THE FUTURE IS MARK HAIG. AND THE PAST. AND THE PRESENT.

I am going to come right out and just say it,.   

I have a huge writer crush on Mark Haig.

I just read his book “How To Stop Time,” and my DNA is still spinning like a trillion carousels.  Remember Jules Feiffer’s seasonally crazed cartoon ballerina?  Yeah, that’s me.

I was so immediately and hypnotically drawn into the book, that somewhere around page twenty I decided to cast the lead role and chose Benedict Cumberbatch.

Before I finished I read in the trades that the movie rights had been bought and the film is going to star Benedict Cumberbatch!

That’s how in tune I was with this little miracle of a novel.

I am a huge believer in the less you know, the better things like plays, movies, and books are, so I am going to share with you as little as possible.

The basic premise:  our contemporary narrator is over 400 years old and yet he looks like he’s in his thirties. This is because he has a rare condition which causes him to age VERY slowly.  He was born in the 16th century and along the way we will be visiting various points of his life.   You would think that he like the ideal house:  old bones, new wiring.  But as this is a deeply romantic book.  pain and loss are both inescapable and inexhaustible. 

He has not loved anyone since his wife, who he courted back in the 1500s and who died tragically.   But they had a daughter...who has the same condition as he does.

This being a novel about time and torment and lessons never learned, we discover that his past life was riddled with prejudice.   His highly visible condition, his never aging,  caused the primitive among us to brand him as evil, which forces him, to keep his family safe, to have to abandon them.

He has never seen his daughter again.  But being that she has his condition, it is highly likely that she is still alive and to find her has been his centuries-long life pursuit.

Enter a society made up of others who are just like him which has been set up to protect themselves from becoming “Shape of Water” experiments.   

To keep you safe you must agree to move every 8 years (to avoid detection) and more importantly: you must never fall in love.

So why are you still reading my measly little blog and not reading this book?  If that is not enough to captivate you, then clearly I am writing to the National Association of Profoundly Stone-Hearted and/or Dead People.

For those of you who are fanboys and fangirls of magical realism, you are in for a treat.

But for me, the book had something far deeper to offer.

It is written in behavioral code.

The ones who will be able to decipher it are people like me who have suffered clinical depression, acute anxiety and suicidal ideation

On practically every single level, It’s a manual on how to survive the toxic spill that you wallow in when you are thrashing and drowning in the eye-level pool of your own despair.

Our main character, appropriately called Tom Hazard, which almost sounds like Time Hazard,  is the kind of train wreck that I was for three years.

Unfortunately, like Tom,  I went through a year of this by myself which I implore you to NEVER do.

Depression at its bottomless core is a loss of faith.  You suddenly do not believe in anything. You are incapable of believing in anything.  You do not believe in yourself.  You do not believe in your children.  You do not believe in your God.

The voice of logic which normally speaks to you, like  Tom does throughout the entire novel, disappears.  The pages of our crammed full of experience autobiographies go blank. 

There is no more beginning, no middle, no end.

Time becomes a useless, impotent marker. 

Your own shadow becomes your mortal enemy, denying you any kind of light which in turn depletes your battery reserve which in turn exhausts you after trying to accomplish the simplest of tasks.

You no longer sleep.

You decompose.

You no longer exist.  

You have no thoughts.  

Sadness seeds itself into your arms and throbs like your handicapped heart. 

Your abilities evaporate.  

It is, in some ways, birth in reverse but instead of a finding yourself returned to the womb, you find yourself trapped in an airless, inescapable tomb of your own design.

You are invisible even to yourself.   

You look into a mirror and see no one.

You find yourself aching to be on the ledge, the ground below appearing more and more intoxicating with every envious glance.

Death is mistaken for rest and the idea of self-termination feels tropical, exotic and freeing.  You begin to obsess about it and it haunts you just like the never aging specter of your one and only love.   The one that got away.  The one that you screwed up and have punished yourself for ever since.

Weeks and months pass like wandering, staggered ghosts who resemble that infamous little naked Napalmed Vietnamese girl on the path to nowhere.

You are on scorched earth. 

You are in permanent danger.

