Outer Life

The Sage

     I’ve always had an affinity for old people. I like the way they think.

     Now I realize that’s a gross generalization, that your average old person probably thinks little better than your average non-old person, and that there’s no fool like an old fool, particularly one with his pants pulled up to his armpits, but here I’m talking about the tip of the tail, the smart old people who’ve spent their whole lives thinking and learning, compounding their understanding in a way that I, with my comparatively fewer years and my shallower well of life experience, cannot yet hope to do.

     There’s one old guy I admire so much I think of him as the Sage. I first met him at a charity tribute dinner, one in which we’d both been dragooned into attending to bolster a powerful CEO’s curiously fragile ego. We were seated next to each other. I introduced myself, he asked me what I did and before I knew it he’d skipped the chit chat and was interrogating me, determined to drain from me any knowledge I had that he didn’t. He doesn’t do what I do, but he already knew inside stuff that even I didn’t know. But what really impressed me was how easily he integrated what I gave him with what he already had, spinning interesting theories and fitting disparate pieces together in ways that had never occurred to me.

     It was like I was wearing blinders and he wasn’t. I felt stupid yet exhilarated, as if the clouds had parted and revealed, for the first time, how incredibly high a mountain I had to climb just as I realized I loved climbing.

     Over the years I’ve seen him at a few more public events. He still interrogates me, but I’ve managed to ask enough questions of my own to learn a little about him.

     His formal education ended in high school, but his real education never stopped. He has a fanatical devotion to lifelong learning. He needs to figure things out. He’s always reading, always questioning people, always mastering something new. Like all wise people, he knows what he doesn’t know, and it drives him nuts. He can’t accept “I don’t know” for an answer from himself.

     With all his knowledge, he doesn’t come across as a know-it-all. Partly that’s because he likes to focus on what he doesn’t know, because that’s what interests him. Partly it’s because he doesn’t seem to care what anyone thinks of him, so he feels no need to put on a show. Mostly I think it’s just his extreme intellectual honesty. Even his declarations sound like they have question marks, as if he’s inviting us to correct him if he’s wrong. “Help me get this right,” he says before he teaches.

     Listening to him, I wonder time and again why he’s so unusual. Why isn’t everyone like this? The world is such a fascinating place, there’s so much to learn, yet so many of us run from its knowledge. We don’t want to know. Nuggets of knowledge are just lying  there for the taking, but we pass them by, never looking down, lost in our own little worlds.

     He has other qualities I appreciate. He’s not a dreamer. Too old for that, he says. What you get from him is unvarnished realism, sometimes very painful realism. No sugar-coating: that’s fuzzy thinking. When your head’s in the clouds, he brings you back to earth. “Listen: It is what it is. That’s all I know. You can figure out on your own time what it should be.”

     He’s thrifty. Or cheap, depending on how you look at it. Drives an old beater of a car, something that simply isn’t done in Los Angeles. I don’t know where he lives, but I expect it’s the same house he bought in 1950 when he was first starting out. What’s odd is I suspect he may be rich, but he’s not saying, I’m not asking, and there’s no telling from looking at him. I like that.

     He’s not a particularly nice guy. Small talk and other social graces elude him. He doesn’t seem to have any interest in getting to know me, or anyone else I’ve seen him with. When I see him at an event, he usually recognizes me and remembers what we spoke about the last time we talked, which could have been months or even years earlier, but he’s never bothered to remember my name. That part isn’t important to his learning project. What’s most disconcerting is the way he ends a conversation – he just turns away without a word. The first time I wondered if it was something I said but, having had it happen time and again, I’ve figured it’s just his way.

     One trait he shares with many of his generation is a deficiency of entitlement. He’s said that every day he wakes up wondering how he’s going to justify his existence for another 24 hours. He also says the world owes him nothing. I trace this back to his formative years in the Great Depression and World War II, a time when many had the entitlement knocked out of them. They take nothing for granted. My parents were like that and did their best to strip the any sense of entitlement out of me. Modern psychologists and self-esteem advocates would say that’s a bad thing, and I’ve certainly suffered for it at times, but overall I find I can connect best with people who share my lack of entitlement.

     He’s currently justifying his existence by writing a treatise on life and a few things he’s learned about fishing. He says this jokingly, but I think he’s serious. It’s just the sort of thing a Sage should do, bequeathing his most valuable asset, his knowledge, to society. In case he is serious, I’ve offered to copy edit the manuscript to ensure that I get my hands on it.

