An Open Letter To You

Apr 14

Apr 14 An Open Letter To You

Dear Reader,

I'll be honest right from the get-go: I don't really want to write this. I sit down now to do so without having outlined any ideas out or having done any real internal postmortem on the situation. In some ways this should be cathartic and healthy, but in other ways it almost certainly will be anything but. C'est la vie, right?

One other quick note on why writing this seems like it may just lightly brush the gossamer edge of "necessary." I have never wanted Re-Critic, the site, to be about Nich Sullivan, the person, even going so far as to consciously not have photos of my face on it (until today). Even though I have written nearly everything on the site (at the time of this writing), it's not about packaging my specific brand of analysis into a tidy box and sending it out for consumption into the fabled "marketplace of ideas." What it is about, or what it is supposed to be about (?), is community. The site was supposed to be a place where writers, entertainers, and fans could come together in a remote embrace and share their quirky opinions about these crazy things we call "music" and "pop culture." Writing a piece like this feels like it's peeling back a curtain on the person behind the personality, and I struggle with the idea that it's maybe happening for its own sake as opposed to it having an intrinsic value aside from that. What compels me to put this on the record are the thoughts that 1) any regular readers deserve at least a factual explanation for why I went over six months without posting any new articles, and 2) that maybe somewhere there is someone that needs to hear a few of these things for reasons of their health, their goals, or their ideas of success. And what even is community if it doesn't offer the opportunity to commiserate sometimes? So let's do it

In the summer of 2019, my writing slowed down. It didn't feel like there was any specific reason for this, at the time it just seemed to be a function of holding down a (admittedly easy) job while also trying to develop and publish timely content here. I felt like it was a predictable downturn and it would naturally fix itself. So I put up a piece in July, and I rested for a bit. I didn't find myself getting inspired to write new pieces, and while the inspiration wasn't striking I didn't feel the motivation to write anything. Through this wash-rinse-repeat cycle of producing zero creative output, I thought I was simply leaning into a chance to resurge and that I would be even more productive on the other side of it.

But that didn't happen. The hour hands circled the clock, the days and months clicked off the calendar, and none of it brought me the ability to sit down and write. Writers will tell you this, and I formally heard it first in Stephen King's On Writing (to this day the only vocational writing book I've ever cared about), but I'll paraphrase: The job of writing is just that. Writing. There's no mystical divination or dark art to it. A writer is someone who sits down with a writing tool, and writes. That's it. There's something so comforting in the idea that this is so easy, so practical. Though one has to ask, what happens when you can't think of what to write? What happens when you can't summon the energy to go after an idea? Well, there's the rub: as easy as it is in practice, it's at least that difficult in theory and principle. The secret of writing is that there's no secret; the tragedy of that is that being unable to do the work (for whatever reason) feels profoundly empty, like one is bereft of all usefulness (if they've convinced themselves that their writing equated with their overall usefulness, which I have and do, for better and for worse).

Reader, you may be thinking at this point, "this is all well and good to explain a bout of writer's block, but what does it have to do with the photo above of someone in a hospital bed?" That question is more than fair, and I'm getting to that explanation, but it requires a small amount of set up.

The months went by and I wasn't writing. Relationships with sister sites dried up, and it was 100% on me and my lack of proactive communication with them (Track 7 and Highway 81 Revisited, especially, get my most heartfelt apologies on this for my lack of follow up after a couple great projects/pitches). As my motivation winked nearly out of existence, the ideas and inspirations followed suit, and my supposed short hiatus became an indefinite sabbatical, as it were. That was it. It seemed like I was cashed out, washed up, maybe done writing altogether. And all for no reason I could articulate, which was frustrating.

Fast forward to the beginning of 2020. I sustained a mild injury at work lifting something I shouldn't have been lifting in a way I shouldn't have been lifting it and had to take a week off. I went back to my job for a few days, and then my wife and I left on a trip to Hawaii that we had been looking forward to for months. We had an amazing time, but things started to go off the rails for me personally. Physically, some of what happened seemed like it might be a hangover from my injury, but that turned out to be very much not the case.

I stopped smoking cigarettes. Yes, this is a good thing, objectively. But it wasn't me, and I didn't even know why I did it, and that was worrying. I mean, you never want to look a gift horse in the mouth…but it felt like something was off in a way I couldn't describe. Eating became difficult, nothing tasted good and I wasn't hungry most of the time. Again, not me. I didn't get to approximately 220 pounds by not eating, my family can tell you how I've treated every meal like it was my last since the age of 11, scarfing every possible calorie with a speed that borders on unnatural. I stopped drinking. Now if I have to stop and tell you why that's odd, well, I guess we're not personally acquainted. Let's just say recreational drinking for me is a big mood and has been for years.

These events made my wife engage her radar due to behavior we could both recognize as odd, but the real madness was only beginning. Eventually, I could no longer sleep in a bed. I tried each night but would pull myself up before achieving any meaningful sleep, in pain throughout my back and neck, and I’d head to the floor where being flat on a colder surface was my only salve. I stopped making sense. Not in a cool “Talking Heads” way, either, in a real way. My answers to simple questions became gobbledegook at an alarming rate, nonsense words in nonsense sequences. At the peak of it all, I felt my mental capacities completely failing me. While watching an episode of NBC's "The Good Place," a show I'd loved since the beginning, I found myself unable to empathize with any of the characters and incapable of tracking the story's narrative. Worse than that, I felt myself being unable to do and feel these things, things that had never been problems before. My tether seemed to be unraveling, increasingly unmoored from everything I knew and every mode of thought I had cultivated over the previous thirty years. It was horrifying in ways I had never imagined possible, ways I hope to never feel again.

