Aaron M. Fortkamp

Look, I think what I really need to do next is write a song. Hear me out.

(If I’d just said that out loud to my son, I would then say next, “HA HA HA HA HA HAAAAAAA!!!!!” because overreacting to silliness is my number one go-to to elicit smiles.)

The Ohio State football team won the National Championship this past Monday, also my son’s birthday. It was a good day. My parents were in town for the birthday, and so we all got to watch the game together, and though it wasn’t really in doubt much of the game that we were going to win, the other team kept hanging around and hanging around and since it was the Irish you couldn’t quite convince yourself we were safe and that nobody was going to pull a Rudy on us. But eventually we did win. And since I had not gotten a lot of sleep last night due to my son being sick and sharing my bed all night while my parents used his, and since we were all tired from the birthday party day anyway, and since we were all stuffed full of birthday pizza and then football game chicken wings, almost immediately after the final whistle my folks packed up and sidled out the door to get to their hotel room so I could sleep and presumably them, too. 

What we missed though, apparently, was Kirk Herbstreit getting a little teary-eyed over his Alma mater taking the crown. You typically don’t see him break character and let everyone know he’s still a Buckeye at heart when he’s commentating on College Gameday or calling the games live. I suppose this could’ve irked some people that he had a dog in the fight, so he offered an explanation the following day, that he actually maintains a close friendship with Ryan Day and the Day family, and of course he knows all of the rest of the Buckeye system through and through, but he’d had a super difficult year and he’d seen Ryan Day have a super difficult year in a lot of respects as well, and that Day had done his family a kindness after Herbstreit’s son’s heart condition rendered him unable to play college football, and there was a breast cancer diagnosis in there somewhere, and on and on, troubles upon troubles upon stress upon obstacles, bad news all the way down. So to see his friend come all the way back from being nearly fired and his team turn the ship right around so hard after the Michigan game that everyone unanimously agreed they were the best team in the tournament after seeing them wreck Tennessee in the first round, which, as my friend the Detroit Lions fan will tell you, is the kiss of death, when everyone jumps on your bandwagon, but they even shook that burden off and played like they were capable of, without letting the pressure dominate or take them over and ruin them which has happened to so many favorited teams over the years—all of it just got to him. He got emotional. Big deal.

Before I even heard about that, however, I was already thinking about writing this. The day after the game, I ran across someone in my Bluesky feed complaining about how, back on the bad site, the top 10 trending topics were all football or futbol related and how glad he was to have a social media site that cares more about science and whatever else seemed anti-sports to him, I forget what exactly, maybe poetry? Except if it would’ve been poetry he’d mentioned I’d’ve immediately replied (before probably deleting it without posting), “Hey dickcheese, that football game was poetry, maybe watch something before judging it.”

Yeah, I would’ve deleted that.

My point being, I know it’s an extremely subjective opinion I’m putting forth on this, but that is also sort of the point in itself. This game mattered to me. To me. It mattered to a lot of other people, too. It meant a lot to a lot of people, a whole lot more than some idiot taking another oath. And while objectively the oath-taking will have a much greater and much more terrible and much longer lasting effect on the world, on the future of all of us, for me and for Kirk Herbstreit and for my mom and for Maurice Clarett and for LeBron James and for Martin Luther King, Jr.’s youngest daughter Bernice who brought out the commemorative coin for the pregame coin toss, this was the spectacle of the day worth paying attention to.

I saw some activists saying now is not the time to turn away, now we need to be even more vigilant and carry ever broader swords and hammer even heavier gavels and chant even louder chants and circle even more circular drum circles, but frankly I disagree. Again, perhaps subjectively, that doesn’t seem to me to be the appropriate response, now that it’s all said and done. He will do what he will do and wreck what he will wreck and steal what he will steal, and there’s nothing a protest march or a TikTok post is going to do to change any of that. Yes, fight for your causes, but forget him. Ignore him as best you can, as much as possible. Now, we as a country do have to suffer the consequences of our actions, but to keep paying the man the attention he so desperately craves is only going to make things worse. You don’t hand a four-year-old a machine gun and then scream bloody murder every time she fires the thing off in the living room, it’s only going to make her shoot it again and do even more damage and get an even bigger reaction out of you. Yes, perhaps, maybe we should not have handed the four-year-old the gun in the first place, but we can’t change the past, can we, what’s done is done, time to minimize the collateral.

Especially if your brain can’t take it anymore.

I genuinely do not know if my antidepressants do anything chemically to affect my brain beyond giving me a new baseline of miserable that once I get used to it is indistinguishable from where I was before I was taking the medicine. I do know that I started taking them about twelve years ago in order to let me focus more on my work. On my writing, back when I was a writer. My perspective on the whole matter was tainted a bit by David Foster Wallace’s experience with much heavier antidepressants (and antipsychotics) than I’ve ever taken, and how the one that worked for him for the longest amount of time and that allowed him to complete Infinite Jest called Nardil eventually stopped working for him, in large part because he stopped taking it, and when he bottomed out and tried to get back on it, it just didn’t work for him anymore. I tend to believe, in large part because he was so very much smarter than me, that Wallace’s depressive episodes dwarfed my own and that the conditions we have are so different they might not even be studiable by the same doctors. But pharmaceutical ficklery was the scariest part of it all to me, when I started. It wasn’t, what if they don’t work?, it was what if they do work but then they stop?

