When I was eight years old, I had the good fortune of having fifteen dollars. My grandfather, who was a photographer, had given it to me for helping him prepare several packets for sports teams he had photographed. Those three five dollar bills were, at the time, the most money I could ever imagine having. I just had to spend it.
I had my hand in my pocket, squeezed around that money so tight I was sweating. Since, at that particular moment, my father and I were driving past a Dairy Queen I asked: “Hey dad, can we pull into Dairy Queen so I can get an Oreo Blizzard?”
My father did not respond, choosing instead to tighten his grip on the steering wheel, so I asked again.
“Hey dad, can we pull into the Dairy Queen so I can get an Oreo Blizzard?”
Again, he did not respond. This time he began to frown.
“Hey dad, can we pull-”
“JESUS FUCKING CHRIST, DO YOU HAVE TO BE SUCH AN ASSHOLE? OVER AND OVER AND OVER AGAIN! ME! ME! ME! I DON’T HAVE ANY FUCKING MONEY! DO YOU FUCKING UNDERSTAND WHAT THAT MEANS? I DON’T HAVE ANY MONEY TO BUY YOU A FUCKING OREO BLIZZARD, YOU GODDAMN ASSHOLE!” He replied.
I slunk down low in my chair, mumbled “I was going to pay for it” and stared out the window for the rest of our trip.
When I was fourteen, awkward and ungainly from my last growth spurt, I fell down a flight of stairs in front of my grandfather. I landed on the soft cement of the basement, feeling somewhat concussed.
Upon observing my several extremities twisted around at various angles, my grandfather grabbed a toothpick from out of his pocket, stuck it between his teeth and calmly remarked “So I guess those ballet lessons aren’t working out.”
I replied with a squeaky pubescent groan, and got back up.
At the age of eighteen, while trying to scale a ladder to lay a bundle of shingles on a roof, the ladder I was on broke in two. I fell a story and a half into a compost pile. There were bits of cabbage in my hair for days.
My father, peering over the edge of the roof past the gutter, remarked “Don’t be a pussy.”
I got up, swore and stomped for several minutes, and limped three and a half miles home.
When I was twenty I was walking around the University of Washington campus with some friend of mine from my advanced math course. Rounding a corner, we were almost struck by a cyclist. He had been pedaling much faster than he ought to, considering he was on a crowded college campus. Enraged that he had been forced to stop so abruptly, seeing as how having a bicycle in his mind at least meant he owned the walkway, he told me and my several friends what he was going to do to us.
It involved mostly general promises of “ass kicking.”
My friends, who as the difficulty of our mutual math course would provide, were for the most part introverted shut-ins who feared all forms of confrontation. I observed that several of them were pale and shaking. I was mostly confused.
The cyclist was at most five and a half feet tall, weighed little more than a hundred and twenty pounds, and had small chicken legs. His hands were well manicured and he not a single scar on his whole face. In his yellow and black spandex uniform he looked more like a strutting cock than a cage-fighter. When I realized with the exception of myself, no involved in this entire confrontation had ever even been punched in the face, I began to laugh.
Then I smiled at the cyclist, winked, and said “Whatever you want, princess.” Before leaving, I blew him a kiss, and my friends and I were on our way. The cyclist chose not to escalate.
Needless to say, it takes a lot to hurt my feelings. If someone ran up and punched me in the face I would say “Ow!” then hit them back, and that would be the end of it. I would not lock myself in a small broom closet for days on end, huddle in a blanket, and mumble conspiratorially about how my “power” had been taken away from me, and how I needed to get my “power” back. Nor would I fall into a psychological stupor about “the endless cycle of violence.”
Bam! You hit me. Bam! I hit you back. The end. Now let’s both fucking go home because fighting is dumb, and I have tv to watch.
I am aware that complete obliviousness is inappropriate, and I probably veer further into that extreme than I should. However, the degree to which our society values sensitivity over thick-skin drives me insane. There is a balance to be struck and it is NOT a balance where people fall down and cry when things don’t go there way.
A few months ago, one of my neighbors was having some difficulty with his math homework. He broke down to such a sobbing, heaving, snot-leaking-from-his-nose extent that his mother had to walk over and ask for my help.
