“Well, I tried hard to make sure nobody did know,” I said.

That’s usually how the conversation starts. The undertone is always ignorance, and regret for that ignorance, as if you could have known. As if I would have in any way let people see past my forced smile and false engagement. As if my mental illness was something I was just going to discuss casually like I would the Lakers or the weather. I mean, that’s just not done. Especially by guys.

Before I was diagnosed, I didn’t know what depression was. I’d seen the commercial with the sad egg and heard the word, but it was always directed at someone else. Not me. I was a happy, funny, jokey kind of guy. I was invincible.

I’ve never lived in an area prone to cold weather, but I have a sense that depression is like black ice. You’re driving along on your way somewhere, or maybe nowhere. There’s a song on the radio. Your fingers are tapping on the steering wheel. Everything is under control. And suddenly, without warning, you’re sliding off the highway, tumbling, wondering what the hell just happened.

In the nine years since I first slid off the highway and into depression, what I have found most disconcerting is how many men, whether they know it or not, have slid off the same patch of highway. Some of them don’t even know it. Some of them are swimming around in their own confusion. Maybe they’re drinking too much or working too many hours or just shuffling through life like it’s quicksand. Maybe they’re cheating or snorting or gambling. The self-distraction is all part of it. That’s the hiding.

While I was chatting with my brother-in-law Saturday night, fireworks popping and whistling not far away, he told me one of his clients killed himself last week. The guy bought a two-million-dollar house, his business collapsed, he couldn’t afford his bug mortgage payments, and he took his own life. Depression? Probably. I’m not a therapist or a psychiatrist, but I’ve been in those scary places where you wonder if trying to rescue yourself is worth the effort.

It is. Do not succumb. Fight. Get help.

Turn into the slide.

“You call yourself a journalist?!” they’d bark. “I’m canceling my subscription to this rag!”

I was 24 years old at the time, and I’ll cop to the fact that these phone called got to me. I was sensitive. I wanted to make my editors happy, and this wasn’t quite what I’d pictured when I dreamed of being a journalist. But in the 15 years since that time, I’ve learned to be grateful for that chore. It helped me develop a thick skin and a measure of perspective. If you put pieces of yourself out there on display—which so many of us do—you must prepare yourself for the inevitability of criticism and, in some cases, personal attack.

That training came in handy a couple of times yesterday.

What I dislike about thick skin is the plain truth that it’s a defense mechanism, and sometimes defense isn’t the appropriate posture. Yes, it’s helpful to be able to deflect the incoming barbs and attacks, but conflicts are a lot easier (and more interesting) to manage when you’re able to throw some punches of your own. But I dare not.

Be the bigger person. Take the high road. Turn the other cheek.

I try.

But lately what I find the hardest posture of all is restraint—and perhaps that’s a sign that my skin isn’t as thick as I thought it was.

People take shots. They just do. And sometimes it feels like shooting back would make it all go away. It’s like an open invitation to stand on top of the table, pound your chest, assert your dominance. But that never ends well. It’s no different than burying hurt feelings under drugs or booze or a half-gallon of rocky road.

Be the bigger person. Take the high road. Turn the other cheek.

I have taken a step back this morning, looked at the bigger picture, and reminded myself that restraint is almost always the smart choice. Not as exciting, nor as fulfilling, but almost always smarter.

But the most recent salvo of cinematic brilliance comes with a twist. Since it was about princesses real and imagined, the fine folks at Disney decided to keep track of every time the words “princess” or “princesa” or “princesita” was spoken by one of the actors. Naturally, my child was elated by this trick. Every time a variation of the P-word popped onto the screen, she shouted it out with glee.

“Daddy! Princesses!”

“Woohoooo!” I lied.

Indeed, my daughter has recently become quite focused upon making herself look like a princess; no more of the youngster who thought leopard-print blouses work well with navy, polka-dotted skirts. She now wears dresses and strappy shoes and little things that make her blondish-brown hair lay certain ways on her tiny little head. I find this to be sweet and endearing, if perhaps a little ridiculous.