Well, twelve years later and a giant turn for the worse in terms of the planet’s and my son’s future, and here we are. I still feel like this. All the time. Is that hyperbole? I don’t know. Pretty much all the time, how’s that.

This subject has been on top of my brain the last few days, not just because of political events, but also I saw that apparently the FDA has expanded approval of a new antidepressant nasal spray (which Johnson and Johnson is telling investors is expected to result in $1 to 5 billion of sales annually), and this is what gives me pause, not the sales numbers but the optimism behind them, because it sure sounds like it not only works but it has almost immediate effectiveness. You don’t have to take it and then think about it for the next four weeks and see if you can tell you’re taking it. You ought to know pretty damn quick. Also it’s chemically related to ketamine, more specifically the S+ enantiomer of ketamine, evidently it’s ketamine backwards, a mirror molecule. Its actual drug name is esketamine, because it’s, well I guess it’s just ketamine, but it works, perhaps! So I’m interested. Even if it’s probably more for the Wallaces of the world, I am interested. But how long does a nasal spray last? Is it for long-term treatment, or just “for specific events” the way therapy is offered by insurance plans? Should it matter that the FDA is catching some flack for fast-tracking this cash cow, relying on only one positive results study when typically they require two independent but complementary studies?

It’s actually twice as potent as ketamine. Apparently.

I didn’t get a book out of the deal, is what’s bothering me. I’ve written before that starting the medicine was scary to me, but if I got a book out of the deal, then would be worth it. I did not get a book, I got complacent. I got tamed. I got married and divorced. I got domesticated and now I work for the man. Literally. I work for one of the men that I’m always, always complaining about. Did the drugs take me here of their own accord, certainly not, I made my choices and in most cases given the opportunity I don’t know how I would make different ones, even knowing what I now know. But they sure didn’t stop me from getting here, either. They did not provide the clarity I’d sought. All I had wanted was for the fog to lift so I could walk the path a-swifter. But they went about tackling the problem from the opposite direction, they said just slow down, just pat pat pat a toe out in front, take small steps, second guess everything, and that will keep you just as safe as if you could see where you’re going.

I hadn’t super looked into the nasal spray until now because I tend to think I wouldn’t even qualify because I’m not depressed enough, my depression has imposter syndrome, and I haven’t exhausted all of the potential medicines out there yet, although I have tried a fair few. But more than that, I would be really, really scared if it did work, because what if one day it didn’t? Could I just, come back to this? And be okay? Also it sounds possible that withdrawal symptoms could be kind of a bitch. Which would be relevant if one day I had to stop treatment, for any number of reasons.

Look, everybody if they’re being honest with themselves really wants to get Algernon’d, for someone to find their missing piece and plug it in for them, I don’t think I’m unique in this aspiration. And I don’t think I’m being unrealistic in doubting that any chemical solvent is going to solve me. But watching the team, my team, my subjective team, succeed, it did remind me that nothing good comes easily, and that sometimes hard work does actually pay off. If you don’t let the pressure get to you.

So, I need to write a song. It should help get me back to doing… things. Projects. Finishing things. I don’t know how to get back into finishing my novel, and that probably won’t happen for a long time, but I do have another project I’m working on, and it’s a different art form, a different medium, and writing a song would be another medium still, but the thing about writing a song is there’s such a limitation on ways to do it. The rules are there, music theory is a thing, we may still not know why we can hear music but we do know how and what makes it sound differently and produce different emotional responses, we do know scientifically what notes harmonize, that much is no longer a question. We also know the rules of genre pretty clearly, too, what makes a pop song, a country song, a rap song. The art there is in the arrangement, and the arrangement is always subjective.

When you’re writing a novel, it’s extremely easy to get caught up in the grandiosity of it. You stop thinking about what are the right decisions for my novel and instead feel the pull of longevity, of history, of How Things Should Be. It becomes less about what your character says or does, but what a good character says or does. Is this how your plot needs to develop, or is this how a good plot would develop? Some invented objectivity floats in front of you like a will-o‘-the-wisp, and you can never capture a definitive glimpse of it, much less catch it. You forget that even the works that are generally considered to be “the greats” still have plenty of detractors. You forget to even ask yourself your own opinion. Am I even going to like this book when I’m done with it? Would it hold my own attention?

I think songwriting is much less bound by such restraints. I think it’ll be a whole lot easier to keep asking myself how this song will go, not how All Songs should go. That’s the frame of mind you need to make anything, anything at all.

There isn’t a nose-spray out there that can provide objective happiness. It’s just not a thing, it’s not possible, and even if it were, maybe it would be the opiate we all need right now, but it is not the one we deserve.

Fuck Bruce Wayne, by the way. Pay your taxes, stop beating up the mentally ill.