Proverbs 7, Verse 4
"Love wisdom like a sweetheart; make her a beloved member of your family."
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CHIPPED WISDOM:
People think I'm wise, but I'm not. If you're reading this blog to soak in the words of a sage, well, there's more wrong with you than there is with me, and I suggest you see a doctor and get rid of it.
I was, at one point, however, wise enough to know that I should be seeking wisdom from people who probably had it. My criteria for people who have wisdom is admittedly narrow in scope. They have to be men and they have to have white hair.
When I was lost in my life at one point, I think it was 2003 or thereabouts, I wrote to Andy Rooney. A friend of mine who worked in show business got me his email address, and I wrote to him to ask him what I should do with my life. It's kind of embarrassing to tell you that I did that, but he wrote back. He told me that advice was like spinach, and that, if I wanted to be a writer, that's what I should do. His email, I hasten to add, was absolutely littered with punctuation and spelling errors. I suspect that, if it had been a letter, banged out on an old Underwood typewriter, it'd have been letter perfect.
Before Andy Rooney, I aimed a little lower, one might say, and wrote to James Best, who played Sheriff Rosco P. Coltrane on "The Dukes of Hazzard". While Best himself acknowledged once in an interview that "all I'll be remembered for when I'm gone is 'cooo cooo cooo!'", he is himself a Shakespearean-trained classical actor, was once a very handsome leading man type, and also not too bad of a painter. This was in my should-I-be-a-cop-or-an-actor phase-- probably 2002, just after graduating college and breaking up with my girlfriend and moved back into my old room in my parents' house and feeling the bottom of a monkey cage. I figured he'd be a good person to write to, being an actor who, for years, played a police officer, albeit a terrible, corrupt, and inept one: the comic Javert. James Best told me I should give acting a shot because, "there is no career this side of Heaven more rewarding". I guess he must have seen Catherine Bach naked in her dressing room once.
I didn't do that. I did buy one of his paintings, though. And, more than ten years after writing to him, I adopted a basset hound. In memory of Flash.
The fact is that I've always been more reliant and more trusting of the advice of people I respect and admire than my own intuition, which I have to believe is faulty, flawed, unfortunate, disordered, and dopey. My poor office mate at work, who has the misfortune to be older and white-haired, is constantly peppered with and judiciously fields what he (I hope) affectionately calls "mother-may-I" questions from me as I sit hunched over in my chair, fidgeting, staring endlessly through the screen of my laptop, nervously sipping from my brushed aluminum decaf coffee dispenser, clearing my throat, crossing my legs, changing a word in a proposal, as if that word, that fucking word will make the difference between getting a project funded or not. As if one word will somehow offend the recipient.
Is this alright?
Do you think?
What if I said?
Should I?
Could I?
Is it okay if I?
Will?
Won't?
Why?
Does?
Know?
No?
One day I'll show up to work and the lock on the office door will be changed, and I'll understand.
It's funny to me to think that, some day, maybe thirty or forty years from now, some naive little pup with dubious evaluative standards will look upon me as someone to go to, someone at whose knee to gaze up and ask questions and expect answers with meat on their bones. If I've gained any wisdom through the decades I'll tell the guy or gal that I'm having a stroke and to come back later.
I do know some things-- but I don't think they make me especially competent or wise. Here's a summary of what I've learned to date:
* Don't be a theatre major.
* Alcohol is guaranteed to make you an idiot, but not drinking isn't guaranteed to make you not an idiot.
* Marry for love, not because you're worried about what people, especially your parents, will think or say.
* Once in your life, drive, if not own, a huge, old American car that gets less than 15 miles a gallon.
* Short cuts are meaningless-- take the route you like the most, just drive fast.
* The skin on the chicken might shorten your life, but who cares? Eat that shit.
* People who have been dealt a terrible, striking blow by life are special, even if they're kind of assholes.
* Listen to a Howlin' Wolf album really, really loud in the car in the summer with all the windows down.
* Women in tank-tops are a lot hotter than women who are naked. Generally speaking.
* If your father's ever hugged you tightly while you're both sobbing, you're both doing something right.
* Humor is very, very powerful.
* Writing is very, very dangerous.
* Live as far away from other people as you can reasonably afford. People are horrible.
* Golf is completely fucking stupid. So are most sports, but golf's at the top of the list.
* Bowling's okay.
* Don't be afraid to write to old guys with white hair. Just try to keep the mother-may-I's to a minimum.