What I do NOT find endearing is that, taking a cue from her mother, my six-year-old daughter is concerned with MY attire.

Hot Wife recently bought me two shirts. She announced when she presented them to me that they were to be worn during my upcoming book tour. (Apparently the ragged, torn, weathered t-shirts I’ve been wearing lately do not fit my beloved’s idea of style or grace.) Fine, I thought. I’ll wear them.

I didn’t know it at the time, but my daughter heard this exchange. That’s bad. At age six, she’s still stuck in that mode where every overheard word or conversation is something to mimic and, in her case, take too far. For her, the contrast of HER looking like a princess and MY looking like a schlemiel is a perfect breeding ground for…um…whatever you call this:

“Daddy-uh, you’re not going to wear that wrinkled shirt when you talk about Rajuhginzamish’gna, are you?”

“No, honey,” I said. “I’m going to wear the new shirts mommy bought for me.”

“Good-uh,” she said. “We can’t have you looking all sloppy.”

“No. Certainly not. Thank you for your concern, princess.”

“You’re welcome, daddy.”

“Wait,” I said. “What’s the book called again?”

“Rajuhginzamish’gna.”

"Exactly."

2. That country bumpkin from “The Bachelorette”

3. That bloviating clown on ESPN who always says, “Backbackbackback…GONE!”

4. That nimrod from North Korea.

5. People who wear shorts with Ugg boots.

6. That old dude who just went to jail for defrauding people out of their life savings.

7. That reverend who shows up to steal the spotlight every time something tragic happens in the African-American community.

8. That one actor guy who became governor of California.

9. That butthole from Venezuela.

10. That overacting dillhole who plays the hotel manager on Zack and Cody.

Any others you can think of?

I contributed a piece to the site when it was in its infancy, and I remember laughing while I was writing. But then I got all serious and started writing about depression, and the light, frivolous tone became scarcer in my day-to-day creativity.

Today I’m going back. Today I rejoin the ranks of my favorites to make a series of unfair, disrespectful confessions about my guilty pop culture pleasures.

Go. Read.

Some highlights:

1) A dedicated Flickr group. (Please join if you feel compelled.)

2) A redesigned Twitter page.

3) A short-but-sweet book tour that includes the following stops:

AUGUST 4 (Release Date)
LOS ANGELES, CA
Book Soup
8818 Sunset Blvd.
7 p.m.

AUGUST 6
SAN DIEGO, CA
Barnes & Noble -- Escondido
810 West Valley Parkway
7 p.m.

AUGUST 12
PORTLAND, OR
Powell's
1005 W. Burnside
7:30 p.m.

AUGUST 15
ORANGE COUNTY, CA
Chemers Gallery -- Tustin
17300 Seventeenth Street
5 p.m.

AUGUST 18
MOUNTAIN VIEW, CA
Books, Inc. Bookstore
301 Castro Street
7 p.m.

If you live in any of these areas, I hope you'll come on out and say hello.

And now you know why I've never posted video of myself on this site before. Thanks to Jon Armstrong, Chris Loesch, and Marcus Jennings for playing along.

Happy Father's Day to all of you dads.

I don’t understand wine.

We have some friends who are, like, BIG into the whole wine thing. They were over here yesterday with a couple of bottles, one red, one white, talking about each one’s “body” in much the same way my college buddies and I used to talk about chicks. Except in this case the terms “blonde”, “brunette”, and “redhead” were replaced with “syrah” and “cab” and “Bordeaux.”

It occurs to me that my strong distaste for the wine culture has something to do with the simple fact that I’m flat broke, meaning I can’t afford $25 bottles of shiraz, so I hate it as a defense mechanism. But I have tested that hypothesis many times over the years, and there’s just no escaping that I just don’t fucking get it. I can’t tell the difference between a $2 bottle of Trader Joe’s merlot and a $5,000 bottle of something spectacular made from special golden grapes that fermented against the scrotum of an ancient king.

But here’s the real problem I have with wine:

People sometimes spit it out. And that’s just plain dumb.

When our friends were over yesterday, drinking their wine, they were talking about some of the wine tastings they’ve been to and about how, despite their great enthusiasm for the stuff, they’d met a man who made them look like noobs.

