#2 It Sucks To Be You.
Ever since I figured out that I’m a sentient being, it’s been a struggle to deal with the fact that I’ve never felt young, and I have trouble acting in the careless and carefree manner that is typical of youth. I guess what I’m trying to say here, is that it’s hard to get along with your peers when you act like an eighty year old man when you are actually only twenty-four. It’s even harder then when I was sixteen and I acted and felt like I was forty…at least then I could still go to parties and almost feel like I fit in. Forty-year olds can have fun helping underage kids buy and consume beer, I suppose, and then they can drive everyone around, but always stay sober enough to drop the kids off at home at the end of the night. But now, as I cross the threshold of my emotional eighties, all I want to do is to go to sleep early, wake up early, and in between? I want my fucking Matlock, or the Gen-X equivalent; Seinfeld reruns, twenty four hours a day, seven days a week, and maybe fifty-one weeks a year, because fifty-two weeks sounds like a lot, so I think I’ll take a break here and there to rant about what it was like before all these crazy young kids got their drivers licenses…or whatever the hell it is that real eighty year olds bitch about. At least I’m still younger than my grandfather – he’s ninety, and yet he complains far less often then I do.
Speaking of aging, I wonder if when people die, and their bodies disintegrate back to what we really are – just bones, I wonder if our bones actually reflect how the person looked when alive. What I mean by this is do you think that you or I would find the bones of an attractive person to be more attractive than the bones of an unattractive person, or do bones not actually have any relevance to inherent attractiveness? For example, fat people often say that they are ‘big boned’ and cannot help it. So when they die, and you look at their bones, would you think, gee this person was a real tub of lard, just look at how big their bones are! Beauty is supposed to be in the eye of the beholder, but we generally can reach a consensus about the extremes, some people are ugly to everyone, and others appear attractive to almost everyone. So, can the same be said about bones? Okay, I don’t really see the point in thinking about this anymore.
I don’t get girls. I get guys. We’re pretty easy to solve. We want to protect the things we love, but we want to be protected, emotionally, by the very things we love and protect. That’s the only part that Freud got right; men do want a mother in their lives. We just don’t want to fuck our mothers. That would make us motherfuckers…and guys don’t want to be motherfuckers. That’s why that term is a derogatory name that you call someone whom you really loathe at a given moment. But, we men do still want our mommy’s, in a non-sexual sense. Where Freud went wrong is that we don’t want to think about our mothers when we’re fucking women. When we’re sick and puking, that’s when we want women to act like our mothers. When we’re scared and depressed, that’s when we want to be held and told that everything will be all right. But when we’re excited and horny, the last thing in the world, Mr. Freud, that normal men are thinking about, is their mothers. We’re actually not thinking, which is why I personally love sex, it’s one of the only times when I stop thinking.
Have you ever noticed how hard it is to tell the truth? What’s weird is that I personally think it’s the hardest to tell the truth when you don’t have an audience. I sit here sometimes, paralyzed with fear, all because I am afraid of writing the truth, because if people read the truth, then they will really get to know me – the real me – and if people were to really know me, then they could seriously evaluate me, and unfortunately, I’m human, so I can’t help but care, at least a little bit, about what others think about me. And other people obviously care about what others think. If they didn’t, we wouldn’t have books, magazines, literature, and opinion polls, to name just a few of the ways we’ve figured out how to measure and monitor what other people are thinking. All this makes me wonder what it would be like to be president. The president gets to know exactly what his ‘approval rating’ is. The president can actually find out the exact percentage of the populace of the nation he lives in that likes him, and literally approves of what he’s doing with his life. Wouldn’t it be cool to open the paper up one day, and read that sixty percent of Americans approve of you (and wouldn’t it suck to read that almost seventy percent disapprove, ahem, Bush)? That would be pretty bizarre, don’t you think?
It seems to me that whenever I am excited about my own future, the world seems really beautiful, and it is easy to love everyone, and to share, even with strangers. So, What makes you excited about your future?
You know that one time, or the very many times in your life where you’ve drunk enough alcohol to literally not give a fuck about what is going to happen next to you or anyone else? Well, I’m pretty sure that with enough alcohol, that feeling happens to everyone. At any rate, I think that right now, the people who run our country, and not just the government, but many of the industry leaders as well, are acting like a bunch of out of control and drunken businessmen who are on a business conference trip in Las Vegas. “What happens in Vegas stays in Vegas!” Oh yeah, well then, I think it’s appropriate to say: “What happens in America post 9/11 circa the Bush Administration, um, stays in America!” Oh wait, it’s kind of hard to keep your sins a secret when you are basically shitting all over the world like it’s your own personal toilet bowl. Our government is the iconoclastic drunken guy at the party who is hitting on a girl way out of his league, while his mostly sober wife stands three people away, jaw open, hands clenched with a sense of powerless rage. Yes, the people in power are drunk with power, greed, and egomaniacal evangelism and they are out of control and don’t give a fuck about what happens next. They feel the way you probably did at the end of the night last Saturday when the bartender yelled last call and you ordered that extraneous shot of tequila with a beer back, just cause you didn’t care what happened next. Global Warming anyone?
And finally, I’d like to point out just how strange it is to become aware of just how utterly clueless we all are. I call this my ‘removing of the veil theory.’ You see, when you are born, there is a giant veil that shrouds your very existence; you are born, helpless and bound to the tit of your mother, or some other woman who can give you the necessary sustenance for immediate survival. At any rate, at first, you think your parents know everything – after all, they own you, protect you, and allow you to survive. But then, as you grow older, and you go to school, you slowly realize that some teachers know more about some things than your parents do, and vice-versa, so you can extend that logic, and you figure that certain elected officials and people in positions of power and responsibility must be the ones who really know what is going on, they must be the ones who know everything, and not just parts of the whole. But they don’t. And so you realize, one day, that no one knows it all. Hell, most people don’t even get a very large part of the whole (myself included).
So, you enter high school, and this realization, as subtle as it may be to each of us, causes most of us to lash out against society, and even more so to our parents. It hurts when you think you’ve been lied to. It’s fucked up to live most of your life thinking that there is a clear set of rules to the board game of life, and that you’ve been playing by the rules, and that there is a finish line somewhere and you can win the game. It’s fucked up to think that, because it’s not true. Life might be a game, but it’s not the kind of game that you can win or lose, there is no finish line, and there is no referee. And when you finally realize just how random it all is, and that no one will ever reward you but yourself, you can become terrified, and filled with paralyzing fear and self-doubt, because you are so alone in the world, and ‘no one will ever really understand you, or know you’.
Of course, with this ‘removing of the veil’ you can also take a deep breath, realize that no one is watching you, and that even if people are watching you, and judging you, they are only doing so because they are afraid to watch and judge themselves, and really, you can do whatever you feel like in life. Isn’t that why you moved out of your parents’ house in the first place – to do what you feel like, when you feel like it? Well, I gotta go, I think Seinfeld is on.