I spent a good fifteen minutes talking to this seventeen year old boy saying things like “Dude, the leading coefficient rule is NOT something to freak out about” and “Synthetic Division is NOT the end of the world.” By keeping a calm demeanor, I finally managed to get him calm enough that he could do his homework.
Now, I don’t care to a fairly alarming extent. I’m not going to argue that point, or try to say that people should be completely disconnected emotionally. For example, I didn’t shed a single tear at my grandfather’s funeral, because I understand people die and there’s nothing I can do about it. At a very fundamental level I asked myself “why freak out?” and could find no answer. I understand that zero concern is unhealthy, but too much concern is just as bad.
We live in this age of knee jerk reaction, where we can’t do anything in moderation. If you try to tell someone they should reign in their feelings a little bit why then you’re a fascist Nazi. Nobody has any sense of balance or proportion anymore, so everything is up in the air. We have completely lost the concept of being an adult.
I learned not to let my emotions get in the way of my decision making because I watched my grandfather and I watched my father. One time my father misplaced his cell phone and drove like a mad man in a three block radius, frothing at the mouth about how he was going “to kill the fucking kid that stole his phone.” I found the phone under the armrest, where he had dropped it. I have also seen my grandfather completely take apart someone who was behaving in a hostile manner by simply putting his emotions on the back burner and presenting a calm face.
I also learned about proportion. One time, I had to call 9-11 on my mother and step-father because they were having an argument about who was the biggest “Dilly-Dallier” and I was afraid someone was going to die. They had escalated an argument about a silly word to the point that they were about to engage in physical violent. Another time a helicopter came out of the fucking sky and crashed at my aunt Debbie’s farm while she was in her garden. You know what she did? She told her husband to call 9-11 and ran to help.
I was nineteen, it was my senior year of high school, and the school administration decided they were going to suspend anyone who participated in Senior Smoke Day. Like all schools, Aberdeen High School prefers mindless zero tolerance policies because it saves everyone from having to make judgment calls. They announced it over the intercom. I went from not caring about Senior Smoke Day at all, to caring about it a great deal. I didn’t, and don’t smoke, but the administration’s reaction bothered me for several reasons.
1. Everyone who was going to smoke was over the legal age to smoke in the state of Washington.
2. They were not going to smoke on school property.
3. Then I got really angry. I sat down and said “Really? Every textbook in this fucking school was written in the 19 goddamn 70′s, we have a drop out rate of over 50%, everyone I went to grade school with is pregnant already, and YOU’RE DOWNSTAIRS BURNING CALORIES THINKING ABOUT HOW TO FUCKING SUSPEND KIDS OVER THE LEGAL AGE WHO WANT TO SMOKE A MOTHER-FUCKING CIGARETTE OFF SCHOOL GROUNDS?!?!?” Now I did not scream and rave about this, I simply realized it was true, and acted accordingly.
So I went to stand with everyone while they smoked, because if there’s one single thing I love about Aberdeen it’s that nobody cares what people in authority have to say. Then I went to the front office, voluntarily with everyone else, and flipped the bird to the teacher who was holding a camera on all of us. If there’s one thing I hate more than excessive use of power it’s the sycophantic narc’s that pop boners over being able to bust people.
I sat down in front of the principal and when he asked “Did you smoke?”
I replied “No, but I demand to be suspended.” I said it in the calm Clint Eastwood voice, I had learned from watching my grandfather.
He said “It’s okay, you didn’t smoke.” He looked immediately uncomfortable, since I had turned the tables on him. I was a student in the principal’s office demanding to be suspended, and the principal was trying to let me go.
I replied “I know, but since it was no more illegal for me to not smoke off school property then it was TO smoke off school property, I’m going to need that suspension slip.”
He replied, “Actually the zoning is such that-”
“The guy who lives across the street from this place smokes every day. Why don’t you go call the cops on him?”
I stared him down until he signed my suspension slip, I wrote a long letter telling the administration what assholes they were and handed it to the principal in person the next day. Then I went home, laid down, and took a nap on the day of the senior slide show. I understand at the assembly I kept being called up to the front for awards and I wasn’t there. I heard it was awesome.
