I Blew Up On TikTok & All I Got Was This Seasonal Depression
The Lord giveth, and the Lord taketh away
This week I realized a childhood dream—I used my lawnmower as a vacuum for autumn leaves because I am 44 going on 45 and have been through enough, so I’ll see you and everyone who looks like you in hell before I will fix my increasingly stiff, gnarled hands around the handle of a goddamn rake.
I don’t even like giving handjobs with those hands! (It takes forever and I no longer have the deltoid strength.) You think I’m going to make them RAKE THINGS? In the immortal words of celebrated comedic actor Richard Karn in his role as Al Borland on the Emmy-nominated ABC series Home Improvement, I don’t think so Tim!
I did raking every Saturday from October through November for the entirety of my childhood at my mother’s exasperated behest.
And while I am grateful she made me actually learn life skills and the value of hard work because children today are soft, mealy-mouthed little bitch-made cucks who could all do with a bit of hard labor (except my nieces and nephews who are perfect angels and should never have to do anything in their entire lives except bathe in tubs of the finest myrrh while watching Bluey), it is also true that being forced to learn about the ins and outs of seasonal lawn care at the age of 8 is something I can’t and shan’t forgive. I can’t and shan’t!
All those Saturdays I could have been playing on the active railroad tracks behind the subdivision throwing rocks at passing freight trains with the other neighborhood derelicts and instead I had to clear my mother’s precious grass of dead Japanese Maple foliage! Bitch SUCK THEM UP IN THE LAWN MOWER ISN’T THAT WHAT IT’S FUCKING FOR I HAVE SHIT TO DO I’M 8. Shit!
Every year my mom and I would go 37 rounds about this. “IF THAT’S NOT WHAT IT’S FOR THEN HOW COME YOU DON’T CUT THE GRASS WITH SCISSORS” I’d shriek at the top of my lungs. “BECAUSE I PAID FOR THE GODDAMN LAWN MOWER SO I MAKE THE RULES GET OUT OF MY SIGHT” she’d bellow back, and honestly Boomer parenting by which I mean *~verbal abuse~* aside? She wasn’t wrong.
But here’s what: neither was I! Like I’m sorry but my logic was unassailable? Like find the fault, babe. Like locate the holes, dear heart. Like ascertain the lapses where the reason runs aground, beloved. Can’t be done, on account of ****they do not exist**** A lawn mower is by definition a giant Dyson for the out-of-doors. This is a fact! And as the far-right loves to tell us, facts don’t care about your feelings! I do not know what you want me to do about it!
And yet I lost this argument every year of my life on the basis that it was indeed my mother and not me who marched into Montgomery Ward and purchased said Lawn Boy with her very own Master Charge (that’s what Mastercard used to be called to those still in the bloom of youth).
I suppose since I could not argue that one I just took her other justification at face value: “ALL IT WILL DO IS CHOP THE LEAVES UP INTO LITTLE PIECES AND SPREAD THEM ALL OVER THE GRASS GO RAKE THE GODDAMN LEAVES.”
Okay first of all Carol, what a bitch in sensible business separates from the Dress Barn between the bulk food store and the JCPenney in the strip mall where the movie theaters used to be is NOT gonna do is fucking swear at me, let’s just start right there. But second of all Carol, YOU ARE A LIE-TELLING TELLER OF LIES. A lie-telling teller of lies!!! A vendor of mistruths. A solicitor of subterfuge. And here’s how I know!
When I looked out the back door the other day and saw that the leaves were in fact six inches deep in my tiny backyard, I realized it was unavoidably time to clear them out. I have recently become acquainted with some of my neighbors in this small burgh, who have made it VERY clear that they do not like “my kind” (poors) or the “element” (poverty) we bring to the neighborhood, so I shan’t give Linda and Janice down the street the satisfaction of tut-tutting at what a messy yard I have. The Boomers already got to ruin the entire country for the next minimum 50 years on their way off this mortal coil, they’re not about to get me evicted too on their way to the funeral home. SQUARE UP LINDA AND JANICE, KNUCK IF YOU BUCK.
However, the thought of actually raking made me want to walk to the center of town with a rock in my pocket and Virginia Woolf myself in the river that runs through the old historic district. I just couldn’t bear it.
So I muttered “fuck this shit,” dragged the lawn mower out of the shed and started vacuuming the lawn. And you know what CAROL and all her defenders and countrymen? It worked fine!! It worked absolutely fucking FINE.
So much so that it was all I could do to not march down to the post office and mail photographic evidence to my mother in Scottsdale! Which honestly I should have done because we don’t speak*, and truly what could be funnier than my mother opening an envelope from her estranged son containing nothing but a bunch of photos of a lawn with a note that just reads, “SEE?” You couldn’t write better comedy.