     I really hope he’s serious.

The Wealth Effect Mirage

     It’s a wonder my relatives still call me for economic advice. When they start throwing themselves a pity party, bemoaning all the money they’ve lost as house values crater, or stocks plummet, I can only reply:

     You’re not as rich as you think you are. You never were.

     Over the past few years people bid up the prices of your homes, stocks and other assets, but now it turns out those people never really had the money to pay for those assets. They were just borrowing and flipping with funny money, a game that allowed them to pay way more for these assets than anyone would using real money. If I offered you $1 million for your house, payable in Monopoly money, would that make your house worth $1 million? That game’s over. Why are you still playing?

     As I said, it’s a wonder they still call. Yet for some reason they do. Strange times.

The Mess Explained

     I work for a company, and sometimes I wear a suit and tie to work. In my extended family, this qualifies me as a business expert.

     So in times of economic crisis, like these, I often hear from distant family members wanting an explanation of what’s really happening.

     I’ve learned over the years that, in explaining economic matters, I must avoid jargon and assume no familiarity with any concepts. Further, I must be prepared on those rare occasions when my explanations result in a flicker of understanding for instinctive hostility to both the economic concepts and to me.

     So I tread carefully, using plain language and simplifying wherever possible.

     My extended family’s been calling a lot lately, wanting to know how we got into the current mess. It’s simple, I say. People wanted more than they could afford, so they borrowed more than they could afford to repay. Both borrowers and lenders assumed house prices would continue to rise, allowing borrowers not only to repay any shortfall out of their real estate profits, but to borrow even more than they could otherwise afford to repay. For ten years this act of faith worked. Last year, it didn’t. Now borrowers are buried under loans they can’t repay, and lenders are figuring out they’ll never get paid back, and those who lent to the lenders are wondering if they’ll ever get paid back, and those who invested in the lenders are wondering if anything will be left for them. So borrower are worried, lenders are worried, investors are worried, and the government’s going to make everything better by borrowing more money.

     Is that clear?

Outside Interests

   Years ago, in an attempt to humanize us, an enterprising staffer in our HR department added an “Outside interests” data field to our personal contact pages on the company’s intranet.

     So now when you click on Carl in payables you learn not only his phone extension and office location, but also that he likes movies and Italian food. Before, you’d just call Carl and ask when he was going to cut your reimbursement check. Now, armed with this outside interest data, you can ask Carl for your reimbursement check and whether he’s had any good spaghetti lately. Before you know it, Carl’s not just a dilatory check cutting functionary, he’s become a real human being.

     I’m all for humanization, and I got the memo instructing us to update our intranet profiles, but I nevertheless had a hard time figuring out what outside interests to list.

     On one hand, I have too many interests. The whole world, and everything and everyone in it, is potentially an interest of mine. They only give us room for three interests. How do I choose?

     On the other hand, I have too few interests. While the whole world is open to me, at any time I am intensely focused on one interest to the exclusion of all others. So if you ask me today, my only outside interest is pre-war American rural music. If you asked me last week, my only interest was compiling an anti-thesaurus exploding the myth of synonyms. And the week before that? I can’t even remember anymore.

     This is a problem, both because it isn’t practical to change our outside interests on a weekly basis and because I don’t want to become too associated with interests I will soon ditch. For instance, a distant branch of my wife’s family knows me only as a golfer, an interest that was burning brightly about 15 years ago when I first met them. The interest extinguished shortly afterwards, but every time I see them it’s all about golf. Every Christmas and birthday, I get golf cards and gifts. I suppose I should tell them I no longer play golf, but then they may figure out I’ve been lying to them for years (you didn’t really love that testicle-shaped golf ball holder?) and I’d have to divulge my current interest to them and that would just set us off on a new spiral of awkward misguidedness, particularly if I have to explain the anti-thesaurus.

     All this assumes the point is to list my own personal outside interests which, of course, is completely not the point. This is work, not play. My real interests are irrelevant. The only interests to list are those best calibrated to advance my career prospects.

     So, to take an easy case, my interest in surreptitiously surveying the curve of a woman’s breasts is one of my few long-standing interests but, if listed, would not further my career prospects.

