Outer Life

Magical Realism

     Unpacking books, I hold a slim volume by Wallace Stevens. Opening it to a bookmarked page, I see “The Emperor of Ice Cream.”

     It’s been years since I read it. For some reason, I stop unpacking, sit down, and re-read it. Once, twice, thrice, its meaning seeping in. The jarring juxtaposition of vibrant life in the first stanza with cold death in the second stanza making its exhortation to “let be be finale of seem,” initially so puzzling, now so clear. Its second stanza’s picture of a dead body laid out, as its “horny feet protrude” from under an old sheet, given over to the eternal darkness, make its final two lines all the more meaningful to me: “Let the lamp affix its beam / The only emperor is the emperor of ice cream.”

     Tears stream down my cheek. I recite the poem out loud, but am incapable of uttering its final lines, my breath caught in my throat, overwhelmed by the realization that for years I had been living in the second stanza and was only now moving back to the first. I have not and will not escape the shadow of eternal darkness but now, for the first time in years, my eyes are open for the lamp’s beam, determined to move to the light for however long it continues to shine for me.

     That night she offered to show me some photographs she’s taken. She’s an avid photographer, taken many classes, would like to do it professionally someday.

     I rarely show my prints to others, she says, they’re very private to me.

     I eagerly assented.

     She disappeared into a closet and emerged with a short stack of large prints. Clearing a space on her dining room table, she looked for the first print to show me.

     My thoughts were along the lines of please oh please let me appreciate this appropriately.

     She placed the first print down on the table for my review.

     Blackness. A dark room. Illuminated only by a thin beam of light streaming in from the outside.

     Speechless, I can only stare, then I look up, my throat catching, and barely manage to recite, in my smallest voice, “Let the lamp affix its beam / The only emperor is the emperor of ice cream.”

     It’s been a few months since that magic moment and, as I continue to move to the light, I experience more and more of these magic moments. It may be that I always had these magic moments but failed to notice them, or that I had these magic moments but chose to dwell on the dark moments, but I doubt it. Magic moments like this are impossible to ignore. No, I prefer to think that magic simply does not dwell in the dark, but that the path to the light is paved with magic moments, so many you cannot miss them as they infuse your life with life, one that eventually may even live up to the title of this post. 

Tattoo You

     I’ve never wanted a tattoo. 

     As a kid, I met some of my father’s navy friends and saw what old tattoos look like on old skin.

     Tattoos are like skin grafitti. They can be clever, but how many are worth a lifetime’s contemplation?

     As one who strives to live in the here-and-now, I would find it distracting to have a constant reminder of the done-and-gone on my forearm, though I suppose I could tattoo “here and now” on my forearm to remind me.

     I don’t wear visible clothing. No t-shirts with messages, no designer labels, nothing like that, so why would I wear visible skin? My car doesn’t have any bumper stickers; why would I want one on my arm?

     That being said, I think about tattoos a lot. I wonder: “If I had to get a tattoo, what would I ink?”

     Most of my ideas range around the person-as-product theme. I am very intrigued by the idea of tattooing scannable codes such as a UPC symbol -- the only question is what amount it would scan to -- or an ISBN code to my favorite book or a QR code that brings you to Outer Life. These tattoos would be more than just ink on skin, but they would also be potentially obsolete someday as scanning code technology progresses.

     I also like the idea of an FDA Nutrition Facts label calibrated to me as if I were a food product. I could enhance the effect with a “sell by” date on my forearm -- probably the day I turned 40.

     Maybe a dotted line running down my chest with “Tear to Open”?

     Might be fun to tattoo a few designer labels on my body while I’m at it, though I’m not sure what I’d do if I got a cease-and-desist letter from Ralph Lauren or Marc Jacobs.

     Completing the product theme, I would probably need something like “SURGEON GENERAL'S WARNING: Thinking Causes Questioning, Undermines Authority, Alters Consciousness, And May Complicate Life.”

     Then, properly packaged, I could be consumed by the world.

Too True

     In the online dating world, you are your picture and your profile.

     So as I prepare to dip a toe into that world, I’m thinking a lot about which pictures to post and what to say in my profile.

     The profile — describe yourself in 1,000 words — presents an interesting challenge. Having reviewed a number of profiles to see how others manage this challenge, I can tell that people really struggle with this. Some are uncomfortable writing about themselves; others are uncomfortable writing. I do not have those problems (see, e.g., this blog). My problem is different:

     I am too honest.

     The point of the profile is, clearly, to reduce yourself to words without reducing yourself. The tone of these profiles is relentlessly positive; never is heard a discouraging word. Apparently we’re perfect only in our mother’s eyes and in our dating profile.

     The problem for me is I seem to be incapable of writing about myself in anything other than a warts-and-all style (see, e.g., this blog).

     Part of this is functional. I simply do not have time to date the world. If there is something about me that will eventually drive you away, I’d rather you figure that out now on your own than after six time-consuming dates with me, time I could have better spent with someone who liked me, warts-and-all. Self-selection is a powerful force for the time-constrained. That being said, I’m concerned that if I admit any weakness in my profile, people will assume I must be severely damaged goods (after all, no one else admitted any weaknesses), so I will end up with too much self-selection and, as a result, too much time on my hands.

     So I am trying to accentuate the positive and eliminate the negative, but it is a real struggle.

     For example, I wrote “I am an incurable romantic seeking my one true love” but then had to add “so long as my one true love lives less than 15 miles away and west of the 405.” In Los Angeles seeing someone who lives more than 15 miles away, or on the other side of the 405, is, by definition, a long-distance relationship, and I have no interest in spending more of my life sitting in traffic, even if it is to see my one true love, so I question whether I’m even a romantic after all. I struck that sentence.

