“Whose $6 billion did JPMorgan Chase & Co. lose during the now-infamous London Whale debacle? Was it depositors’ money or shareholders’ money? Or was no money lost at all?”

“A new respiratory illness similar to the Sars virus that spread globally in 2003 and killed hundreds of people has been identified in a man who is being treated in Britain. The 49-year-old man, who was transferred to a London hospital by air ambulance from Qatar, is the second person confirmed with the coronavirus. The first case was a patient in Saudi Arabia who has since died. Officials are still determining what threat the new virus may pose. The World Health Organization has not recommended any travel restrictions.”
 — How do I continue to drink beer through this cumbersome gas mask? Oh, this is how!

“Opponents of badger cull plan vuvuzela protest”

“Until this week, only riders on downtown No. 6 trains at Bleecker Street could transfer to the B, D, F or M lines at Broadway-Lafayette. Riders from the other direction would have to switch trains elsewhere — at Jay Street-Borough Hall or Atlantic Avenue-Pacific Street in Brooklyn, for example — or suffer the inconvenience of a walk above ground between the Broadway-Lafayette and Bleecker Street stations, capped by an extra MetroCard swipe. But with the completion of a construction project of the Metropolitan Transportation Authority that included a platform extension and the installation of new elevators, the system’s only such incomplete transfer point has been made whole.”
 — BUT NOW IT’S DIFFERENT! I am not at all joking when I say that this is going to CHANGE LIVES.

Photo by TheCoolQuest, via Flickr

If you turn 21 today you share a birthday with Face the Nation, “the third and final album by hip-hop duo Kid ‘n Play.” Oh, also a record called Nevermind by some band out of Seattle. Yes, that’s right, Nevermind is as old now as The Carpenters’ Close to You was when Nevermind was released. You know what else came out 21 years ago today? The Red Hot Chili Peppers’ Blood Sugar Sex Magik, the final album of their “credibility” period. 1991, man. They say if you can remember it you’re old now.

Mike Shatzkin, a “widely-acknowledged thought leader about digital change in the book publishing industry” (his bio), counsels that Brightline, Barry Diller and Scott Rudin’s new ebook publishing company with the fun and talented Frances Coady, “would appear to be poised to compete with major publishers for major books.” And: “Diller and Rudin, with their Hollywood roots, certainly have access to many of the great story-creators and storytellers.” True, but they have two bad choices there in order to compete: explain the finances behind ebooks to authors who are used to being overpaid — “Hey, you get 50%! Of something between zero and infinity dollars!” — or, overpay those authors up front, and we all know how that story ends. And! “Through connections to lots of people with marketing platforms plus the extensive network of connections through Diller’s IAC collection of web properties, they also have the capabilities to promote them.” True… but pretty sure Thesaurus.com and IWON®! aren’t going to sell any ebooks. Although OurTime.com — for singles over 50! — could probably move some units! The book market basically is lonely literate singles. Anyway, totally are on board with more people publishing as ebooks-only — there’s always room for one more! — and would totally put our money on Frances Coady too. But what’s the threat? It’s not like they’re going to “disrupt” publishing by… offering authors money to publish their books. And there’s always someone who wants to play big and who has maybe lost a little sense of the value of money due to have so much of it. It’s not like Tina Brown is ruining the Internet for the rest of us, after all.

“Yes, we are all going to die…”
 — David Quammen, author of the forthcoming Spillover: Animal Infections and the Next Human Pandemic, tells you what we’ve been saying all along.

Tonight: It’s Seth Greenland at Greenlight Bookstore! Go say hi.

We’re pleased to present the inaugural column of Turning The Screw, existential crisis counseling for the faint of heart. “Because nothingness becomes you!”

Dear Polly,

I’m about to have a baby and it’s scaring me to death. I know that I’m meant to be a mother, but I don’t want to spend the next ten years with apple sauce stuck to my clothes. I feel like I’m watching my good life disappear in front of my eyes.

