Knifethrust of Thought

“Authentic” celebrity is never the product only of the efforts of the person who is celebrated.  The actor commanding $10 million a picture is able to do so because in his second appearance in a film the screenplay was written by a genius, the director was a wizard, the producer kept his eye on the ball, the studio cut a hell of a distribution deal, or his co-star was a $15 million a picture celebrity whose notoriety (always a career booster) led to a record-breaking opening weekend.   Meanwhile hundreds of thousands of never-will-be’s  strive and sacrifice, “prepare” themselves and writhe with desire and hope until their intestines cycle into spin/dry, yet never get a call-back.  The predicament is too humanly destructive for a glib or frivolous comment about being in the right place at the right time (however apt that may be).  It’s just the way things are.  It’s the luck of the draw.  The only consolation the multitude of disappointed might savor is the knowledge that after that first big success, the celebrity in question gets his choice of five or six of all the good parts on offer at the moment and, more often than not, either exercises terrible judgment or never again receives a smidgen of the good fortune he enjoyed his second time out.  Bye, bye, happiness.  Still, there is a difference in being a 45-year-old car salesman who never delivered a line on screen, and a no-longer-employable leading man with fifty million dollars in the bank and a Gulfstream jet.  That is an irony that calls for sarcasm, but I am sorry—I just can’t seem to find it in me.

People who react to experience not spontaneously, but rather by first considering how the reaction might “play” for them—or in the case of our crusading intellectuals, how they might use it in the prosecution of their pet sociocultural narratives—and what its corresponding value will be, worry the hell out of me because interposing anything that is arbitrary between reality and our awareness of reality, which is to say, preconditioning our consciousness, is an ego defense that makes me wonder what’s wrong with them that they don’t want revealed through inadequate, inappropriate or inept behavior. I put them in the psychodynamic category that contains socio- and psychopaths, junkies maddened by desperation and rabid ideologues of all denominations.

Egos today are like those huge balloons floating bland-faced and with absurd solemnity above the crowds in Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade, except the balloons are tethered to the reality of tow-trucks navigating a complex course through congested streets.

People who say they want to be entertained, as opposed to being edified, really mean they want to have their senses stimulated.  Their minds never occupy their thinking, and thinking never occupies their minds.

When you’re taking a shower and you find yourself thinking, “You know, there’s more than just soap and water running out of this stall.  My life’s going down the drain, too,” it is time to begin playing with yourself.

Depriving a teenager of idealism is like not charging the battery of a car before you turn the ignition key and step on the gas.  The car can’t go anywhere, and you flood the engine.

If you trust the words of people who say “I tell it like it is,” you not only don’t trust your own judgment, you don’t have any judgment to trust.

How often does a commodity prove as satisfying as the packaging and hype compel you to imagine it is?

If intentions equaled actions, we’d be having pie-in-the-sky for dessert tonight.

Properly defined, rest is an activity.

We’ve only got a little over 900,000 years to get it right.  The anthropologists say a dominant species of mammal endures for a million years.  Our prognosis is not very bright for dying with our integrity intact.

Don’t altogether ignore people who can’t speak coherently or to the point, because they may have authentic insights but not be able to formulate them constructively.  Be wise rather than just intelligent, and appreciate every notion deriving genuinely from experience.

I don’t like looking overlong at an acquaintance when he’s not aware I’m watching.  I start imagining outlandish things about him.  I think this is because he’s affectless at such times, so my sensibility isn’t influenced by the familiar prods and kneading we carry on with when we deliberately interact.

Why do we most need exercise when we least feel like doing it?  Knowing that the answer is “accumulated stress” has never yet prompted me to put a book down or get up from the couch and cut the DVD player off.  I didn’t prefigure this, but it looks as though I’d rather be fat and edified than lean and bored.

Wreck children at your peril. The acuteness of their pain inspires an unappeasable hunger for payback.

What we need to remember about criminals is that they spend an inordinate amount of time worrying about whether their mothers ever loved them.

The way a child grows into adulthood is by having his good-natured sense of humor, his sly mischievousness, his adoring loyalty and his fine companionship discouraged and devalued systematically until he’s liberated to become a spirit-stunted prick like the rest of us.

Hollywood celebrities who “make statements on politics” resemble fart-cushions.

We were creatures of stimulus-and-response when trilobites were still a hundred million years in the future.

Some people think that our intelligence is the master of our lives.  Other people believe it is the servant.  The vast majority of people couldn’t care less, and the patterns of their behavior, while they may be coherent, are never comprehensive.