     Jocks seem to do well here, so I considered inventing a sporting interest. The problem is, it’s hard to fake it. Major spectator sports are out – day in and day out, their fans demonstrate a granular expertise I can’t come close to faking. I toyed with some obscure sports, but there you’re taking the chance that someone in the office will actually know something about rugby and demonstrate it on you in the hallway.

     Getting perhaps a little too meta, I considered but quickly rejected interests such as “God and mammon,” “truth, justice and the American way” and “making my boss look good.”

     In the end, I settled on a simple but effective “None.” That one word does double-duty, assuring the gunners that “I’m a workaholic” while winking “I’m too cool for school” to the ironically detached.

     Unfortunately, it also conveyed “malcontent” to a higher-up. He instructed me to get with the program, intimating that the program did not accept “None” as an outside interest.

     So I debated once again what interests to list. This time it was even more difficult, knowing, as I now did, that at least one higher-up with a finely calibrated smart-ass detector would be scrutinizing whatever I wrote. It paralyzed me.

     Realizing that cooking up more palatable interests would take some time, and that I couldn’t leave the “None” just sitting there, I called HR and asked the chirpy associate to delete the offending “None.”

     “You want us to just leave it blank?”

     “Yes.”

     “But isn’t that the same thing?”

     I tried explaining that it wasn’t the same thing, at least to one higher-up.

     “Well you have to have an interest. The system won’t accept a blank. So what are your interests?”

     Long pause while I conducted a furious internal rewind of the outside interests I’d tried and previously rejected. I thought I’d have more time!

     “Everyone wants to noodle over those interests. How hard can it be? Just tell me your interests and I’ll input them now. Do you like movies?”

     Desperate visions of “movies and Italian food” tattooed forever on my forehead scrambled my mind long enough to resurrect a previous reject and shoot it out my temporarily mad mouth:

     “God and mammon.”

     “God and Mammoth? So you like skiing! I’ll just write ‘religion and skiing’ and we’re good to go. See, that wasn’t so hard.”

     Click.

     It’s not so bad, actually. I don’t know how to ski, or, for that matter, anything about skiing you wouldn’t learn by watching the Winter Olympics, but I’ve successfully deflected a dreaded ski invitation by pointing at my knee and ruefully saying “ACL.” Too painful to discuss.

     And the religion part earned me some cred with the not insignificant God-fearing segment of the office population. Like everyone else, they used to think I was an anti-social asshole, now they see me as an anti-social asshole with a halo. Makes a huge difference to some.

     And now, at last, I’ve been humanized.

Ear Candy

     When my pre-teen daughter’s peers get together, the first thing they ask each other is: “Who do want to win American Idol?” The next thing they must know is: “Who’s your favorite Jonas Brother?”

     On the basis of this data, they forge their self-identities and begin to socially sort themselves, much as an earlier generations of girls sorted themselves on the basis of their favorite Beatle or New Kid or any of the numerous other non-threatening post-pubescent all-male but still-sorta-feminine singing groups who perform this valuable identity-building and social-sorting role for our pre-teen females.

     Until recently, my daughter couldn’t answer these questions, as we don’t watch American Idol and, though we’ve heard the Jonas Brothers on the radio, we’ve never actually seen them. And seeing is the whole point of the Jonas Brothers experience, or so I’m told, so she really can’t pick a favorite.

     In short, we’re raising a freak child.

     I’m okay with that, being a freak adult myself, but my wife, perhaps moved by some vestigial memory of her favorite Bay City Roller, is not okay with that.

     So that’s why last Tuesday night found me and my daughter planted in front of the TV watching American Idol, perhaps the last Americans to be initiated into its mysteries.  My daughter’s job: Find a favorite contestant. My job: Avoid snarky comments. Notepad in hand, she dutifully recorded the name of each contestant and distinguishing physical characteristics, while I did my best impression of a couch potato, switching off my brain and slumping back in slack-jawed silence.

     That didn’t last long. The sights and sounds of this, our most popular television show, simply overwhelmed the cultural criticism compartment of my brain, pressing each of its hot buttons, which, against my will and contrary to my explicit instructions, caused it to whir into action. It was all I could do to keep my recently slack-jawed mouth shut.

     As my bottled-up brain gathered steam and threatened to blow, my daughter earnestly jotted away, oblivious to my turmoil.

     And that’s how it should be, for she’s still just a child, with a child’s view of the world, and I don’t want to distort it with my adult opinions. As her parent, it is my duty to guide her development, not supplant it. So, let her reach her own conclusions, I kept repeating to myself, as the ravings in my head grew ever more feverish.

