Samples of Stupidity

CHIP OF WISDOM:

Proverbs 9; Verse 6

"Leave behind your foolishness and begin to live;

learn how to be wise."

---

CHIPPED WISDOM:

Dear God,

Are you fucking kidding me?  

I know all creatures are beautiful in your eyes, or equal, or something to that effect, but, really-- am I on the same playing field as the guy who created this ad?  I am composed of the same atoms and carbon-based material?  Did he eat graham crackers and water (milk is for goyim, even four-year-olds know that) in pre-school, just like I did?  Did he wear little Osh-Kosh overalls and did he cling and clutch to his mommy, well into his mid-twenties, like I did?  Does the bit of skin in between his eyebrows need regular maintenance in order to belie his Middle Eastern roots and keep him off the Homeland Security's terrorism watch list?  Is he blogging away the angst he should have outgrown over a decade-and-a-half ago while his children resist the seductive song of the sandman's sultry siren in the next room?  

Tell me, truly, ex-Special Agent Starling....

I realize, of course, that there is an air of superiority in the tone of this blog post.  I won't deny it, but I won't make it any more superior by saying "I shan't deny it," because, let's face it, that would be too much.  I suppose that feeling superior to anyone, (even if it's a guy chained to a musty desk in some dank basement creating ads for "natural ways to boost testosterone") must mean that my medication is working to some degree, which is good, because it's fucking expensive enough-- and that's with insurance.  

When I cried (almost literally) poor to my psychiatrist, he left the room-- I presumed, to return with a firearm to Old Yeller me up good-- but instead he came back with a cascading armful of Viibryd samples.  

"If my math is right," he said, and I prayed that it was, because mine never is unless it involved Reeses Peanut Butter Cups and the answer is always "6"), "this will set you straight for about ten weeks.  Just come back when you run out-- you don't even have to see me."

"Is this guy legal?" I thought to myself, albeit fleetingly, as I hungrily grabbed all the samples from him, dropping one on the floor.

I asked him if this was an ethical thing to do.  He looked at me.  I tried to dance around the fact that I'm white and employed, unlike many of the people I have often observed in his West Philly waiting room.  He smiled at me.

"That's cute, but you're not depriving these people of anything.  I have enough samples of this to keep you good for at least a few years and, let's face it, the shitty medical assistance that most of these people get gives them better prescription coverage than you have.  Sick, right?"

It was, I had to agree.

There's a lot of things in this world that are wrong and silly, sick or bizarre.  I don't need to tell you that.  You're in the shit, you live it.  You have eyes, you eat Reeses Peanut Butter Cups.  You know.  You're like me, and you're like that guy who designed the stupid testosterone ad with the hot blonde chick in the babydoll dress and she wears the boots and everything is going fine and the Basset is whining and the babies are still chirping and Pandora doesn't give a shit that I don't want to hear that Bach right now but like my mother says "everything will turn out okay in the end.  

And we all know what that means. 

It's all good, though-- just try this weird trick and take your performance to the next level. 

Twice-Told Tales

CHIP OF WISDOM:

Proverbs 13, Verse 3

"Self-control means controlling the tongue!

A quick retort can ruin everything."

---

CHIPPED WISDOM:

I think I'm beginning to feel a certain amount of empathy for my math teachers, even my earliest and possibly most enigmatic math teacher; my father.  I'm feeling their pain.  I'm getting where they were coming from.  

I am, in short, a very poor student.  

And I always was, it was always that way.  I just wore glasses and tucked my shirt in and this threw teachers.  They didn't know what to make of it.  Single digit scores on math tests, and yet looks like Paul Pfieffer.  

Does.  Not.  Compute.  

And so I spent a significant portion of my academic life not computing.  In all senses of that word.  I slid, skated, glided, sailed and slunk by without accomplishing much of, well, anything really in school.  Sure, I wrote a lot of stories and won some public speaking contests.  I got a story called "When Yellow Geese Eat Chairs" published in a national magazine when I was in middle school and got five dollars out of it.  But my homework was done on the bus on the way to school, if at all, and I once convinced a teacher that I didn't do a Spanish project because my grandmother had died.  

She, at that point, hadn't.

Not only was I apathetic about school work and, occasionally, brutally dishonest, I also learned at a painfully slow speed.  Not to say that I was "slow", but it took me a while to figure things out.  Like that fucking Major Molineux story.  Who knew "Toby" and "Kunta" were the same person?

Actually, looking back on it, maybe I've just gotten slower-- maybe I really was fine in school (besides math, obviously) and my synapses and my pistons and my o-rings are just now starting to falter.  Maybe fatherhood has made me stupider.  It certainly isn't making me any brighter.  

So my learning curve is getting broader, or wider, or more concave.  I don't know.  Obtuse.  At any rate, it takes me longer to figure things out, to make connections, to get the main idea.  Would you repeat that?  What do you mean by that?  Every anecdote, I find, must be a twice-told tale which, for people who don't mind talking, isn't very bothersome, I guess.  I find that I'm in meetings furiously scribbling down everything the dumb fuck in front of me is saying for fear that I won't be able to tease out what's really important, and, convinced that I know absolutely nothing, I must assimilate everything.  

And so I learn nothing.  Or, if I do, it just takes a painfully long time.