     Or I wrote “My job challenges me in all the right ways” but on reflection added “and many of the wrong ways.” No one has the perfect job, and I struggle, like you, with all sorts of crap at work, and the last thing I want to convey is that I am somehow the only guy in the world with a job that isn’t sucking his soul. So I struck that sentence.

     It is really tricky to describe honestly who you are looking for. Most people speak in meaningless generalities, saying they’re looking for “a strong, confident partner who seeks the best from herself and those around her,” when we know they’re really looking for a woman with a huge rack and loose morals. But you can’t say that. In my case, not being one of those body part fetishists, and being truly interested in mind as well as body, I’ve figured I can reduce this to a simple algorithm: “If IQ > lbs., yes, else no.” I’ve been persuaded to strike that and will go instead with the “strong, confident” blather that filters out no one. This means I will have to sift through a lot of women with less-than-stellar intelligence, including some with huge racks and loose morals. I guess it could be worse.

     One of the dating sites asks you “What do you do on a typical Friday night?” The right answer is something like “On a typical Friday night, when not fending off eager suitors, I am surrounded by my plentiful friends as we attend intimidatingly-intellectual cultural experiences or recreate the Algonquin round table or have crazy fun times of the sort only hinted at in beer commercials.” Clearly not my life, so instead I wrote “On a typical Friday night I am staring into the abyss as waves of existential dread wash over me. Or I go out.” I’m keeping those sentences.

Dying Alone

     It seems like everywhere I look these days I see dating advice articles. 

     When I was married I never saw them, but now that I am a newly single man contemplating entry into the modern dating world I see them all the time. And on top of that, friends send me even more dating articles, so I’ve read quite a few of them by now.

     The advice in these articles is almost always directed at women. I’m not sure if that’s because women are especially deficient in dating skills (seems unlikely) or because men don’t care or are beyond help (bingo), but I nevertheless find these articles very useful. Apart from giving me a better idea of what is concerning the women I’m going to meet, the best of these articles help explain the intricacies of a highly complex world of which I know nothing.

     Many articles are predicated on what I call the “dying alone theme”: “if you don’t want to die alone, you’ll need to do X and/or stop doing Y.” Dying alone figures so prominently in these articles that I must assume women have an especially acute fear of it.

     By “dying alone” they can’t mean “dying without a partner” because women live, on average, much longer than men, so even those women who do X or stop doing Y and find a male partner will see their partner die before them. Dating advice isn’t going to change the odds much here.

     This dying alone theme might refer to children who, presumably, would be expected to sit around the dying woman’s deathbed, particularly as her partner probably predeceased her, but then in my age range (mid-40s) I would imagine very few childless women still harbor hopes of having children, so for them dying alone seems to be pretty much guaranteed whether or not they do X and/or stop doing Y.

     Is that so bad? What’s doubly puzzling, to me, is why anyone would even want to die with company. As your body fails, often in embarrassingly fluid-leaking ways, and your mind is shot or, at best, drugged up beyond comprehension, I highly doubt you’ll want an audience or would even be aware of it. Cultures in which old people went to mountain tops or into the desert to die seem to have had a better grasp on the realities of the situation (not to mention having devised a much more cost-effective way to go).

     So the prospect of dying alone will not motivate me to do X or stop doing Y. What does motivate me is avoiding the prospect of living alone.

Aruba

     In college he was known as “Aruba.” 

     Freshman year, he was always telling us he was “off to Aruba” or “just back from Aruba,” so if you were describing him to someone, you’d say “you know, that guy who’s always in Aruba” and they would know exactly who you meant. Eventually you’d just say “Aruba’s coming to dinner” or “I saw Aruba in the Quad.”

     But I never called him “Aruba” to his face. Somehow I could tell from the beginning that he was not the sort of person who could gracefully wear an effacing nickname, so I’d make a point of addressing him by his real name. Others were not so sensitive. As the years went by, I noticed his circle of friends constricted to the point where he hung out with just a few of us, none of whom uttered the forbidden nickname in his presence.

     I’m not sure exactly why I hung out with him. We had little in common. He was rich -- I later learned his Aruba place actually belonged to his uncle, who was very rich -- while I was poor. He jetted about the world, while I’d never left the country. He never seemed to study, while my head was always buried in a book (though, come to think of it, I wasn’t studying either, as those were usually not the books assigned in my classes). He dressed like a peacock while I wore the same tired uniform of jeans and t-shirt everyday.

     I’m pretty sure I hung out with him only because he wanted to hang out with me. He was very good at hunting me down -- this was in the days before cell phones, text messages and even email, and I didn’t have a landline, so finding me required effort. That he exerted the effort was very gratifying, coming at a time in my life when no one else bothered.

     One oddity: I couldn’t hunt him down. I tried, sometimes, but he never answered his phone or, when I later got a phone, returned my calls, if I dropped by unexpectedly he'd ignore my knocks and never responded when I left messages on his door's white board, and he was even cold to me when I saw him walking on campus. It was as if our friendship was exclusively one-way; only he could control it.

     He was a great talker. He’d spin these stories that went on for hours. He’d swear they were true, but I wondered. Could anyone’s life possibly be this entertaining? Could he possibly be such an infallible superhero? Could others truly be responsible for all his problems? Of course not, but I held my tongue, never expressed any doubts, and truth be told I did find his stories entertaining. I was, in short, a good listener, just what he needed.

