A few months ago, I made the commitment to try to get into death metal. I was inspired by my yearly attempt to try to find more Halloween-related music to craft a new Halloween Mix. Based on the death metal album covers and song titles I saw, the genre seemed sufficiently spooky to provide me with a wealth of new spooky music for my spooky listening pleasure.
I mean, look at how spooky that is!
Or this one!
Unfortunately, as one of my friends sagely informed me in advance, only the death metal aesthetics is spooky. The actual music isn’t very spooky at all. This was disappointing to me, but it isn’t the fault of the music itself. This is a subgenre whose album to album expectations are unusually straightforward. You know exactly what you’re getting when you go to listen to a death metal album. It is what it is, nothing more or less.
As it turns out, I don’t really enjoy death metal, even setting aside my disappointment about the low spookiness quotient. It just isn’t for me. I respect the taste community insofar as I can’t tell if the music is any good not and so have no way of fairly evaluating it, just like I can’t fairly evaluate opera. Some of it’s probably good, and some of it probably sucks. That’s how genres usually work. Rarely are entire genres of art exclusively terrible, although such genres do exist (Troma films is a good example).
However, despite my lack of interest in death metal songs, the spookiness of the aesthetic still compels me. I was particularly intrigued by the song titles of Cannibal Corpse, who a death metal enthusiast friend of mine assured me was an essential band in the genre. Although I will probably never listen to another Cannibal Corpse song (because I don’t like them, not because they are bad), I still think the band should be commended for their staggering, legendary talent for naming songs. Below is a list of 50 Cannibal Corpse song titles that are just stone cold amazing. I could have made an even longer list, especially if I were interested in graphic sexuality (gems like “Orgasm through Torture” and “Stripped, Raped, and Strangled” would have been included), but I’m not. Anyway, I decided to keep it to 50. Enjoy!
This is the story of my 2013 suicide attempt. I hope that it brings hope to anyone out there who is currently suffering from suicidal ideation and inspiration in general to everyone who has gone through similar struggles in their lives.
When I was going through the very worst period of my life, a six-month major depressive episode that culminated in the suicide attempt, I met a woman (we’ll call her Jenny). Once Jenny found out what I was going through, she shared her story with me. “I went through the same thing that you’re going through now,” she said, “and I got better. I got better because of three things: therapy, medication, and a network of support from family and friends. I don’t think that by sharing my story with you, you will suddenly become well. No one’s story can do that. But the facts of my story are meaningful. I was as low as you are now, and I came out on the other side. These days, I’m as happy as anyone I know. I think that your story is the same as mine, just on a different timeline. You will get better, and it will happen via those same three things that helped me. People get better. I got better. Those are the facts.” Jenny had complete confidence in me, which was both helpful and wearying.
The truth of what she said was irrefutable. She had gone as far down as a human being could go, and now she was happy. That it COULD happen was undeniable. Of course, this didn’t change my situation much. But her story was always in the back of my mind, and even on the day I decided to kill myself, I couldn’t help but feel that the plot of my story was playing out in the same way that hers had. This exact thing had happened to her, and then she got better. It was something to hold on to, even when it wasn’t enough to keep me from letting go.
In February of 2013, I was diagnosed with bipolar I. I had struggled with the illness off and on for most of my adult life, but a series of personal events that occurred at the end of 2012 led me to my most extreme depressive episode. I exhibited all of the classic signs of depression. I lost the feeling that life was meaningful. I was unable to experience pleasure from any of the things that had typically brought it to me, a symptom common to depression called “anhedonia.” My personal relationships were variously either too taxing to be worth attending to or so profoundly crucial to my survival that I wore them thin. I was maudlin, implacable, and impossible to get off the phone. My friends were becoming exhausted by the constant need to keep me afloat. Their efforts to keep me alive were sincere, but my illness was indefatigable. Even the most grand of gestures was only able to stave off my sadness temporarily. Most mornings, I woke to find that my depression had reset overnight like a computer, no matter how much happiness I had procured when I went to sleep. One of the most obvious signs of depression is difficulty getting out of bed, and this, I think, is why. And there was nothing either I or my friends could do to prevent it.