And all you do is crave-wish to be able to return to the cozy comfort of your familial past and reclaim who you used to be. like an ancient explorer, planting a flag on the precipice of once upon a time you.

Like Tom, I suffered a great loss during this self-lacerating and protracted episode of despair.  My mom died.  My best friend died of pancreatic cancer.  My chiropractor died.  And then my therapist, Dr. Gold, who knew how to mine for it,  who I was seeing five days a week, died on an operating table during a simple procedure.

Before he died he said to me:  “You have to metaphorically die.  When you do, the clouds will part.”

Looking back, I did not want to join my dearly departed.

I just wanted to find them.  Just like Tom’s daughter.

When I finally escaped Los Angeles, which is the number one worst place to be sick in (if you do not have the scent of success on you, you become, like Tom, someone who is frightening, threatening.  To be avoided at all costs.  Or simply destroyed by ignorance).

I was rescued by a New York angel, an old girlfriend, who took me in and nurtured me, instantly becoming the voice in my head which had abandoned me.

And yet I kept right on trying to resuscitate my past life.  I took jobs in LA that I could not handle.   I took gigs in the east coast whose every task seemed impossibly outsized and impossible to achieve.

And that made me finally stop.  Like time. 

That was step one.

Step two: an artist friend of mine, the appropriately named Susie Sugar, suggested that I stop following the same circular patterns and shatter them by coming down and visiting her in Key West.

Worn down by the luster of possibilities, I braved my way onto a plane and found Key West to be a city in post-hurricane shambles.  Cars were flipped. Roofs had been ripped off like gripped fingernails.

One day, while sitting in a most mournful drizzle in Susie’s backyard, I noticed that the garden which had been equally ravaged...was coming back.

It was not the same garden.

It was being reborn.

And in that moment, a year after Dr. Gold’s passing that is when I got what he, like Vincent to Don McLean, was saying to me.

The garden had metaphorically died and was being reborn.

And I looked up and the clouds parted.

Next door to Susie, lived a poor black family, replete with chained-up growling dog, who was, perhaps protecting nothing more than their lost dignity.  They had a scrawny-thin ribs visiblesix-year-oldd boy who dreamed of becoming Nijinsky. 

Stil,l in the garden, my soul in post labor rebirth, I turned, in what felt like slow motion, and there he was, bare-chested, wearing only a rope tied pair of torn asunder shorts dancing in the rain.

And that was lesson number two.

That was all that I would ever need.

The air.  The sky. The rain.  And yes, even the occasional darkness.

But most importantly, whatever your dance is,.

Mine happened to be a most unbridled imagination which had been held, tortured and hostage for three long, Rapunzel-worthy years.

Until that healing moment.

All of this came roaring back to me when I read Mark’s book.

I am a recovering depressive who has ,since those days, achieved even greater success than before.  After all these years,  I even have a new show, “There’s Johnny” which is currently streaming on Hulu.  That kind of reward virtually never arrives on the doorstep of a guy my age.   I have two new plays, one that is being produced in June.  The other, about magic lost and reclaimed, called “My Own Personal Mermaid,” is about to enjoy a reading.

“How To Stop Time,” for anyone who has ever known personal loss or been thrown down the rabbit hole of sadness, is beyond an important read.

It is prescriptive.   

It will offer you, especially those of you who feel lost and even worse, invisible, a full of tank of exhilarating oxygen and by association, clarity.

It will remind you of what is important and what is not.

It will gently force you to re-examine your own life, trace you own, personal how to get there map.  It will teach you to embrace your often ignored or misunderstood life lessons that may or may not be serving you well.

It is magnificently written.   Sentences at times, leap off the page, and demand your love and considered attention.

Everything that is old will feel new again.

There is profound wisdom here.

And songs.

And a journey, that just like yours, has, well, hazard signs, which are placed expertly along the way whose sole purpose is to remind you to love and to be loved in return.

Thankfully, all we have is time.

The idea is not to misuse it.

It is as vital as our blood.

We play music to it.  Write towards it. Move to it. Avoid it.  Envy it.  Wish for more of it.  Lose ourselves in it.

Who knew that, in the end, that by taking responsibility for it, we rescue ourselves too?

Hey Mark.  Want to have a New York meal on me?

If I've got anything, it's time.