     He was also a great source of information. He had strong opinions, and was often right. He knew which shoes were the best, what time of year you needed to visit Paris, what haircut looked best on your head, which tie worked with that shirt, which girl was right for you, how to achieve that particular slide guitar sound, all sorts of stuff. I was a sponge for his information, but never an acolyte, as I couldn’t afford to implement most of his advice ($200 for shoes?!), but he didn’t seem to care. The advice just kept flowing.  

     He did have an unpleasant habit of inserting little digs against me into his stories, and advice, but given my own low self-esteem I didn’t disagree with a lot of them and shrugged off the others.

     So even though I found him strange and off-putting, and even though I could never really develop a real friendship with him, given the one-way artificially stilted nature of our interactions, I continued to respond when he called.

     After college we went our separate ways but I never completely lost touch with him. Every so often, out of the blue, I’d get a call from him, and after his perfunctory “how are you doing?” he’d ignore my response and spend an hour or so spinning another story, just like in college. Occasionally he’d leave me room to say something, which he then usually treated as an open invitation to deliver more advice. By this point he knew so little of my life that his advice was often ridiculously wide-of-the-mark, but his certainty never wavered.

     Then a few years ago another friend emailed me a news story with a note: “Check this out: Aruba’s going to jail!” Aruba had gone into business for himself, probably seeded by his rich uncle, and ran into hard times during the financial crisis. To stay afloat, he allegedly spun a story for some new investors, enticing money out of them before they realized he’d allegedly misrepresented the true state of his business.

     I called Aruba, and sent an email. True to form, he never responded.

     He hasn’t gone to jail but, from the limited news I’ve seen, he lost at least one investor case and must be spending a lot of his time hunkered down with lawyers.

     I’m sure he will rise again, if only in his own mind, but until he does I am equally sure I will not hear from him. For he must always be the infallible superhero and, at this time in his life, not even he can pull that off. And if he falls far enough below me, I am sure I will never hear from him again, for I am now convinced that the real reason he sought me out so assiduously in college was that I was the ultimate loser and, therefore, the perfect backdrop for him to display his relative greatness.

     Aruba is but a minor footnote in my life, or so I thought, for recently I have realized that my life is filled with Arubas. I am drawn to these charismatic narcissists, just as they are drawn to me. They offer me an enticing vision of a fully-realized self while I offer them the unquestioning affirmation they so desperately crave. In the process I make them worse, and they make me worse, thereby increasing our respective needs for each other.

     Sick, but there it is. At least now I know.

     But I also have to admit that if my phone rings and caller ID tells me it is Aruba, I’m still going to answer. And listen.

     Sick, but there it is.

Serendipitous Reading

     I live for serendipitous reading experiences. Take, for instance, four strands in my recent reading:

Strand 1: Errol Morris/Saul Kripke

     I am an avid consumer of the lengthy essays Errol Morris occasionally publishes in The New York Times and, in May, I eagerly devoured his latest three-parter: “What’s In a Name?”

     In his typically digressive footnote-heavy style, Morris explored the significance of naming, bringing to it the level of enthusiasm one expects from a not-yet-jaded philosophy grad student, which is what Morris once was. In the process, Morris weaves together disparate strands into an unexpected whole, seeing connections where, on first glance, there would appear to be none, which is mainly what I like about his writing (and his documentaries).

     Along the way, I encountered (again) the logician Saul Kripke. Morris drew heavily on Kripke’s Naming and Necessity for this latest essay, and has grappled with Kripke in prior essays. Naming and Necessity is a collection of three lectures on the significance of names that Kripke delivered at Princeton in 1970, supposedly without notes, to a group of grad students that included Morris. I’d long been meaning to tackle Kripke, so after finishing Morris’s essay I finally did. Naming and Necessity is out of print but a used copy was easily procured and I made my way through it, certain I had not divined the full extent of his ideas, but intrigued enough to explore Kripke’s other writings, of which there is surprisingly little. One of the few Kripke books is Wittgenstein on Rules and Private Language, which seemed promising to me because I thought seeing Kripke set himself against Wittgenstein would, possibly, help clarify aspects of Kripke’s thinking that I was unable to glean from Naming and Necessity.

     So my to-be-read pile now includes Kripke’s book on Wittgenstein but, in the meantime....

Strand 2: David Markson

     Years ago I read David Markson’s Vanishing Point, one of Markson’s last four novels. These novels, if you haven’t encountered them, are unique, constructed out of short seemingly random factoids, initially puzzling in the extreme, but quickly converting your resisting mind to the potato chip-like allure of consuming just one more factoid, until, by the end, the totality of factoids congeal into something much more meaningful, along the way giving you the powerful impression that you have become the writer, as you are the one constructing the meaning.

     Anyway, that’s my take on Markson and, for some reason, shortly before I started the Morris essay I had decided I needed to return to Markson. I ordered the three later novels I did not have and, in the process, noticed the novel he wrote before his last four: Wittgenstein’s Mistress. It was well-reviewed and, on my review of a few pages, appeared to be a precursor stylistically to the last four novels so, after giving it a minute’s thought, I added it to the order.

     Just after finishing Kripke’s Naming and Necessity, my Markson books arrived and I dove into Wittgenstein’s Mistress. At first I had no idea what he was doing, finding this book even more puzzling than Vanishing Point, as unlike the later novels Wittgenstein’s Mistress did have a character, albeit one about whom I could fathom almost nothing. After 30 pages or so, I paused, put the book down, and thought. The first thing that occurred to me was “Hey, this is a book styled after Wittgenstein’s Tractatus!” Obvious insight, given the title, and that both Wittgenstein and Markson largely employ short one-sentence-per-paragraph styles, but an insight that, nevertheless, had not occurred to me when I started reading.