Regardless, life had stopped being a thing worth doing, so I kept living only out of obligation and fear of death. I knew that there was no hope for me to get better. It was only a matter of deciding whether or not to continue living a hopeless life. I did my best to keep my life running. I joylessly did those things that were required of me and nothing else.
Well, I mean, nothing else but talk endlessly about my depression and my desire to end my life. Most people who go on to attempt suicide (80%, recent numbers show) talk about killing themselves to someone beforehand, and many leave clues about their impending suicide attempt once they have decided on a plan and a time frame. I was no exception. I talked of suicide constantly to anyone who would listen. I was urged to find a therapist by my overburdened friends, after a few misses, I found a pleasant and capable woman who diagnosed me almost immediately and started me on medication. It was the beginning of what would ultimately be the mechanism by which I recovered.
But, for the moment, it had come too late. I wasn’t immediately getting better, and I believed that there was no real evidence to suggest that I ever would. When Jenny told me that she had felt the same way when she was at this point in HER story and that she wished she had just been patient (because therapy and medication can take months to effect true change), I believed her, but I didn’t feel comforted. It was annoying, really. I felt like my decision to kill myself could only be cliché now because she had done it too. I felt disempowered. But I didn’t feel anything as strongly as the melancholy and loneliness that had become my entire experience of the world. Cliché or not, I decided that, with no future prospects of happiness, I had no option left but to kill myself. The majority of suicide survivors, myself included, spend much of the period of their “active suicidal ideation” in a state of powerful ambivalence, unwilling to actually die but unable to see any reason to keep living. They are, as Robert Lowell puts it, “to-froing on the fringe of being.” Eventually, I fro’d.
I attempted suicide on April 12th of that year. I could highlight a few incidents as tipping points, but ultimately the decision was less a reaction to what was happening and more a reaction to what wasn’t happening. As I said, I simply wasn’t getting better, and I couldn’t envision a world where things were better for me. So, I gave up. Alone at 10:30 in a campus building whose doors closed at 5:15, I took the elevator up one story to the tenth floor with the intention of jumping off of the roof. I found, to both my horror and relief, that there was no way to get onto the roof without a key, the kind that was given only to janitors and campus security. While I mulled this over, I was approached by an actual janitor to whom I explained my dilemma, pretending to be a hired photographer looking to get some impressive shots of downtown Atlanta. He responded with a long, almost Shakespearean speech about the magnetism of falling when alone at great heights, comparing being on top of a tall building to being aboard a tall ship. “When you’re alone at the top like that, it just calls to you,” he said in my life’s most outrageous moment of deus ex machina. Unable to convince this man, who I saw a few times later after my recovery and thus know was not fictional, to allow me on the roof, I took the elevator back down one story and retreated to my office, saved from ending my life by someone whose name also means “the illegal lending of money at exorbitantly high interest rates.”
In a fit of manic amusement, I called a close friend, and, giggling wildly the whole time, told her what had happened. She told me she was going to call the campus police for my safety but, having been previously institutionalized and being unwilling to go through it again (mostly because of how boring it was), I made her promise not to. She got off the phone and immediately did so anyway, which I am to this day very grateful for, even though I called her when I found out and berated her for her betrayal. After her, I called Jenny.
Jenny sympathized with my struggle and asked me if I felt like I was safe. I told her that I was. Like many suicide attempters, once my initial attempt fell through, the idea lost its appeal and no longer seemed attractive to me. Jenny understood this and was in the middle of helping me understand it myself when a campus police officer arrived at my office door.
