There are some days I believe that I destroyed the company
I lived that way for a few years and I couldn’t stop doing that shit on my own
Hello. The latest two issues of Hell World this week have been for paid subscribers only but here’s a bit of what they were all about below. Subscribe if you want to get access to these two and all the archives and if not no worries see you in a few days give or take!
How are you guys holding up? No seriously how are you? Not great I’m guessing based on a recent findings from the CDC.
“Symptoms of anxiety disorder and depressive disorder increased considerably in the United States during April–June of 2020, compared with the same period in 2019,” they report which sounds obvious but I suppose it’s still helpful to see some data anyway.
“Overall, 40.9% of respondents reported at least one adverse mental or behavioral health condition, including symptoms of anxiety disorder or depressive disorder (30.9%), symptoms of a trauma- and stressor-related disorder related to the pandemic (26.3%), and having started or increased substance use to cope with stress or emotions related to COVID-19 (13.3%),” the report explains and that seems alarming sure but it also seems a little low right? Who are the people not experiencing any adverse mental or behavioral health conditions right now? Besides the untouched and unbothered rich I mean. What must that kind of life be like? To have made it this far into the pandemic without breaking down at least once or twice doesn’t seem like evidence of a healthy functioning brain to me does it?
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And then there’s some shit about baseball and Andrew Cuomo and schools opening back up and closing almost immediately thereafter and a bit about a guy who shot himself in the balls by accident as a joke (?) and also some stuff about Fugazi.
Read the rest here.
Speaking of substance abuse in today’s Hell World I caught up with the infamous former Gawker editor A.J. Daulerio.
“This August 22 will be the four-year anniversary of Gawker’s last post,” Daulerio writes in the most recent edition of his recovery, substance abuse, and mental health focused newsletter The Small Bow. “Four years ago, freshmen arrived at college dorms for the first time, many of whom are now beginning their senior year stuck at home. The Summer Olympics in Rio were about to end, all its participants unaware that the next one wouldn’t be until 2021 at the earliest. And in August of 2016 America was still convinced we’d have the first female elected president and, Jesus, that seems like a decade ago.”
“Every August for the past four years I’ve thought about when Nick Denton fired Remy Stern and handed me the job,” he goes on about his takeover of top editor role at Gawker. You should read the whole thing. Like much of the writing in the newsletter every week it’s raw and honest. A far cry from the irredeemable shithead many people might remember Daulerio as.
“Then I feel guilty I took it because there are some days I believe that I destroyed the company. I also feel the absence of Nick Denton in my life and I’m still trying to figure out if I’m okay with that.”
If you followed the story or were a fan or critic of Gawker -- and back then it seemed like you had to be one or the other -- you probably remember what happened after that. Hulk Hogan’s Peter Thiel-funded lawsuit sent the once feared and beloved company into a spiral that it never fully recovered from, and laid out a path for vindictive billionaires to fuck with media they don’t like going forward.
The fallout made clear to Daulerio all of the ways that his life had already been in ruins, even before the trial, with a subsequent comeuppance that many think was well-earned.
In a lot of ways it all seems to have saved his life too. “I had to acknowledge that my life was already pretty bad–I was already unemployable, broke, and unstable before Hogan came in and blew it up. It took a little while for me to realize that, but that's really what changed for me is I stopped blaming the trial for ‘ruining’ shit and began to see it as a real opportunity to change,” he told me.
Four years on Daulerio is clean and sober and The Small Bow has become a lovely community of people in recovery.
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And then we talk about a bunch of shit which you can read here if you like and will be of particular interest to Hell World readers in recovery or ones like me who are still very much invested in maintaining our bad habits even though we know we probably shouldn’t!
I also liked this anecdote:
I assume Hulk Hogan was your hero as a boy like mine? One time my dad took me to see him at the Boston Garden and it was one of my fondest childhood memories. Anyway what’s it like being ruined by basically the guy second only to Luke Skywalker for people our age?
There was an odd moment early on in the trial where one of the attorneys (who I'd just met in person in Tampa a couple of days before trial) asked me for humanizing anecdotes he could use in opening statements. For some reason, he thought it would be good if the jury saw me as a WWF fan. I told him I was–but my favorite wrestlers were George The Animal Steele, Tony Atlas, Superfly Snuka, JYD, SD Jones, and Rowdy Roddy Piper. Great! he said. And that was what he used–that I was a Rowdy Roddy Piper fan. It seemed like an unnecessary cheap shot and no one in the jury thought it was cute.
As for Hogan, he was such a huge part of my early childhood. But I thought it was lame to be a Hulk Hogan fan, in the same way it was lame to be a Cowboys, Yankees, or Lakers fan. So that's why I gravitated towards Piper. But Hollywood Hogan? N.W.O.? That dude was the shit. And that's all I kept thinking about at the trial with him dressed all in black. And while I was on the stand, he totally stared right at me and gave me this knowing nod with his lips all pursed like a total heel and I thought "I'm about to get fucking crushed," which, of course, I did. Afterward, he did an interview with the Post where he called me a "buccaneering young stud" and that was honestly the nicest thing anyone in the press had said about me at that point.
Ok that’s all for today see you soon. Listen to this.