     The second insight was that this must be a book written in a Wittgensteinian world. Armed with that insight, I quickly finished the book. I found it incredibly funny, meaningful and moving (I actually cried at the end). I marveled that I had the good fortune to stumble on a book with so much to say about loneliness at this time in my life. I doubt I would have appreciated it as much any other time.

     I then immediately dusted off my copy of Wittgenstein’s Tractatus and dove back in. I find much of that short book impenetrable, which is doubly frustrating because it is written in such clear and precise prose, but it provokes thought and so, for that reason, it is one of those books I will intermittently return to again and again throughout my life, yet never really understand. As I paged through Wittgenstein, I recalled the Kripke book on Wittgenstein and felt the first two strands meld. But then....

Strand 3: Logicomix

     One of the more unfortunate side effects of divorce is losing friends, both when couple friends dump you for your former mate, and when you move out of one community and into a new one.

     So as part of my multi-front campaign to replenish my stock of friends, I’ve been looking into joining a book club or two, given that I read a ton and actually liked my college English seminars. Searching around I discovered a club that would soon be discussing Haruki Murakami's Hard-Boiled Wonderland the End of the World. Having already read all the Murakamis, in the process all-but erecting a shrine to him in my living room, I figured this would be an easy one for me, so I RSVP’d and attended. Half the group hated the novel, half loved it, so we had a lively discussion, and I enjoyed it all very much.

     After the meeting ended, one of my fellow Murakami partisans and I spent the next hour discussing Murakami and then other writers, each of us, at the end, exchanging specific recommendations we eagerly typed into our iPhones. At one point graphic novels were discussed. I recommended she try Chris Ware’s Jimmy Corrigan: The Smartest Kid on Earth, which she, a fan of graphic novels, had inexplicably neglected to read, and she pointed me to Logicomix, one that I not only had inexplicably failed to read, but had not even heard of.

     Walking home, I popped into my local Barnes & Noble and found Logicomix. Once home, I opened it and realized almost immediately that this was a book about Bertrand Russell, who was Wittgenstein’s teacher, then student of a sort.

     Every reading path leads to Wittgenstein, I thought, as I finished Logicomix and....

Strand 4: David Foster Wallace

     … turned to my next book club book, for in my eagerness I signed up for a second book club. This one would be reading a book I hadn’t read before, David Foster Wallace’s first novel The Broom of the System.

     Imagine my shock on reaching page 42 and encountering Bertrand Russell again, as one of the characters recites Russell’s famous barber antinomy. This character, I later learned, was a student of Wittgenstein’s at Cambridge.

     Four strands in one month, each starting from completely separate points, all converging on Wittgenstein. And I don’t even read much philosophy. 

     But wait, there’s more!

Random Serendipitous Encounter

     This weekend I checked my heretofore all-but-dormant Outer Life email account and noticed the first page filled with the emails Twitter sends me when someone new starts following me. First thought: I’ve been hit by a Twitter spambot. Next thought, after checking Twitter: Saturday night The Epicurean Dealmaker recommended my writing and many of his many followers decided to follow me too. What is especially cool about this is that I’ve read The Epicurean Dealmaker for years: his is one of the longest-standing blogs on my RSS reader.

     I clicked through to his actual blog to check it out -- reading his posts through Google Reader, I never actually see his blog -- and what did I see? At the top, under the heading “Food for Thought,” he lists three quotes, the first of which is “Wovon man nicht sprechen kann, darüber muss man schweigen.” (“Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent.”) It is the final line of Wittgenstein’s Tractatus, and the only one of the seven propositions in that book that stands alone without further explication.

     Wittgenstein everywhere! Am I going mad? (This is not an idle speculation, given the predilection for madness in logicians, illustrated so vividly in Logicomix.) No, what I think is happening is I’m living what Wittgenstein called Übersicht, or an ultimate sight that gives us a heightened ability to see connections, so that I cannot open a novel these days, or click through to a blog, without seeing connections back to Wittgenstein.

     It is particularly appropriate that this is happening at a time when I have, for reasons not entirely clear to me, mostly shifted my reading diet from non-fiction to fiction, perhaps unconsciously turning to the metaphysical side that Wittgenstein, misclassified by so many as a cold logician, actually considered to be the best path to discover the meaning of life. This is the path he was referring to in the quote above, the path that must be felt and cannot be explicated by mere logic. Feeling over theory, insight over fact, that is the direction in which my thinking has moved recently, unconsciously walking Wittgenstein’s path.

     And in that process I am seeing Wittgenstein everywhere. Maybe that is madness, of a sort, but it has been such a pleasure to experience these disparate strands unexpectedly weaving together into a cohesive whole that I can’t help thinking that if this madness, more please!

Denominators

     In my quest to be a cliche, when my wife and I separated I moved to the beach. 

     So to get my kids, I now drive a long, windy canyon road that’s just a single lane in each direction.

     Its many twists and turns prevent passing. Its sliver of a shoulder and lack of turnouts means the slow driver ahead of you cannot, even if he wanted, pull over to let you pass. Mile after mile, you cannot go any faster than the slowest driver ahead of you.

     This is life at the “slowest common denominator.”

     For me, this is a real challenge. I am a very fast-paced person. I walk fast, I talk fast, I think fast. I’ve elevated impatience to an art form (albeit one that is appreciated only by me). Living in fast forward, everyone else appears to move in super slow-mo. It’s a real Mercury/Jupiter thing, with me being Mercury, orbiting the Sun in the 88 days, while so many others are Jupiters, taking a leisurely 4,329 days to complete their orbits.

