TIED UP IN THE PAST

I'm not sure which is the crueler fate: To live a life of so little agency so as to allow some powerful force to determine one's thoughts and behaviors or to live with such a person who allows these powerful forces to dominate their will and animate their actions.

I strongly suspect it's the latter. 

Dennis "Bucky" Digby, age 6

My son Bucky - we call him Bucky though his real name is Dennis - is thirty-four years old and has been married to his wife Sherry for nearly five years. They have a four year-old daughter, Dania, who in all objectivity, is the single most beautiful thing in the entire universe. Even at this tender age I can see she'll be the image of her dad.

Hopefully.

It's not that her mother is unattractive, quite the contrary, I find Sherry to be rather fetching. It's just that she's one of those people whose character is of such flimsy foundation that she's constantly involving herself in one type of cultish fad after another.

Just in the past several years she's flirted with the paranoid bridge tables of Lyndon LaRouche, the sandaled Theosophicals of Ojai, the double-jointed Dahn yoga nerds of Scotsdale and most recently those clean cut weirdos with the bright yellow name tags from GroundSign Technologies who cordially invite you to their twelve-hour lectures but once you're there, don't let you use the bathroom.

 Imagine going out for sushi and hearing why 9/11 was an inside job or how the great "Ancient Wisdom" was corrupted by Christianity or that murdered meat will mess with your chakras or that "the past has no meaning outside the meaning given to it by the past."

That's Sherry in a nutshell - a passionate, fair-weather enthusiast of all things ridiculous. 

And you know what ... she should live and be well if this stuff makes her happy.

My problem is that her nonsense is not just running her life but it's running  Bucky's and the baby's as well. One month he's hiding the New York Times under a seat cushion to avoid an argument about "the alleged independent press," the next he's sneaking Dania out of the house for an Easter egg hunt so as not to listen to a screed on the commodification of normative religion.  

Sherry's "new bold self" is so sensitive and fragile that just about anything that comes out of Bucky's mouth is likely to set her off.

When she was taking the six-month Leadership course at GroundSign she needed to recruit at least fifteen new enrollees or else they would revoke her designation as a senior Seminar Room Captain and take away her "Guidance Binder". When Bucky refused to sign up for the three day course she told him he was stubborn and "uncoachable" and they've been living under a vapor ever since. 

In the good old days all the crackpots lived in California but unfortunately that's no longer the case. In our lawless, disorderly age the cultural hen house has been raided by heretics and hucksters. With the decline of faith our natural rage after meaning finds its meager satisfaction in the fleeting orthodoxies of street prophets and con men. No longer guided by the venerable public intellectuals of the past we ask YouTube to illuminate on life's puzzles and mysteries.


Ever wonder how to tie the perfect Windsor?

My Meeting With Rodríguez or The Arithmetic Of Betrayal

I make it point to shave each and every morning just in case my wife decides to kiss me.

I'm retired and I haven't had to button down with a tie in over six wonderful years.

My wife hasn't kissed me in about twelve.

 I never lose hope, though. She tells me she loves me several times a day, sometimes she even says it with a smile. Betty isn't inclined toward physical contact which unfortunately includes kissing.

The kids are grown and live out of town so I guess she's also a little bit out of practice. 

Years and about 45 pounds ago I had the "opportunity" to cheat on my wife with a really nice gal from the office. (Don't worry about this indiscreet confession, Betty never reads my stuff anyway). I remember the struggle I went through at the time and how the hemispheres of my body were in a constant state of war.

Betty, of course, knew nothing of my conflicts. To her our lack of intimacy was simply a matter of course. Betty was a veteran of the Women's Movement and saw sex as a form of submission.

I too see sex as submission - an elevated and reciprocal choreography of consent -  which is precisely why I was so terribly divided at the time. A man simply can't live on "I love you's" and I was painfully torn between my loyalty and my loins.

 I let the opportunity pass, which was just as well because I most likely would have gotten caught. The whole episode was instructive because it gave me the ability to see myself not only as a deeply flawed middle-aged guy with a gut but as someone interesting, vital and even masculine.

It's funny how love contains such a strong element of revulsion though I don't think it really has to be that way. I still adore my Betty with the same ardor and the same devotion that I did on our wedding day and the fact that she's indifferent to me is simply her loss.

To live is to crave and denial is simply a form of existential defilement. "To live without passion is to live a life in half" is how Micah Carpentier described it in his memoir Mi Lucha con Cordura and I think that's doubly true for me.

 

 Betty, my cheeks are still as smooth as glass.

AN OPEN LETTER TO BILL O'REILLY

I was watching TV the other night, dozing off and half paying attention when I momentarily perked up as I heard a snide oily voice mumble something about masturbation. Not your typical fare, even on basic cable, so I roused myself to attention trying to figure out what it was all about.

I guess I had fallen asleep because I was sure I had been watching American Ninja Warrior. Instead what was on the screen was a panel of slick middle-aged professor types and what appeared to be either extremely precocious middle school girls or a pair dazzling anorectics. 

Now I don't know about you but every time I hear someone start a sentence with the words "As the Viennese feuilletonist Karl Kraus famously quipped..." I reach for the remote before I start gagging on my sour cream and onion lightly ribbed potato chips. This time however, there was something different in the air.

"A woman occasionally is quite a serviceable substitute for masturbation," remarked one professor, and I suppose you're allowed to say that on cable so long as you cite a Viennese feuilletonist.

The other pointy-headed academics nodded impassively but not surprisingly, the anorectics took issue.

I must be a dimwit because the ensuing debate flew over my head like a zeppelin.  It seems that the professors saw the whole thing through the lens of social satire, calling Kraus the Steve Colbert of the time and likening the informality of the feuilleton to a blog or a Twitter feed.

The two gals insisted it was sexist.

There was no moderator but if I were there I would have split the difference. Yes it was sexist but it was also funny and not altogether untrue.


It reminded me of another line from the great Austrian essayist.

"An illusion of depth often occurs if a blockhead is a muddlehead at the same time."