“He was telling us about this tasting he’d been to recently,” our friend Andrea recalled, “where he tasted something like 100 different wines.”

“Did he spit?” someone asked.

“Yeah,” she said. “He spits.”

Again. College flashbacks.

I suppose I can understand the practicality of spitting wine, especially if you’re drinking that many different kinds. But times are hard and good buzzes are hard to come by these days, and I simply cannot excuse the notion that THERE IS ALCOHOL IN YOUR MOUTH AND YOU ARE NOT SWALLOWING IT. People get killed for that in Ireland.

Because I don’t care for wine, I reject the whole concept of spitting (as opposed to swallowing) (which…this isn’t that kind of site, you sick pigs). It’s like, “Yes, I want the rather humiliating experience of sipping tiny little birdie-sized helpings of wine and filtering it through my teeth and trying to find notes of oak and cherries and king scrotum in it, but I’m not at all interested in attaining the requisite level of drunkenness that would make this behavior seem less awkward.”

It’s absurd. And that’s why I prefer beer.

And I swallow.

Often times when Hot Wife’s family would talk about Bruce, they’d get a sorrowful, resigned look in their eyes, as if they knew something awful was about to happen. His doctors told them that was the case. Bruce’s cancer (non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma) was “aggressive.” Terminal certainly. And soon.

They gave him six months to live.

He lived for 10 years.

- - -

The nature of Bruce’s cancer was such that he became something of a guinea pig. Existing methods of treatment had been tried, sometimes retried. Some worked temporarily, some not at all, but none seemed to have the desired long-term effect. So Bruce voluntarily became the University of Wisconsin’s default test case. Experimental treatments of all sorts were injected into his veins and nodes. Many extended his life for indefinite periods of time, but most made him violently ill. I never personally witnessed the magnitude of his sickness, but the figments of my imagination are bad enough.

Bruce and his wife had a daughter, my niece: an adorable little redhead with a big smile. I wonder what it must have been like for him to be the father of such a precious child and hear from a physician that he only had six months left to be her daddy.

I remember seeing my friend Jimbo slowly succumb to cancer and watching the way he looked at his son. There was such desperation in his eyes. It’s not fair. It’s not fair when a man puts so much of himself into his child and then, just as that child is coming into his own, is taken.

- - -

I smile when I think of Bruce. I think of how proud he would be of his daughter, who has graduated from college and set out on a career. She comes to visit us now and again, and my children absolutely cannot leave her alone. She’s so loving with them, so patient. Bruce is alive in her spirit.

But my smile is also for what Bruce gave me.

Many of us spend our lives trying to live up to expectations set by others, as though our course has been preordained. We sometimes resign ourselves to the belief that we are at the whim of fate – that someone or something greater than us is in control. That certainly was true of me. But Bruce broke me of that mindset.

He taught me how to fight. His life says to me now that the will to fight and the determination to win are as much a determinant of our success as they are a reflection of our character.

Bruce showed me that when people set expectations for us – they gave him six months – our job is to prove them wrong. Our job is to dig in our heels, stand firm, say no, and take control. Without his lesson I may still be sitting in a cubicle, still wishing I had the balls to attack life, still thinking writing books was something done by people who had more than me.

Thanks, Bruce. You’re missed.

- - -

In the six years I’ve been writing this site, I’ve never written a post on a topic dictated by an advertiser. This is different. The American Cancer Society is different. I’ve given them my site for today because I want them to have exposure, to make money, to be the engine that drives toward a cure.

I would also like to see just how much this disease has impacted the Dad Gone Mad readership community. If you choose to leave a comment, give us the name(s) and relationship(s) of those you have lost to cancer. Let us remember them here.

We were in the kitchen – I was manning the sausage station (man, that sounds dirty) and Hot Wife was arranging the pancake mix into shapes approximating a silhouette of Mickey Mouse – when our son removed himself from the Wii long enough to how dinner was progressing.

Also, he asked this nonsequitur:

“Dad, why did you have to have a vasectomy?”

