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.
Archive for the ‘anxiety’ Category.
Speaking of Gore Vidal, he didn’t look like a wretched old Queen until he started launching the little bee bees that are all he has remaining from his blunderbuss days as the pinup girl of Marxian polemics. Oddly enough, I met him in 1990 at a fundraiser during his surreal—it could have been directed by Fellini—Senatorial campaign in California, and he never looked me in the eye, though all I said to him was, “How are you?” On the other hand, his sulky lips and aristocratic jaw worked perpetually as though he’d got some peanut particles lodged inside the crevices of his teeth. Aha, I thought. A man who’s not comfortable with his masquerade. (When they asked me, “What about the money?”, on my way out, I replied, “I’m the wrong flavor, friend. I bleed red. I was just here to see the bon vivant and litterateur, not the hard-charging candidate.”)
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.
Whatever happened to harmonic dissonance? People seem oblivious to their not even having tried to merit the lofty attributes their egos require them to ascribe to themselves.
We may confidently assume that those who lack curiosity are also “non-judgmental”. People who fear being wrongly definite repress all their instincts.
The surest indication that you need to pause and ponder right now is the feeling that you ought to wait until you’re better able to think.
Values are principles that control behavior. They derive from a twin pair of evolutionary imperatives: the self-assertive need to achieve goals that are measurable, promoting the self-esteem necessary to continue achieving goals; and the self-protective need to assert oneself without fatally antagonizing other people asserting themselves. Convictions, on the other hand, are intellectual formulations of values as they relate to the fundamental aspects of external reality at a given time. Here’s the tricky part: The fundamentals of external reality (i.e., circumstances) are always in the process of altering as time persists. Maladapted people hang on to their obsolete convictions with the ferocity of a downing man clinging for his life to an anvil. Well-adjusted people know that dropping old convictions and adopting new ones as circumstances mandate is the only way their values can be preserved. Soi brave, mon enfant!
Whatever Happened to Harmonic Dissonance? II: That a person could even utter a statement like, “I don’t need to read the newspaper because nothing in it interests me,” or, “I’ve never eaten Korean food because I know I wouldn’t like it,” betokens a breakdown of the speaker’s most basic associative operations (his mind “throwing a rod”); and it yields a proposition that is ridiculous—that we can judge the value or utility of an experience without having tried it. I remember when this fallacy typified the thinking of teenagers in the early Eighties. Now we hear it from adults every day. The disconnect occurs to people who haven’t managed to objectify, assimilate and conceptualize the elements and forces of contemporary existence; coping in desperation with incessant shotgun blasts of minutiae stresses them so completely that their minds simply shut down rather than entertain the thought of taking on something new and different. Neglecting one’s mental capacities is not the wisest preparation for life inside a kaleidoscope.
The lack of a sense of responsibility leads to self-deception, and this is one of a slew of contemporary American “behaviors” (i.e., behavioral syndromes) against which the sweet-reason approach is powerless to effect change and therefore pointless to employ; others are depression (resulting from the long-term repression of impulses), addiction (escapism masquerading as courageous self-discovery or outrageous self-expression), the chronic inability to keep a promise (“I lied,” “things change,” “I’m moving on”), blaming someone or something other than oneself, saying that one has a disease in order to show that “I couldn’t help it.” The problem is that these sad and threadbare devices are defensive mechanisms applied when people actually need to assert themselves to overcome the fear arising from the insecurity that typifies society so conspicuously. The rising popularity of “extreme sports,” in which people fling themselves off thousand-foot cliffs, for example, with no great assurance that they’re going to land on the ground as anything but a splat, signals the severity of our anxiety. Those of us who don’t leap experience the right impulse (close your eyes and jump) but are afraid to act on it lest we wimp out or look stupid, which we really are for not responding; but we’re not in a condition to appreciate that. And because of our own insecurity we want to cut the clearly maladjusted plenty of slack—we “empower” them, to use another current catch phrase. Unfortunately, the dysfunctional syndrome we adopt metastasizes along with our unabated insecurity until we’re offering even greater slack to those guilty of committing actual crimes; fully crediting them for any of those blame-deflecting excuses cited above they care to indicate, because we believe (however absurdly) that we could well stand in their shoes some day and be in need of all the slack that we can get. The moral of this unhappy exposition is that society is crippled for everybody when a large enough number of its members refuse to accept the discomfort and inconvenience of self-investigation and behavior change as the price of putting an end to the pathology. America’s prosperity, which makes it easy to dissociate cause and effect, insures that this is going to be the way things are for a long time to come.
