how faint the line of demarcation was between the normal and neurotic person
Now, not to shift with unnecessarily disrespectful haste to a lighter topic, but I’ve never been good with tasteful WordPress transitions, so Voila! Here are some other interesting phobias, arranged in clearly compatible pairs:
Euphobia: Fear of hearing good news; Eurotophobia: Fear of female genitalia.
Caligynephobia: Fear of beautiful women; Dikephobia: Fear of justice.
Ideophobia: Fear of ideas; Ithyphallophobia: Fear of seeing, thinking about, or having an erect penis.
Judeophobia: Fear of Jews; Ouranophobia: Fear of heaven.
In middle school I used to get angry that everything circled back to sexuality, that there were friendships based on flirting, that it was impure and imperfect and biological. I thought it was reductionist, too easy, too adolescent, too petty, too dumb, too physical, too earthly.
I was ethereal, I had standards, I was the feminine ideal. I was flimsy and far-seeing and righteous and, and…
Then I discovered that people don’t respond positively to feminine passivity, that it all circles back to sexuality, all the time. But can limitations be freeing? Or do we only think as much in justificatory retrospect? It’s only sex, it’s only biology, but it’s also the crux so that makes it everything! My first novel will be entitled Sex and Self-Esteem. My second: Stanching the Wave of Melancholia with a Dike of Ejaculate.
Maybe.
But like I was saying: My story has no duplicates. I am a special, solitary Digg article; I am fragile and what I call humble but actually just fearful. I am 14 and I want to go east where I will be free of my Minnesotan shackles, free of the creepy familial cabal with its claustrophobic Jews and their refugee neediness and their wastefulness. I will go and live among civilized savages with good taste and barbaric facial hair. Ideally they will be British Freudian Sephardim-descended but I may come into a thing for blondes and hope that they wear swastikas just to make things more morally dubious and HOTTTTT. I will get into concerts free, make my own moonshine and bottle it in stainless steel receptacles so as not to get infected by all the carcinogens that did me infect when I carted my rum-and-coke concoctions around in plastic. I will feel perfectly at ease on Coney Island Avenue and try to think less at present about burqas and clitoridectomies because they get me down too fast; aye, for the nonce will I wonder only at wholesome sexuality and unpretentious common sense.
You see, Andy (or Sarah, or whoever you are), I attempt to advocate relativism in everything I do, so sure, I aver, our stories have no duplicates but we are not unique! Nay, importance is relative; everything is important if it matters to someone. In my younger years, my motto was So Long As No One Gets Hurt.
I wonder if by accepting limitations, what is cordoned off, we can transcend the cordons, storm the barricades, symbolically stand alongside the Columbia River in red cotton mail-order Victoria’s Secret shorts billowing in the late 90s wind, pretty free and 14, crying cathartically into the summertime haze that My story has no duplicates! I am unique! And, and…
This is the second half of my Realism tract. You can’t tell ‘cause I made it a separate entry but I see the links. Can you? Maybe what I’m half-flippantly, half-insistently trying to say by asserting the ‘limitation’ of sex being the crux of our mental lives (or by extension physicality in general) is just to acknowledge reality. Maybe there are no limitations at all. Maybe it’s just seeing things with uncovered eyes. Why do I feel I so fervently have to CONVINCE anonymous millions of this? Why do I think I’m the medium? Who gave me the message!? Damn it, I’m so idealistic.
“… when Max sets sail… you intuit his pluck and will from the close-ups of him staring into the unknown. He looms large here, as we do inside our heads. But when the view abruptly shifts to an overhead shot, you see that the boat is simply a speck amid an overwhelming vastness…”
“Optimism really has no place in psychotherapy,” said the woman on the podium that temperate October night. Over the wails of a particularly ponderous, pedantic old eristic, she gently continued with a saucy touch of arch, “What I’m trying to say here is it looks worse than it is.”
I like psychoanalysis and I like ladies so it makes sense that my views on optimism and realism are, to my wish-fulfilling mind, aligned with my idols.
I’ve been dogged by deeply depressed optimism-pushers all my days. They weren’t all the same. One was a manic, ecstatically passive-aggressive fireball. Another was blinded by an intoxicating cloud of mushy fakery; he couldn’t see or understand anything outside himself, drugged as he was in order to function. Another worked well with me when the conversation was superficial. I think I reminded him too much of himself. ‘Optimism’ under the auspices of the mostly males who have presented it to me has always seemed a needy, desperate, flimsy, candy-coated levee holding back an endless, restless torrent of hatred in all points directed.
And I like my hatred in the open. I don’t want to cap it so it explodes. In my experience of the world, acknowledging pain dissolves pain. Realism not negativism is the name of my prospective game. Realism heartens, optimism obfuscates. Optimism is fake. Realism is optimism.
There’s something so beautiful about staring into the vortex of sorrow, the disconsolate, destitute keening of despair! and accepting it and being humbled by it and made stronger by it, and kinder by it and that, if nothing else, is the goal on the eve of my four-and-twentieth year, notwithstanding erotic freedom.
