Sunday mornings, almost like clockwork, the apartment across the hall would erupt into horrifying screaming. A mother– or I would presume it was the mother– would fling the most vile obscenities at two girls, who I’d seen around the apartment complex. Neither one could be older than about ten, and they were sisters. This went on for months, and the shouting got worse and worse. Eventually, one Sunday, I heard the girls pounding on the door to that apartment, begging to be let in. There were shouts from the other side. “Let us in,” the girls cried. “We’re hungry. Please let us in.” After a couple more shouts, the girls bolted from the door as if the devil himself were going to come through it.

I was faced with a dilemma. Do I call the police? Would I be under suspicion of having stalked the girls? After all, it wouldn’t look good that a thirty-year-old single guy with tons of cartoons and video games in his apartment would try to offer refuge to two children. But these kids were obviously being abused. I had no doubt in my mind that there was a physical component to it that I couldn’t see; abusers, for all their irrational fury, always make sure to never leave a mark. Worse yet, what if my act of benevolence spelled doom for those girls? Abusers never take responsibility for the consequences of their actions; if the police visited the apartment, it would be perceived as the fault of the girls and not the woman for screaming.

In the end, I called the cops. The officer came by, spoke to me, then went over to the apartment. I never heard the screaming after that, and I never saw the girls again.

I don’t like to talk about my depression much, mostly because its reasons and solutions are very private and very complex. I can say, of course, that it was never caused by family mistreating me, and the day that I say it was is never, ever going to come. But self-esteem is not something that comes easily to me. It never has, and unfortunately it never will.

Picture yourself alone in your room at night, safe in your bed. It’s not too late, you don’t have any obligations in the morning that are out of the ordinary, and you’re not ill with a cold or flu or anything. What do you think about? What do you feel? How do you see the events of the day? Did you do well, did you do badly? How do you see the coming day? How much hope do you have that things will turn out right? For a lot of people who’ve been bullied, the answers to those questions are heartbreaking, but they all come back to one single question: “Why?” Why am I being pushed around? Why can’t I convince people not to do this to me? Why can the people hurting me get away with this? Why won’t anyone listen to my complaints? Why won’t anyone help me?

In the darkness, all alone, the answer is plainly obvious: it’s because you’re not good enough, the depressive thinks. It’s because you failed in this and this way today. If you were smarter, if you were tougher, if you were better, you wouldn’t be hurt like this. It doesn’t matter what you did right, only that you failed to do everything right. No one will help you. No one will save you. You aren’t worth help or salvation. This is happening to you because you deserve it.

When thoughts like that become your nightly lullabyes, it makes it hard to come up with even the slightest bit of pride in anything you do. Victories are hollow because of every failure that came before. Forgiveness may be plentiful from everyone else, but it’s worthless because one cannot forgive themselves. Hope is an empty promise, something only fools do. Ambition is vanity, and success impossible. All one in that position can ever do is to survive, and to cause as much damage to everyone else as they can.

The bitch of it is, the one thing that can solve it– talking it over with people who’ll help you get out of that pattern– is the first thing you condition yourself out of. After all, nobody will help you, so it’s a waste of everyone’s time to ask for it. So you never ask, and you never get help.

So let’s talk about that nerd book. In December I said that part of my goal was to figure out why nerds have it so hard in the world, and to see what we could do about fixing that. The intervening months haven’t provided me with too much insight in this regard, and I’m finding that I need a bit more time to think on it. Ironically, what information I have gleaned from the time, combined with my own unwillingness to offer a preliminary answer, may actually be the answer.

I’ve been looking at the big picture of the world stage, or at least the American side of it, in trying to figure out just why nerdery– or, put more accurately, intelligence– is so devalued as a virtue. In particular, the race for the Presidency seems to be less about who is more able to effectively and fairly govern as it is about “connecting” with a group of voters deemed most desirable. And, sadly, this “connection” is based on the assumption, implicit or explicit, that the groups being targeted or disregarded aren’t smart enough to look at how the candidates are contradicting themselves left and right in the name of getting a vote. It happens on both sides, so don’t kid yourself (and I despair of the fact that it’s “both sides” in American politics and not “all sides” as it should be in any free country, but that’s a discussion for later).

It’s not that the candidates are stupid. That’s far from accurate. What it is about is that the candidates oftentimes show an unwillingness to mature their opinions and conclusions. You cannot hope to decide a court case from the opening arguments alone. You cannot hope to ever understand a situation fully in the first five seconds that you hear of it. And yet, that’s what voters expect out of the candidates. Snap decisions trump reasoned, thought-out conclusions. If the situation changes, candidates are expected to stand by faulty conclusions that no longer account for all of the evidence. If it can’t be solved in thirty seconds, in a sound bite, that’s seen as a weakness in the candidate.

