Self-manslaughter.

I was thinking of a family member who had an awful car accident a couple of decades back. Actually it could have been much worse; the car hit a low concrete barrier at speed and flipped. Physically she came through just fine. Mentally she was not well afterward. In fact, she was not at all well beforehand. 

The woman in question had lost her husband of many years, and was driving back home to their empty house after coming up to New York for the funeral. When I found out about this accident -- to a woman with a perfectly clean driving record -- my thought was then as it is now, that her intense grief led to an involuntary suicide attempt. Not self-murder, but self-manslaughter. 

Probably all but the most even keeled or self-possessed of us have had those times when we're so overwhelmed with anger or sorrow or some other form of emotional pain that for a brief period we would blow up the world (or our own world) just to stop the pain. For most it would not bring us to suicide, but it could certainly make us so out of control that we could cause some horrific harm to ourselves by accident. This is very like manslaughter -- there was no intention of killing someone, but a terrifying lapse of control has led to just that -- except the victim is us.  

According to the CDC's provisional data for 2023, heart diseases are still the top cause of death in America, followed by cancer. Accidental deaths are next by a considerable margin, not even a third of heart disease deaths. But they're all awful, because they each took the life of someone who could have lived another day. 

And now I wonder -- how many of them could technically have been caused by self-harm, which is eleventh on the list? I wouldn't be surprised if psychiatrists and statisticians have looked into this, but I doubt there's a way to know. Maybe a population sample that seeks out those who died accidentally to see how many were known to be suffering distress -- but who can say? A lot of men, and women too, try to hide these feelings for a variety of reasons. There's no way to know who was going along, outwardly in control, who suddenly had a moment in which he or she said I can't take one more second of this -- or felt that way without putting it into conscious words -- and made a small mistake with fatal consequences. 

If you're feeling that way as you read this, I ask that you not wait until it escalates but tell someone. The 988 crisis hotline has a good rep. And if you're in a stage of catastrophic distress but don't think it will rise to the level of danger, still try to find a positive way forward. The lady with the car accident I described lived almost four years longer and died of natural causes, but not for one day did she ever move forward out of her grief. She didn't deserve to suffer that way. 

When is Men's History Month?

I demand a Men's History Month. We're a minority in America (49.6% of the population are women) and we need to stand up and be noticed. 

And who knows? Maybe if there is a little more respect for the men in our culture, they'll stop putting on women's gym clothes and trying to pretend they think they're girls so they can beat the snot of out ladies. 

Of course, the argument is that men, especially white men, have all the power in the country and so they don't need any recognition for their accomplishments. As one of the white cisgendered oppressors, I say to that: Nuts! If we have it so great, why are men almost four times more likely than women to commit suicide? 

But let's get back to sports for a moment, because the just-completed Women's History Month likes to shove the famous 1974 Billie Jean King/Bobby Riggs tennis match in the Houston Astrodome in our face every year, and it ought to be addressed. In fact, except for women's tennis, which it publicized, I think it's done a disservice to other women in sports in the long run. 

I have no doubt that the match was honestly won by King; moreover, I don't care. Bobby Riggs was a washed-up 55-year-old man when he played that match, and his opponent was 29. Riggs had retired from professional tennis 11 years earlier. The last time he'd won a major, Harry Truman was president. Sure, he was shootin' off his mouth, saying he could beat a female opponent regardless of her age, but that was all in service of his main mission: to Promote the Career of Bobby Riggs. And in that event, he succeeded admirably. 

Meanwhile, on Earth, a man of competitive age beat both the Williams sisters at tennis in 1998 -- in back-to-back matches. The Williamses claimed to be able to beat any man ranked under 200, so Karsten Braasch of Germany (ranked #203) obliged. The pack-a-day-smoking Braasch beat them 6-1 (Serena) and 6-2 (Venus) while drinking beer. Sure, this was a funsies match, and no one involved was too caught up in the result, but then again, how different would it been if they had? Maybe not a lot. Serena was always a ferocious competitor (a trait that served her well, but also led to some John McEnroe-type hysterics later in her career), and I can't believe she took it easy on Braasch. 

The Riggs/King match, though, made it seem more plausible that a woman could beat a similarly able man at a physical challenge, when in fact this not true. Sure, there are plenty of women who could beat me any anything -- I'm not proud, or competitive, or athletic -- but they could not beat a man at the same level of ability. Which is why they are being viciously routed by jerks who claim womanhood but have the physical advantages of manhood. 

We're not celebrating those dudes in our Men's History Month. We're celebrating the ones who gut it out every day to do the right thing for those they love, who show honor and courage and deal squarely and honestly with everyone. Those are traits men respect, traits we need more of in society. 

True love.

 

Eat it.

Quite a few years ago my wife and I were honored to be invited to a colleague's wedding in Chinatown. We were very touched to be included, along with some other people I knew, and were looking forward to it. It was a beautiful ceremony, a gorgeous blend of Chinese tradition, Christian church, and no fewer than three outstanding dresses for the bride at different parts of the evening.

We were also promised an amazing feast of many courses. I was a little wary, knowing that this was not going to be the takeout that Americans normally think of as Chinese food. But we had recently started to frequent a wonderful Indian restaurant and were all in on that cuisine, so we figured this might be a similar situation.

As you might guess, it was not.

