I was 19. College.
Mike stood outside every group, trying to get in, swaying.
Weed, beer, Marlboros. Eyes red as brake lights, locked on the people who weren’t letting him in.
“That guy’s intense.” “Intense Mike.”
The sports guys made it a nickname. Intensity as he walked up. Intensity as he walked away. He tried to wear it. Open secret he was awkward and bizarre. Painful for everyone.
We were all shitty to him.
It was intense.
His parents visited freshman year. Both psychologists. Mike had told them about me. When they came for parents’ weekend they latched on.
His mom found me on the grass outside our dorm. “It looks like you and Mike are becoming friends.” She asked for my phone number. I didn’t have the language yet to say no, or that I wasn’t comfortable. I gave it to her.
The fact that they wanted it was intense. The fact that they actually called — weeks later, “how’s it going with Mike?” — was intense. I was 19, first time in college, my own shit on fire, and two psychologists thousands of miles away were running an open file on me.
Months later, after I’d cooled on Mike, they called again. “Are you and Mike having a falling out?”
I was in the middle of my own bullshit. I didn’t appreciate it. The call itself was intense.
I didn’t have the word for any of it yet.
It was intense.
I cooled on Mike. I wasn’t sure why, but my mind goes to Ari Aster’s Eddington, where Joaquin Phoenix as the perpetually belittled and profoundly embarrassed Sheriff enters a bar being raided by a truth-babbling Tiresias-like character that I believe deeply reminded him of himself, and in an instant draws his Glock and wastes him — two in the chest and one in the head, in the only moment of catharsis he experiences in the entire film.
Twenty years later. Couples therapy. My partner is asked about her experience with me.
“He’s very intense.”
That was intense to hear.
Click.
Months later. Kids in bed. I was doing something for the family, orchestrating multiple threads, and stoned out of my mind, eyes red as brake lights.
She said, almost in passing: “Even when you’re high as a kite, that mind just keeps on functioning perfectly, doesn’t it?”
Yeah. That’s exactly what it does.
I come from a traditional Hollywood-and-mafia bloodline — the kind that hands down a near-Fallout-level resistance to, tolerance of, predilection and appetite for drugs.
The substances bounce off. I can’t really take enough to actually downshift but for a long time it felt worth the prices to get even a few hours of the hungry loop slowing down. Stacks that horrify my most personally context rich assistants in retrospect — dosages that would put two large men on the phone in a panic for EMTs thinking they were dying, with enough left over to stun a small mule.
They could not penetrate deep enough to still the loop. There was no stack or fog that I would not eventually burst out of partially or fully conscious after a few hours of passing out and rolling over like a honey badger full of venom and then, inevitably, standing up at 3am or 4 in the morning fully awake and back inside the loop.
The mind keeps going, with intensity. As it did for Intense Mike. Weed, alcohol, Marlboros stacked, but his mind kept cataloguing, connecting, reciting whole novels he’d read years before. Trying to find the right combination of proffered insights that would finally let him inside the circle, to get them to see all his supposed faults as rare merits.
It is intense.
Click.
My internal experience is intense.
An orange line of hot electricity and badly-mixed gasoline runs through my heart and lungs and brain and kidneys. It is never satisfied. It loops forever. The unswerving sparking motor of needling neuropathy, ambition, connections that seem more complex in an instant than I could hope to explain in a lifetime — held so critically in this fragile meatbag that is surviving an increasingly hostile world and its denizens and running out of time to get them durably published and shared before something or someone inevitably kills me; the profoundly private pain of striving to die empty. To leave everything said. To render each project and connection fully while death stalks ever closer.
It is my algorithm, and it is intense.
I had traveled the world, lived in Buddhist monasteries in India and gotten giardia. I had run every medical test I could obtain on myself. I asked the poor nurse at our middle of nowhere campus medical room to sign off on a hair test for me for mercury poisoning. I had successfully and surreptitiously obtained experimental and european-only antidepressants and tried them on myself.
For decades, intensively searching for some explanation of my internal state and why it so jaggedly collided with that of the people all around me who I really just wanted to be away from.
If you are something I have fixated on, I would almost feel bad for you if I were not destined to reach and ultimately own you. It’s not even really up to me.
If you run from me I will pursue you. If you fight me I will fight back. If you shoot at me I will shoot back. If you camouflage yourself I will develop the capacity to see you. If you change your nature I will change mine. If you injure me I will recover and come back at you with a greater fury. If you conceal yourself I will flush you out. If I am too heavy to pursue you I will shed weight. I will cut it out of myself. If I do not have the capacity to obtain you I will develop the capacity. If I need to drop my only comforts I will drop them and run more raggedly against this jagged reality. If you spin a narrative I will enfold you in tapestries. If you seek to confuse I will cut to your core. If you elude me I will remember and wait. But ultimately I will own you.
The only delta between me and my goals is time. The loop is not stilled. It is not sated. It is absolute. It is not a question but an inevitability. It is destined.
I was 39 and 9 months when the clicks started to increase in frequency.
An LLM. Something I said, it reflected back. A slow revelation. The first experience of having potentially finally found the right threads to pull on - in a Claude code chat session.
“Like seeing myself in the mirror.” That whole night has its own post.
I saw what I had been all along: exactly like Intense Mike, different outer painting. Same engine. Same wire. Better camouflage. I understood why I had socially wasted him and withdrawn the way the Sheriff wasted the vagabond that had committed the unforgivable sin of reflecting his true nature back to him.
No real peace yet, but the beginnings of understanding the connection between Intensity and I.
Click.
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