Ourland

I started shocking everything I touched shortly after taking Zoloft for the first time. One morning, my cheek grazed the metal pull string for the living room fan and the ZAP! was so loud that my wife, Caitlin, thought I’d bashed my head into something. Everything in my house became a potential threat: door handles, the microwave, the dog, my son. Finally I asked Caitlin, who’d started taking Zoloft after her mom died in 2024: do SSRIs make your body more electric? She laughed at me, and in retrospect, I guess it was a pretty dumb question. No, she said. Static electricity is worse in the winter because the air is dryer. I’d never really thought about this, but even when I did think about it, it didn’t make sense: you’d figure it would be worse when the air is moist because water conducts electricity. I guess the problem is that I don’t understand how the world works, in a general sort of way, even with the most basic stuff. I didn’t even realize owls were birds until, like, three years ago. I wish I was kidding.

Anyway, I’m on Zoloft now. I’d resisted taking anti-depressants for years because I didn’t want to be one of those people who had to swallow a drug everyday just to feel normal, and also because I felt like I’d become pretty good at managing my depression. It was never a thing that hung around for long, not like it did during the Drunken Lost Years of My Early Twenties. If I ever started feeling down, I could usually pull myself out of the rut by writing or exercising or making a stew. None of that was working this winter. It felt like my body couldn’t adjust to the time change, like I was mulling around in a perpetual state of jet lag. I was sleeping like crap. Every innocent noise our pets made felt like an affront to justice itself. The sound of people chewing at a socially-acceptable volume made me want to rip off their lips. Maybe you should be on Zoloft, too, Caitlin said one day while I had my head buried in my arms at the kitchen table. I grunted a noise that confirmed she was right. 

I feel like I need to clarify my statement about not knowing owls are birds. I don’t take this level of ignorance lightly. It’s not like I was actively refuting their birdness, it’s just that, like most things in my life, I hadn’t given it much thought. I’d never taken the time to consider what owls actually were; I guess I just assumed they were their own thing, whatever the hell that means. So when Caitlin mentioned to our son, Conley, that owls were nocturnal birds, she inadvertently taught me something I should’ve learned, like, 30 years ago. I’m aware that this clarification doesn’t make me sound like any less of an idiot, but somehow it makes me feel a little better about myself. 

If I ever started feeling down, I could usually pull myself out of the rut by writing or exercising or making a stew. None of that was working this winter. It felt like my body couldn’t adjust to the time change, like I was mulling around in a perpetual state of jet lag. I was sleeping like crap. Every innocent noise our pets made felt like an affront to justice itself. The sound of people chewing at a socially-acceptable volume made me want to rip off their lips.

My doctor, who I’d just met for the first time, prescribed me the lowest dose of Zoloft. She’d known me for five minutes and immediately put me on a drug that would fundamentally alter my brain chemistry. The first night I took it, I jolted awake at three in the morning, vibrating with so much energy that I’d surely incinerate the entire house if I touched the fan’s pull string again. Strange, severe thoughts were zapping around in my mind, and I noted them on my phone so I wouldn’t forget them by sunrise. I wrote: Hello, my name is Happy McSmilesalot. It feels like I live in a two-story brick rancher. I used to spend a lot of time in the basement, but I’m only allowed on the main level now. The basement is locked and off-limits. This description of my feelings makes sense, given how Zoloft works: serotonin, the happy hormone, leaves the synapse, and Zoloft acts like a bouncer that won’t allow it to reenter. This keeps the brain bathed in an ambient sort of pleasantness that feels like vanilla ice cream.

Other weird and novel things started happening: I use an app called SleepCycle to track the intensity and duration of my snoring because, for a while there, I was convinced I had a severe case of sleep apnea (It turns out I did not). During my second or third night on Zoloft, the app recorded me saying, in a British accent at one a.m., by God, by God, before mumbling then falling back to sleep. During my waking hours, I was able to look at myself in the mirror or listen to a recording of my voice without wanting to plunge my head through drywall. I considered this an improvement in my mental health. I also assumed all of these experiences were placebo-related, because the effects of Zoloft are supposed to take weeks to be felt. I really have no way of knowing what was real and what was just in my head, not that there’s much of a difference between the two, anyway. 