(*At her behest, I must clarify, because every time I mention this I get an email from some Boomer lecturing me about how I should be more forgiving of my mother because one thing about a Boomer? They STAY minding everyone’s business but their own. They STAY minding everyone’s business but their own!!!)
But really, I should’ve known about the lawn mower thing because you know what else this mother of mine was wrong about?
It’s so stupid you’ll never guess in a million years. Just try to guess. You never will. But just try. You’ll never get it. But just venture a guess, it’ll be fun. But you’ll never land on it. Ever. But what’s your hunch? Shot in the dark! It’ll end up being a waste of time because it’s so stupid you’ll die. But say there’s a gun to your head and you have to hypothesize a conjecture. What would it be?
Would your postulate have been potato mashers? I didn’t think so. And yet.
And yet! This woman refused for nearly my entire childhood to make mashed potatoes because, and I quote, “Then I have to get out the MIXER and the BEATERS and then WASH them and I’m NOT! DOING IT! WE’RE HAVING CRISPY CROWNS FROM THE ORE-IDA FAMILY OF FROZEN POTATO PRODUCTS!”
If it wasn’t Thanksgiving or Christmas Carol wasn’t making no fucking mashed potatoes and that was simply that on that. Imagine my surprise when I went to friends’ houses and they had mashed potatoes on, like, a Wednesday night in February for no reason. It’s simply not done!
But it IS done, you see. One day while watching the film Parenthood I pointed to Dianne Weist mashing potatoes with some sort of implement and when I asked what the hell Diane was using my mom said “a potato masher” like I’d just asked her what my own name was.
Imagine the way my entire brain exploded in my tiny elementary school head. A potato masher? A PO-TA-TO. MASHER??? hhhhhWhy, Carol, have you never owned one of these? What other secrets are you keeping?! “I HATE THOSE THINGS THEY MAKE THE POTATOES LUMPY AND THEY’RE IMPOSSIBLE TO CLEAN” she bellowed as a stream of Salem Lights smoke stuttered out of her various faceholes (it was the 80s).
And so all my life until approximately the age of THIRTY FIVE YEARS I was under the impression that potato mashers were just for… I don’t know, stupid people who obviously didn’t know the right way to make mashed potatoes was with an electric mixer? Or something?
There aren’t words for the shock and awe I experienced when, as a fully grown man with a crushing debt load and the beginnings of crow’s feet, I finally learned that rather than getting a mixer, plugging it in, inserting the beaters, making the potatoes, carrying the mixer across the kitchen to the sink, ejecting the beaters, coiling up the mixer cord, putting the mixer back into the cupboard and then eating your mashed potatoes you could instead RAM A POTATO MASHER INTO THEM APPROXIMATELY FIVE TIMES AND THEN GO SIT DOWN AND EAT YOUR FUCKING DINNER. And. And! IT’S EASIER TO CLEAN THAN THE BEATERS!!!! What is WRONG with this person?! A buffoon. A buffoon! See Mo’Nique really was right, when you do clownery, the clown comes back to bite.
Anyway, much like a fucking potato masher the lawn mower thing worked so well that when I was done I immediately burst into tears at the sight of my dead lawn emptied of its colorful autumnal foliage.
At least it was sort of festive before. Now it just looks… well, like winter, which always makes me want to die both literally and figuratively. And sure enough! There it was, one look at that backyard and there was that old familiar feeling. “Maybe tonight while I sleep a jetliner will crash into my home and its nose will slam directly into my person,” I thought while snuggling into the warm embrace of my memory foam mattress that night. A boy can dream!
Of course the lesson should have been that I was UNWELL with the seasonal depresh and already had been for weeks.
But I missed the seasonal depression memo in part because did you know I am now a Halloween influencer on TikTok?
I’m exaggerating, but not by much: I posted a single video about my neighbor’s 30-foot inflatable Stay Puft Marshmallow Man at the beginning of October, and of all the things I have posted on the TWENTY YEARS I have been on the internet THAT is the thing that finally hit. I now have 35,000 followers.
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Have you ever heard anything so fucking stupid in your life? I don’t even LIKE Halloween! It gives me the heebie jeebies, but the wrong kind of heebie jeebies, like the kind of heebie jeebies I imagine you get when you go for a Scientology audit. Unsubscribe!
But I have always been a “give the people what they want!” ass bitch on account of my parents didn’t love me and whatnot, so I spent all of October planning and creating a handful of fun Halloween videos. And honestly it was a very good time and I made lots of new internet friends AND a handful of IRL ones in my neighborhood AND the owners of the Stay Puft Marshmallow Man won the town Halloween decor contest. So pretty great, all in all.