     I cracked only once, wondering out loud how Bob Dylan would have done as a contestant on this show, but I left it at that.

     And she ended up selecting two favorites, a male and a female, and gathered enough observations about the other contestants to carry her through the social whirl until the next week’s show.

To Serve and Deflect

     Flattery will get you everywhere. At least, that is, when you’re dealing with me.

     “We really need someone with your insights and experience,” the head of my kids’ school said when she asked me to join its board. That was all I needed to hear.

     What she really needed was my money, of course. And what’s truly sad is that I knew that was really what she needed, but my fragile self-esteem craves flattery so I said “yes.”

     Even sadder still is that I don’t have anything like the money she thought I had. So her well-executed flattery wasn’t nearly as profitable as she'd hoped.

     Ten months later, I’m sitting at a long table late at night staring hard at a piece of paper in my lap so as to make it appear that I’m engrossed in some intensely analytical exercise related to something written on the sheet and not just averting my eyes from hers at the head of the table.

     She’s just finished another “someone” plea, as in “we need someone to…” or “it would be great if someone would….” In this case, someone needs to chair the fundraising committee as it launches the school’s next capital campaign. I’m not looking, but I can see what’s happening: her eyes are boring holes in each trustee’s head, one by one, scanning back and forth, as we stare down, our minds desperately searching for plausible-sounding excuses that’ll explain why we’ll be out of town and working around the clock and tending to a dying father and unable to use a phone or the computer for the next six months.

     One glance at that Gorgon turns you into a volunteer.

     The silence is excruciating. People, like nature, abhor a vacuum. Soon one of us must crack. Please, oh please, just let it not be me.

     I don’t have to be here. Yet here I am. Not for the first time I wonder: Why do I do this?

     It isn’t the flattery, for that stopped the minute I joined the board. It isn’t my sense of duty to the school and my community, for I have none. It isn’t the contacts I’m making on this board, for my goal is simply to avoid these people, arriving just before meetings begin and racing out the door as soon as they end. And it isn’t to support my kids, who attend this school, for since joining the board I’ve seen enough of this school’s sausage-making that we’re applying to send them to other schools. We’re out as soon as we get in.

     Actually, I suppose in a sense I am here to support my kids. When applying to other schools, you must get the head of your current school to write a (hopefully) glowing recommendation for your kid. The problem is, submitting the recommendation form to the head of school telegraphs your intention to leave the school. In other words, you’re now a traitor.

     You have hope if the head of school hates your guts so much she’ll do anything to ensure you leave, even if that means she has to swallow the bile and write a few nice words on your recommendation form.

     Or maybe she thinks she has a chance to keep your youngest because the better school down the road isn’t expected to have any openings at his level next year.

     Most of all, it helps if she’s just about to launch a major capital campaign and needs lots of money from your friends and acquaintances. So if you must leave, she hopes you leave quietly. Preferably with a good word for the school if anyone asks. And preferably after making a sizable donation to assuage your guilt for abandoning the school at its hour of greatest need.

     It’s the guilt, after all, that explains why I remain on this board. She peddles a particularly potent strain of guilt, blending constant crises with appalling sacrifices, in order to cement us in our board seats and goad us into looking up when she’s looking for yet another someone.

     The school is always teetering on the brink of something, which is why she always needs someone. That’s the constant crisis method of management. It works best when the people you manage aren’t motivated. I may be projecting a little here, but judging by the deafening silence at the table tonight, most of my fellow trustees share my lack of motivation. Each of us is thinking: “If I don’t volunteer, I will destroy the school, pushing it and all our children and the dedicated teachers and staff over the precipice to their doom.” That's the guilt talking.

     I said “most” trustees are unmotivated because there are two trustees with boundless motivation. Not enough to cover the board’s collective deficit (hence tonight’s need for yet another someone), but enough to subject themselves and their families to such extreme hardships in service of the school that it puts the rest of us to shame. Their appalling sacrifices, though repellent on one level, stoke strong feelings of guilt at deeper levels. How can I refuse to co-chair this year’s silent auction when last year Arthur did it all by himself, personally wheedling and cajoling free goods and services from over 100 local businesses to support a school that caters to the rich? How can I refuse to donate more when Alan took out a second mortgage on his home when the school had that liquidity crisis?

     How can I, indeed? Yet I do.

     Still looking down.