To my uncultured Ugly American palette, what we faced was just dish after dish of weird things from the sea, stuff you would throw back, stuff that might make you give up fishing forever if it landed in your net. Everything seemed runny, gummy, wobbly, gushy, weird. We and the other white folks at the table were fighting over the rice as the meal progressed. Also, we of some Irish extraction drank all the beer before the reception was half over. (Meanwhile, the groom, who did not like to drink, was borne by tradition to toast every table of the large extended family with Chivas Regal.)

I bring this up as an example of why I think it's perfectly natural to resist unfamiliar food, and the more unfamiliar the stronger the resistance. My wife has lately taken to watching the show Monsters Inside Me, and if you are trying to lose weight this new year, I advise putting it on during dinner. 

Monsters Inside Me details the real-life horrors of people who at some point contracted a terrifying disease, most often caused by parasites. Doctors are unhelpful, because early symptoms and signs are confused with more common complaints -- but eventually the effects turn hellacious, and usually life-threatening. If that's not enough, the show provides gruesome magnified animations of the "monsters" at play in the body, munching, bursting, oozing, and multiplying. My wife turned it on once and the narrator was saying something like "When the fungus finishes eating the natural bacteria on the eyeball, it can adapt to eat the tissue of the eye itself." I called out from the kitchen, "That is the most typical piece of dialogue you can imagine from the show." Every episode I've seen includes little talks from Dr. Daniel Riskin, explaining why these creatures are so deadly and how many people they kill. He's lots of fun at parties. 

No offense to our wedding hosts, and I can promise you no one got sick there, unless it was from too much Chivas Regal. The only reason I bring it up is that there are consequences to eating unknown foods in strange places, especially things that have not had the hell cooked out of them, and we seem to have a natural urge to avoid foreign things if we can. Evolutionary biologists might say it comes from millennia of watching Og or Thunk so hungry that him eat weird thing raw and then him turn green and devoured from inside out. Our natural reaction to new food, thus, ranges from caution to spurning to horror. 

Heck, what's more anodyne than American peanut butter to those without food allergies? And yet I'm told many people from foreign lands think it's weird and won't touch it. 

It's not a bad idea to be cautious when sojourning outside the country. As the CDC says, "International travelers can be at risk for a variety of infectious and non-infectious diseases. Travelers may acquire parasitic illnesses: through ingestion of contaminated food or water, by vector-borne transmission, or through person-to-person contact. Contaminated food and drink are common sources for the introduction of infection into the body." I think Monsters Inside Me has turned my wife off sushi permanently.

It's not bad enough that eating raw crabs or something can infect you with a parasite that will kill you. It's that the parasite may also make you want to kill yourself. You may have heard that the common cat-related Toxoplasma gondii parasite is linked with depression, but so too is Ascaris lumbricoides, which may be ingested if good hygiene is not observed.

Which got me to think of chef and author Anthony Bourdain, largely remembered for traveling around the world and eating weird foods on shows like No Reservations. Well, now I have reservations -- I wonder if his mental state had been wrecked by some ingested parasite. If the autopsy did not look for it, we'll never know; Bourdain was cremated. 

I'll add a note too to Andrew Zimmern, host of various Bizarre Foods shows: Bring a microscope with you when you dine out. Or Dr. Daniel Riskin.

Emma and Anna.

[Classic reference here.]

Life hack.

Down through the years.

A fellow I know, a retired handyman who knows that I edit books and write things to make my living (such as it is), asked me a favor that everyone dreads, not just publishing people:

Would I look at a stack of poems he wrote? 

Oh, boy. 

What do you say? 

Most poetry is pretty bad. I ought to know, having written a few rivers of bad poetry myself. And I cautioned him right up top that I am not a poet except for some light doggerel, have worked on very few volumes of poetry, and that everything I know about the field says that unless your name is Maya Angelou you can't make a nickel on poetry, and she's dead. No agent, no publisher wants to look at poetry because no one reads it anymore. More people actually write it than read it, weird as that is to believe, but it's true; people who write it sometimes have little interest in anyone else's work. Poetry is not the neglected cul-de-sac of the book world; it is a neglected cul-de-sac that burned down, fell over in an earthquake, and got washed away by a flood so long ago that people have even forgotten it was ever there, or would care if they remembered. Poetry is a discipline of language, and a slovenly culture cannot endure it. Most of the time, neither can I. 

But this man once did me a favor that may have saved my life, more than a decade ago. It was a small act of kindness perhaps to him, but it has meant the world to me ever since. And this man began writing when his child died, not too long ago.

His child was not a victim of a terrorist attack, just a victim of a dread disease. But on this day, fifteen years on, so many others are remembering their children who were killed, and their parents, and their wives, and their husbands. 

This year I'm not thinking about the conspiracy cranks, or the many ways that memories of the day sneak up and devour my heart again and again. 

This year I'm thinking about Pat Flounders. Pat would have been 65 today. But in December 2001, she put a gun to her head and ended her life. 

Her husband had died three months earlier, having stayed behind on the 84th floor of the South Tower to try to help a coworker escape. 

Similarly, the husband of Prasanna Kalahasthi, Vamsi, was on American Airlines Flight 11 that murderous morning. "I'll be there before lunchtime," he told his wife on the phone before he left. In October 2001, Prasanna hanged herself with a nylon rope. 

September is not just the month of Patriot Day, of our remembrance. It is also Suicide Prevention Awareness Month. 

What do you say? You say yes. Of course I'll read your poems. (Which actually may turn out to be very good, like my friend's.) You say of course I've got time to talk. You follow tips like these. You can show your love as well as tell it. 

It may not be enough. Sometimes nothing can be enough. But we can try and we can hope.