I’ll spare you the details of the grotesque and comic day that followed, including my discovery that the officer was on the hunt for me but had misheard my name as “Zack Romeo,” a suicide note with “THIS IS A SUICIDE NOTE” written at the top of it, and the cat-and-mouse game I played with my concerned friends who were trying to find me to get me into the mental institution, which I eventually lost because they promised me free McDonald’s and told me they would take me to a monastery. When people romanticize how interesting it is to have bipolar, I balk. For the vast majority, the illness mostly presents as depression with occasional mania, and depression is by nature usually uninteresting. However, the events of that day remain unbelievable to me to this day.
It barely seemed like a suicide attempt to me, but my therapist disagreed. She argued that it was no different than if I’d put a gun to my head and pulled the trigger, only to find that it wasn’t loaded. If the roof had been accessible, I would be dead. Thankfully, it wasn’t.
My institutionalization lasted a little under a week. Over the months that followed my release, I made a full recovery. I was lucky enough to have found a good therapist, to have figured out what medication worked for me on the second try (lamotrigine, a seizure medication commonly prescribed to those with bipolar), and to have had a network of friends and family. I got better exactly as Jenny predicated, in the same amount of time and by way of the same three means. I no longer experience any of the symptoms of bipolar, and I’ve long since no longer needed therapy; a determination made, importantly, not by me but by my therapist.
The facts of my story are just as undeniable as Jenny’s. I fell as low as I could fall, and now I am happier than I’ve ever been in my life. It happened to me just as it had happened to Jenny. If you are currently suffering from mental illness, especially if you’re thinking of attempting suicide, you can hold on to my story, just as I held on to Jenny’s story. It won’t save you by itself, but it’s there, and it’s as true as anything can be. I will add that I suffered from a specific mental illness and experienced those symptoms that are characteristic of it. You may struggle with a different illness, so my story may only partially resemble yours. But I have learned from my extensive interaction with others who suffer from different illness that much of what I went through applies to a wide range of situations. The facts agree. People get better. I got better. So can you.
The 2004 Detroit Pistons are the only team in NBA history to win a Championship without a Hall of Famer.
Every team in the history of the NBA, which began in 1946, has had a Hall of Famer on their roster except for the 2004 Detroit Pistons.
In 2004, the Detroit Pistons won an NBA Championship without a Hall of Fame caliber player. That had never happened before, and it hasn’t happened since.
No matter how many different ways I type this, I don’t feel like you’re going to get the full impact of how much of a historical anomaly the ’04 Pistons are. They weren’t just a weird Championship team. They weren’t just unexpected Champions. They are, to this date, the least likely team to ever win a title. Historically, the odds of them winning that title were so small that it’s still unbelievable that they did. I don’t mean “astounding” or “impressive.” I mean that everything in the history of the NBA, which is 73 years old, dictates that they shouldn’t have won. The formula “winning team must have at least one Hall of Famer” is 72-1 in the NBA Finals. 72-1! That’s a 1.39% chance of winning for Detroit. If I went back and offered you the chance to bet $20 against the Pistons in the 2004 NBA Finals, and you didn’t do it, you’d be a complete moron.
You’d also have my $20.
Not all playoff systems are created equal. There are a few Super Bowl winners without Hall of Famers (will this happen to the 2017 Eagles?). Global soccer doesn’t have a Hall of Fame; I don’t know if any global team sports do. College sports, which already have tenuous connections to their various Halls of Fame (if they even have them), frequently produced Sean May type champions. The single-game elimination format occasionally results in this outcome, just by a combination of injuries, bad luck for the best teams, and good luck for the mediocre ones. Sometimes, one bad call swings an entire game and thus an entire season. Sometimes, Eli Manning throws an insane pass to David Tyree, a man who didn’t catch a single NFL pass after that one. You can’t predict every single game in any sport, which is why Eli Manning might make the Hall of Fame. Sometimes stuff just happens. Sometimes it happens for Eli Manning in two separate years, and then he makes the Hall of Fame. Eli Manning! What can you do?