My wife thinks I’m being melodramatic (this is her usual take) but she’s not the one who’s pregnant. She’s a busy executive who makes a pretty big salary and works around the clock. This is part of my fear, of course: that she gets the great career downtown and I’m stuck at home in Noe Valley, like a dairy cow, feeding the kid, while my own career languishes. When I think about exposing my son to great art and music and different cultures, I can soothe myself a little, but then I remember that the next few years are just going to be me, alone on the couch with spit-up on my shoulder, feeling resentful.

I’m also old. I feel like I started this whole thing too late, and by the time I’m out of the weeds, all the good times will have dried up and all I’ll be left with is a lame career, a damaged marriage and a teenager who hates me. And then what?

Help!

Scared

Dear Scared,

Then what? Well, then you’ll grow older and older and your kid will move away and never call or write, and your spouse (who doesn’t even seem to like you anymore) will also get older and older and then she’ll get arthritis or she’ll blow out her knees and you’ll have to move to a bad condo with no stairs, and then she’ll die and you’ll be traumatized and lonely and pissed off at your kid for not helping more. (“Oh, I’m sure Barcelona really is amazing, with all those wonderful museums and open air concerts, especially when you’re not the least bit guilty about your dear old mom back in the states, who would give anything just to spend one goddamn holiday in your presence, you ungrateful fuck.”) And then you’ll get even older. And then your kid will fly back to put you in a nursing home so you don’t blow his inheritance, and he’ll take away your mail-order catalogues, which were the only thing keeping you cemented to this mortal coil, and you’ll drift off into a haze of flocked wallpaper and urine smells and colorful pills in tiny paper cups and confused roommates, crying out for their dead mothers in the still of the night, the loneliness magnified, somehow, by the wheezing hiss of the air conditioning vent and the flatulent squish of the night nurse’s triple-soled shoes, padding down the carpeted hallways outside, double-checking Frank Avison’s DNR orders before resolving to ignore his labored breaths until the morning.

Yes, lean into the horror of it! Without the terror of existential vertigo, you have no motive for clawing your way up that sheer cliff and redefining your (inherently meaningless, mildly pathetic) existence.

You know what’s awesome, though? As petulant and unforgiving as they are, babies have a pretty singular way of distracting you from the brutal impact of your slow, sickening decline for a long, long time. They don’t just distract, in fact, they create the illusion that you’re building something important, rather than just decomposing in slow motion. This illusion of growth/importance is exactly what makes most parents so fucking insufferable. But it also keeps them from murdering themselves and each other. Most of the time.

What’s funny about the eve of child-birthing is that you believe yourself to be teetering on the brink of a terrible new life, whereas those who’ve been there recognize that you’re about to be handed a free pass from justifying your existence for the next decade. No one really thinks you’re doing something good for the world by bringing another lazy, entitled future film student into the world, mind you. But your hormones are going to feed you that fairy tale, so lean into that shit and savor the hell out of it.

And hire some more down-to-earth, less self-involved female immigrants to raise your kid while you’re at it, so you can spend your time on more important things, like redecorating, and hair removal. Nothingkeeps you from reckoning with your own mortality quite like a swift jerk of the waxing strip, followed by a long conversation with a Room & Board Senior Design Associate about whether or not that Bradshaw cocktail table goes with your Odin leather sectional in Dijon. (It doesn’t, by the way).

People with lots of money never have to stare into the inky-black abyss for very long. People with money and babies? Forget it. They’re more insulated from reality than the Michelin man. Totally no fair. But then, what isn’t?

See you in the lobby at 3 for Bingo!

Polly

Dear Polly,

I want to quit my job, but I can’t get up the courage to do it. I work at a law office, but I’m only there part-time. I can support myself with that for now, but I know that every hour I spend in that place is an hour wasted. I don’t want to waste my life. But I don’t know what else I should be doing. Every time I try to think about some other career that might make me happier, I get depressed. I write down my feelings in journals and sometimes that helps. But whenever I think about trying to write something more meaningful, like a poem or a novel, I get depressed about the fact that I’ll never get paid to do that for a living, and I’ll never be any good, so why even bother?

I just feel like I should make some kind of a mark on the world.

Wishy Washy

Dear Wishy Washy,

My dog feels the same way. She solves this spiritual crisis by pissing on stuff.

