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 ‘desperation’ Category.
The artist and the intellectual ought to fear decadence more than ignorance. Ignorance is a quality that enlightenment may ameliorate, whereas decadence is a condition curable only by despair following a catastrophe.
Political correctness is not about acceptance of the other, tolerance, affirmative action, doing the right thing or any other cultural or social issue. It’s a moral salve for the consciences of people who refuse to endure the strictures on behavior of a personal moral code. Imagine a woman who breaks her arm and goes to work as a municipal plasterer instead of seeing a doctor, on the grounds that “confining my limb to a plaster cast infringes on my individual freedom.” The more unbearable her pain becomes, the more civic wall-space she slathers with her featureless goo, crippled but convinced that she is beautifying the city.
Despite appearances, most people’s behavior is not irrational; it’s neurotic, i.e., dysfunctional in rational ways. But because we imagine that certain people—most of them, in fact–are irrational, we solicitously counter their bizarreness with our light-wand of rationality, to no avail, because their maladjustment is spawned not in the intellectual faculty but in the awful chaotic swirl of modern life. I think we ought to reverse the terms of the process and purposely act irrationally in order to snap such people out of their neuroses. The next time you run into that smarmy little self-deprecator who works down the hall, ask, “Why did you dye your hair blue?” and instantly leave the room. The baffled neurotic, imploding with uncertainty and doubt, will then take a couple of baby steps along the path to eventual normalcy by hastening to find a mirror so he can verify his hair color, then wondering why you might have spoken so strangely. (Point #1: Your insanity acts like a cattle prod, shocking his malady into the open.) The second time you see the patient, offer this assurance: “I don’t blame you for killing your wife. Your secret is safe with me”; and then go away again. After this encounter, the subject will begin to objectify his thinking as he tries to figure out what in the hell your problem is. (Point #2: Objectification is the sine qua non of emotional salubrity.) Keep this going, and the day will come when you two collide at the water cooler and the former human ant colony says, “You don’t play badminton, do you? I just took it up and it looks like I’ve got a real talent for it!”
Envy is a displacement of the gnawing fear that if we attempted to do something as exceptional as the other person did, we wouldn’t be able to bring it off. Jealousy is a displacement of the crippling fear that we do not deserve our good fortune.
Hollywood, Cradle of the Gold-Plated Castrato: A semi-tropical desert become a verdant fantasy park despite the absence of actual weather through the beguiling sorcery of agricultural irrigation. The altar of tasteless excess on which the carcass of Integrity has long since blanched in the sun. A hyperbolic monument of strident vibrating neon to all the cheap souls exterminated by the treacheries of art commerce. Accurate to the smallest detail, faithful only to the spirit of rapine. The town where no means, “Offer me some more money,” and yes means, “But I get to fuck you first.” Where people walk backwards in order to see the knives coming. Where egos drift serenely across the empyrean like dirigibles. Where slack-jawed women enthrall themselves from the looking-glass above the bed while their hairy-backed producers seek to elude their own perfidy by stuffing their entire bodies into the crevice of the Rotting Goddess. Where chicken-liver shakes its booty at Giorgio, and Rolls takes a dump on Mercedes. Where “opportunity missed” means a body is still on its feet. Where the values in the screenplays are guessed at by the self-mutilated eunuchs who not only can’t get their values up anymore, but can’t remember how it ever felt to have values. Where minimal self-respect requires the bloody abolition of all the other sleazoids doing business in this town. And where the Nine Muses alighted from the train in 1939 to get a feel for the place, but within the hour reentered the train and departed, never to grace these inhospitable precincts again.
Overheard at the Intersection of Hollywood and Vine: A woman is using the payphone. I don’t have his pants. Why would I be walking around Hollywood holding Peter’s pants in my hands? Jesus…. So I’m the bad guy?…. The last time I saw the goldfish it was in the refrigerator door-rack.…. Hey this grungy-looking weirdo is staring at me. He’s checking out my tits. Wait a minute…. Okay, he’s gone. Are you saying I didn’t pick her up from school yesterday? Fuck that. Who’s got her?…. Oh shit. Look, can you go down and get her out for me? You can act like you’re me…. I would act like I was you, if you…. What’s the big deal, Breanne? Don’t you give a shit about my daughter?….