Not the sort of thing you want to hear when you’re “manning the sausage station,” if you know what I mean. We have discussed private parts before, but mostly in the context of the differences between boys and girls – never in the domain of the practical application of those instruments or, as in this case, how to render them unproductive. All of this is to say I was wholly unprepared for this moment.

“Well…uh…son,” I started. “Have you ever seen a tadpole?”

“Uh-huh.”

“OK. Good.”

I look at Hot Wife, willing her to step in and assist me. She averts my eyes. I think she wants to hear my explanation, if only for the entertainment value.

“Well, your testicles…you know…your junk…produce these teeny, tiny, microscopic things that look a lot like tadpoles. They’re called sperm. So when the mommy and the daddy want to have a baby, the sperm comes from the dad’s junk and does a little happy dance all the way to the mom’s egg.”

He giggles. Hot Wife stifles a guffaw. Entertainment? Check!

While I ramble, we finish cooking and move to the dining room table. Our daughter joins us there. I start shaking Tapatio onto my eggs as I continue to speak.

“OK. So! After you and your cute little sister over there were born, mommy and I decided we were done having babies…”

“Why?”

“Because there’s so much awesome in the two of you that we just didn’t think we could handle any more awesomeness.”

He smiles. His sister smiles. Their mother rolls her eyes as if I just walked up to her wearing a suede, burgundy suit and thrown her that line about rearranging the alphabet so “U and I” could be next to each other.

“So that’s why I had a vasectomy,” I say.

He’s not satisfied. In fact, he looks perplexed.

“Do you have a question?” I ask him.

“What happens with a vasectomy?” he asks. “Like, what did they do to you?”

He’s old enough to remember the Friday I had my “procedure.” When he got home from school I was laying on the couch with a bag of frozen peas resting on my crotch. In fact, I spent the entire weekend that way. Some of that time may have been a sympathy ploy and an excuse to request that people bring me sandwiches and pain pills, but still…

“Well, the sperm starts in your junk and travels up through a tube and out through the hole in your pickle. When you have a vasectomy, they cut open your happy bag, chop the tube in half, and burn the ends closed with a solder iron.”

You should have seen his face. Having played baseball and soccer, and having been tagged in the balls a time or two, he had a sense for what sort of pain my explanation would create. His face scrunched up and his eyes opened wider and he kind of went, “oooooooh!” like someone in a video getting stabbed.

But then? Another probing question.

“So wait. There’s still sperms in there, right? They just can’t get out.”

“Pretty much,” I concede.

“What do they do?”

“I don’t know,” I say. “Maybe they just hang out in there and have a little party. Maybe they listen to Green Day and play Mario Kart.”

“Yeah,” my daughter says, laughing, “and maybe they have breakfast for dinner, too.”

“Ew!"

“Yeah. Ew.”

The night of my twenty-second birthday, I drank so much Jose Cuervo Gold that I blacked out for the first and last time in my life. Late (very late) the next morning I walked into the shower, hoping maybe the rush of hot water would cleanse me of my malaise and thumping headache. Suddenly the water pooling at me feet turned dark blue.

I had no recollection of becoming a Smurf overnight, and I couldn’t see the source of the blueness. Had I swallowed at 2,000 Flushes tablet? No. I turned around, looked behind myself, and noticed that my “friends” had taken advantage of my drunkenness by pulled my pants down and drawing a large, hair-specked penis on my right buttock. Next to it were the words, “Danny loves cock.”

(By the way, mom, that’s not true.)

Even worse than that humiliation, however, was the lingering taste of tequila. Even after I’d scrubbed my ass clean, brushed my teeth, swallowed a gallon of water, and munched on a bag of Corn Nuts, I couldn’t chase that sweet, awful tequila taste from my mouth. It was like my taste buds were the only part of me that had any recollection of the night before, and they weren’t about to let it go.

That was 18 years ago!

I tested my theory Saturday night. I drank tequila. On purpose. My friend Marty, about whom I have written here before, has an appetite for the finer food and drink, and to celebrate a joyous occasion he bought two bottles of this stuff.