I’m looking for a less retroactive, psychobabble-y substitute for “acting out.” But it’s hard to soberly search when I’m acting out. So if anyone you know could act as my academic other half while I histrionically and/or symbolically flail through the moonlit streets, slathered with a thick cake of sludge and trussed, hog-tied and faggoted up with rotting crab grass and ringlet butterflies while slithering over splinter-rich stockades and into the arms of myriad prickly, poison propane-expulsing insects, for god’s sake: make me privy. Perhaps I can repay them retrospectively.
First up: Irish drinking songs gone American Idol-ified!
Oh, crap. I quite enjoy this. It may be beyond polished, it may be painfully cheesy but the lyrics are so clear–perfect for people who like to memorize–and look how much everyone’s enjoying themselves! An audience of multigenerational lassies smothered in a glow of green fawning afore technically impressive folksong enthusiasts in their prime! It’s so convivial, however commercial! But to paraphrase A.O. Scott’s review of About A Boy, I succumb to the warmth and bonhomie as the alternative is to wallow in not-as-good renditions by… wait, Luke Kelly’s version is really good, too. I love the Rocky Road to Dublin, but not rocky roads, nor Dublin, terribly.
Following fast on the heels of the Hibernians, I present a fretful sampling of my most favorite lady rappers. No other lustful 90s triad was as weird, aggressive, friendly, imperfect, gender-bending, natural and awesome as Salt N Pepa. No other unit of ladies barring the unit of me and my imaginary cadre of Amazon defenders moves me quite like they.
In the third place, a representative movie trailer.
I LOVE TRAILERS SO MUCH. TASTE TRUMPS MATURE TYPING STANDARDS WHERE MY LOVE IS INVOLVED. My friend Sarah says trailers are a “lie.” It’s true that some trailers are much better than their realized wholes, but I don’t agree. I treat them, I guess, as separate entities. I like some movies. I like some trailers. I like long stories and I like the short, tighly-wound, knuckle-clenched emotional punch(!) of a good trailer. Conclusion: I love trailers and am not afraid of treacly cheese, overwrought emotions and recycled movie music if it serves a greater (ripping my heart out/patching it up) purpose. Visual/aural outlets need no tasteful restraint. If trailers were people, I’d be a more tolerant person.
Fourth and further down, I offer you a video I can’t embed, a video I can’t but describe below.
Ah, Mysterious Skin. Not to condescend, but I can’t think of another descriptor, so I’ll just go ahead and call fan videos like this total (efficacious, and appreciated!) catharsis porn with their pathos-provoking helpless babes, incensing movie music and anger-dispelling eroticism wrought by indignation, pity and angry, desperate desires for righting action… at least that’s my reaction. This video has an effect on me similar to that of a Holocaust documentary, specifically The Last Days. (But not the one about Kurt Cobain.) It additionally has the effect of swelling my motherly devotion towards my nimble cat, who–as I write these solemn words–reclines on her back with her head propped up on the inside of my calf which, in turn, has the snowballing effect of bolstering the extra empathy engendered by this fan video towards the young, mute and needing of succour, just as I–meta-self, am in need of mine own. I’m not sure if that’s a proper sentence. However, Joseph Gordon-Levitt reminds me of my brother.
Fifthly and finally, Angels in America, again and evermore.
I don’t know why Tony Kushner doesn’t respond to my letters.
In the Guise of a Paraphiliac with the Heart of an Anaphrodisiac
My cat’s body is not unlike Wall-E’s. Her exoskeleton must be removed and recharged. My son has a terminal disease. At his expected time of death, protocol requires our participation in the studio audience of a live talk show. As we wait for the show to begin, my son buys an $800 cheese wedge from a vendor. His father/my husband looks on approvingly. This is how my autistic, overweight, quietly sensitive son chooses to spend his last living moments. I guess I approve. But do I miss him in advance?
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Jim Carey and I visit Andy at his white railroad home bedecked in aluminum siding. It looks lived-in. Andy is embarrassed by his poverty. Jim Carey is embarrassed by his agedness. Andy’s parents and Katie come home and feed us and set us in front of the TV. Andy drives me to subway station where the ferry docks to proudly show me proof of his civic involvement. He’s the supervisor? I see a name I recognize on a chalkboard underneath the heading “See Andy for Improvements.” Andy gets angry at me for ignoring him and thus leaves me at the station wherefrom I timorously attempt to make my way back. Unsurprisingly, I get lost en route but find a pretty, doily and gingerbread-rich cake shop in its lack! The prices are so low and the cakes are so beautiful I buy a fluffy buttercream one, but I wonder how the hell I’ll transport it home.
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British Rule. Iranians protest, at interval, on the highway, for freedom. It’s crucial to cross the street only when the violence momentarily ceases (like Frogger). Some sexually humiliating incident befalls me and I am exposed for my licentiousness (or maybe just exposed?) while wearing all blue, just like the girl who was all over the news, the one who bought up lots of TV space trying to retrieve her dignity. I send text messages to a little kid named Ben, messages which are promptly read aloud by his caretaker. Waiting with Brienne to get her carefully deliberated-over tattoo at a fancy, whitewashed, hospital corridor-hygienic tattoo parlor, I sneak away impulsively and aimlessly wander into a cheap tattoo parlor down the street and dreamily, but resolutely decide to get two Renaissance-typeface tattoos in rectangular boxes that look like two of my prettiest camp patches (one red and rosy, the other light pink and yellow). Why?
