Underdogging

VAMP 1: What is your malfunction, man?!

SPIKE: It’s Halloween, you nit! We take the night off. Those are the rules.

VAMP 1: Me and mine don’t follow no stinkin’ rules! We’re rebels!

SPIKE: No. I’m a rebel. You’re an idiot. (dusts the vamp) Give the lot of us a bad name.

- “All the Way” (Buffy the Vampire Slayer episode), written by Steven S. DeKnight

I don’t really follow sports. If I did, I’d probably follow baseball. I enjoy a nice summer day at the park with some friends and a drink or two. Baseball has a nice, leisurely pace that lets you watch without just staring at the field in case you miss something. It’s relaxing. Whether my team wins or loses, I always come away feeling happier and lighter and more in touch with the world. (That may be the Smirnoff Ice talking, but I like to think it’s the game.)

And if I followed baseball, I’d be a Yankees fan. Why? Hard to argue with the best record in baseball. Sure, they can afford to pay big salaries to get the best players. Success breeds success. I’m cool with that. Plus my brother is a Dodgers fan, so that choice made itself a long time ago.

I could never be a Cubs fan. I’m not generally a fan of the underdog. I don’t have anything against underdogs per se – if they have a good cause, I can get behind them. I just don’t see the point of rooting for someone just because they’re losing or likely to do so. Maybe they don’t deserve to lose, but there they are losing anyway. Unless they’re your team, why get behind them if the odds are they’re going to let you down? Why fight the uphill battle for no better reason than the slope?

I don’t entirely get the appeal of the outlaw, either – that persistent anti-government, anti-authority streak that’s been a part of American culture since the beginning. (Am I the only one who finds it troubling that our Founders  basically enshrined a right to revolution in our founding documents? It’s like adding “or if you get fat” to “until death do us part” at the altar. You’re in or you’re out.) If the government is “We the People”, then isn’t it kind of silly and counterproductive to be “anti-government”? You want us to co-operate less, be more divided, maybe demonstrate less compassion for our neighbors? Okay then. Enjoy your crazy pie with crappy sauce. It comes with a side of “you just got your ass kicked by the next biggest jerk on the pile”, by the way. Free of charge.

I think that these ideas are often linked to a certain level of nihilism and contempt for clarity. There’s a distinct strain of anti-intellectualism and willful ignorance in American culture that’s always troubled me, and I associate them with the love of the underdog and the rebel. It’s a stubborn desire to see things as simple, linear, and binary because that’s what you’ve learned to understand and feel comfortable with: right and wrong, white and black, them and us. It’s a lot easier to argue for term limits than it is to figure out who to vote for. Anecdotes are easy, analysis is hard.

I’ve run into too many people who think it’s smart to reject received wisdom wholesale, deny every asserted truth, and spit every sacred cow. I realize that we can’t take what we’re handed for granted – that those givens often come with strings attached, fine print at the bottom, and a distinct whiff of falsehood. But it makes no more sense to throw out the baby with the clean bathwater than it would with the dirty. Wisdom isn’t about reinventing the wheel. It’s about learning why the wheel is round, what a wheel does and doesn’t do, and whether the wheel is right for you.

I’m open to a “re-evaluation of all values”. But here Nietzsche and I part ways – he seems to take the rejection and replacement of Christian (and to our Western culture traditional) values as a given. Quite the provocateur and advocate, but perhaps not the ideal sage for this or any time. What’s needed is intelligent and critical affirmation, not wholesale rejection – “no” is the single least useful word in any language absent some accompanying affirmative. Not for nothing is Faust – the man who would affirm all life, embrace even the feared and the forbidden – tempted by “the spirit that ever denies“.

Taking a part a malfunctioning car is the easy part. To put it back into some kind of working order, you need more than a wrench and some leverage. You need to know how it works and what you want it to do. Until you get that, you’re better off leaving tune-ups to trained professionals.

Lessons Learned Not From Tigers and Turtles

(A bit of new silliness next door.)

When you grow up in a house where discipline means a two-by-four, bad dogs get thrown over the fence or beaten with their favorite toys, people who come to the church looking for help are assumed to be worthless drug addicts or alcoholics and given nothing but a brushoff, nothing you want matters, not even your room or your piggy bank or your privacy are your own, and the things you love most about yourself are routinely derided and dismissed, you learn a few things. They aren’t always healthy or wise lessons.

You learn that violence is power: the strong do as they will and the weak submit  as they must. It’s not the best argument or the most righteous cause that wins – it’s the loudest voice, the strongest arm. Mix in three years of literally daily verbal and physical bullying from virtually the entire student body and you get the point driven well home. That’s where I learned to value coldness, ruthlessness, detachment – it was a way to survive. I couldn’t fight back, not against any of them. So I went where they could hurt me less.

You learn to fetishize violence like Travis Bickle. You dream of vengeance and a way to repay all that humiliation.

You learn to cling to what’s yours, to what should belong to you and no one else. You learn to keep that close and held tight behind your back because if they see it or even know it exists they’ll make you share it with them. They won’t ask or persuade because they don’t see why they should. They will take it and you will lose it.

You learn not to trust. Everyone uses everyone everywhere. Help is for those too weak to have made the right choices, and they deserve the shame that’s come to them. Let them admit it and be forgiven or keep their pride and get nothing.