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HOWEVER.
It also fried my brain, mainly because LOLOLOLOLOL I already have two jobs, and making TikToks is literally a third, and aside from the $.02 I made on TikTok live on Halloween night (literally I made $.02 from two lovely people who gave me “diamonds” whatever that means I will be 45 in a month!) it is unpaid labor. It also represented an erosion of my anonymity in this small town, which manifested in fun side effects such as lying awake at night convinced every noise I heard downstairs was a marauding band of Pr0ud Boys breaking into my house to kill the “gr00mer” they now know lives on the block because of TikTok. Ha! Haha! Oh we have fun in America in 2023 don’t we? What mirth!
I could honestly feel the erosion of my mental well-being occurring in real time but what am I gonna do, talk to my therapist about it? LOL yeah right! Then I’d have to admit that she’s right about the ills of social media and how for my own wellness I must get off the internet, and listen lady, thank God for you and your reasonably priced psychotherapy services but I am never doing that!
This woman has shown me actual science that reveals what social media is doing to all of our brains, especially broken ones like mine, but I simply refuse to listen, because if I did not go on the internet *what would I do*? Talk to people in real life? Read books? Go to the gym? Clean my house? Develop a healthy sense of self and relationships to other individuals in my community? Date and do sex with actual persons? What is this, the 1700s? Just scan my credit card for this therapy co-pay and keep it pushin, Laura Ingalls Wilder!
What’s extra stupid is I agree with everything she says and hate social media with all my heart.
I have written no fewer that 463 articles at my job about “the fraying of the social fabric” and “the death of civic engagement” and “the collapse of the communal village” and all the other shit the internet has wrought which has made possible the total destruction of this country and most of our minds.
And that’s before we even get into something like the Israel-Gaza conflict. Tell you what, you want to lose all faith in humanity? Go log onto Twitter and read everyone’s Israel-Gaza tweets. You’ll be dumping a bottle of bleach down your gullet by tweet five, I assure you. Everyone is stupid on a level I personally had not realized—and I have always thought 90% of people are dipshits since basically the day I was born—but for extra fun they’ve also lost even the faintest sense of human dignity while also having become *manifestly insane*.
A real trifecta: Dumb, soulless, insane. I curse everyone who ever had a hand in building any of this internet shit and if I ever actually succeed in life and make money the first thing I’m doing is deleting my entire online presence and getting a Motorola Razr and playing that Snake game it came with till I die. Don’t call, don’t text.
But see this is how they get you: You cannot even participate in society today, much less have a job in media, communication or the arts—the only skills I have because I am a fucking homosexual from the 90s with a goddamn theater degree, what am I gonna do, pivot to civil engineering?—without being online. So here I am! Hating every minute of it and letting it erode my mental health on purpose. Wheeeeeee!
Which is all to say I didn’t tell my therapist that I am now America’s (or at least Northville, Michigan’s) foremost Halloween influencer, because I know her reaction would be to roll her eyes so hard they shoot out the back of her head while she calmly intones “Ohrkay, thet’s something we’re gonna need to talk throurrrrgh?” (she’s Australian) while barely containing her rage. It’s almost like treating a ravingly mentally ill person who won’t listen to reason for 10 years is frustrating or something. I frankly think she should manage her expectations but that’s just me!
In any case, all this combined with the onset of winter has meant my brain has been slowly breaking for a month.
And by breaking, I mean breaking to the point that I spent $70 on antique baking dishes a few weekends ago (????????????????????) AND have developed an obsession with roasting cabbage (????????????????????????????????????????????) AND burst into tears over the loss of a bunch of leaves in my yard (lololol).
And yet it wasn’t until last night, as I was driving home from my friend’s house cataloging a list of every bitch I was gonna call the following morning and tell EXACTLY what I think of them, including some who could absolutely and instantaneously ruin my life, that I finally was like “oh wait I think I might have lost my mind a little bit ha ha ooopsie doodle!”
Anyway, my point is that’s how you know a lawn mower works just fine for vacuuming up leaves—it did such a good job I went thoroughly and actively insane, as evidenced by this newsletter entry! There’s also probably a point to be made here about seasonal depression but as you’ve no doubt gathered, my brain is scrambled so I’m certainly not going to be the one to tie this post up with a neat ending even though that is literally my job!
Instead, I will leave you with my solemn wish for you and yours as we head into what is supposed to be the happiest time of the year (lololololololol bitch be so fucking for real): That you, too, become vindicated of your mother’s assails, and that you, too, also never touch a rake, whether literal or figurative, ever again. Amen.
Now someone please come take me to the brain hospital.