     Someone PLEASE crack!

     This is getting unbearable. She’s never held out this long before. Thankfully I have this paper in my lap, a paper so fascinating its hold on my eyes looks to be permanent. Do I have a pen? It would look even better if I was writing on the paper, jotting notes or making calculations or something, for I am a busy man, and busy men never stop working, projects everywhere all the time, the last guy you’d ask to do anything. But if you want something done, ask someone who’s busy. Damn! Surely she knows that. Wrong strategy. But if she did call on me, I’d pretend I didn’t hear her, engrossed as I am in this utterly absorbing piece of paper. And if she raised her voice and called on me again, I’d pretend I didn’t hear the original question for my mind was elsewhere, on this paper in my lap to be exact, and it would look so much better if I only had a pen, for the paper is nearly blank, a save-the-date for this year’s school carnival, hardly the sort of topic to occupy my mind, or any mind, for more than a few seconds. It would look so much better if I could just scrawl some figures on it.

     And that’s when I looked up. My pen, somewhere on the table, eluded my blind reach, forcing my eyes up long enough to find it, which was all the opening she needed to pounce, triumphantly bellowing my name for the all the room to hear that I was the someone.

     As they looked up and breathed a collective sigh of relief, some shaking their heads at their close call, a few maybe taking pity on me and my family for undertaking this appalling sacrifice, I flailed momentarily, unable to meet her gaze, looking down reflexively, hoping it would all go away, but of course it wouldn’t, and I knew that, and that's when I felt a heretofore unknown strength growing in my body, along with a backbone, for I realized then that I also knew something else:

     I’d already played the trustee card.

     Last week we interviewed at the school down the street, and my wife, per our carefully-plotted plan, let it drop in the context of something else that I had been busy at a trustee’s meeting, and at that the admissions officer perked up immediately, for she now knew two essential things about me: I had trustee-level bucks, and I was sufficiently vain and gullible to subject myself to the appalling sacrifices expected of a school trustee. We could see the visions of dollar signs dancing in her head. When the admissions officer called the headmaster in to meet with us, an honor he rarely bestows, or at least that’s what they wanted us to think, for they mentioned it several times, I knew with a high degree of certainty that whether or not the head of our current school wrote a good recommendation, our eldest would be getting a fat envelope from the new school in a few weeks, which meant my youngest would soon be classified as a “sibling of a current student,” which meant he’d rocket to the top of the waiting list, which meant I no longer needed any of this, if I ever did.

     Now looking into her eyes, meeting her gaze, daring her to blink, I cleared my throat, the room went silent, and I regretted to inform her, I said, that unfortunately we couldn’t undertake the assignment. We had just committed to another project, you see, one that may not be as important as the school’s capital campaign, but one that’s nevertheless close to our hearts: bringing clean water to West African villages. I know it’s not much, but these simple water pumps have ripple effects: They allow the village girls, for the first time, to attend school, their lives previously devoted to fetching water from distant wells. The new pumps also help eradicate the scourge of the guinea worm, a truly nasty creature that breeds in pools of filthy water surrounding old-style water holes where it attaches itself to the bodies of its victims, feasting on their innards as it grows to lengths of three feet or more, all the while inflicting a burning and debilitating pain. The pumps, and their clean water, also help these people fight off many other fatal diseases and hideous afflictions, nightmarish conditions so distant from our lives that our pampered minds can’t even conceive of them.

     If only I’d known you’d need me to chair the school’s capital campaign. But I didn’t, so now my hands are tied. What can I do? I am so sorry for this.

     Now she’s looking down. As are the other trustees.

     And now I’ve got to find me a water project in West Africa. Quick.

FYI

I haven’t posted anything in a few months. I believe the standard procedure in this sort of situation is to apologize to one’s readers and promise to post more frequently in the future. Or, if one has decided to hang it up, to apologize and say farewell.

I can do neither.

While common courtesy may require an apology to those few diehards who’ve kept the faith, continuing to monitor this site in the hope that words will flow again, I fear that any apology from me would imply that I’ve breached an obligation to you. I have no such obligation, and the minute I start thinking I do is the minute this becomes a job. If I want to keep this going, I can’t let that happen.

Of course, judging by the evidence of recent postings, or the lack thereof, one could fairly conclude that job or not, all I’m offering here is the sound of silence.