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.
We would all be just fine if we traveled back to that particular day in the past, that exact moment, when something first made us too afraid to act decisively in a significant personal dilemma, and establish the identity of the something that intimidated us, then investigate why it made us afraid, instead of continuing desperately to evade the confrontation though we know it might reconstitute our lives.
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.
I don’t know about a “death wish,” but I do think human beings are cursed with a hey-look-at-what-an-idiot-I am wish, and I deduce this from the fact that when circumstances won’t permit us to escape appearing to be something that we’re not, instead of just trying inconspicuously to get by with a minimum of to-do we are seized with an insane compulsion to attract scrutiny to ourselves by acting as though we are the epitome of the modality we are seeking to evince. It’s as though we desire to fail at being something we are not in order to punish ourselves for our presumption, involuntary though it may have been. Looked at in this light, the syndrome appears to be salutary. It reminds us that we embarrass ourselves less when we say, “I don’t know how to do that. Would you show me?” than when we undertake one of our absurd foredoomed Goofy impersonations.
The Second American Civil War is going to be waged between the two populations currently squaring off against each other in proliferating hatred and approximately equal numbers—those embracing the principle that the Self is perfectly freewheeling, and those for whom cherishing the Good entails imperative obligations. For historians of the future, the most significant aspect of this conflict will be a staggering irony: That the institutions erected by the Early Americans to guarantee the preservation of the nation became the very agents that, growing ineffably corrupt, precipitated its demise.
Calling on a decrepit if not depleted metaphor, we might suggest that insecurity is a large-girthed tree that has brachiated profusely or in other words has sprouted numerous branches. Some of these branches become increasingly starved of chlorophyll as they extend themselves into thickets of schizophrenia, paranoia and other kinds of psychopathological underbrush. But up there near the top of the tapering trunk, high above the forest-floor clutter and soaking up the sun, is the sense-of-humor branch, and the sense-of-humor branch is this tree’s finest flower (to botch the starting metaphor by grafting on an equally trite fragment of another). That listing, fist-clenching, pudgy, perspiration-flicking dork back in high school who in terminal desperation taught himself to entertain his classmates with asinine wisecracks and joke-book gags may have been an irritating fool at times, and often bleated out inappropriately; but that’s beside the point. You were never going to like a pudgy dork anyway, and by occasionally causing you to laugh he at least prevented you from stomping him to death. Managing somehow to survive, hearty old party guy Charlie, pitched into an expanding variety of contexts after graduation, learned to refine his technique until he wound up with a scalpel instead of the meat-cleaver he started with. He also made a decent living once he lurched into the sales profession, and eventually he achieved the intuition that the sense-of-humor branch he’d grasped hold of is the only outgrowth of the insecurity tree that is never more than minimally neurotic; because laughter itself—I mean the actual physiological process—produces all the enzymes and neurotransmitters necessary to forestall the psyche from diving off a cliff-top into a chasm of insanity. Thus it might not be true that if you laugh the world laughs with you, but it is surely valid to say that if you attune yourself to laughter instead of tears you’ll have a lot less to cry about as time goes on.
Double Double Boil and Bubble. Unless we objectify, examine and define our feelings, troubles, conditions, situations, predicaments and relationships,we never genuinely understand them, so we’re never able to resolve our problems. By no means does the process prohibit you from getting all the help you can locate. I only mean to say that if you don’t do the work, especially taking the all-important first step of objectification, unless you make the effort, give it a try no matter how lame and pathetic the results may be, you won’t be dealing with actuality. Rather, you will fearfully latch onto the first bromidic cliché that comes floating past out of the popular-culture smog looking as though it fits your needs, a cliché like, “I eat when I get nervous,” for example, instead of asking yourself, “Why do I keep getting nervous?” and then reviewing some of your recent anxiety episodes for clues as to what might be setting you off. We actually know what’s setting us off, but refuse to acknowledge that the all-purpose bromides with their unmerited aura of psychiatric appositeness do not come close to filling the bill; yet when the dread redoubles and resurfaces you thrash about again and grasp yourself a rootless platitude to pacify your affliction with, for instance, “What goes around, comes around,” which is to say, a hollow-canny maxim that does not even have a meaning and of which the efficacy is in inverse proportion to its lack of suitability to your case. Now you’re out there at two removes from your actual difficulty having put in layers of delusion and evasion to keep you from getting back to your self. The next time your anxiety lunges out of the ocean depths spectacularly, I’m afraid you’re going to be in much more trouble than you would have been in had you just mustered the courage to identify and deal objectively with the problem in the first place. The conclusion following from the argument: Unattended maladjustments metastasize.