This is why I think a series-based format, though not realistic for every sport, is preferable in attempting to determine the best team in every given year. Nowhere is this MORE apparent than the NBA, where no team without a Hall of Fame caliber player has ever won a Championship. It’s not always the case that the best regular season team wins or that the most impressive playoff team wins, but the team that DOES win, no matter how good they seemed or how they performed prior to the Finals, always, always, ALWAYS has a Hall of Fame caliber player. There are no Sean Mays here. You have to earn your Championship over four seven-game playoff series. Of course, there’s room for error with everything. Injuries happen. Bad luck happens. Shady officiating happens. But, even if the team that seemed the most deserving doesn’t win, an undeserving team NEVER wins. There’s always a team with a player so great that he is will go to the Hall of Fame holding the Larry O’Brien trophy at the end.
And I’m not talking about washed up Hall of Famers riding the bench chasing a ring. I’m not even talking about Hall of Famers as role players, like Karl Malone as a Laker. Every NBA Champion has had a Hall of Famer as their best or second best player at the time of their win. At no point has a team won the NBA Championship without a Hall of Famer somewhere in their prime.
Although it’s not technically intended to be, the Finals MVP provides a mostly reliable index for who a Champion’s best player was. There are exceptions because the Finals MVP is specifically designed to reward the player who played the best in the final series. Sometimes, someone who isn’t the team’s best player outperforms everyone else in that series (like when Tony Parker carved up the Cavaliers in 2007). Sometimes, a team’s best player underperforms and essentially plays himself out of contention (like when Larry Bird had back-to-back 8 point games in 1981, giving the Finals MVP to the more consistent Cedric Maxwell, who should have won it anyway for being a Niner). And sometimes, the NBA just gets cute with it (like when they gave it to Andre Iguodala in 2015 for guarding Lebron, which, to be fair, wasn’t entirely unreasonable given that Lebron submitted one of the most impressive one-man performances in Finals history). Still, overall, it’s a pretty reliable way to see who led any given team to a Championship.
Let me be clear here. I’m talking about EVERY Championship team, all the way up to the present day Lakers (setting aside Kawhi Leonard’s Raptors for now, which I will address at the end of the post). Players have to be retired for at least three years before they become eligible for the Hall, but this rule applies to every single team, including ones whose players are still active.
Although that may seem suspect initially, it’s actually not particularly controversial when you go back and look at the Championship teams. Just to give us a substantial sample size, every NBA champion this century was led by obvious Hall of Famers. It seems like something you might want to argue about until you actually go through the teams. Here’s a list of the players who were the best on a team that won a title this century (again, setting aside the Raptors): Shaq, Tim Duncan, Dwyane Wade, Kevin Garnett, Kobe, Dirk Nowitzki, Lebron, Steph Curry, Kevin Durant. Not a lot to discuss here. All of those men are either already in the Hall of Fame or indisputably bound for it. And if you go back into the 90’s, you’ll find that those players have all already been inducted.
What’s more, these men were almost all Hall of Fame bound when they won their titles. As a general rule, Hall of Fame players have to pay their dues and establish themselves before they win their first Championship (Giannis is going through this right now). Of course, many players play themselves into the Hall of Fame by winning a bunch of titles (like Dennis Johnson). But it’s not as many as you’d think. Of the players on that list, which again covers this entire century, all of them had already won a regular season MVP or were the reigning MVP when they won their first Championship except for Dwyane Wade, who was playing with former MVP Shaq. These were men who were well on their way to induction before they got their titles. I mean, there are only nine of them. You could argue that some of these men were actually the second best players on their Championship teams (particularly the Spurs, who played pure team basketball), but that isn’t in contradiction with my larger argument, which is that all NBA champions have a Hall of Famer as their best or second best player.
Well. All of them excepppppttttttttt.
