People who consider it in their interest that no rules inhibit or limit their behavior find the pleasures of their excesses short-lived and incomplete. Why else would they keep repeating them so neurotically?
Archive for the ‘compulsion’ Category.
Some people sabotage their own pretensions to individuality through the fear of being perceived as different. Collections of such people agree to be different together in meticulously codified ways.
I’ve heard about moderation all my life, but I’ve never seen one.
Endlessly repeated assertion of the alcoholic on the mend: “I used to spill more than most people drink.” As a badge of honor, this is pathetic. But it indicates that pride is still kicking and for that reason reclamation is still a possibility.
The Baby Boomers were our first generation to wreck a whole ethos because of perceived parental overkill. First they were required to work for their allowance at the abusive rate of half an hour a week. Later on they had to do some homework. They were even forced to come downstairs and intermingle with the family on Thanksgiving. What with the TV and stereo blasting away in perpetuity, the message just didn’t get through that after adolescence they would be expected to take the reins and fund their own existence. Ultimately their folks refused to buy a Stingray for them on the occasion of their extrusion from high school, and that broke the camel’s back. They hit the road in high dudgeon, only to discover that Dad kept the allowance coming anyway. For the first time in their lives, the Babes were faced with making strategic decisions. They opted to spend their money purchasing 80% of the world’s drug supply. Everything after that was a psychedelic pisshaze with vagrant bouts of sexual activity and sloganeering attended by wine, incense and fingernails-on-the-blackboard music until they woke up in college, still siphoning their parents’ bucks yet acknowledging that the old farts had steered them right all along: the better the grades they made, the more money they would earn to finance their ongoing self-indulgence crusade. Additionally they were pleased to learn that they had Changed the World, a source of immense pride and distinction which they duly acknowledged by still wearing their hair long, growing mutton chops and ‘staches, and not wearing anything special to class. Viva la revolucion.
My instinct is to speak reasonably with people, especially those who disagree with me. I empathize with everybody who undertakes the passion-rousing quest I think of as the never-ending (because chronology persists and circumstances change) search for what is best for us all. But the Liberals with their moral certitude and giddy pretension to intellectual probity refuse to clasp my open hand. They assume irremediably that we Conservatives are jackbooted zealots who want to waste civilization in an operatic (Wagnerian, of course) orgy of butchering bloodlust, and that we consequently deserve to be dismissed contemptuously—and also snidely—from their circle-jerk of self-appointed philosopher-kings. Well on this day I dismiss them, and with a lot more contempt than I can adequately express. I also hereby renounce all further effort to reason with these people as though they were actually well-disposed brokers of the intellect and culture. What they are is thought-police, tyrannical oligarchs, micromanaging nannies and unprincipled polemicists, and from now on I am going to deal with them as they deserve. Ich kann nicht anders. If any say I’m not being fair to “honest” Liberals who don’t bear a likeness to the portrait I have limned, my reply is: let them move away from what their creed has metamorphosed into and publicly denounce its pathology. Christopher Hitchens did this, and they can follow suit.
Euphoria smothers prudence. I drank so much whiskey that now I’m an alcoholic. I overeat so much that I’ve become obese. I have collected 15,000 books, 3500 LPs, tape cassettes and CDs, and 3200 movies. I guess I’ll stop getting carried away when they carry me away.
The truth is not relative. It is, however, subject to what I call “perspective-distortion,” and this is what I mean: When I was drinking, I always said I didn’t suffer from hangovers, believing that I was telling the truth. Then I quit drinking, and after awhile I realized I’d been telling lies all those years, albeit unintentionally.
Calling all Shrinks. Can anybody tell me what percentage of American friendships is based on mutuality of outlook reinforced by bonding experiences, and what percentage is founded on the mutual need to bolster ego-salvaging pretenses? I do know how you can test your own friends. Just consistently oppose them. If they stand up to you, fine; you’ll have a lot of laughs together. If the ones with touch-me-not egos can’t bear the opposition and react by “breaking it off,” that’s fine too, because they never were your friends.