Make sure you (a) know where the nearest way out is, and (b) have a plausible reason to get up and leave immediately, when you sit down to have a conversation with a stranger. I understand that you are not going to sit down to talk with just anybody. You are a discriminating sort of person who has learned by past mistakes. The only strangers you are likely to associate with are well dressed, presentably groomed and possessed of the hard-to-nail-down quality of “being interesting looking,” or else they are attractive young specimens of the opposite sex you have developed some reason to believe or hope you might be able to become friendly with. The problem I’m talking about does not lie with you, however, or in the quality of your judgment. The problem is that in this country today a stranger is susceptible as human beings have never before been to assuming irritatingly boring or obnoxious interaction styles or else so many dangerous proclivities and unhinged derangements that you simply can’t afford to hazard an unguarded encounter with any of them. The person you think “may have possibilities” could easily be or perhaps is probably a functional alcoholic on the point of having a black out, a person who just a minute before did a line or shot up in the bathroom, an AWOL member of the armed services squirming to link up with a tolerant soul he can spill his guts to, a stalker whom you will forever after find haunting your traces with zonked-out gaze and steam jets exuding from his nostrils, somebody with political views that differ diametrically from your own who is shiftily intent on drawing you out for the purpose of demolishing everything you believe in, a logorrhetic hospital orderly who is trying to justify the carrying out of his fantasized mercy killings, a con man preening his goatee and kicking his engine over as you approach, a sports fiend who cannot be dissuaded from recounting the “chances” of a thousand players and teams you’ve barely even heard of, a workaholic who imagines that you aspire to hear a twelve-hour-long breakdown of what he’s gotten done since breakfast, a young lady who attempted to put her dad’s eye out with a ballpoint for groping her breasts and who has run away from home because her mom thinks she “egged him on,” another young lady whose boyfriend made her pregnant and, when she told him what had happened, then said for her to get fucked (“But I said, ‘That’s what we already did—that’s what’s wrong, Harold!’”), another and slightly older young lady who offers to blow you in return for cab fare back to the city provided you have a “nationally recognized” condom secreted on your person, a marketing specialist with a briefcase full of surveys he wants to go over with you regarding the fine points of the wording of the questions they consist of, and then still another young lady who this time is not sexually despoiled but who can’t stop yakking about the cool events occurring at her boss’ surprise birthday party that she was put in charge of making the arrangements for, an eight-foot-tall professional basketball player who from in back of Yves Saint Laurent sunglasses happens to drop the news, a propos of nothing, that his hand-made sharkskin suit cost six-thousand dollars, the ex-marine who is now a cop and is about to burst with anecdotes and information concerning duty, honor and the imperative need to bring your buddies back, a Jesus freak, a self-anointed movie reviewer who says he thinks Bunuel is one of the brands of candy they sell at the concession stand, one of those asses laboring under the impression they have gained uncanny insight and expertise in multiple fields of knowledge but who turn out to express themselves in painfully obvious bromides and platitudes, people who are downcast and scandalized by the kidnappings of lovely teenage Wasp suburbanites but exhibit absolutely no expressions on their faces when you try to turn the talk to crack babies and juvenile prostitution, a man who restively assures you that Mafia guys aren’t that bad once they get to know you, and so on and so on and so on…. These are just the random assortment of fellow citizens I once encountered in a thirty-minute delay at an airport gate before my plane took off. Of course it’s always possible that despite appearances you are secretly a mouth-frothing masochist, and that all the loose canons I’ve described are your cup of tea; if this is so you ought to proceed to the nearest convention center. As for me, I have acted on an idea I got from observing those people at the airport who hold up placards saying things like Mr. Will Newton? and Japan Tour Group. Now when I go to catch an airplane I drape a sign over my chest that reads Please Don’t Speak To Me Unless You Have An Original Insight To Offer Into Kafka’s Short Story “The Hunger Artist.” I have found that it is possible in even the most crowded venues to create a satisfactory buffer zone of silence around yourself.