     So driving at the slowest common denominator can be a thick slice of hell on earth, sure to drive me insane, or at least goad me into bumping cars off the road Spy Hunter-style, if not for my concerted efforts to convert this into a valuable learning opportunity.

     I ask myself “why do these people drive so slow?” Perhaps they are old, they are lousy drivers, they cannot see well in the dark, they are fearful, they cannot get another ticket without losing their license, or for some reason their car has a lawnmower engine. Lots of possible reasons, none of them having anything to do with me. So I try not to personalize this.

     Then I ask myself “what can I do about it?” Apart from bumping them off the road Spy Hunter-style, there is nothing I can do to speed them up. So I breathe. Having recently started yoga, I use this extra time to practice my meditative breathing, focusing on the inhale and the exhale while maintaining mindfulness. I don’t always succeed in losing myself this way, but at least it gives me something to do while forced to putter along at the slowest common denominator.

     And if I manage to make it to this higher state of mind, I might even wonder “why do I need to go so fast in the first place?” The rest of the world seems happy enough puttering along Jupiter-style, yet for some reason I feel compelled to zip around Mercury-style. Why am I in such a hurry? Who am I to presume that you should drive at my crazy pace? Could it be that I’m the one who’s in the wrong here, driving myself through life at a ridiculous pace? I can be so pushy.

     And then there are broader questions to consider: If I am not the slowest common denominator on this road, could I, nevertheless, be the lowest common denominator in other ways? I fear that much of my life is, indeed, a lowest common denominator life, as so much of what I do is automatic and easy, most likely because I race through life so fast there’s no time to think. Perhaps if I slowed down, savored life, thought a little more about what I was doing, and why, I could elevate my life to the highest uncommon denominator.

     Surely that is something to strive for, I think, as I putter along this road, driving so slow it feels like reverse, with no end in sight, my enlightened state evaporating, but not fast enough for me to realize, as I contemplate what I’ve written here, that this post was never really about a road.

Karma

     Karma is a bitch.

     E.g.,

     Snow Day at Shady Glen! Not a real snow day, mind you, this being Southern California, where it’s 80 degrees in December, but a Snow Day Shady Glen style. This means tons of shaved ice trucked into Shady Glen’s park first thing in the morning, piled into a hill by a crew of day laborers, then smoothed out by a sledding expert to create a nifty sled run for the kids. Add in a coffee cart for the adults and you’ve got yourself a day full of fun.

     All that’s asked of you is to bring an unwrapped new toy, worth about $20, for the Fire Department’s toys-for-tots campaign. At the end of Snow Day the firemen show up in a hook-and-ladder, give the kids a tour, let them sit behind the wheel, that sort of thing, and then load it up with the toys and head off to spread the Holiday cheer to those kids whose parents cannot afford to truck tons of fake snow into their communities.  

     So there I was, working the toy table at the entrance like the good Shady Glen citizen I was, when she showed up with three kids in tow. And no toys. I’d been there for two hours, collecting toys from maybe 100 people, and she was the first to arrive without a toy. Most brought one for each kid, some brought even more, considering it was such a good cause and all, but she had none.

     Sometimes time slows down, seconds crawl by, perception tingles and you notice every little thing. Something like that happened to me then. Her eyes hit on me, then darted down to the table, strewn with new toys, then over to the poster informing entrants of the new toy entrance requirement, then back to me, my mouth starting to form the question “Do you have a toy?,” but before I could get to the “have” she turned away, put her head down, grabbed her nearest kid and barreled past me, pretending not to hear me as I finished my sentence.

     Standing there, my sentence finished but now discarded on the ground, I watched her back recede from me. What to do? Only one thing. I abandoned my post and ran after her.

     She had made it to a group of women when I caught up to her. I sidled into their circle, turned to her, and repeated: “Do you have a toy?” This time she glared at me, didn’t look away, and said she hadn’t, that she’d been very busy, what with being a working mother and all, and she was sorry but no, she hadn’t brought one, she said as she turned away and started to walk away, continuing her retreat.

     Visions of underprivileged children danced through my head. Visions of the many working mothers who’d managed to find the time to buy a toy for these underprivileged children also danced through my head. So I called out, loudly, to her rapidly receding back: “Everyone else is busy but no one else is stiffing the poor kids!”

     That got her attention. And others’ as well. Faces turned to me, hers included. She reached into her purse, pulled out a $20 dollar bill, crumpled it into a ball, and threw it at me. As it sailed through the air she yelled out “Fuck you!” and continued walking away. The $20 fell short. I left it there and returned to my table, now deprived of whatever good cheer I’d accumulated that morning and questioning whether I was wrong to confront her like that.

     Then, in quick succession, the following happened:

     Her business failed. She designed items for the rooms of fashionable children (irony of ironies!). It turns out she sourced some of her raw materials from China, and said raw materials were so soaked in formaldehyde that they gave off noxious fumes, hardly the sort of thing one wants a fashionable child to breathe in his or her room. So when news of this broke her business broke leaving her broke.

     That meant the house had to go. She had just finished constructing a mega-mansion that must’ve cost many millions. She’d designed it herself, heedless of others’ advice, she being the expert, after all, on rooms for fashionable children and therefore, by close extrapolation, rooms for fashionable people. As far as I know, the house wasn’t soaked in formaldehyde, but some of her ideas were nearly as toxic, such as the dormitory-style kids’ room for her three tots in its own isolated second-floor wing, the stage with seating for 30 in case the kids every wanted to put on a play, and a slide from the kids’ wing down to the first floor that wasn’t completely enclosed and therefore conjured up visions in most people of kids spilling over the edge to their deaths. Hardly the sort of vision one wants when one contemplates buying a mega-mansion with a multi-million price tag. So her house just sat on the market, unsold, and as overall house prices plunged hers plunged faster.

