Why We Do What We Do
Thoughts on male writers, the NYT piece, and my visit to a bookstore
A few years ago a coworker of mine convinced me to take advantage of a program that was offered to us allowing us to get seen by a therapist for as many visits as we needed. The therapist would be randomly assigned or based on my preference from the local area. At first, I wasn’t interested1, but after giving it some thought I became curious about the whole process. At that time I was reading a lot of Jung and the idea of psychotherapy intrigued me, even if this was going to be a more contemporary version, I still felt like I should take in the experience if only out of curiosity and the fact that I could schedule the appointments during working hours effectively giving me paid half days every other week for as long as it lasted.
After a quick telephone interview with the insurance company, I was assigned a local therapist. Her first name was Cinnamon2, and she was a middle-aged Jewish hippie. I remember smiling when I walked into her office and noticed crystals, healing bowls, Stars of David, and a bunch of Los Angeles Lakers memorabilia. I told myself that I would give it one try but move on if it was stupid. I ended up seeing Cinnamon for almost a year.
After the initial visit, I found myself enjoying our conversation. Despite the red flags of shitlibbery, she was nothing like her decor suggested and was significantly right-leaning, against COVID-era overreach, she told me right away that wearing masks was stupid but she would wear one if I asked her. Of course I laughed, I don’t think I wore a mask the entirety of COVID. So, yeah, I enjoyed therapy, if you could call it that. Every other week or so I would leave work early, stop by Starbucks for a large cup of coffee, and make my way to her office which was walking distance from Ventura beach. We would chat about books, movies, television, and some current events for about an hour. She would recommend me a book to read, one of them was Victor Frankl’s Man’s Search for Meaning which I found very convincing and is influential on my outlook on life to this day.
During my time with her, I never brought up work, never even mentioned what I spent most of my working life doing, until one of the very last sessions where I mentioned my career coming to a close and my desire to move on to something different. When she found out what I did she told me she was surprised and that she never expected it from me. She pinned me as some sort of professor, maybe at a local community college, or some kind of librarian or artist. The last thing she would have thought was what I was, a college dropout combat veteran, career military medic, specialized in tactical level care, who spent my entire career with Marine Infantry units. Turns out that we misread each other from the very beginning.
The point of this story is to illustrate a problem I’ve had my entire life. I’ve been torn between two worlds and have never felt at home in either. Cinnamon's observation did not take me by surprise because many other people have made the same observation, so much so that I’ve even been accused of being an elitist with a privileged education, which is especially funny because formally I was a 1.89 GPA High School graduate with a smattering of University and Community College credits, formal academic achievement was never something I gave a damn about.
This duality, in the fact that my interests and passions fluctuate between the world of books and the life of heavy drinking and violence, has always been something that I’ve wrestled with. A lack of belonging in contemporary society is made worse by being an immigrant and a straight white male in an America hostile to the latter. I know that in the past there was a place for men like me but in the 21st century we were not welcomed anywhere until recently.
Yesterday I found myself feeling a bit stir-crazy, overwhelmed with a sense of cabin fever, due to my family playing a game of virus tag, first it was my kid, then me, then my wife, and now my kid and wife again. With both of them couch-ridden with a nasty cold I decided to go out on my own for a bit and maybe get the last of my Christmas shopping out of the way.
I decided to check out the recently opened Books A Million near me. I’ve meant to give it a visit for a while now but haven’t had the time and my wife who did told me it was mediocre. I think she misspoke because it was far worse than mediocre. It was downright pathetic. A massive bookstore with the smallest literature section I’ve ever seen. There was a wall of Funko toys larger than the entire literature shelf. Every nook and cranny of this supposed bookstore was filled with crap, toys, crap toys, junk, and some of the cringiest books I’ve ever laid eyes on. I couldn’t find one novel by McCarthy or Murakami, let alone a novel by a writer less mainstream. This place made Barnes & Noble look like a literary bulwark.
On my way out after buying a young readers' version of Frog and Toad for my daughter I sent a text to my wife letting her know I was on my way home and if she wanted anything from the supermarket I planned on stopping at. Right away she replied with something along the lines of, “told ya you wouldn’t like it, it’s not for you,” about my bookstore visit. She was right, the massive commercial bookstore was not for me, but what was for me, where do I go?
I bring this event up because it was one of three connected topics that shared a certain synergy that crossed my path yesterday. Driving to the bookstore and back I listened to fellow Substacker and podcaster
recent episode with . While the entirety of the episode was outstanding, towards the end the conversation pivoted towards a discussion on why they podcast, why they engage in discourse, and why they bother with discourse on the digital labyrinth of the modern Internet.This topic became even more timely to my thoughts after getting home and coming across the latest bit of mealy-mouthed drivel from the New York Times on the topic of White Male Writers. I don’t think I’ve ever read a more disgusting piece of double-speak and ideological cuckery than the filth by David Morris. The human yeast of a man laments the fact that white men no longer write and then recommends that men should read Sally Rooney. I can only imagine how many men this poisonous goblin has turned away from a life of literature through the bottomfeeding feminist pondsuckery that he teaches in his University courses.
I was tempted to write a direct response to the NYT piece but honestly, everything has already been said and a while back I wrote No Country for Young Men in response to Joyce Carol Oates's Twitter shitstorm. Everything I said in that piece could be said again about yesterday's NYT nonsense. Read it, I stand by everything I said back then and more.
My visit to the gift shop masquerading as a bookstore and David Morris's piece managed to put Astral and Burden’s questions into focus. Why do we do what we do, why do we bother, why do we podcast, write, and take part in the discourse, why do we engage, and spend so much of our free time recording podcasts and writing essays? I think the answer is because we have to. We have to because we have nowhere else to go, nothing else to read, and nobody to talk to. We do it because men like us have been barred from the 21st-century mainstream. If we didn’t do it all that would have is Books A Million gift stores and the opinions of David Morris and other self-flagellating sycophants.
I created The Deceneus Review podcast because I needed a home and I want to share this home with every single person who feels like me, shut out and unwelcome in the insectoid society run by human yeast. I want to create a culture where a man who feels comfortable shooting an M4 can freely have a conversation about Faulkner and Murakami free of the ideological poison that permeates mainstream academic circles. I want to find like-minded people and have great fulfilling conversations. Most of all I want to encourage people to discover and read the mountains of culturally important works of literature that have come before us and hopefully inspire them to continue the legacies that have been cut and interrupted by the brain rot that permeates our culture. I’m doing this because I refuse to give up any ground to David Morris and his grotesque masters and neither should you.
While this episode of experimenting with therapy didn’t do much for me I did end up going to a different therapist a few years later that ended up being very beneficial and who I credit for a lot of intellectual and emotional growth in the past few years. Of course this psychologist was a male and a Navy SEAL so we had a bit more in common and shared life experience.
My wife still is convinced that I just went to hang out with some stripper.
I didn’t need to read that Morris piece, because I’ve read the exact same piece dozens of times before from similar soft, sackless court eunuchs like him, or their mannish termagant masters. Anything done to spite these clowns is a worthwhile endeavor indeed.
Really good, all the way through. Glad you do what you do.