Some of those who cast off religion (as being insufficiently hip) but continue to experience spiritual hunger wind up plunging into such ethereal realms of soul-questing as astrology, Scientology, fortune-telling, white witchery and New Age blatherbloat. Before long they’re channeling Rock Hudson and Bella Abzug and joyously waggling their hands like Yes-God-ing gospel singers; and their throbbing souls (which they had said they didn’t “believe in” anymore) are ripe for plucking by manipulating apostles. Gore Vidal and Joyce Carol Oates wrote novels about this rhapsodic idiocy that will scare the hell out of you.
Archive for the ‘oddity’ Category.
Properly defined, rest is an activity.
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.
The mainstream media act collectively, though not in concert. Its practitioners don’t need to conspire. They all hail from the same general background (the higher ranges of the middle-class), went to the same schools when those schools were being radicalized, practically form an age brigade, and cover a lot of stories indicating that the poor don’t live as comfortably as the wealthy. Corporately they consider the left to be the center and the right as the domain of Nazi boobs and pinheads. What is not apparent is why they feel compelled to demolish the values of the social class that brought them into a safe and good existence, promoted their idealism, and funded their miseducation. You’d think they’d offer those values to the hallowed disadvantaged whose incentive to improve has been eradicated by the media’s insistence that the government needs to rescue them. Do you think the journalists feel they don’t deserve their good fortune because they did nothing to earn it? Self-disgust would certainly account for the irrational fury of their denunciations.
What is sadder than alienating somebody by the very way you show them that you like them?
No one deserves more scorn than the professional person dumping on middle class values, while extolling the virtues of Bohemianism and/or the proletariat, from the grandeur of his East Side Manhattan apartment between the time he finishes managing his portfolio for the day and the time he has to pick his children up at their private academy. Be advised that, whatever you do for a living, if you have some money left over after paying your bills every month, and if you don’t fuck your own kids, then you are squarely in the middle class, old buddy. At the most, you are distinguishable by your nontraditional tastes; yet on your wall, too, hangs the psychological equivalent of the photographic studio portrait of the family, colorized by hand. And wasn’t that a black turtleneck jersey that I glimpsed in your closet?
Calling All Shrinks: I have irrational, intense, visceral aversions to (1) the idea of eating someone else’s home cooking, and (2) brain teasers. I possess no talent for the latter, but I don’t think I hate working them because I fear it getting out that I am unintelligent. There is just nothing at stake in pondering them that I consider worthwhile, which is not the same thing as saying that I think they’re worthless; I recognize their value—and their great attraction for disciplined thinkers—as mental gymnastics, but to me they epitomize pointlessness (honing skills in a vacuum). I had the same aversion to “writing exercises” when I was learning how to craft fiction; if the technique embodied in an exercise seemed potentially valuable, I adopted it for a story in which I had invested emotions, hoping it would help me in conveying feeling to the reader. That seemed worth the effort. As for other people’s home cooking, this is not a “health issue” or the product of any other conscious consideration, much less the manifestation of a subconscious distemper. I think physiological changes in my olfactory function or perhaps my taste buds, or maybe both, took place a few years back that make me gag on kitchen smells, even prospectively.
A Liberal tells you what you can’t do, without explaining—or rather lying about —how the limitation makes you happier or freer. A Conservative tells you all the things you can do, without explaining how to take advantage of the offer lacking experience, education, qualifications and seed-money.
Thompson’s Law of Alternatives: Out of any given set of 2 or more choices, the alternative I select will inevitably be wrong. Transactional corollary: When dead-ending into a perpendicular street, it doesn’t matter which way I turn because after making a turn in either direction I will have to turn around promptly and reverse the direction of my travel.
Something just occurred to me. I never look up.