And sometimes, when I’m trying to write (I’ve been a professional writer for well over a decade, and I still get depressed about the fact that I’ll never get paid again and I’ll never be any good), I remember that making a mark on the world, the way most of us have the ego-driven urge to do it, doesn’t generally transcend the level of peeing on someone else’s front lawn. Yes, a dog might wander by and press its nose into what you’ve “created,” or someone will go outside and see the brown patch of grass on their otherwise immaculate, lush green landscaping, and they’ll curse the besmirching of their personal property (because somehow your mark reflects poorly on the mark that they’re making on the world). But overall, unless you’re operating on cancer patients or advocating for troubled foster children, you’re just a drain on global resources, a carbuncle on the smooth ass cheek of humanity.

The sooner you come to terms with that, the better. Because most of us today are absolutely stricken with this pointless compulsion to “make a mark,” typically in ways that don’t involve helping other human beings or working hard to change the systematic raping and pillaging of everything good and pure in the world. Personally, I struggle mightily to convince myself that my efforts to put words on the page are worthwhile and not just some elaborate, indulgent, expensive act of extreme vanity. Some days these efforts seem worthwhile, sure. But most of the time it’s clear that, in the big scheme of things, I’m no better than a common mongrel doing my best to ruin the neighbor’s begonias.

So I’m done with this making-a-mark bullshit, because your mark can never really be big enough to satisfy your ravenous ego. And even when your mark is big, you have no palpable way of knowing how many other dogs are sniffing your genius, or how many are merely anxious to mask your stank with their own. Recognizing the total pointlessness of writing has been sort of emancipating, though. I’m free to admit that I enjoy writing — sometimes, almost — and that’s why I do it. I like the practice, sort of. I like to feel like I’m improving, even if that’s an illusion. Even though this is a thin, semi-masturbatory justification for writing, it’s the only thing that remotely motivates me to sally forth.

You, on the other hand, are in the enviable position of having a marketable skill (knowledge of the law). You can use your skill for good (helping the disenfranchised, the underserved, those continually sodomized by The Man, etc.) instead of evil. And even if you just continue to live off meaningless part-time work, and spend the other half of your time going back to school or writing or painting, guess what? We all waste some time on survival. You’re pretty lucky you have to waste so little of your time on it. In fact, sometimes the wasted hours are actually the ones keeping you sane. Hours eaten up by making meals, working out, performing rote tasks — Viktor Frankl saw these routines as a necessary structure, a trellis if you will, without which the creeping vine of True Happiness could never bloom. (True Happiness is an invasive species, though, so don’t actually plant it.)

Remember: Obsessing about your legacy, whether you’re just starting out or world-famous, is like sniffing your own mess. If you have to do it, at least have the common courtesy not to do it in public.

Here’s to pissing into the wind with increased efficiency!

Polly

Send your existential inquiries, philosophical dilemmas, pressing life questions and haunting trivialities to polly@theawl.com. Letters may be edited for length and clarity.

Heather Havrilesky (aka Polly Esther) is our new existential advice columnist. She’s also a regular contributor to The New York Times Magazine, and is the author of the memoir Disaster Preparedness (Riverhead 2011). She blogs here about scratchy pants, personality disorders, and aged cheeses.Photo by Splinter Group.

“Where does this disdain for workers come from? Some of it, obviously, reflects the influence of money in politics: big-money donors, like the ones Mr. Romney was speaking to when he went off on half the nation, don’t live paycheck to paycheck. But it also reflects the extent to which the G.O.P. has been taken over by an Ayn Rand-type vision of society, in which a handful of heroic businessmen are responsible for all economic good, while the rest of us are just along for the ride.”
 — Paul Krugman is right. And it’s important to note that before Neil Peart replaced John Rutsey on drums and Rush was taken over by an Ayn Rand-type vision of society, the great Canadian power trio were also much friendlier to the working man. Here are thirteen songs the Republican Party should listen to.

(There’s an excellent interview leading up to the above performance.)

(The band has an amazing and mostly nonsensical conversation about the origin of the album title “Get Lucky” for the first two minutes of this video. Heavy Canadian accents, and we learn that the “the buck stops” with Mike Reno. Which is only how it should ever be. It’s better than the song, really.)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MadqClezV2w