Blood & Tears
Blood & Tears
I wrote about corndogs, cigarettes, and crying on the ambulance for SAD HAPPENS, a new anthology from Brandon Stosuy and Rose Lazar
When I started working for Marfa EMS, a frontier 911 ambulance service, I was a confused mess. I’d considered writing about the experience, but chose not to. I became a first responder in 2010 because I was burned out on writing, and wanted to do something immediately helpful. And as I learned very quickly, when I was on duty I needed to focus completely on whatever was happening right in front of me, not get distracted by how I might repackage it for an audience after we returned from the ER. And so it is an unexpected pleasure and a privilege to announce with the 101st edition of the Vøid Säd Contemplation Tactics newsletter that my essay about trying not to cry on the ambulance will be published in Sad Happens: A Celebration of Tears, “a beautifully-illustrated, celebratory anthology exploring sadness—and the transformative power of tears” from editor Brandon Stosuy and illustrator Rose Lazar. Sad Happens is available on 11/14/2023 from Simon & Schuster.
I’d recently moved to Marfa from Los Angeles when I decided to try work as a medical first responder, a job where – at the very least – I wouldn’t question why I was going to work in the morning, or in the afternoon, or in the middle of the night. I was looking for some meaning or purpose that I hadn’t been getting from my work as a freelance writer and editor in Los Angeles. Showing up to help people on the worst day of their lives is about as immediately useful as it gets.
Within a year of making the move to rural Far West Texas, I completed the bare-bones 40 hours of training that qualifies anyone without an extensive criminal record for the job of Emergency Care Attendant (ECA). As the saying goes in EMS circles, if you’ve got a pulse and a patch you’ve got a job. It is not a difficult field to break into, but it’s also not easy to stay. If it’s not for you, that will become apparent within the first few runs. Even if you’ve got the physical and mental constitution to do the work, the combination of profound stress, high risk, and low compensation – I made $11/hour with no health insurance – makes it hard to hang around.
A friend from Los Angeles who had been watching my progress congratulated me once I had my Marfa EMS patch, saying “sounds like you’ve landed your first book, too.” Obviously it had occurred to me that I could write about my experience as a lonely 36-year-old person who chose to walk away from a miserable but high-paying startup job, and who never figured out how to sustain a once-promising career as a magazine writer and editor, to go into credit card debt as a trauma janitor at the ass-end of Texas.
The decade I spent as a writer and editor with URB and Arthur magazines – two wildly creative print publications covering art and culture through the politicized lenses of hip-hop, dance music, drugs, and bohemian counterculture writ large – was hugely important. I knew I could write, sometimes well. But after my first time sitting with a scared and hurting patient in the back of unit 411, I knew that I was on the ambulance to be on the ambulance.
As I’ve said elsewhere, one of the most important parts of being a medic is being fully present during very boring, gross, scary, sad, and traumatic moments. I did write about my experiences at the time, but only as personal correspondence with friends, and eventually in self-published essays here in the newsletter. Many of these friends are still on this mailing list: Thank you for reading for so many years, it means more that I know how to express. Both self-published essays are archived here:
I stayed with Marfa EMS for four years. In 2014 I once again quietly walked away from a career and closed another chapter in a resume that works better as an ADHD diagnosis than a pathway to financial stability. I started writing again with this newsletter, and began to see overlap between my work as a medic, and my experiences living at the Indianapolis Zen Center, the crusty, borderline apostate spiritual commune where I took up residence after leaving Marfa. My work as a medic is also an important part of Basking in Gravity, the audiovisual “psychedelic death yoga” and meditation art project I’ve been hosting since 2019.
My brief essay in Sad Happens is the first time I’ve produced anything about my EMS experience that wasn’t self-published. What’s more, it’s an actual IRL book – also available as an audiobook – that includes contributions from Hanif Abdurraqib, Mike Birbiglia, Sasha Grey, Eileen Myles, my old friend from the URB days, New Yorker staff writer Hua Hsu; and many others. I’m immensely grateful to Brandon for the thoughtful correspondence that led to my contribution, and to Rose for her wonderful illustrations of cigarettes, Bibles, and gas station corn dogs: three of the things that my kindred medics offered as substitutes for a shoulder to cry on.
Big gratitude to my dear friend Whitney Joiner who has given me a shoulder to cry on more times than I can remember since we first met in Marfa almost 15 years ago. She’s also given me so much wise and helpful feedback on my attempts to write about EMS, most of which are still hidden away on hard drives. All of my love to my wife Rachel Buckmaster, who has helped me burn though countless hours of anxiety, self-doubt, and frustration as I continue the emotionally and financially-draining hobby of writing. I am also immensely grateful to the 394 people who read this newsletter: Your enthusiasm and feedback and at the very least your decision to not smash the unsubscribe button does so much to soothe the anxiety and doubt that will always be mumbling in the background of my internal dialogue.
Last of all, solidarity and love to my kindred medics back in Marfa. I’m sorry I’ve fallen out of touch, but we all know that’s the way these things go sometimes. You taught me more than you can realize about what it means to be alive. Thank you for trusting me.
If you know anyone else who might find something useful or enjoyable in the Sad Happens anthology, or in the pages of this free newsletter, please pass the good word along. As with many other writers, self-promotion is a weak point for me. As with many other humans, social media is not good for my mental health. Word of mouth has gotten me this far, and I feel confident – if not hopeful lol – that at least six of you 394 subscribers have one friend who might also subscribe and take me over the 400-person mark. But also “more” is not the same thing as “enough” and 394 is way beyond what I was expecting. I’m much obliged to each individual reader for being enough.
We’ll return to the regularly scheduled Inter-Dimensional Music programming and curmudgeonly takes on spiritual anarchism and apostate Zen soon enough. Play us out, Glenn and/or Marissa …
Since you've been gone
I hear you've been crying …
blessing up and blessing down,
Daniel
If you know anyone who might find value or otherwise enjoy Vøid Contemplation Tactics or Inter-Dimensional Music, please pass it along. It means a lot to me!
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