Lonely Hearts Chapel

Here’s an excerpt from Chapter 10 of LONELYHEARTS 2016, my upcoming campy, surrealish, dramedy novel about a bipolar pansexual at the end of the world. (More succinctly, it’s about a troubled young man who starts college during this era in American politics.)

I was too busy to be social anyway. I’d been ‘volunteering’ every week at a suicide hotline, as part of a scholarship program. Even though I was doing it almost entirely for the money, I didn’t feel guilty. Because I genuinely enjoyed listening to these people. Maybe ‘enjoyed’ is the wrong word. At any rate, working at the hotline made me feel better about myself. And better about life in general. That’s what I told myself about it every day; and sometimes it honestly felt true, as much as I struggled with it at first. Most of the callers really only needed to talk, and to know that someone could listen without judging them. The hope that such compassion exists was the only thing keeping them alive.

The opportunity came to me the previous semester, in an email from my favorite professor. To apply, you had to write an essay about a major social problem and propose solutions for it. I waited to write mine until I was wine-drunk the night it was due. It was about mental illness stigma, and how it could be remedied by mandating occasional mental-health evaluations for all public-school students, like we already do with physical exams and vaccinations. I also proposed cultural-sensitivity training for the counselors who’d perform the evaluations, to ensure they’d treat all students fairly; and then they could also help kids work through any self-hatred they might be experiencing because of the bullies or bigots in their lives. Such mandatory screenings would not only help validate mental health treatment, they would also help lower rates of crime, addiction, and other risky behaviors. I didn’t even proofread the essay before I submitted it, because it was a national program and I figured I didn’t have a chance.

But a few months later, I learned I was one of the chosen ones. This meant I’d receive a scholarship upfront, and then I would receive another scholarship at the end of the semester, after volunteering every week at a group dealing with my essay-topic; hence the suicide hotline. This news thundered into my life like a miracle, because tuition had just increased; and scholarships, cut–both for the third time in three years. And that trend seemed like it was going to continue for a long time. Consequently, I’d just taken out thousands more in student loans than I took out the previous year; and I was suffocating under unthinkable debt, along with the enormous doubt that I would ever receive a decent wage for work I could be proud of. Plus, on top of everything else, it had become impossible for me to imagine things ever getting better. I was sure the world would always be broken, with a few people having far too much of it, and a million times more people having nothing at all, or not nearly enough. That crushing debt and doubt was what motivated me to accept the position at the hotline, even though most days it felt like I could barely even persuade myself to stay alive.

You can read excerpts from chapters 1-10 here. 

Love always,

your Mister

P.S. – I’ve been meaning to update you on my progress, but lately I’ve been struggling to regain control of my body, from this creative alter-ego I think I summoned earlier this year by parting my bangs on the opposite side hahaha long story. Suffice it to say: you haven’t heard the last of me. The opening act’s barely begun. Thank you so much for being here. I really do love you.