There has been a change in my life that is massive and boring, miraculous and quotidian. After decades of failing, flailing, and frustration, I am on medication and in therapy for ADHD. My brain is finally beginning to work properly, and the biggest breakthrough is the smallest: now I rinse the last dish. Perhaps you think of ADHD as a racing mind, a restless energy, a propensity to focus a little bit on a lot of things, but for me, the symptoms were all in the sink. I'd always been good at starting to do the dishes. I'd come in hot every time, then get 85% of the way through and burn out. My mind would flash to any of the other dozen tasks I'd left 85% done, and I'd rush off to finish one of those. A dirty dish and a fork left to be tended to at a later time, when I was 85% into something else. There was always a little bit of laundry left unfolded, a bill or two left unpaid, a to-do list almost all crossed off. That's what my ADHD looked like in adulthood: small piles of good intentions strewn around the house. |
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| How to Get Into the Marvel Cinematic Universe |
One fateful Tuesday afternoon, during Esquire's weekly culture meeting, about a month before the debut of Spider-Man: No Way Home, our Articles Director, Kelly Stout, asked an innocent question: What if we wrote a guide for people who can't figure out how to get into Marvel? Brady, you should do that! said another editor. It'll be fun! chimed in the rest. I broke out in a cold sweat. No. This would, decidedly, not be fun. At the time, the Marvel Cinematic Universe—which began with 2008's Iron Man—included 26 movies and an indeterminate number of TV seasons. That total has only swelled in the time since. It now clocks in at well over 100 hours of interconnected storytelling, countless running gags, and multiple versions of super-powered dudes played by Benedict Cumberbatch and Tom Hiddleston. Some of the releases are pretty damn good. Some aren't! Not to sound like Esquire's resident poindexter, which I am, but you just can't… get… into… Marvel. On a bad day, with all the superheroes and zingers and CGI explosions bleeding in and around my brain, I might even advise against it. I got the assignment, all the same. And I put it off for six months. It felt impossible. But like Peter Parker under a building's worth of rubble, screaming and sobbing to get out—but yes, eventually doing it because he simply had to—I pulled my shit together. |
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Creed Bratton Has a Story to Tell |
Creed Bratton is a troubadour. If you'll listen, he'd like to tell you a story. It's his, and it's complicated. There's so much of it, so much you need to know no matter where he begins. He's lived three lives, had five names. At least. He's most well-known, of course, for playing the seedy, scheming octogenarian, with whom he shares a name, on the American version of the television show The Office. He turned a non-speaking background role into a cult-favorite character on one of the most successful comedies of all time, but that's not the story. So much came before that. Like when he hitched his way, penniless, around the globe, formed a band in Germany, played gigs for oil camps in the Sahara, a brothel full of sheikhs in Beirut, smoked the most potent pot imaginable in Lebanon, chilled with Kirk Douglas in Israel, played some more music, came home, still penniless, formed another band, and then scored two certified gold singles and a gold album–all by the age of 26. Those are just highlights of the highlights, and anyway, that's not the story, either. Not to Creed. We started talking via FaceTime in June of 2020 (he's in L.A.; I'm in New York). COVID still felt as unpredictable as it did deadly and Creed, then 77, had confined himself to his townhouse. He was a month away from dropping his ninth solo album, Slightly Altered, and the idea was to pair a profile–Did you know Creed Bratton is a singer-songwriter?–with the release. But as we dug into his past, it became evident he was telling me a story much bigger than a pithy hidden-in-plain-sight piece. |
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Forever Trying to Rescue You |
Dear Rob, I love you, Dad. Those are the last words you said to me the day before you killed yourself. They're also the last words you said to me in the first letter I wrote to you in this magazine, 24 years ago. Back then you were "Robbie" and I was "Daddy," and I never thought I could possibly love you more than I did. Then again, I never imagined I'd be writing this letter to you now. At least, not consciously. But down deep, I came to fear this day would come. On some level, I felt that, no matter how hard I tried, there was nothing I could do to stop it. The letter I wrote when you were seven was about how I hadn't wanted to adopt you—it was Mom's idea—and how that feeling vanished the moment I first saw your beautiful face. This letter is about another kind of feeling, one that will never vanish. Sometimes I feel that you're right here beside me. I hear you talking to me–like right now I just heard you say, "Dad, I hate it when you sound so sad. That's the worst." It's the worst for me too, dude. There was a whole lot of "the worst" those last few years. Ending with the worst of the worst. Which I didn't see coming when we had lunch at our favorite Chinese restaurant in Los Angeles the afternoon before you did what you did. |
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I Tried Everything. Then I Tried Ayahuasca. |
Six months ago, I sat outside, on a wooden deck in the mountains, across from a white dude with a man bun. "Do you actually think this can fix me?" I asked him. The man went by "Kapétt," a name he picked up while studying indigenous culture in a Peruvian forest, though his legal name was John Thomas Caldwell III, and he was raised in Greenwich, Connecticut. "I can't promise that," said Kapétt/John III, moving his left leg to cross under his right. "But I've seen people speak with their deceased loved ones. Others who've had their depression instantly cleared. Things you wouldn't believe." Neither of those possibilities interested me. I'm not depressed and I don't believe in ghosts or God or an after-life. When we die, we turn off, at least I think so. And if I'm wrong, and my dead relatives do exist, I have no desire to hear from them—loud Jews from the world beyond, floating around my bedroom, judging me for the gay-leaning porn I consume when I believe I'm alone. But regardless, I, at 31, came to this retreat because of a vestibular balance issue I'd been dealing with for three years—something wrong with my left ear. Every moment that I'd been awake, on a first date or a job interview, on a run, or in a chair, drunk at a concert or sober in bed, standing up or upside down, I'd been mildly dizzy. |
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The 32 Best Gay Bars in America |
When we gathered over Zoom to plan stories about LGBTQ+ lives, Esquire's Market Editor Alfonso Fernandez Navas said something so profound and significant that we will quote it in full: "Can we, like, have fun?" It is not an exaggeration to say that Alfonso's request inspired a real and welcome shift in perspective. So much of the narrative around the queer experience is centered around trauma. Illness and alienation. The pain of finding your true self, by yourself, in a hostile world, and the pain of living in a world that is swinging back toward that hostility. And it is important to remember those things. We have to know where we've been. But we also have to know where we are. We have to acknowledge that we survived what's come before, and we have to celebrate being alive to face what's ahead. |
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