What really keeps me up at night is the fear that we will get a President that actually believes that there’s an instant solution to every problem. If that happens, I won’t have to worry about a war keeping Americans locked in their homes in fear; we’ll have lost that war by the second commercial break.

Late in 2008, shortly after the election, the higher-ups pulled the trigger on the Sirius-XM channel merger. This happened quite without any real warning for those of us who were, y’know, listening to the stations at the time. Even then, though, there had been warning signs. My personal favorite station, The System, was running on dismally short autopilot cycles; the centrist, reasonable politics channel POTUS was skewing a bit more confrontational and the hosts disappearing without so much as a by-your-leave; and the alternative oldies station, Lucy, had issued a scathing and downright mean-spirited final live show the Saturday before that, honestly, I wish I had heard.

Needless to say, once the merger actually happened and everyone on the XM side discovered that the reasons they picked that service over Sirius in the first place were going straight into the trash can, ain’t nobody was happy.

Part of the reason I’m harping on this three years later is because I’ve cancelled and reopened my satellite subscription a couple of times since then, and most recently it was offered to me as part of my new car. I’d been listening to the stations they chose to “replace” my old standbys with, and while I can appreciate how some of them are back to a listenable state (POTUS is far better now that they have the election to focus on again, except for the atrociously bad call-in show in the afternoon), others are still just as wretched as if not worse than before (the decades stations are godawful messes and the electronic stations are missing the trance/progressive music that made The System special). What stations are good are ruined by virtue of having predictable and short autopilot cycles, meaning you can tune in to Classic Vinyl at X each day to hear the exact same damn song. This could all be excusable if Sirius wasn’t doing their damnedest to make people think there never were those stations before the merger and to belittle people who want them, or at least their format, back.

I’m all for change. I appreciate that there’s always going to be a maturation process. But when you have a good thing that half of your customer base likes, don’t just yank it out from under them. Put another way, the “merger” felt more like a “takeover” for those of us on the XM side. It probably was, in all honesty, but that just means it never should have been called as such.

It could be, though, that having worked in radio and having an appreciation for a strong stable of music directors like XM did, I could just be taking this a little harder than others. But I still think that I have a point in my outrage, and I still think that unless Sirius shapes up and flies right by the time I get done with this audiobook (I’ll almost certainly be done before the free trial runs out), they don’t deserve my money.

I made mention yesterday about taking advantage of my commute to “read” the set of George R. R. Martin’s Song of Ice and Fire series. This was an idea that was first brought to my attention by the fact that my car has a CD changer in it now, but also by the fact that, quite frankly, I miss being able to take the bus in to work. When that was an option, I had a good two hours each day that I could sit down, put myself at ease, and accomplish either some reading or some gaming. I got through the better part of Neal Stephenson’s Baroque Cycle that way, and that honestly was as much a function of the e-book reader as it was the time availability.

I’m not going to lie, I also managed to get through the majority of two Pokemon games on the bus, too, and those are not known for brevity.

The point being, an audiobook spread over a commute is no unique thing to me. During 2008, when I was still an XM subscriber, I would make sure that I got into work early enough that I could catch the half-hour portion of an Orson Scott Card book on their audiobook channel on the way home. I first discovered this opportunity because I was trying to get to the gym early, as well. That got me through a lot of tooth-grindingly slow traffic, let me tell you. And to be honest, it didn’t matter that I already knew all the stories. I’d been meaning to go through them again anyway.

Regardless, I’m probably going to be picking up audiobooks from here on out in order to do my “serious” reading. It surprises me, really, how much I remember while listening as opposed to reading; there’s details there that I honestly would have missed otherwise. If this is what it really takes in order for me to be “up to date” with my friends’ reading lists, then so be it.

I still think that the Lannisters are, to a man, toolbags, though.

I’ve been thinking a bit about the projects I meant to work on and never finished. The one that always comes to mind was the “30 movies” project I was working on in the beginning of 2009. This is a particularly galling one to me because of how its failure was immortalized: it got into a book of humorous tweets. The tweet about giving up wasn’t in the book, but rather a tweet of my progress. I never actually did get around to watching Mary Poppins since then, incidentally.

Part of the problem is that I find myself chasing way too many goals at once, and not realizing until it’s too late how absolutely contradictory they are. Case in point, I also had a goal of 50 Game Clears in 2010, and this was at the same time that I decided I needed to move out of my current apartment and to start working with Tekkoshocon. Oh, and I had lost my job at the beginning of the year, so I had that going on, and I was working on the board game idea I’d had, and… you see what I mean.