But if you listen carefully, you might hear the faint sound of gears whirring off in the distance, as the machinery in my head continues to process words for possible future display on this site. I can’t predict when, or even if, the machinery will actually produce anything, but I can assure you that I tend it assiduously in the hope that it will.

Dereligification

     I used to ignore Christmas. With no religion, a fractured family, deeply-ingrained anti-social tendencies, and a steadfast and principled opposition to gift-giving and -getting as being inefficient transfers of resources designed only to enrich the retail sector of our economy, ignoring Christmas was the only thing to do.

     Then I had kids.

     I no longer ignore Christmas. With kids, apparently, that isn’t an option. So now I tolerate visits from my fractured family, I pretend for a few days that I’m not as anti-social as I am, and I do my part to enrich the retail sector. You’ll even see some bright blinking lights hanging from the eaves of my house.

     But I draw the line at religion. I’m not going to pretend I believe something I don’t. And that poses a problem because, as anyone who’s watched the Peanuts Christmas special knows, the “true” meaning of Christmas isn’t the groovy dancing, the bright blinking lights or even the aluminum trees. No, as Linus teaches, the true meaning of Christmas is to celebrate the birth of Jesus. And that has no meaning for me.

     So, even if I celebrate Christmas in a half-assed going-through-the-motions non-denominational kind of way, I’m still celebrating, at the most fundamental level, the birth of Jesus. That doesn’t sit right with me. Not so much because I have anything against anyone celebrating that birthday – if it makes you happy, it makes me happy – but because I feel like a hypocrite going through those motions.

     I could reject the whole religious side of Christmas, but I fear that would just force me into embracing the flipside: crass consumerism. Linus and I are of one mind there.

     Is there a third way?

     I suppose Festivus may be a solution. It is, after all, for the rest of us. But Festivus is so different from a traditional Christmas I’d need my family to play along. Substituting an aluminum Festivus pole for a Christmas tree?  Airing of the grievances? Wrestling the head of household to the ground? It has promise, but I don’t think they’ll go for it.

     I think the only way out of my bind is to work within existing Christmas traditions, but squeeze the religion out of them. So, for instance, we will have a Christmas tree and wreath, but I will tell myself those evergreens are in our house not to celebrate Jesus’s birthday, but to celebrate the return of spring at a time when everything else is brown. Similarly, we will still hang mistletoe, but any kissing that occurs will not be a celebration of Jesus, it will be a celebration of, say, fertility. And I see no reason to pull the yule log out of the fireplace. As we watch it burn, its bright warm glow will not be a reflection of Jesus’s birth, it will instead remind me that, with the recent winter solstice, these darkest of days are now getting longer, and soon we will be basking in the sun’s warmth again.

     The more I think of it, the more I think this dereligification approach has a lot of merit. Already I’m feeling much better about this holiday season. I will celebrate in silence, though, as I wouldn’t want my Christian friends thinking I was misappropriating their traditions and twisting them to my own ends. They might think that was sacrilegious, and I wouldn’t want to offend them on this, their special day.

Soul Stealers

They say some aboriginal people fear cameras, worried a photograph of them will steal their souls.

I feel the same way about advertising.

My mental space is my soul. It's me. I guard it jealously, but there's an obvious difficulty with that. Just as my body isn't a closed system, needing nourishment in order to survive, my mental space must remain open to new ideas in order to thrive.

I try to carefully regulate what gets in. Just as I don't shove my face full of junk food, I try to keep my mind clear of junk ideas.

But it's hard to resist. Junk ideas, like junk food, are crafty adversaries, designed to penetrate our defenses. They always look so good, their surface allure masking the junkiness within.

It helps to have a burly bouncer guarding your mental door, one who is impervious to glam and flash and popularity, lifting your velvet rope only for the worthy.

But that mental bouncer requires constant vigilance, a quality few, if any, have, and it can easily get overwhelmed by a crowd of gate crashers bull rushing the door, so it also helps to avoid the junk.

And that's where advertising is so insidious. It won't let us avoid it. I don't watch TV, which is, of course, riddled with ads, but increasingly I can't watch movies either, having to sit through commercials before the movie and product placements once it starts. I can't drive down the street without ads hitting me from billboards, bus benches, buses and cabs. I can no longer attend concerts or sporting events without having to resist constant pitches from the "sponsors" who make it all possible. They've even put ads on the walls of my office building's parking garage, and on screens installed in our elevators. I keep my head down to avoid it all, which is why they've started putting ads on the floor of our supermarkets.