Boil gizzards. Stew in pot with salt, garlic and vegetables for 40 minutes.
Remove gizzards from heat. Save gizzard stock.
Heat vegetable oil in gigantic pot.
Coat gizzards in mixture of flour, salt, bread crumbs, Old Bay and oregano.
Add gizzards to boiling oil and fry, fry, fry till you can’t fry no more!
Cover frying gizzards for 10 minutes.
Feel guiltily omnivorous, but technically accomplished.
Eat.
Here are some things that you, by learning from my negligence, ought do: Cut off the gristle before you boil, boil a bay leaf into the pot, beat an egg o’er the organs ‘fore you slather with flour, heat the oil to 350 degrees (how do you do that?), dry fried nasty bits on paper towels (aye, ‘twill be wasteful, but better not to collapse of oil overload. So… oily)
Ladies and gentlemen, I’ve traveled over many neighborhood boundaries in 90 degree humidity to be here tonight. I couldn’t get away sooner because a new shipload of salivating, ballyragging he-men was docking on every corner I was walking with my day labor and I had to see about them. Ladies and gentlemen, if I say I’m a well-mannered man, you will agree. I don’t make kissy sounds or indecent assessments when ladies pass. I’m a civilized man. I live a civilized life. This is my credo and that by which I judge my fellows: So long as no one gets hurt. All is permissible so long as no one gets socked in the stomach, in any sense. Now, you have a great chance here to be a decent gentleperson. I have a string of barbarian-free manners and dignity-enhancing morals with which to imbue you that are ready to put to work. I assure you, ladies and gentlemen, no matter what the thugs promise to do to you, by the glow of their incandescent penises, when it comes to the showdown, they won’t be fucking you in any dark alleyway. A civilized man doesn’t blazon his manliness. A civilized man wins his paramours with greater art, or artlessness–really, whatever the situation calls for so long as it’s anything other than slimy, impersonal bullying I can’t on any level conceptualize as being attractive, though I am wont to find many things in this disgusting world attractive. A civilized man is not a baby crying out for mammary glands, nor an unwanted troll desperately hawking his dubious masculinity or even a well-intentioned knucklehead following the lead of his sociopathic, woman-hating friends. Like Ludacris, a civilized man is a lady in the street, but a freak in the bed. If a civilized man is denied his right to be left to his person while walking with his day labor in 90 degree humidity, minding his own business and daydreaming about no one who would have the low class stupidity to wolf whistle, there will be blood.
Treading the tillage, I react with equanimity to the cloying requests from my brother to play snooker. I dither whither we travel in tandem, over the fallow land. In time, I shall become churlish as I know he is really a roué. His dalliances are made known to all who should know them. An earmark of my family is our debauchment. I am a misfit in that I do not impart my passions physically.
–
“You wag!” she cried at he quoth euphuistically from a bevy of needlessly elaborate, 16th century poems. “The dromedary soonest march through the desert, the tramp soonest hop the next train, teeming, tenuous, tenebrous.” Ho, ho, ho! The children cried. How funny that such prepossessing language should be ruined by excessive garniture! But just as they were merrily loping and laughing down the hall, the laggard steward set himself before them and bellowed, with great consternation “It’s teatime, ya’ grisly imps!”
–
A blustering rube from the purlieus was conscripted into the Union Army after making a galvanic speech accompanied by calliope encouraging his supernumerary colleagues to revolt against the Crown. Wearing a periwinkle blouse, hot pink brogues and an unkempt mop, the authorities easily identified him and wasted no time in sending him to battle where he could make no further agitation. The nameless authorities felt no contrition over their decision. It was only a peccadillo, only one maniac out of trillions.
–
Furtively, I stepped onto the proscenium and made the announcement I’d been dying to disclose. I was a dipsomaniac, but not without compunction for the shame I would bring to my family with this corroboration of their darkest fears. Of course, I had never been obstreperous. I’d done as I was told. And yet, I could not live freely until I tendered unto myself carte blanche and acceptance through open expression and honesty. I was not sententious as I said it. It was not incumbent on me to go on long. “I’m a dipsomaniac!” I yelled with open arms and a face brimming with fresh tears and the smile of a one who had freed himself from the shackles of secrecy and abiding thirstiness. “Now get me a drink!” I cried.
Fighting has its high points, for it healthfully releases steam. But fighting has its low points, for not all fighters’ steam-releasing mechanisms are compatible or useful or comprehensible, given the situation and the players. Some people learn the hard way, and some people are hard-wired oddly. Fighting is foolish. Fighting’s not fun. But if we must fight, please don’t bring your gun… and know that I’m not good at interacting with people who show no affect. We operate by different kinds of machinery. Without reference points to bind us, to what reality do we tend? I clutch for straws; I pine, I flounder. Mr. Lies!