There are actually people who resent children for being free of the responsibilities that impinge upon their own (the adults’) ego-satisfaction and pleasure-getting. In fact there are adults who hate children for this.
When my daughter was learning to drive, one of my instructions (issued like the others about a hundred thousand times) was that she never think about using the turn signal. I said, “Never ask yourself, Should I use it now? Should I use it here? Should I use it this time? When you make a turn of any sort, anywhere, whether there’s a car behind you or a car coming towards you or not, use your turn signal. Use it automatically.” I propose the same principle be adopted by the four or five individuals left in this country for whom the leading of an honest life is a desideratum. Simply do the honest thing at all times in every situation. You don’t need to think about it, and don’t tell me that it’s not that simple, because it is.
We squander, I would say, 30% of our lives trying to “understand” our difficulties, thrashing them out, telling people about them, worrying ourselves silly, wearing ourselves down. If we actually wanted to know the truth about ourselves, we wouldn’t do any of that crap.
“Oh I didn’t have time” is bullshit.
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.
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?….
Conversation and Interpretation:
Jack: “Morning, William. How’s it going?” (By saying “William” instead of “Bill” I’m magnifying your ego, hoping you’ll relax whatever reservations you have about me.)
Bill: “Been better, Jack. I still haven’t lost that cold.” (I know you flattered me but I still need some coddling.)
Jack: “Sorry to hear it.” (I don’t give a fuck how you feel, I’ve got my own troubles. What are you, a baby?)
Bill: “Been hunting yet this season?” (You’re right. I need to get my masculinity on the table.)
Jack: “Got me a doe down at Willow Branch is all” (In case you ever wondered if I got enough balls to break the law.)
Bill: “Skinned her on the spot, did you? (That’s what a real man would do.)
Jack: “Well Moloson was there and you know how he is. He likes to do all that for you.” (Moloson is the best hunter in three damn counties and he let me tag along with him last week if I cleaned the truck up when we got back. How you like them apples, assblossom?)
Bill: “They got anything good on the menu this morning?” (I’ve had enough of this crap. You’ve already taken up more of my time than you deserve, you little gas-pumping, best-friend’s-wife-humping moron)
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.
Nobody beats Americans for coming up with self-serving bromides for their psycho-emotional cowardice. “She’s not what I thought she was, but I’m not going to leave her because I don’t want to hurt her feelings.” Yes, it’s much better for her when you chronically get drunk rather than spend time with her, stay out playing with the boys five nights a week, never take her anywhere, screw every other female who will lie still for you, and beat the living shit out of her when you come home and realize you’re “stuck” with this woman. That way you don’t have to test whether you’re capable of inveigling a more desirable and self-respecting female to take up residence with you and tolerate your violently disintegrating personality.
I don’t know if you’ll be any more successful, but I know you’ll be happier (defined as “not tied up in knots”) if you forget about whether you can do it, how you’ll look to others, whether you’ll lose your job, family, dog, friends, membership in the club, season tickets, new car, mind, everything, and trust yourself to handle the challenges that await you. Put another way, you’ll do far better jumping into the deep end of the pool without knowing you can swim, than you will by continuing to bark your shins bloody futzing about safety in the shallow end. Trusting yourself to rise to the occasion whenever that is called for—here is Point Zero.
I lack the power to exaggerate as surreally as life itself can. Walking into my office one day years ago, I saw my secretary overturn a small bottle of White Out on the desk. As I approached to see if I could help she lowered her head and draped her arms in a loose circle about the mess. Looking back across her shoulder she said, “I didn’t do that.” I not too loudly cackled with laughter (not that I could tell you why) but she was perfectly serious. “You didn’t see me do that,” she said. Her eyes were virtually pinwheeling while her other features had gone into gargoyle mode. Her terror was absurd yet it was about to devastate her. “Do what?” I said. “You’re right. I didn’t see anything.” Then I turned on my heel, left the office again and drove to a happy-hour bar.