No, this is a different piece. It’s about the experience of being without Jen.

It is not an advice piece. I would never offer advice on relationships or matters of the heart. I just feel like it would be as trustworthy as Inspector Clouseau's advice on police work.

It’s a description of where I’ve been, and where I am today.

Every now and then people ask me what the milestones were during the last decade, or what I learned. I have email and phone conversations somewhat regularly with people who know about this part of my biography and are experiencing some version of it now and want to know more or less what they’re in for. I never know what to tell them except that it was all a slow-motion blur, one situation bleeding into another.

Things were especially blurry in the years right after Jen died. I was basically a drunk and a pothead for the first two years, but I was so careful about hiding it that only a few people knew how bad it was. It was so bad that one time I just took off for two weeks and visited three cities, got blackout drunk and woke up in a hotel in a fourth city, San Francisco, in a room overlooking the bay, with no memory of having bought a plane ticket or booked a room there.



Then there was an approximately two-month stretch where I’d leave my kids with friends or family members, get drunk in bars and wander around Brooklyn trying to provoke fistfights with strangers—a suicide wish, to be sure, or maybe just a wish to at least be convicted of assault and go to jail and be taken out of my family’s ongoing story, a drama in which I felt like a miscast actor who couldn’t remember his lines anyway, so what was the point of even being onstage?

I used to castigate myself about all the bad decisions I made during that period.

There were a lot. I mean a lot.

I had two newspaper jobs when Jen died, one full time and the other contract freelance. But I felt embarrassed at my inability to produce at the same level I had before, so I quit both of them. I could have gone on disability from the staff job or taken a sabbatical from the freelance gig. There was no reason to have just quit. It wasn’t helping anyone but the companies that employed me—helping them save a few bucks. Dumb, dumb, dumb. I burned through the insurance money and part of our savings. I sold a share in a condominium in Disney World that Jen had saved up for, to pay for a Super 16mm short film about my mental state about a year-and-a-half into the post-Jen era, a period in which I was drinking several bottles of red wine a day and using sleeping pills and caffeine pills to make myself go to sleep each night and be sure I woke up in time to get my daughter off to school the next day. I think it’s pretty good—at least it looks and sounds good, and has strong performances; I had professonal collaborators—but in a rare burst of common sense, I decided I’d rather spend a few thousand dollars on my children than get it scanned and color-corrected. (The negative is in a plastic bin in a safety deposit box. I have no idea where the sound files are. Somewhere, I hope.)