     Around this time the husband left. I never knew what he did, other than look like a male model and drive the kids around, but whatever he did he started doing it without her.

     And then her youngest kid got cancer. Was it the formaldehyde? People wondered.

     And at that point even I could no longer derive pleasure from her karmic misfortunes. Yet when she organized a fundraiser to help pay for her kid’s cancer treatment, I initially considered attending, if only I could throw my money at her, but in the end I refused to go and, in so doing, I let her kid down.

     Karma is, indeed, a bitch, and when I reflect on this, and all the other valid reasons karma could cite for making my own life a living hell, I shudder.

Superpowers

     Sitting in another comic book movie with my 11-year-old son, my thoughts turn to my own superpowers.

      Yes, I have superpowers. At least three.

      One is the power to disappear. I am the invisible man. Especially at parties. One minute I’m in a circle of people, nodding my head, maybe contributing a word or two, the next I’m completely invisible to everyone in the room. Happens a lot. Even when I’m not trying. I’m also good at disappearing completely from people’s lives.

      Another is my ability to walk through people. At top speed. Slow-moving densely-packed urban sidewalks do not slow me down at all. I weave in, out and around the packs, never touching or brushing a person, constantly searching for seams to exploit, zigging where they zag and zagging where they zig, always heading for daylight. It’s like the other pedestrians aren’t there at all.

      Finally, I have the power to completely dominate a conversation. When I want, I can talk over anyone, twist any conversation to what I want to talk about. This power, I must admit, is sort of the opposite of my first power, the power to disappear, as instead of disappearing myself, I cause the other people who were ostensibly part of the conversation to disappear. 

      I am not yet comic book-eligible as I do not own a lycra body suit (yet), nor do I have a logo or a catchy nom de plume.

      I can't even call myself a superhero, as that implies using one’s power for heroic purposes, and my powers, such as they are, are hardly suited for heroics.

      And I must admit that my superpowers are a bit of a double-edged sword, though now that I write that I wonder why I did. Double-edged swords can be very handy, especially when one is surrounded by enemies, as they allow you to cut both ways, slicing through them on both sides, never wasting a swing, and I did not intend to imply that my superpowers are anywhere near that handy. Instead, I intended to imply that my superpowers aren’t really that super, certainly not as super as a double-edged sword when you’re surrounded by enemies. But then again maybe I did mean that, in a different way, because just as an effectively-wielded double-edged sword eliminates the people around you, so, too, do my superpowers.

      And for that reason I am now forging some new superpowers. 

The History of Today

     Never start a story before you know how it ends.

     In January I posted "The Headache, Part 1." This was intended to be the first of a multi-part saga chronicling my two-and-a-half year bout with migraines so severe they were, at my lowest point, hitting me four or five days a week. I planned to explore a variety of topics, including how an Alzheimer's medication led directly to my spotless office, how another medication led indirectly to the removal of my uvula, how I managed to turn my first massage into a stressful experience (for me and the masseuse), why my acupuncture experiences never healed or relaxed me and actually made my condition worse, my uneasy and heretofore undisclosed relationship with Botox (for migraines, not wrinkles!), and my predictably wacky experience in the medical marijuana world.

     The story, as I planned it, would end with my migraines reduced in severity and frequency and my life back to normal, though migraines would continue to lurk.

     After I started writing the series, though, two things changed. First, my marriage ended. Then, my migraines completely disappeared. Two twists that significantly changed the story. At this point I suppose I could rewrite it, but I am no longer interested in yesterday.

     Instead, I find my thoughts returning to the history of today.

     Which is probably a good thing for this blog.

The Headache, Part 1

     Summer 2009. A double bat mitzvah. Two sisters. We know their parents well, so we’re there in the temple for the full ceremony. Can’t just waltz in later for the reception. No sir, we’re sitting through the entire ceremony. In Hebrew. Must be a conservative congregation.

      I hope they see us here.

     I have no idea what they are saying, but that’s okay. It’s so rare that I feel this disoriented that I’m liking the novelty. This must be how I felt when I was three years old sitting in church. A back to the future moment. 

     I’m liking my borrowed yarmulke a lot less. It sits uneasily on my head. Other men’s seem to be cemented in place. Some use pins, others may actually use cement. Mine just drifts. 

     It’s not helping that I have a headache. And a neck ache. All those micro-movements needed to keep the yarmulke in place, shielding the top of my skull from the Hebrew god, who apparently cannot bear to see a middle-aged man’s monk spot, are just making it worse. 

     And then everyone stands, so I stand too, and my head explodes. Not literally, but that’s how it feels. It’s like my head is filled to the brim with a highly toxic fluid, and any movement causes some to spill and burn a path of destruction through my brain. 

     And then we sit and more toxic fluid sluices around in my head, searing more paths of pain.

     This is really hurting. 

     And then the yarmulke slides off my head and hits the floor. Mortified lest the Hebrew god smite me and my exposed monk spot down, I lean down to get it and nearly black out from the excruciating pain. This must be what smiting feels like. 

     Bathed in cold sweat, desperate to avoid any more head movements, I spend the rest of the ceremony ignoring the ceremony, and the congregation, and the standing and sitting, and the Hebrew god, as I just sit there sweating with my head cradled in my hands.

     Afterwards I implored my wife to take me home. It was mid-afternoon, but I headed straight for bed, pulled a pillow over my head, and slept the next 16 hours. 