Honesty in Neurosis. Eliminating the symptom does not cure the disease, but it does prevent the organism from unnecessarily feeding the disease and thereby it nurtures the possibility that a cure can be effected. For neurotics one of the most dastardly of their symptoms is semantic self-beguilement, to wit, the employment of euphemisms that preclude the incipient maniac from growing conscious of his malady, objectification being the first step along the road to mental/emotional wellness. My plan is to force neurotics to articulate such hot-button issues forthrightly rather than trying to camouflage them from themselves with innocuous verbal formulations. For example, they should say, “If I stay here and talk about this I may begin to peel the flesh off my face,” instead of, “I’d better leave now if I’m going to make my doctor’s appointment.” They should say, “I have an unbearable urge to look up my mother’s dress,” instead of, “The temperature’s going up to 74 today.” They should say, “Do you ever feel that you’re defecating for more than one person?” instead of, “I’d like a mechanic to look at my suspension system.” They should say, “Children’s necks look as if they would snap in two quite easily,” instead of, “I don’t even know why they’re-re-remaking A Star Is Born.” They should say, “I bet I can get inside my cat,” instead of, “What would sushi be without seafood?” The next time your friend’s lips twitch and curl into that little fey Anthony Perkins mystery smile, make him shut up at once and identify exactly what it is that’s scaring the shit out of him. Let’s keep our neurotics from going all the way!
Give Me Your Liars, Your Hoors, Your Bloody Assassins: The American people led by their politicians are riddled with insecurity and self-doubt to the point of fatally overcompensating by adopting legislative depth-charges, that is, laws that give every initial appearance of being salutary but blow up in our faces. Nowhere is this more true and damaging than in the area of immigration. Since ordinary people began concerning themselves with pleasure and excitement to the exclusion of everything else, and the intelligentsia switched its focus from illuminating our essential needs to manipulating our minds and our behavior for their own ideological purposes, our propensity for electing politicians whose exclusive concern is getting re-elected has really come home to haunt us. Now nobody gives a good Goddamn about anything but his or her direct immediate concerns. That spells s-e-l-f-d-e-s-t-r-u-c-t-i-o-n, folks. Now is it not axiomatic that a country should so conduct itself as to perpetuate its own existence? With respect to immigration does that not mean allowing to move into this country and take up residence only individuals we think comprise prime-quality American-citizen material? Alternately, what end does it serve to open the gates—for the doorways aren’t wide enough anymore—in the name of even-handed equality to floods of those who at best desire to exploit our freedom and economic opportunity with no intention of either kicking back to the kitty or lending a hand in doing the grunt work of civic systems maintenance, and at worst simply find it more convenient and less expensive to plan and work for our destruction from right here on our own soil? We are like the drunks who “love everybody” and invite thieving rapists to come home with us in the middle of the night. Is this any way to run a country? Do you even give a shit?