I took four shots of it.

Today I have this sensation that my left eyeball is going to take a swan dive into my lap and the skin from the right side of my face is going to slide down to the front of my chest and establish a home there, like a boob. A boob that looks like my face. A faceboob.

The good news, however, is that there was no ass graffiti this time. Where I come from, we call that progress.

See you in 18 years, tequila, my sweet, sweet love.

Well, the Lakers anyway.

We don’t really think about weather here. We don’t have seasons. I can’t even remember the last time I wore a jacket. When we turn on the national news and see Buffalo digging out of a blizzard or the Carolinas bracing for a hurricane or Kansas running for cover after a tornado warning, sometimes its all we can do not to say, “That’s what you get for not living in California, idiots.”

Well, who’s the idiot now? [Points at self]

I was asleep at 2:16 am last night – dead asleep, dreaming – when Mother Nature decided to fuck with me. Out of nowhere, she unloaded a booming, soul-shaking clap of thunder that sounded like a very angry F-16 was landing on the roof of Evans World Headquarters. I woke up thinking I was in the middle of a Michael Bay movie.

I sat up straight. Hot Wife did the same. We rubbed the sleep out of our eyes and then, in a scene right out of Home Alone, we looked at each other a screamed at the top of our lungs.

“What was that?” I said.

“I don’t know,” she said. “Sounded like a yeti.”

“There aren’t any yetis in Orange County, honey. That was something man-made. It might have been Optimus Prime.”

“Octo-mom?”

“No,” I snapped. “The Transformer guy. He’s probably on the roof right now because he thinks I’m Shia Laboeuf. He sounds pissed.”

“OK,” she said, calculating, “you go outside and kill the yeti and I’ll check on the kids.”

“It’s not a yeti, it’s a robot in disguise,” I said. “And what am I supposed to kill it with? All I have here is a Mag-Lite and a tube of KY. When was the last time you heard of a Transformer getting a prostate exam?”

“Shit!” she said.

“Yeah,” I said. “Shit!”

I turned on the little clock radio next to the bed and tuned it to the all-news station, if only to see if the Transformers were launching a full-scale assault on Southern California. Turns out they weren’t. The weather dude said something about “a large, unstable air mass” over the area.

Oh well. We still have the Lakers.

About 18 months ago, when I decided it was time to (as my mother-in-law like to say) “shit or get off the pot” with respect to my dream of writing a book, I emailed every blogger I knew and asked if they could help me. I needed an agent. I needed an editor. I needed to know what a book proposal looked like. I needed everything.

What I learned from that experience is this: there are a lot of extraordinarily supportive people in our midst. Everyone I asked helped me. Everyone.

Including Jen. Especially Jen.

When I’d finally signed with an agent and we’d nailed down my final proposal for RAGE, I sent it to Jen to see if she wouldn’t mind writing a blurb for the proposal. Given the fact that she was already well on her way to becoming the New York Times best-selling author she is now, I was floored when she agreed.

But then she went farther.

She told me to make sure my agent sent the book to HER editor at NAL, and she promised to give that editor a heads-up that RAGE was coming and she should read it. A few weeks later, Jen’s editor offered me a book deal.

About two weeks ago, Jen’s tour for her fourth book brought her to Orange County. It was the first opportunity I’ve had to meet her and thank her in person. Hot Wife and the kids, all knowing the tremendous positive difference she’s made in our lives, demanded that they be allowed to go and meet Jen, too.

There were 300 people there. It was a school night so Hot Wife and kids snuck up to the table where Jen was signing, introduced themselves, and left. I stayed. And waited. And waited. And waited. You should have seen it. All of these people, books in hand, giddy about the prospect of meeting the author they cherish. They waited in line for hours. And the best part? Jen never stopped smiling. She was genuinely happy to be there, meeting her fans, posing for photos, shaking hands, giving hugs.

When everyone was done – including the bookstore employees! – Jen and I went to get a drink, and I finally got to hug her and thank her for literally helping me change my life. The great news? She’s the real deal. As warm and genuine in real life as I always assumed she would be. And of course, she would take no credit. But I told her she had no choice.