An addict myself, I can assure you that the proposition, “You can’t help someone who won’t help himself,” is equally as valid as the proposition asserting the speed of light to be 186,000 miles per second.
Some of the Hippie boys were so pretty that after they explained that I had mistaken their gender, I almost said, “I don’t care.”
I don’t say this lightly. I have tried my best. I have worked at it and I have worried about it. But the plain truth is, I’m not going to stop smoking cigarettes until they stop manufacturing them, after which I’ll switch to cigars, which I also inhale.
The Cell Phone’s Connected to the Self-Image Bone. [2002] Just about everything people do in public these days is intended to “send a message” or “make a statement.” The first generation of cell phone users, whipping the little chirping gadget out of their shoulder bags, purses and jacket side-pockets, were saying to the world, “Look how damned important I am!” Today’s cell-phoner takes a different approach, because more people own cell phones now, and consequently everybody’s getting more calls. This enables the user to announce on the whip-out, via body language and facial expression, that, “I’m connected to such a far-flung elaborate network of contacts that one or another of them always needs to check in with me!” Incidentally, the cell phone today is perhaps only half the size it was during the first generation, and with that in mind we may propose the following theorem: Thompson’s Law of Cell Phones: Egos have ballooned in volume in direct proportion as cell phones have shrunk.
You know of course that some folks are not happy unless they’re miserable. Don’t bother these people. By cheering them up you’ll only make them feel bad.
Americans are hedonistic but they will never be Epicurean because they have conveniently overlooked the great philosophy’s cardinal tenet: moderation is indispensible to preventing pleasure from either cloying or becoming destructive.
The more fundamentally ignorant a person is, the more avidly he or she seeks, not (as prudence would dictate) to attract as little attention as possible, but rather to appear stunningly in-the-know, cutting-edge, insider savvy. The very anxiety of such people to be admired instead of just accepted prevents them from perceiving how absurd they are when they express their compulsion in the form of trendspeak: “money talks and bullshit walks,” “at the end of the day,” “jokes are not his fortay,” taking ludicrous pride in spouting obvious tripe, employing phrases inappropriately and mispronouncing foreign words as in the last sample given, thereby revealing themselves to be stupendous ignoramuses. Beware overreaching, for in attempting too much we accomplish nothing. The conclusion following from the argument: People are not stupid because they are ignorant. They are ignorant because they are stupid.
Things and people are seldom what they seem (perception is not reality), so when somebody says, “I am not judgmental,” you should interpret the words as follows: “You are manifestly an obtuse and arrogant schmuck, but I’m not going to say that because you could then reply that I’m a repulsive, inconsequential jerk. So I prefer to maintain this fiction that I don’t think you’re anything at all, and to go on sweating rivulets in my concern that I am forever on the verge of being unmasked as a panic-driven mealy-mouthed coward.”
Ted Turner looked in the mirror and said, “There was a time when I was not am. I was not being some that when. Imagine being sometime where you are not were. Can you be some one place time, and another sometime one when? Or do you always have to are more where another time were? Not only there was but is some when I am not other was is. Sometime there is a where one am was, and someplace there will be a now where I was are am. The person I is was are. Then am I where I now was is. Someplace time. One then some were when I am are was. If I some more eyes had would I other more have I’s? Time more me now were I where would will. Or I see more me when time were some eye am. Would eye place more me were I more eye are? I more time are when I more find eye time eye. Eye time more eye more time? Eye I eye I eye I. My eye was am some when I were are where. Turner Turner Turner. Eye O. Eye am eye O eye? Eye was Turn more some when er was other time will. Ner more were Tur eye when some I ner Tur are? Dead am eye are Ted when I more was some er Turn. Where Ted are was when He O some I were? Turn Ted Turd er. Ted Turd Ted Turd. Eye are Turd when Ted am some more were was. Turd some time other where O is Ted are. Some is more where er time place I Turn. But eye now are Turd.
A parent justifiably takes pride in helping a child succeed in an endeavor. But how many are jealous rather than proud when the child succeeds at something without calling on the parent for help.
A psychiatrist could see them coming from a mile away, those screaming headlines in Moscow: PUTIN STABS SELF IN BACK!