Everyone else cut a deal where they picked up trash, and got their suspensions lifted. And the next year the principal was fired for having multiple affairs with teachers. I accomplished nothing but had the pride of not backing down. Which leads me to the part about over-sensitivity that makes me absolutely furious.
Your extreme fears, rages, passions, and delusions make society worse. Regulating your feelings is absolutely essential. Society is like a giant clock and people are the cogs. When the people crumble at the slightest pressure that clock doesn’t work. It just stalls. And when that clock stalls bad things happens. Complete morons who know nothing can get elected to office, because the populace is so panicked about every little thing that nobody can see their ass from a hole in the ground. When that panic sets in objective reality ceases to be relevant, and everything becomes a matter of opinion to the point that anyone will believe anything as long as it’s presented properly.
I was sixteen, with my father in Mexico. He wanted to buy a timeshare. The salesman was a meticulously sickly looking man and made sure to look at my father as though he was intimidated and afraid. Before sitting down my father looked over at me and said “You just watch this.”
So for the next two and a half hours, I watched my father get raped at the negotiation table all the while looking over at me like he was hammering the sickly salesman into the ground. He gave away his other timeshare of equivalent value for the timeshare that was being sold and was made to feel like the salesman was doing him a favor.
Then there was the bigger issue, which is that timeshares really have no value. “Dad, you do realize you’re basically paying thousands of dollars for a hotel reservation, right?”
At the end, my dad felt like he had come out on top, and was privileged to pay on the order of ten thousand dollars for the timeshare he had just bought. The salesman managed this by making my father feel the way he wanted him to, and by applying pressure. It was one of the best confidence jobs I have ever seen.
I am, by my nature, suspicious. I don’t believe in God, or magic, or Karma. All I have is a non-contradicting chain of cause and effect that goes back to the moment of creation. Magicians don’t like me because I never take my eyes off their hands. Not to say that I always know how a magic trick works.
I was twenty-one and sitting in a restaurant with my cousin Anthony when a magician came up to work our table. I stared at his hands. He immediately positioned himself so I couldn’t see. Then he engaged me in conversation and made sure I had to look him in the eye when he did the trick. He left soon after, because I am an unsatisfying audience.
Which leads me to my final point. I cannot stand people who cannot accept criticism. I am bugged enough when people are thrown off their emotional equilibrium by events, but I am downright mystified when people lose their countenance because of words.
“Hey man, I didn’t like your story.”
“Oh, too bad. I hope you like the next one.”
That’s it.
Maybe I’m different in this regard, because I have security in the fact that I know I’m good enough that people will just show up and read what I have to write. And if someone hates something I like, fine. If someone likes something I didn’t personally find to be my best work, that’s fine too. My opinion remains unchanged.
I know people who will lose sleep, sweat, and get indigestion over negative criticism.
“Did you think you were perfect?”
“Well, no.”
“Then what’s to worry about? And maybe their points aren’t even valid. But there’s always room for improvement. Don’t be put off by that.”
Then there is that ever present back up argument of “But still.”
Worse, and I cannot believe I occupy the same cosmology as these people I am so mystified by this, are people who lose their shit over passive non-biased criticism. Just pure passionless analysis.
“I went to a writing group today, and I just feel really shaken up. They said my story sucked.” Except of course it’s never that blatant.
“Well, did it suck?”
Then there’s that look, that sheer terror, like it’s not okay to suck. I’ve written all kinds of stories here that I know suck. You know what I did? I looked at it, said “that sucked” and then I wrote another story.
I know my life consists of alarming eccentricity, but it is often punctuated by moments of pure sanity. So that being said here are:
The Three Laws of Maintaining Homeostasis:
1. Don’t be a pussy
There’s no need to cry, and crying doesn’t help. Just be calm if you can’t be anything else. And if you can’t be calm, just don’t do anything.
2. Don’t be a dumbass
Think. Are you acting out of emotion or out of reason? Is your problem really going to get better if you fly off the handle?
3. Don’t be an asshole
Don’t be too attached, but don’t be so disconnected you hurt people’s feelings.