And, what's worse, ads are perhaps the most effective mental space invaders ever designed. Crafted by experts, they sing catchy jingles, they show strategic jiggles, they scream and joke and criticize and brag and cajole and give us puppy dog eyes, exploiting our weaknesses over and over and over until they've worn us down enough for them to barge in and burrow deep, setting up shop and crowding out our thoughts.

So you could say I fear ads, worried that each one I see or hear steals a bit of my soul.

Even More Unctuous

     I’m on a diet, hope to lose 10 pounds.

     Isn’t everyone?

     In my case, there’s a slight difference from most, I suspect, in that I don’t need to lose the weight. My BMI is 22, putting me comfortably in the middle of the normal range, well below most of my peers (60% of whom are classified as either “overweight” or “obese”).

     I don’t particularly want to lose the weight either. I’m currently at the lower-end of my personal weight range. My clothes all fit. I don’t care how I look. And, happily married and surgically removed from the breeding pool, I have no need to impress the ladies (and if did, I’d have to gain weight, my slight physique the sort that begs for the sand-kicking and subsequent girl-stealing so popular amongst those with high BMIs).

     And apart from two small love handles, I’m not sure where my body will find the expendable pounds if my diet succeeds. Will it be forced to jettison minor organs?

     So why am I doing this?

     My purpose is not, as many of you surely suspect, to annoy the hell out of those who actually need to lose weight. In fact, only my wife and you are privy to my plan. As the pounds melt away, I’m perfectly content to let everyone else think I’m dying from some wasting disease.

     And my purpose is not in any way anorexic, unless, that is, a middle-aged man with no history of eating disorders or concern for his body image or desire for more control over his life could nevertheless be hit out of the blue with strong but well-disguised anorexic urges. I suppose anything’s possible, but if so, these urges are so deeply submerged I’ve never perceived them.

     My purpose, as far as I can tell, has three levels.

     At the first and most superficial level, my purpose is to prove a point. Intrigued by the science behind Seth Roberts’ Shangri-La Diet, I tried to convince my wife to try it. My wife, in my opinion, needs to lose no weight, but this is not, apparently, her opinion, for she, like so many of her female peers, is steadfastly devoted to periodically depriving herself of food in order to reach the impossible dream of the Perfect Weight, which is always defined as 10 pounds less than whatever she happens to weigh that day. It’s the modern equivalent of sackcloth, ashes and self-flagellation in order to attain that eternally elusive goal of Perfect Grace.

     The Shangri-La Diet claims to offer a much easier way, like free indulgences that actually work. It’s based on the premise that your body actively regulates your appetite, ramping it up in times of plenty, damping it down in times of scarcity. Flavor is the signal; the more intense and familiar the flavor, the more your body assumes you’re in a time of plenty. This little-known process is little-known in the developed world because we live in a land of perpetual plenty, our highly-processed food stuffed full of artificial flavor enhancers, ensuring our appetites are permanently set on “Gorge.”

     When your appetite is set to “Gorge,” it’s really hard to stop eating. Which is why conventional diets are so hard to follow for long. Your body won’t stop screaming “EAT!” Is it any wonder 60% of my peers are overweight or obese?

     The Shangri-La Diet seeks to subvert this system by depriving it of flavor, not of food. Every day on this diet, you consume 300 or so calories in the form of flavorless oil. By ingesting these flavorless calories, you manage the neat trick of avoiding hunger pangs while fooling your body into thinking you’re hungry. As your body reacts by going into scarcity mode, lowering your appetite, you need less and less real food to feel full, causing those excess pounds to effortlessly melt away.

     It seems too good to be true, it’s counterintuitive, it flies in the face of conventional wisdom so, of course, I had to try it. My hope is that, if it works, I can convince my wife to exchange her deprivation treadmill for daily doses of flavorless oil.

     At a deeper level, though, this isn’t really about the Shangri-La Diet. It’s simply the latest episode in my long history of self-experimentation with food.

     One year, I went vegetarian, not out of a love for animals, or a hatred of vegetables, but simply out of curiosity. How difficult would it be? Would I develop cravings for the taste of freshly-slaughtered animal flesh? Or, with distance, would I lose the desire to sink my teeth into dead things? Is it possible to completely avoid the omnipresence of meat and meat byproducts in our food system (what, no Jello!) while still living a normal life? Would I feel better, or worse? Would the sudden disappearance from my diet of bovine growth hormones soften my features, raise the pitch of my voice and reduce the density of my body hair? Does a meatless diet attract (or repel) the opposite sex? Is it something in the vegetables that causes hard-eyed cynicism to melt into wide-eyed idealism, ultimately driving one to vote for a Kennedy?