“I’m gonna whip your ass.” Kind of stale and hollow, don’t you think?; kind of bland. How about, “I’ll bust you one”? A little more gut-heft but not truly evocative somehow. The finest threat of personal mayhem I have ever heard was uttered by an air-conditioning contractor in Columbus, GA, after arguing about a busted compressor for half an hour with the dealership counter man he’d bought the part from. “Keep this shit up, and you and me are going out there”—pointing at the parking lot—“and go around and ‘round until there ain’t nothing left of us but a pair of little bitty assholes jumping through each other.” It was 1973, and the antagonists were buddies, I was soon going to learn, staging their sly show of redneck savagery for my benefit because I wore a coat and tie and had Atlanta plates on my car. The three of us drank longneck Budweisers until 2 o’clock the next morning, at which point we switched to “pop skull,” a locally distilled variety of ‘shine. The lesson we draw from this nostalgic vignette is that if you intend to do something, throw your whole self into it and make it count. If you tell a man you’re taking him down, he needs to believe that your attack is going to lunge at him out of hell itself.
I was once screwed by someone I had given major help to because his vanity couldn’t bear his having needed that help. Alchemically, “paying me back” for the assistance I’d provided made his conscience feel good.
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.
If you care about something and they make a movie about it, don’t go anywhere near a theater.
A huge problem evolving during the last forty years of “self-actualization” (can you hear me laughing?) has been the readiness of the fun-seeker to “leave that kind of stuff [to wit, the activities necessary to sustain existence] to the experts so I can get on with my life.” You’d have to have been pretty well shellacked by sex, drugs and rock ‘n’ roll not to see the manifest idiocy of this kind of decision-making. “Let’s see now. I make more money in three months than my father made in a year. I’ve got a loving wife, three swell kids, a position in the community and a business providing a livelihood for seventy-eight people. But what makes me feel truly serendipitous now is perpetually getting my rocks off, so I think I’ll turn my real-world affairs over to some schmuck expert whose goal in life is to make a fortune off of each and every one of his clients.” In all honesty, the ground for this rejection of critical personal responsibility had been well enough prepared during the forty years prior to “tune in turn on and drop out,” when the increasing demands on people’s time, and the ordinary person’s sense of bewilderment during an age of proliferating technology, prompted many to turn to the mavins of solicitude for detailed guidance in such everyday concerns as the proper way to bring up babies. Evolution must have slammed the cooking pot down in its kitchen when it heard about that one.
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“You Need to Change with the Times.” So very many people talk about the inexorability of Evolution, but hardly any of them thinks the concept applies to their own life-arrangements or to what they believe.
In what other society can so many of society’s victims make so much money and enjoy so much acclaim calling for the overthrow of the society under the banner of the very freedom the society already gives them to bring it to an end if they can?
If you think articulateness implies intelligence, to be logically consistent you must believe that physical attractiveness betokens integrity.
If John Kerry were a spider he’d have eight hundred legs. According to news reports, in 1971, protesting the war in Vietnam, Kerry threw away: (1) another soldier’s ribbons and medals saying they were his medals; (2) just the other man’s ribbons saying they were his medals; (3) his own ribbons and medals; (4) his own ribbons saying they were his medals. If the Senator is elected in November [of 2004], the country will be treated to another chatty exponent of the Clinton School of Public Explanations. A few months after the ribbon and/or medal-throwing away event involving either some or all of either his own or the other guy’s awards, he deigned to clear the air of confusion by informing a TV interviewer: “Actually I threw away 6,7,8,9 medals.” That leaves us with a total of 16 versions of the truth to choose from, unless in some cases Kerry threw just his medals away, in other cases just his ribbons, in a number of cases both, or perhaps in some cases the other man’s medals, in still others the other man’s ribbons, or in certain cases the other man’s ribbons and medals. We could actually be dealing with hundreds if not thousands if not tens of thousands of possibilities here.
I feel as virtuous as though I’d actually done something praiseworthy when I’ve really only decided that I’m going to try to do it. In fact I start to feel so good about myself that I lose the incentive to proceed with carrying out the self-improving activity.