If you haven’t read Jen’s books, you must. I say that not because I want you to support my friend (although I do) but because she doesn’t take shortcuts. Her books sell by the hundreds of thousands because each one is a bona fide examination of her life, her motives, her loves, her shortcomings, and her attachment to reality TV. And they are funny as hell. Those are the kinds of books I want to write, too. (Per Jen’s order, I have started my second.)

The past year has been humbling for me. While I have worked hard and pushed forward and made some of my own breaks, I have learned without equivocation that no man succeeds without help. I have learned that achieving a goal has as much to do with the caliber of people one surrounds himself with as it does about his own fortitude.

If we’re lucky in life, we all get a Jen. If we’re lucky, we befriend someone who, just by living his or her life the way her or she always does, opens doors and inspires and lifts us up.

I’m certain this all sounds a little too stalkerish and creepy, but I’m acting on the belief that this is the kind of person many of us wish to be. And I want to thank Jen publicly for giving me something to pay forward.

I think I’m prepared for whatever may come from my desire to push the issue of male depression into the light. With such a volatile and misunderstood topic, I’m sure there will be all manner of reactions to the book. Some will call me strong, some will call me weak. Some will be supportive, some will be outraged that I could find humor in such personal devastation. Still, no reaction could be as bad as the disease itself, so I consider myself prepared for just about anything people may say about my depression.

I was not, however, prepared for this:

Dear Mr. Evans:

Thank you for considering Big-Ass Health Plan for your health coverage. Unfortunately, we are unable to offer you coverage at this time.

Big-Ass Health Plan is a cost-effective individual health care coverage program. We maintain its cost-effectiveness by only accepting for membership those individuals who successfully pass the medical underwriting screening process. Based on the information provided on the application for membership, we cannot approve enrollment due to the following:

* Serious medication(s) listed on your application

* Your history of major depression or neurosis

* Your history of mild depression/anxiety

Again, thank you for considering us for your health care needs.

Sincerely,

Big-Ass Heath Plan

I’m trying very hard not to react to this correspondence with a tidal wave of self-righteousness and indignation. I’m trying to be grown up about it, to remember that health care is a business, not a birthright. I’m trying to come to terms with the sad reality that my depression, which is almost NINE YEARS in the rearview mirror, is a threat to a health plan’s bottom line and THAT’S why I was rejected. It’s not because they don’t like me.

Then again? Jesus Harold Carmichael Christ! We’re only going to insure people who are and have been in perfect health for their entire lives? Is it of no consequence that I worked my skinny white ass off to pull myself out of depression? It’s like a foreigner applying for US citizenship only to be rejected because this one time? Like 20 years ago? He used the word F-A-S-C-I-S-T in Scrabble.

“Serious medication”? Is there such a thing as “funny medication”? “Light-hearted, trivial medication”?
My “history” of depression/anxiety? What about the rest of my history? That was OK with you? Like the time I got so drunk in college that I woke up the next morning with a Sharpie drawing of a penis on my right butt cheek? And the time I threw a rock across the street and hit Gina Giudicceci in the head? That’s all fine and harmless, but the depression I had almost a decade ago is a deal-breaker?

Dear Big-Ass Health Plan:

Thank you for rejecting my application for medical insurance. Fortunately, I'm going out on a book tour in a few weeks and I'm going to use your rejection as fodder when people ask for examples of how I think depression is still so misunderstood. Also, I'm going to blog the ever-loving shit out of your corporate buffoonery. Evidently, you don't know who you fucked with this time. See, cuz I'm mentally ill? And it probably would be wise to adjust your eligibility standards so you don't make crazy people mad. Especially crazy people with an axe to grind. And a blog. And a reading audience in the high teens. Bitch!

All my love,

The Reject

YOUR ASSIGNMENT
In the comments section of this post, I would like someone to make the case FOR banning gay marriage.

GUIDELINES
If possible, since church and state are supposed to be separate, refrain from variations on the theme of "God said so." Also, I will not hesitate to delete comments that I deem hateful, disrespectful, or mean.

Ready? Go.