(A) Problem: To think up 365 ideas for entries in a compilation I’d like to finish writing in six to eight weeks. The central and procedural writing-challenge technique that underlies the project as a whole will generate at least 60% of the entries, and many of the rest will come from bottled up perceptions plus inspirations of the moment plus a handful of trusty formats. How then to come up with the rest? (B) Solution: (1) Start with a Paul Harvey-type bromide or platitude of the solemn, self-conscious, overblown sort that everyone generates occasionally thinking they are being soberly portentous—i.e., the stalest of stale truisms, wholly lackluster and intrinsically productive of ennui. Such as: “The only time I really get into trouble is when I try to be dishonest.” Terrific. What we need is a starting point, and this will serve as well as anything. (2) Applying irony, craft a contrasting, extending or mutating context in which to allude to the blatherous pomposity. E.g., I was reluctantly dishonest within a larger effort of trying to cover my ass for having committed some egregious backfiring stupidity. (C) Formulation of Resultant Entry: Your goal is not to set up a gag or a pay off, as it were, but to blend all the ingredients into a recognizable, full-bodied, entertaining human experience. You should do complete justice to every aspect of your little opus, and clothe the elements in the raiment of ordinary reality, to wit: My wife’s perpetual plaint was, “Why are all your friends such assholes?” My response was normally a shrug, a head shake, and a saucering of the eyes and mouth in the classic male Gee-I-haven’t-got-a-clue charade. But I deeply loved my wife and I never wanted intentionally to break faith with her, I mean not essentially. At one point fairly early in our married life I had gotten to know a customer who initiated a dialogue with me about the possibility of our going into business together. I was pretty much a lone gun, yet the customer offered some striking inducements for me to consider the proposition. As “part of my process” (I was fairly adept in wielding the proto-Execuspeak of that day) I invited George (we shall call him) to join us at home for dinner one night without telling my wife what he and I had been talking about. She however possessed an excellent nose for bullshit (in consequence of being my spouse, I’m sure she would have intimated) so she was skeptical of George and everything about him—clothes, speech, stories, background, “aspirations,” the whole ball of wax—and she looked extremely askance at him for no other reason in the world than that I appeared to want to display the guy in a positive light. Her acid scrutiny even got to George himself at one point and he excused himself to go outside and “get some air.” While he was gone I took a couple of stabs at breaking down my wife’s carapace of skepticism and accusatory lowering mistrust, to no good result whatsoever. When “George” returned we all evinced the same desire to get the evening over with as quickly and as courteously as possible. We went out front to see George off, and as I revolved to go back in the house my darling made the following statement, doing so with an intimation of ominous unspecified menace—such is women’s way—: “I’m going to water the grass.” Ten minutes later I heard her tread ascending the stairwell to our bedroom with a thudding firmness of resolve. Then she came rounding into the room demanding, “And what pray tell is this?” She carried a baggie full of marijuana that George, rattled by her attitude at the dinner table, must have inadvertently left in evidence in the front yard when he went out to get some “fresh air.” I was already at a disadvantage, for I was lying on the bed humped up on my elbows and physically unable to avert my eyes from my lady’s unwavering blinkless glare. Two ideas graphically crossed my mind: (a) she’s going to think I smoke it too if he does, and (b) I don’t want her to hate the guy before I decide whether it might be a good thing for the family for me to go into business with him. So I idiotically did what men are biologically geared to do—I rationalized covering my ass by lying to my wife for her sake. I laughed in a really poor whinnying snigger and asserted, “That’s not what you think it is, sweetheart. It’s a new kind of catnip he thought Leopold might enjoy.” In a nanosecond she had wheeled about and started back down the stairs proclaiming, “We’ll find out if Leopold enjoys it.” I levered up off the bed and trailed behind her feeling absolutely miserable with the guilt of having told her the very first outright lie literally since I’d met her, and also atremble with the trepidation of wondering what sort of madness the lie was on the verge of setting off. The final aside uttered by my wife, as she unshipped the contents of the baggie into Leopold’s dish, was, “And don’t call me ‘sweetheart’.” I don’t enjoy recalling, and therefore will refrain from boring you with, the very large number of unprecedented-in-the-cat-world gyrations and unearthly feats of narcotized insanity our young cat Leopold performed throughout the length and breadth of the house during the next half hour, nor the punitive and depressing amount of money above his standard fee our veterinarian tacks on when you roust him out of bed in the middle of the night to tranquilize a twitching and gibbering feline (that clawed the back of his hands into mincemeat) in order to “bring it down.” But I will inform you that since the consciousness-rearranging events of that disastrous night so many years ago, I have never told my wife another lie.