     When I awoke, the headache was gone. 

     What the hell had just happened? 

     I spent much of the next two years trying to answer this question.

     Writing about illness and writing about not writing are two of the most tedious topics to read. And that's precisely what I propose to do. You've been warned.  

 

Empty Middle Seat

     Years ago I met a very rich person.

     This very rich person had so much money that if he just invested it in a money market fund, he would earn more in one day than I earned in an entire year. His net worth was at least 10,000 times greater than mine.

     We had to fly to meet with him. While on the plane I fantasized what it would be like to have so much money.

     At first I thought of all the things I could buy. I was earning enough at my job at the time to support a U.S. upper-middle class lifestyle, so I already owned the things I needed. All I could buy with my newfound wealth were things I didn’t need. And while it would surely be neat to own a private jet, a beach house, a zeppelin, or a 100,000-book library, I wondered whether owning these things would be more trouble than they were worth. I feel guilty enough having 25 unread books on my shelves: how would I feel surrounded by 99,900 unread books?

     I suppose I could hire people to deal with most of the hassles that would come with the new things, but then I’d have to deal with those people. It wouldn’t be hassle-avoidance as much as it was hassle-transference.

     I would quit my job if I had all that money. My time would be all mine. That would be a benefit.

     But then I got to thinking of all that money sitting in the bank not being spent on zeppelins. I would have to do something with it. Think of all the suffering I could alleviate with my wealth. The guilt of letting it sit there without me doing anything with it would be overwhelming. But giving money away isn’t easy. Charlatans would swarm. And even if I could avoid them, there was a danger that in trying to do good I could do bad. If I gave away fish, would people forget how to fish? (I suppose today I could give it all to Bill Gates, but at the time I wasn’t aware of his foundation.) So giving away so much money would take much of my time. I’d be leaving one full-time job for another.

     I imagine a big attraction of being really rich is you get a huge bump in status and, I suppose, power. My personality is warped, though, so I avoid anything that would make other people pay attention to me, and I have no desire to make anyone do anything. I prefer to be left alone. With so much money, I could secrete myself in a mountain hideaway like a Bond villain, but then I’d need a small army of security guards to keep people away. Not quite the kind of anonymous solitude I seek.

     With so much money, another concern is that nothing would ever be good enough for me. Every day I’d ask myself why my day wasn’t better. If anything went wrong, why wasn’t it right? If something tasted good, why didn’t it taste great? Today I am a very accepting person. I tend to make the best out of whatever I have. With unlimited funds available to satisfy my every need in the most satisfying way possible, would I be so willing to accept the less-than-perfect? I’d probably drive myself crazy. My life would devolve into a Twilight Zone episode.

     Our meeting with the rich person went well. A little too well, in fact, as we got so immersed in the issues we were discussing that we lost track of time. Then one of us realized that if we didn’t leave soon, we’d miss the last flight back.

     The very rich person looked perplexed, as if the idea of missing a flight had never occurred to him. It probably hadn’t. He offered to have his private jet take us back, but one of his people reminded him that the jet was in maintenance, so he apologized for keeping us so long and we scrambled back to the airport and just barely made our flight.

     We were flying Southwest, my favorite airline. I love its no-nonsense approach. I snagged an aisle seat and waited for the rest of the passengers to board, hoping none took the middle seat next to me. No one did. An on-time flight with an empty middle seat: does it get any better than this?

     And that’s when I realized how close I’d come to disaster.

     If the very rich person’s jet had been ready, we would have flown back on it. That would have been my first trip on a private jet. And after flying once on a private jet, would a Southwest flight with an empty middle seat ever again be all I needed for a great flight?

     It still is. 

The Banker, Take 2

He’s an investment banker. I’ve known him for ten years. “Known” only in the working sense, never in the social sense. His bank is one of the banks that works with my company, so when his bank does a deal with my company, he sometimes shows up on our team, and when that happens sometimes I’m there too, and we end up working together. Sometimes closely. For a while. 

We’re not friends, but our relationship is always friendly. That’s because he’s a banker, and bankers are programmed to be friendly no matter what. Even when they’re stealing money from you, they smile all friendly-like. 

Years ago he pulled a fast one on me, claimed I’d agreed to pay his bank a ridiculously high success fee. We went back and forth, he ended up going behind my back, pulling rank on me. It got very unpleasant with my superiors and he got a little of what he wanted and that was way more than he deserved and I solemnly swore I would never speak to him again. I didn’t really care. Plenty of fish in that fetid sea. I was glad to be rid of him. 

Then a few years later there he was on my doorstep again, all jolly and happy with a mandate from a higher-up in our company (and a sizable fee discount) and suddenly it was let bygones-be-bygones and onward-and-upwards and arm-in-arm all over again. Nothing I could do about it. Might as well smile and enjoy it. That’s how it is with bankers.

Anyways, there’s something about him that struck me from the minute I first met him. Banking is a macho culture, dripping in testosterone, lots of jocks, thick necks, four-letter words. Even the women bankers swagger. He’s different. 

Most bankers love a fight. They live for the moment when they can show their client that they’re fighting for them. He, on the other hand, hates conflict. He can be devious, but he will do anything to avoid an in-your-face fight. “Never ruffle a feather” is his motto. Negotiations with him involved can be excruciating, as he carefully listens to every side, trying to find a way to ensure that everyone’s needs are being met, that the word “no” is never said. In long meetings it is easy to forget who he represents. I often find myself cringing in conference rooms as he strains to find common ground where there is clearly none; on several occasions I’ve had to be the banker, shutting him up and being the one to tell the other side “no.” I hate that about working with him. 