So what happened with the ’04 Detroit Pistons? Let me briefly address the unlikely objection that someone on that team is a future Hall of Famer. Even given how easy it is to make it into the Hall of Fame, none of the players on that roster have a shot. Who was their best player? The Finals MVP was Chauncey Billups, and rightfully so, but he never even made an All-NBA First Team (and only made the Second Team once). The player with the strongest resume (and that year’s overall playoffs MVP) is Ben Wallace, a four time Defensive Player of the year and four time All-Star. He also never made the All-NBA First Team and, to my surprise, only led the league in rebounding twice. But it doesn’t matter. Both of them have been Hall eligible for at least six years and counting. They all had a shot in 2018, a weak year that saw Vlade Divac and Sidney Moncrief making it, and they didn’t make it. Their probabilities go down every year as new, deserving players emerge.
Tellingly, the probability-based list of “next in line but won’t make it” that I researched includes two other players from the ’04 Pistons: Rasheed Wallace and Rip Hamilton. This gets to the heart of what was so anomalous about that team. It’s more than just the fact that they didn’t have a clear number one player. It’s that none of their possible number one players were of the caliber of ANY of the number one players on ANY other Championship team in the nearly 75 year history of the NBA.
Here’s an explanation of how they managed to win a title despite that from a glowing retrospective article about the team: “It was a perfect team for a perfect time, one that couldn’t be duplicated in its own era and certainly not in the age of ‘Super Friends’ aligning to wreck the league…a superstar-less team that wasn’t any less complete than any of its predecessors, successors or peers. Time hasn’t diminished the Pistons’ standing as the most surprising champion in modern NBA history. They were a bunch of castoffs, players who’d been passed around, skipped over and dismissed by other organizations who managed to come together in Detroit — bonded by collective failures, mischaracterizations and a maniacal competitiveness that looked like arrogance wrapped in resilience.”
That’s the nice way of putting it. Here’s what Bill Simmons said in his essential The Book of Basketball, after calling Billups the best player on that team: “Billups led the ’04 Pistons during a discombobulated season when the rules swung too far in favor of elite defensive teams who made threes and limited possessions. Plus, the Shaq/Kobe era completely imploded that season, with half the team embroiled in ‘I’m not talking to that mothafucka anymore” fights…and yet they still could have won the title if Karl Malone hadn’t gotten hurt.” (Like everyone else, Simmons is unclear on who the best player on the team was, calling Billups the leader here and elsewhere saying Wallace was the ’04 playoffs MVP.)
What Simmons alludes to (in part) is the NBA’s decision to legalize zone defense as of the 2001-2002 season. This resulted in what is generally agreed to be the century’s most boring stretch of NBA basketball. The 2003 Spurs/Nets Finals was one of the least watched in NBA history. The Pistons and Spurs, both elite defensive teams, thrived in this era, but the NBA did not. Immediately after the Pistons won the ’04 title, the NBA changed the rules for enforcement of hand checking in hopes of leveling out the playing field for offenses and making basketball watchable again. But for that 2-3 year window, elite defenses had a significant advantage.
That’s how the Detroit Pistons managed to win their title with a roster that lacked a Hall of Fame player. It had never happened before, and it hasn’t happened since. And I don’t know if it ever will.
Postscript:
I started writing this post three years ago. To my great surprise, the Toronto Raptors won the Championship in 2019, and that’s caused me to reevaluate my argument. Kawhi Leonard is an exception to my general rule that the Hall of Famers on title-winning teams in this century have already been well on their to induction. Although he had a robust resume after winning the title last year (2 Championships, 2 Finals MVPs, 2 All-NBA 1st Teams, 2 Defensive Player of the Year awards), he is far from a lock. Like Dennis Johnson, he is a player whose career needs to fully unfold before we can say for certain if he’s worthy of induction.