One thing I am learning, very very slowly, is to watch my mouth.  Especially when I'm angry and/or passionate, because what I say and how I say it is often unfiltered and unappreciated.  And I get it, I understand.  And part of me agrees-- I wouldn't appreciate it if someone talked to me the way I talk to people sometimes, but sometimes I just don't see any other way to make people care.

Which, of course, you can't do.  

You can't make somebody care about their job or their Spanish homework or their yard if they don't, even though you'd really like it if they did.  And that's something I'm learning very, very slowly.  I expended so much energy when I was younger taking pen to paper with vitriol leaking out of my inkwell, insisting with every ounce of fury my vocabulary could muster, that people care about what I care about.  

But it doesn't work.  It didn't, and it doesn't.  

No one ever gave me a satisfactory reason as to why I should care about math, so I didn't.  If they had a crystal ball and said, "Gee, you know, in 2013 you're going to be writing grants with complicated budgets and you're going to have to understand audited financials and P&L statements and 990s and maybe it would be good if you fucking knew how to add and subtract" I might have taken some notice.

But probably not.  

Because, maybe underneath it all, I am a shrewd youth, and may rise in the world, with or without the help of my kinsman, Major Molineux.  

Missa in Angustiis

CHIP OF WISDOM:

Proverbs 30, Verses 2 & 3:

"I am too stupid even to call myself a human being!  

I cannot understand man, let alone God."

---

CHIPPED WISDOM:

Orson Welles once said, "I don't pray because I don't want to bore God".  I guess I feel kind of the same way.  I suppose, in some sort of perverted, disorganized and unfortunate way, these blog posts could be construed as a type of prayer.  Something is created, if you want to be kind and call it that, and it is sent out, maybe sent up.  Prayers are pleas, right?  They're missives intended to be heard, if not heeded.  

Hear us, O Lord.  We beseech you and so forth.  

I'm doing the same thing, if artlessly so.  Hear me, O Best Beloved.  I beseech you and so forth. 

Whether we're secular or pious, we've been sending things out, and maybe up, for a very long time.  Whether it's been psychotic scribblings on walls or Haydn's "Lord Nelson Mass", a tumultuous and terrifying play about Vietnam by David Rabe, whether it's an Excel spreadsheet on a deadline or a whistleblowing expose of greed or incompetence or worse-- it's all prayer.  Every raspy, erotic exhalation and every turn signal and each creak of the rocking chair and each diaper change.  Every cough and every tear.  

Every, every minute.

And I suppose that's why people think they need religion because, without it, we don't know what the fuck we're doing.  We're like fumbling with buttons in the dark.  We're too stupid even to call ourselves human beings.  We're lazy and scared and there's a mess on the desk and dog shit out back and twins tenuously asleep in the next room and everything is precarious and we're all holding it in or holding back or waiting for the next thing.  

What is the next thing going to be?

I remember when my brother-in-law died of cancer.  He was thirty-four.  And the babies had just been born.  And I was thinking, what could it be?  The next thing.  Even in the couple of months from his diagnosis to his death, there were many "next things".  More MRIs.  More scans.  More tumors.  More texts.  More calls.  Every time the phone rang or went "bleepboop" it was bad.  It was so bad.  And I don't think I ever prayed for him.  Not formally.  No Hebrew.  I mean-- he wasn't Jewish, so maybe it wouldn't have gotten translated right anyway.  But there was plenty of prayer.  My kind of prayer.  

This.

DO YOU HEAR ME UP THERE YOU FUCK?

I love it.  You pray to the guy who did it. Hilarious.  A scream.  A howler.  Crazygonuts.  Fucking phonies.

The high holidays are coming again.  They always do.  We're going to go to services and march around with the children behind the torahs.  It is what it is.  I don't believe in it any more than I believe in Santa Claus.  Hell, I believe in Santa Claus more-- at least I get to play him at the psych hospital.  And read "A Christmas Carol".  I love that.  There's no prayer more prayery than that.  Dickens in the Day Room.  

It doesn't heal a soul.  It doesn't do a thing.  But it does what art is supposed to do: take you out of the place you are in, for a moment or two.  Take you out of yourself.  Out of your own psyche.  Your own troubles.  Your own shit.  It does it for me as much as it does it for them.  

My children are having what my wife calls "The Language Explosion".  In laymen's terms: they're talking their little asses off.  

mamadadacarshoessipcupuppacrackercookiewatercookieavodacoballbeepbeepbearblankieandalltherestofit

One day, they're going to start asking me about God and religion and humanity and why people use nerve gas on each other and why the former president put a cigar in that idiot's vagina and why the neighbor doesn't like us and why are there little shiny bits in the street that glisten like diamonds and why diamonds are a girl's best friend and why they don't have any friends and what were we like before they were born and what happens when we die and why do birds suddenly appear and bluebirds say.

What the fuck do they say?

What the fuck do I say?

What will I say?

I'm kind of hoping they befriend an old man.  Not a creepers old man with a dirty trench coat and a comb-over and a ubiquitous white van, but a wizened old man, all crinkly behind his gold-rimmed glasses and his well-worn wingtips and his faded corduroys who'll sit on his porch and tell them stories about the way it was and he'll have clever, quaint, slightly biting, deadpan and droll way of looking at the world.  And they'll soak in his words and his wisdom and they'll repeat his aphorisms at school and their teachers will call them "old souls" and they'll know things-- they'll just know.  

You know?

Because I don't.  I just don't know.  And I know that's supposed to be one of the bravest things you can possibly say, but these are troubled times.  They're always troubled times.  And I just don't know.