     One summer I lived on fried rice for lunch and peanut butter sandwiches for dinner. That wasn’t experiment, though, as I couldn’t afford anything else.

     Other times I’ve given up specific food items or ingredients just to see what effect, if any, that would have on me. Giving up dairy revealed a lactose intolerance I never realized I had (hey, I feel so much better!). Radically reducing the sodium in my daily diet made restaurant food taste like it had been soaked overnight in brine (I still avoid it, and it still does). Similarly, a ban on sugar made many foods taste like candy (do you realize how much sugar is in ketchup?). Giving up caffeine revealed (a) that I didn’t need it (I actually felt awake when I awoke), but (b) that I nevertheless wanted it so much I made it my recreational drug of choice, which it is to this day.

     I once tried to gain weight, wondering where it would show. I guzzled two liter bottles of regular Coke, I ate almost exclusively at fast food joints, at night I downed a pint or two of ice cream and, to top it off, I’d have a few beers. Within just a few weeks, love handles appeared on the side, and then, in a matter of only a few months, I had several inches of belly skin drooping my significantly expanded waistband. Looking back, that experiment was a mistake; although it took only a few months of monastic living to shed the beer belly, nothing I’ve done has succeeded in eliminating the handles.

     Once I gave up solid food for a blended concoction of various powders, fruits, supplements and yogurts. I didn’t do this out of a desire to improve my health, or to lose weight, or to see if I could live without teeth, but to see how much time I could save if I eliminated most trips to the grocery store, almost all food preparation time, and all that time we spend sitting around a table chewing the cud. If we had food pellets like in the Jetsons, I would have gladly eaten those instead.

     I was eventually coaxed into returning to the table, but as recently as last year I was experimenting with the total elimination of lunch from my life, subsisting solely on breakfast and dinner and a few cashews or peanuts in between. This has made my shift to the Shangri-La Diet much easier, for all I had to do was substitute 3 tablespoons of oil for the nuts.

     By this point you may be wondering why anyone would do this to himself. Food is one of life’s great pleasures. Why mess with it if you don’t have to? The answer, I think, is in the third, and probably ultimate, reason why I’ve undertaken to lose weight I don’t have.

     It goes back to the whole Cartesian mind/body duality thing. Philosophically, I reject this mind/body dualism. It isn’t mind over matter, it’s mind is matter.

     I qualify this with “philosophically,” though, not because I’m trying to score more pretentiousness points (as if that were possible) but because I have to admit that when it comes to dualism, what I believe is very different from what I do.

     Every day, my mind holds fast to the belief that it’s just matter, no different from the rest of me, in fact it is me, while at the same time my mind carries on a constant campaign to detach itself from my body.

     So when my body sends hunger signals up my spine and into my amygdala, some higher part of my brain asks “Why?” That higher part asks whether this is true hunger, or just time-based conditioning (it’s noon, must eat) or social conditioning (everyone’s eating, so must I). That higher part likes to experiment, wondering what would happen if we denied the request or answered it with something different (you want lunch? here’s a handful of peanuts). That higher part basically needs to insert itself between me and all my basic urges, monitoring, analyzing, filtering and ultimately controlling what I do. Nothing is allowed to be mindless.

     We all do this to some degree – that is, those of us who aren’t savages – but I suspect I do it to a greater degree than most. And I can appreciate that at some point, all this thinking just gets in the way. It isn’t living. It isn’t healthy. I’ve tried to turn off my mind – studied Taoism, meditated – but so far without success. I can’t resist self-analysis.

     So I’ll continue to drink oil to see what happens, just as I’ll continue to experiment with sleep (how much do I really need? can I get it all on the weekend?, can I get to REM sleep while sitting up?), music (must it be repetitive? how long should it take to grow on you? when have you listened too much? does it sound one way when you play it, another when you listen to a tape of yourself playing? are all pop melodies derived from the same simple formula?), sex (if I wear nose plugs, will it affect my desire or just my desirability? is it better with eyes closed or open? does sex improve in the dark? does laughter help or get in the way?), and everything else that makes life, for everyone else, worth living.