By the end of the trip, it was clear that I needed serious medical help of some sort. We boarded the plane back to the Bay Area, which was touch-and-go to say the least, and came back to the mainland in mid-January. A few days later a doctor told me that physically I seemed OK, so he gave me a prescription for a migraine drug and a future appointment for an MRI scan. I never made it to that scan because the need became an emergency within a few more days. An emergency MRI led to our being made aware of a large and aggressive tumor in my left frontal lobe; I was transferred to the hospital immediately where I awaited the next available surgery slot.

I am going to skim over the next part a bit, but the greatest hits are as follows. I had my craniotomy on January 28th and my brilliant neurosurgeon was able to remove around 95% of the tumor. I showed remarkable recovery in speech, motor skills, and memory very quickly. I was home by February 1st, just in time to see my beloved Kansas City Chiefs win their first title in fifty years (no big deal). I spent my immediate post-surgery time surrounded by family, which was amazing and invaluable. The next few weeks were about getting back up to speed in every way that I could: walking, working out, reading, listening to music (duh), and having as many conversations as I could to see if I could find any issues in my speech and/or associative cognition. I'm immeasurably happy to report that no issues were found. By the beginning of March, I was essentially back to being the same person I was before all the awfulness began.

Please indulge me on this, because it needs to be said. My family was amazing, and they came from a great distance to while away the days with me and they showed me so much love it was hard to believe. But the real rock star of this entire time was my wife, Samantha. She dealt with every stitch of paperwork, she talked to every medical professional, she called every family member and friend across the country, and through it all she kept working because she knew that a home we might be evicted from was not a home for me to come back to. She had conversations DAILY about what would happen if I died, or if I came back to the world as a completely different version of myself. Knock on wood, none of that happened, but the thought that she even had to entertain those possibilities is a strain I will and could never be able to repay. She was a lighthouse that brought our household through a high-stakes storm, and if the positions had been reversed I could never have done as much as she did with the grace she was able to pull it off with. Thank you, Sam, you're my favorite person. I didn't need this to show me that, but you went ahead and proved it anyhow.

All in all, I am living through pretty much the happiest ending that I ever could have expected. And yet, it's not really over. I will be on some kind of monitoring/treatment protocol for the rest of my life. I don't even know what my first round of radiation and chemo have done to the tumor at this point, I find that out in a couple of weeks. But I am in a much better position than I have any right to be in, all things considered.

With all this progress, my need to write has come back almost as if it never left. I have time now (which COVID-19 shares much of the blame for, but whatever), I have ideas for essays and articles, and I have the motivation to follow through on them. For all intents and purposes, I am back at it and feeling great. In looking back at what we’ve learned about my illness, it is entirely possible that the tumor's rapid growth began at some point around last summer. It's only a theory and we can't know for sure. Even so, it would explain a good deal of what went on with my writing, or more accurately my inability to write. The activity and pressure collecting in my brain was concentrated very close to my speech center, it's more than possible that the tumor either catalyzed my period of inactivity or even just exacerbated or elongated it. My tumor invaded me and tried to turn me into someone else, and that in itself would have only been a pinpoint on the scenic route toward turning me into a cadaver. It's nice to have some answers on all this in the aftermath but it doesn't change the fact that the thought of that is…I don't know, sobering is perhaps the word I’m looking for.

Luckily, I am back and I am still me, only with a lot less physical pain. So that's a bonus. But let's talk about the present and the future.

What is new on the site now? I'm glad you asked! I began a new feature recently called Thirsty Firsty as a start. This is a feature (hopefully weekly, perhaps bi-weekly) that catches my first impressions on a release that has newly dropped, one that is notable and recent, or (perhaps) one that is simply new to me. To be clear, I love the art of the in-depth review, and l love what I would consider to be "pure criticism", so that is the lane I often attempt to stay in. But I also love the idea that feelings change over time and with repetition, so there is a real "lightning in a bottle" energy to a well-developed first impression. Added benefits of this new feature include: new music is always coming out somewhere, so I shouldn't ever be at a loss for a release to write about; this format gives me a loose and groovy way to comment on some new art without being too precious about how history may view my take; and it's just incredibly fun for me to write in this mode.

What is coming in the future? I've never been one to "plan" or "premeditate" my plays, as a rule. Right now, putting up new material at a regular or semi-regular clip is more than enough for me. I have some ideas of other more hard-boiled Re-Critic fare that I think will come to fruition some day in the not-too-distant future. Through the haze, I can dimly see a promised land where material is posted like clockwork and I hustle more successfully to push it into new networks and avenues. I hope that happens, but it's up to me to do that work, so I'm counting on you to keep me honest, Reader.

More importantly as it pertains to that pie-in-the-sky future I keep talking about, I have rediscovered my intentionalism when it comes to writing. It sounds simple, but it’s not nothing. I again know why it is that I write. I remember why it is that I created this site/forum/idea space. I recently heard street graffiti described as a way of screaming into the abyss that "I was here!" Re-Critic is a lot like that for me. I am not a person that has ever greatly considered his legacy with any seriousness, but it turns out that this is my scream into the abyss. This will continue to be the evidence that I was here. This will be my love song to art for all time. Frankly, I can't wait to hear how it ends and I hope beyond hope that you'll be there with me.

Cheers to you all! Thank you for all the support, as always! Whether it’s reading one article, making one piece of music, or sending me a hat in the mail that hit on just the right day, know that this is for you as much as it is for me and that your encouragement is never forgotten. Thank you.

And if you seriously read <gestures at 2700+ words on the screen> all this?! You're a goddamn champion and you're going in my Ring of Honor.

Love, safety, and wellness to you. … And, not for nuthin', but if you feel like you may need to get your head checked, do it.