I was still zapping everything I touched when Alex Pretti was murdered by the feds. Then we got buried under almost a foot of snowcrete, and the Big Freeze locked us in a glossy winter hellscape. I threw out my back shoveling the dense white stuff off the driveway; I was about halfway done when my lower spine popped, as it tends to do with the dependability of American elections, though this may not be the best analogy for our times. I wobbled over to Caitlin, who was skating around with Conley on a sheet of ice that was once our front yard, and told her that I had to lie down. I knew my back would be spasming for at least a couple days, that I’d have to spend the majority of that time horizontal in the guest bed next to the litterbox. What’s more is that Conley wouldn’t have school on account of the Arctic accumulation, so I’d be in charge of taking care of him, knowing that a lightning bolt could strike my lower back any time I bent over or tried to stand up. 

In the past, this confluence of crappy events – personal injury leading to immobility, a brutal winter storm, uninterrupted childcare demands, a public execution by the federal government – would’ve made me all noodly and despondent, but this time I got proactive: I drew up a “lesson plan” for a mock school day with Conley. I set up an obstacle course composed of a step-stool, a rubber boot, and a small table (P.E.); We did a kid’s yoga nidra about glowbugs (Religious Studies? Psychology?); I let him pound on a thrift store keyboardwhile I strummed a guitar (horizontally on the guest bed, near the litterbox) and we ad-libbed a song about a flying kangaroo (Music Education). It seemed like the happy pills were doing their job. The Big SAD still visited me from time-to-time, but unlike before, its presence wasn’t all-consuming. I didn’t even have the urge to headbutt drywall anymore.

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I hadn’t zapped anything in a week when I had a dream about Jason Segal in my basement. I’d hired him as a contractor to conduct renovations down there, and he’d assembled a group of tradespeople to get the job done quickly and efficiently. He looked at me and said: “OK, the first thing we need to do is take care of these bugs.” As soon as he said this, I noticed all of the spiders and centipedes crawling in the corners of the room, the fog of gnats and mosquitoes swarming all around. Just then, this milky white insect with the body of a praying mantis and the head of a human skull climbed onto the arm of one of the skilled tradesmen and reared back its pincer, ready to strike. Segal instructed him to smash it, but I stepped in to de-escalate: “Those are endangered,” I said. “Let me handle the bastard.” I stood up and started moving cautiously toward the ghost-white mantis bug, but before I could do whatever I had planned, I was rudely ripped out of the dream, leaving Segal to figure out how to handle that dicey situation all by himself.

It was early when I woke up, too early, not even six yet, and the room was so dark it might as well have been the middle of the night. I rolled over and opened Reddit on my phone, a move that was starting to feel as instinctive as a hungry pup latching on to his mother’s poison teet. The first post that popped up was a video of Pretti having a physical altercation with federal agents 11 days before he was executed in broad daylight, and the comment section was mostly one big argument about whether or not the video was AI. This made everything in the world seem even more distant and uncertain than it already was. It made me wonder: are owls actually birds? Are birds themselves even real, or are they just government drones deployed to monitor our every move? It was hard to know anymore, and Lord knows we can’t rely on birds to tell us the truth. 

The first post that popped up was a video of Pretti having a physical altercation with federal agents 11 days before he was executed in broad daylight, and the comment section was mostly one big argument about whether or not the video was AI. This made everything in the world seem even more distant and uncertain than it already was.

Reddit is not a sane or healthy way to greet the day. It activates my nervous system like I’m preparing for a brawl with the QAnon Shaman. So I tossed my phone to the foot of the bed and vowed, for the thousandth time, to live a life less-dependent on screens. I lumbered, tight-backed and bleary-eyed, towards the door, and when I reached for the knob, a streak of lightning leaped from the metal and kissed my finger with a POW! I let out a YIP and jumped back, offended that inanimate objects were once again conspiring to destroy me. But my assessment of the situation was just another way that I was misunderstanding the world, another instance of assigning too much weight to minor inconveniences, another example of how I don’t give life the depth of thought that it so readily deserves.