He’s also insanely analytical. He actually reads the legal documents and fills the margins with questions and comments that drive the lawyers crazy. You’d be amazed how often the lawyers don’t read their own documents. He recrunches all the numbers in the financials and spreadsheets, often finding errors or thinking of different ways to model things. He’s an equal opportunity nudge, attacking everyone’s documents. By the end of a meeting, everyone who’s brought a document hates him. I love that about working with him. 

He’s got to be pushing 50, which is ancient for a banker. His OCD-with-the-documents shtick probably earned him big brownie points back when he was the junior banker on the team, and had nothing else to offer, but now that he’s sprouting gray hairs, that act has gotten old, and only underscores how little he brings to the table. I’ve seen junior bankers on his team roll their eyes as he grabs the room, breaks the flow and demands that we focus on yet another column of figures or still another legal clause he thinks he’s found an error in, holding us all hostage until we either agree with him or convince him he’s wrong. 

As I get older I am blessed with a new perspective on life that let’s me better appreciate how people end up. When I was younger I used to think life was more of a meritocracy. Novels and biographies and always emphasized that the top people were the “best” at what they did, clearly implying that that was why they were the top people. Now that I am older and have actually met some of these so-called top people I can see that this is not universally true. Our banker is clear evidence of that, a complete mediocrity, obvious to all, who has managed not only to stay afloat, but to succeed, despite lacking any but the most superficially annoying skills needed to succeed. Clearly life is a lot more complicated than novels and biographies led me to believe. And, thankfully, a lot more interesting. 

Looking back, I can appreciate now that our banker’s conflict avoidance issues may have meshed well on some transactions with my, shall we say, directness issues. I have a tendency to do the opposite of our banker, to cut to the heart of the matter, tell the other side in the first minute of a meeting exactly where they are strong and where they are weak, and tell them how their deal ought to be done. Sometimes my approach isn’t greeted as the refreshing blast of fresh air that it is. Sometimes people need some hand holding, need to do the dance, need to finger their worry beads, need to lie down on the couch and talk to their analyst, need to confess their sins, need to analyze the problem twenty-eight different ways and prepare three hundred different models before realizing that my solution is the right one after all. For those deals I guess he brings something to the table that I don’t. 

Because, let’s face it, I, too, am a mediocrity, albeit one of a different stripe. I guess it takes one to know one. 

The Banker

He’s an investment banker. I’ve known him for ten years. “Known” only in the working sense, never in the social sense. His bank is one of the banks that works with my company, so when his bank does a deal with my company, he sometimes shows up on our team, and when that happens sometimes I’m there too, and we end up working together. Sometimes closely. For a while. 

We’re not friends, but our relationship is always friendly. That’s because he’s a banker, and bankers are programmed to be friendly no matter what. Even when they’re stealing money from you, they smile. 

Years ago he pulled a fast one on me, claimed I’d agreed to pay his bank a ridiculously high success fee. We went back and forth, he ended pulling rank on me, it got very unpleasant and he ended up getting a little of what he wanted and that was way more than he deserved and I solemnly swore I would never speak to him again. I didn’t really care. Plenty of fish in that fetid sea. I was glad to be rid of him. 

Then a few years later there he was on my doorstep again, all jolly and happy with a mandate from a higher-up in our company (and a sizable fee discount) and suddenly it was let bygones-be-bygones and onward-and-upwards and arm-in-arm all over again. Nothing I could do about it. Might as well smile and enjoy it. That’s how it is with bankers.

Anyways, there’s something about him that struck me from the minute I first met him. Banking is a macho culture, dripping in testosterone, lots of jocks, thick necks, four-letter words. Even the women bankers swagger. He’s different. 

Most bankers love a fight. They live for the moment when they can show their client that they’re fighting for them. He, on the other hand, hates conflict. He will do anything to avoid a fight. “Never ruffle a feather” is his motto. Negotiations with him involved can be excruciating, as he carefully listens to every side, trying to find a way to ensure that everyone’s needs are being met, that the word “no” is never said. In long meetings it is easy to forget who he represents. I often find myself cringing in conference rooms as he strains to find common ground where there is clearly none; on several occasions I’ve had to be the banker, shutting him up and being the one to tell the other side “no.” I hate that about working with him. 

He’s also insanely analytical. He actually reads the legal documents and fills the margins with questions and comments that drive the lawyers crazy. You’d be amazed how often the lawyers don’t read their own documents. He recrunches all the numbers in the financials and spreadsheets, often finding errors or thinking of different ways to model things. He’s an equal opportunity nudge, attacking everyone’s documents. By the end of a meeting, everyone who’s brought a document hates him. I love that about working with him. 

Looking back, I can appreciate now that his conflict avoidance issues may have meshed well on some transactions with my, shall we say, directness issues. I have a tendency to do the opposite of our banker, to cut to the heart of the matter, tell the other side in the first minute of a meeting exactly where they are strong and where they are weak, and tell them how their deal ought to be done. Sometimes my approach isn’t greeted as the refreshing blast of fresh air that it is. Sometimes people need some hand holding, need to do the dance, need to finger their worry beads, need to lie down on the couch and talk to their analyst, need to confess their sins, need to analyze the problem twenty-eight different ways and prepare three hundred different models before realizing that my solution is the right one after all. For those deals I guess he brings something to the table. 

But I’d rather not do those deals. Those are partners I don’t need. In the end, I really hate working with him. I just don’t have the time. Life is too short for all his people-pleasing and detail-obsessing. As my time here feels more finite, I’m more determined to cut people like this out of my life.