You learn that love is contingent. Be who they want you to be, think what they want you to think, live like they want you to live. You have no voice but the echo of theirs. You learn that they love you for who you are to them, not who you are in and of yourself. You learn that when you make them angry or disappoint them they will make you feel small and unwanted and unloved. And you cannot make them happy without becoming someone else, and if you give them that you will have nothing. You will be nothing, because if your will is not your own then what is? That’s where I learned to keep to myself. For someone as naturally and exuberantly wordy as I am, I am very good at weaponizing silence. I wasn’t born introverted or antisocial or weird. I had to learn all that.

But that was decades ago. I don’t have to live there. Not one of the bullies who made every school day a living hell for three straight years has given me a second thought in all that time. My parents – well, they remember what they remember. I don’t expect much from them but that they keep their distance.

So I try to teach myself different. I fight the impulse to crush, bully, and silence. I learn that there’s more to life than tigers and turtles. Tomorrow I’m going to frame the first dollar I made as a writer, and to hell with the ghost that scorned my imagination.

Disoriented Turtle Style

In the ancient times before microwaves were self-cleaning, when prunes did not have the right to vote and hominy had not been banned by universal acclaim, there was a wanderer who roamed the earth seeking the secrets of wisdom. His birth certificate called him “Wentworth Fotheringay Newsbox Champion de Milo”, but he preferred to be called “Josh”.

While crossing the desert, he found himself in the most terrible dust storm. The wind howled like a demon mother looking for her lost child. The dust stung like a thousand wasps. Also there was poor WiFi. So he ducked into a Stuckee’s.

There he met an ancient man, wizened but unbowed by the passage of time. He was drinking a cup of hot tea and eating some hash browns. He had put more ketchup on his hash browns than any man Josh had ever seen.

“Old man,” he said, “what’s the deal with all that ketchup?”

The old man smiled. “Ketchup is rich in vitamin C, and contains natural mellowing agents. Also you should stop talking because you sound like an ignorant mule chewing an old brassiere.”

Josh took some offense at this. As he possessed more skill in tae kwan do than sense, he immediately tried to put his foot through the old man’s forehead. The old man easily blocked the kick with an elegantly extended pinky, then struck a stance so peculiar and uncomfortable-looking that Josh was unsure what defense to prepare. This hesitation cost Josh a black eye, a bruised abdomen, and most of his trail mix.

As Josh tried to stand up, the old man smiled at him and put more ketchup on his hash browns. “Understand, tadpole, that the current you swim against is no more than the sum of your own fears.”

“I don’t understand,” Josh said.

“A butterfly and a coupon for a free oil change share the same wind, but not the same fork,” the old man said.

“Oh,” Josh said. “What was that style you used, master? I have never seen anything like it.”

“It is called Disoriented Turtle Style,” the old man answered.

“How does it work?”

The old man put down his fork. “The essence of the Disoriented Turtle is confusion. Your movements should be erratic and almost unfamiliar, as if you are performing a badly memorize routine you saw on TV. This sows confusion in your enemy’s mind, and when the harvest comes you reap it at your leisure.”

“And my trail mix?” Josh said.

“Too many cashews,” the master replied, “and you should add more raisins.”

The Good Kind

My father had a bit of a heart scare this weekend. He’s fine – just needs to go on blood thinners and get his good cholesterol up – but it was kind of the last straw in my ongoing battle to get myself to get healthier.

So I’ve started exercising again (again). Walked about 2.5 miles last night, and got up early to do it again before work. The plan is to work up to running five miles a day, but for now it’s just walking. My legs aren’t happy with me. They seem to think I should stretch more and rest more. I’m sure they’re right. At least tonight they’re getting 24 hours to rest, and tomorrow I’m going to remember to stretch before I head out.

I spent most of the day poring over agent activity reports. For those not in the call center business, agent activity reports show each phone transaction a given rep does each day. Every call that comes in, every call that goes out, every time they go on break – basically every time they touch a button on the phone system. They tend to be tedious, and going through about three months’ worth for one of my reps was just about the boringest thing I’ve done in ages. But I needed some information to complete his annual review, and this was the only way to get it. Fun.

Most of the rest of the day was meetings. Not the funnest day I’ve had, but I got a lot done. I picked up some groceries on the way home. I cooked a couple of days’ worth of meals (I like to take leftovers to work for lunch), which I found relaxing. I wrecked another batch of rice by not rinsing it enough before putting it in the cooker. I had fun with my cats. I watched a couple of my favorite shows. I let my legs rest.

And now I’m ready for bed. I’m tired, and in a very good way.

The Sound of Keyboards

I woke up from strange dreams three times last night. I’m not sure what they were about any more, but two of them ended when I heard something that sounded like someone typing INCREDIBLY fast. The cats were nowhere near the keyboard. A sound that I first identified (incorrectly) as my little flatscreen TV being knocked over and hanging by a cable woke me from the third dream.  I looked around the house to see what the cats might have gotten into, but everything appeared to be fine. So I have no idea what woke me up. It’s a little disturbing.

It reminds me of a dream I had when I was a kid. A huge dragon was chasing my school bus, and every time it breathed fire it made this horrible kind of grinding roar. I could still hear it when I woke up – it was my grandfather snoring in the next room.

A couple of nights ago I dreamed about my friend B. For a long time I thought of her as my best friend and the woman I would one day marry. She just thought of me as one of her best friends – I wasn’t her type. I thought I was madly in love with her, but the fact was that I was obsessed. She dealt with all that as best she could for as long as she could. But there came a day when we argued over something silly, and neither of us tried to reconcile.

The dream was kind of a “what might have been” dream. I dreamed we were still friends, still hanging out and laughing and sharing. I wasn’t obsessed with her and she didn’t feel uncomfortable around me. It was a little bittersweet.