And I think he was well on track…but then he went to the Clippers. By voluntarily joining the NBA’s most doomed franchise, I think Leonard has put his entire career (and, more importantly, my argument) in jeopardy. Whether he believes it or not, he has year after year of playoff let-downs ahead of him in Los Angeles. He will not win a title with the Clippers. They will roll into every playoffs looking solid and then embarrassingly underperform, probably missing *another* potential epic showdown with the Lakers in the process. If his career numbers stay around where they are per game, he’ll need another Championship to have a Hall of Fame resume (unless he plays for an unusually long time). He was All-NBA First Team in 2016 and 2017, but there’s a good chance that doesn’t happen again.
And he will NOT win a Championship playing for the Los Angeles Clippers. It will never happen. So, although he is a great player and could definitely end up making the Hall, he is the biggest threat to the validity of my argument going forward. In fact, I think him ruining his career by going to the Clippers is a bigger threat than any of the ’04 Pistons making the Hall. So, you know. Get it together, Kahwi. My blog post NEEDS you.
It hasn’t been a great year for America. Election Day is upon us, and our country is still bitterly divided. Rather than bring our nation closer together, it looks to me like this year has further entrenched us in our pre-established and often antipodal theoretical and political positions.
But this fighting, which at times is our moral obligation and at times is just Internet nastiness, does not preclude us from sticking together as a country. We can be divided while still being whole. There are few things that really link all of us, few things that draw together all Americans. I’ve thought a lot this week about what those things are and have realized again and again how hard it is to find them. At every turn, there is someone who cannot connect.
But these things DO exist. I thought of one. All of us have as part of our American heritage a deep connection to Emily Dickinson. This woman, who has written poetry that ranks among the greatest of all time, is a part of what it means to be an American. This woman, whose thoughts on Nature, so unique and so profound, were written in a garden by her humble New England home that is about the size of my parent’s backyard, is for all of us. She is American, and we, as Americans, can share in the power and profundity of her words. All of us, no matter what we believe or who we love/hate, have an equal claim to Emily Dickinson. No American can be denied the right to say that he or she comes from the country of Emily Dickinson, the proud and beautiful country that alone could have brought to the world such a poet. No other country could have produced Emily Dickinson. I know because they’ve had plenty of time, and they haven’t. We as Americans have the right the be part of the story of Emily Dickinson. And that is a wonderful, wonderful thing. Let that bring you peace in these times of intellectual war. Read an Emily Dickinson poem this week, and listen to what she has to say. She wrote it for me and for you. She addressed it to America.
You can still believe in America. America produced Emily Dickinson. It will continue to produce things that live up to the ideals of our country, even as it simultaneously self-destructs in other ways. How do I know? Here, in no order, are 50 other things that America is responsible for that all Americans can be proud of:
1. Miles Wesley Rearick
2. 12 Angry Men
3. Bleach by Nirvana
4. Regal Cinemas
5. Vince Carter’s dunk on Frederic Weis
6. The microwave
7. GPS
8. Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison
9. Target
10. Carli Lloyd’s hat trick in the 2015 World Cup Finals
11. The Wright Brothers
12. The X-Files
13. Norton Criticals
14. Leaves of Grass by Walt Whitman
15. Potato chips
16. StitchFix
17. Scattergories
18. Jesse Owens
19. Into the Woods
20. “National Anthem” by Lana Del Rey
21. Trick ‘r Treat
22. Graco products
23. Pepsi
24. Netflix
25. Rose Lavelle
26. Facebook
27. Ariel by Sylvia Plath
28. SwaddleMe
29. Kerri Strug
30. “Hail Mary” by 2Pac
31. The Peanuts comic strip
32. Saving Private Ryan
33. Modern-day barbecue sauce
34. The Breakfast Club
35. Thriller by Michael Jackson
36. The Giver by Lois Lowry
37. How I Met Your Mother
38. Billy Joel
39. Cranium Party Playoff
40. Michael Phelps at the 2008 Olympics
41. Chemotherapy
42. The Popeye’s Chicken Sandwich (it’s a proper noun to me)
blood bank blues 