Anyway, I take my promises very seriously, and it always bothers me when I’m not able to complete a project that I’ve said I would. I then take it out on myself, and eventually it got to the point where I didn’t dare announce that I was doing anything, let alone work on a project that I thought would never get anywhere. Again, you can see how this might contribute to depression.

Funnily enough, by being as ridiculously busy as I am, this makes it remarkably easier for me to see that just because I don’t get one thing done doesn’t mean I can’t get anything done. Crushing my free time down to nothing has in fact made me cherish it more. And, more than anything, it’s taught me that I should think twice about setting a time deadline on free-time activities that don’t have external ones already.

I’m still sticking to my goal of clearing 40 games in 2012, of course, but I’d also like to try to watch 30 new movies in that time, too. And, of course, “reading” via audiobook the Song of Ice and Fire series. Ultimately, it’s not about not having time, but more about using my time more effectively.

I am a very busy individual. This is no secret.

It occurs to me that, this coming May, I will have been blogging in some capacity on some service or another for just about eleven years. That’s a very long time to do anything, and after a certain point it changes from something I do to amuse myself, to something I like to do, to something people depend on me to do, to something I feel obligated to do. Sometime around 2010, blogging shifted into that last category, and I have yet to find a way to pull it free of that.

The thing is, I’m in a very different place than where I was in 2001. I’m no longer in college, for one thing, and I’m also no longer in Erie. The people I converse with most often now, I do so face-to-face, without computer monitors and the whole of the Internet in between. I’m working on a ton of projects, some paid and some not. I’m spending more and more of my time outside of my home, and in some cases far outside my comfort zone. This should make me a happy person, and it does– but it also bothers me, because I can’t devote as much time nowadays to things I’ve “always” done– video games, of course, but also writing.

I remember having a discussion with my parents about whether or not I’d ever “outgrow” video gaming. I argued at the time that I wouldn’t ever, because as I grew older, there would always be games that fit my maturity level. I still stand by my position– it’s far from a hobby for the immature, to be sure– but at the same time, my life obligations are starting to catch up to me, and I’m finding it harder and harder to find the time to sit down and play a 60 to 80 hour game anymore. Case in point, I put in Tales of the Abyss– a positively stellar RPG, and one of the most highly acclaimed games of the past decade– late in February, played it for all of three hours, and haven’t had a chance to get back to it since.

Now, bear in mind: I’m single. I don’t own my residence, so it’s not like I have tons of house upkeep to do. I don’t have kids or a significant other. My commute is reasonable– 30 minutes or so depending on traffic– and ordinarily I only work 40 hours a week at my paying job. If any of those were different, I’d probably have dropped blogging long, long ago. But I want to give this one last chance before I throw in the towel.

From today, March 7th, to April 8th, 2012, there will be a “substantial” post written up about some topic or another. I’m writing them up ahead of time, diving into some older topics here and there, and going through my old archives to see if there’s anything I’d like to update. But rest assured, there’s going to be an unbroken string of content here for at least thirty days. If I still feel like I need to quit after that– if this was an undue burden on me that I can’t afford anymore– then I’ll gladly call this whole thing off, and that’ll be the end of it.

A few things should be made mention: there will probably be a lot more of the “multi-part” stories during this time. I haven’t been willing to break up content like that in the past, but it’s a habit that I really ought to consider more often not only because it fills time, but because it can be easier to digest than giant walls of text. Even when I don’t, you’ll probably notice a lot of flow between the days, where a mention made in yesterday’s post becomes the day’s topic. I’m also going to try to keep my word counts down– this is already longer than I wanted it to be, but a lot of it is preface and preamble that, while necessary, is mostly ornamental.

Finally, there won’t be any Bailout. At all. I’m done with that particular crutch, and I’ve found that I abuse it far more than I should. Between that and the “content-free posting” euphemistic tag, I’ve had 250 infractions of Bailout since January of 2007, or roughly 13% of the time. That’s a one-in-eight chance that any given post of mine is completely useless and intended just to fill time. It’s a cheat, and it’s one I should have never started to use.

So that’s the plan. Here’s to keeping it going.

Folks, I’m sure you’re disappointed in me for the rather alarming number of missed posts recently. I am as shamed as you are. I’m probably going to take a little bit of time this evening to write up some shorter posts and pre-load them for the month of March just so I don’t have to scramble for Bailout first thing in the morning. I’ll have to have some canned posts ready for during the convention, at the very least. Still, it’s my goal to make sure that I have a fresh post ready for you all once the convention preparation period is over. Thank you for bearing with this.

Today I learned that adversity can best be overcome by hanging out with your friends and shouting loudly at television.

Alcohol is optional but greatly facilitates the process.