Category Archives: Inspiration

These Aren’t My Pants

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They’re browner. And they don’t really reach my shoe tops. When I go like this, they do. But I’m not going to go like that all day. My posture is bad enough as it is.

It’s too bad because it’s late. I’m already at the bus stop and the bus is coming. Walk home to change pants at this point and my whole day is off. But then, so are these pants.

They’re a little tighter. The only brown belt I have goes one extra hole. They flare like a pair of pants I used to have that I never wore. They looked and felt great until you got out into the sunlight and you realized just how shit-colored they actually were. They needed just the right kind of anti-shit-colored shirt. And frankly, no such thing exists. So they hung in the closet and once in awhile in a blind grab I’d put them on by mistake and then stand there in the mirror wincing. Too shit colored.

But these aren’t those. These have a nice sheeny brown to them that I’ve never seen before. They wear nice, they’re just a touch short. Worse, they’re not mine. They are no doubt the product of reverse thievery. People I don’t know breaking into my house to hang pants in my closet.

Did I grow two inches overnight?

I may have simply reached that time of life my Uncle did. He’d see a great sale on coats and find this incredible full-length camel’s hair winter coat for half price just his size and run up to the cashier with that certain light in his eyes–can’t believe your luck!–that kind of light. And he’d purchase it at a great discount and take it home to hang it in his closet for next winter and discover that there were two exact replicas of that same camel’s hair coat, unworn and just bought from previous years, hanging there waiting for him to wear them. Or for the California winter to reach freezing. That’s the worse part, I think.  He grew up in Chicago but had lived in LA for 30 years. Maybe one day a year on a cold day he could wear a camel’s hair coat.

My mother was the opposite. She became a schlump in her old age. She had been a very handsome and well-dressed middle-aged lady, but she just got bored with it all–the stockings, the shoes (her collection rivaled Imelda Marcos’), the sleek dresses. She had a great figure ’til the day she died when it shrunk a little. But she reached an age where she just couldn’t be bothered with any of it. I think there was a freedom of sorts in this. The rules of ladyhood just didn’t apply to her anymore. For us though, it was a little disconcerting. One day, she went from Chanel to ripped jeans. Like that.

For me the rules still apply. I like getting dressed, looking nice at work. I don’t do it for others, I do it for me. I like picking a tie, a shirt, a pair of pants, socks, a sport coat. I like putting them all together until they make something of me. And that’s exactly the process I followed today, but these aren’t my pants.

I know what you’re thinking. Either this guy is crackers, why am I reading this, or this is too close to home I’d better check the tag on my underwear they’re feeling tight.

But wearing these pants feels wrong. I didn’t buy them, I’ve never seen them, I don’t know how they got in my closet. I’d never wear trousers without pleats. These are pleat-less. And there’s something yellow in my tan shoes that just doesn’t jibe with these bluish-brown pants. It feels like I’m in a clown show. Floppy shoes, a big polka dot tie. I might as well paint my face.

Every day is different they say. You’re never exactly the same person from day to day. But today’s me is wearing stupid pants.

So clearly, today’s me is just going to have to suck it up. Stay away from mirrors and reflective store windows and forget about the pants. It’s not about the pants. The day it becomes about the pants, you’re in trouble. No deep problem can get solved with pants. But geez these are ugly. They hang on me like a jib sail in the horse latitudes.

Look. I’m older now. I know the secret of hats. When I was younger I could never wear hats. Because I was always looking in the mirror, waiting for the hat to become cool on my head. It never did. So if it couldn’t become cool on my head in the mirror, I couldn’t make it become cool as I walked around town.

Now I know. The point of a cool hat is the jaunt. It’s spirit. It’s faith. It’s not “Am I cool?” as you walk the streets. It’s “Aren’t I cool. I am so effing cool. I define cool. Look at me.”

So that’s what I have to do with these pants. Pathetic choice that they are. Eschew mirrors. Believe in cool. Walk with a spring in my step like I’m fucking Donald Trump. And dare anyone to call them ugly. They’re not. They’re beautiful. Beautiful short brown pants without all those horrible pleats. I’m gorgeous. You don’t have to tell me how good I look. I know it. I own it. John Gielgud. Laurence Olivier…

But these aren’t my pants.

All You Need is Love*

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Looking back after sixteen years of marriage to the same woman, I see now that love has gotten me to where I am today. I am a much stronger man than I was before, because of love—love-the word, love-the feeling, love-the idea, love-the romantic notion…love is the Styrofoam peanut of our existence. Without it the contents of our independent lives would bang together mercilessly. With it we are well-packed.

Clearly I am not the man I was a decade and a half ago. We use less words and we mean more, my spouse and I. We choose our words wisely so as not to push the other’s buttons involuntarily.  The Eskimos may have had hundreds of variations for the word ‘snow’. We’re the opposite. We have one word and we paste it everywhere. ‘Love’ is the common denominator.

“I love you.” (Translation: You have meaning for me, even if I don’t always love you.)

“I love YOU.” (Translation: I rarely love you, but thanks for being nice to me. So few are. I’m glad there’s someone who has to be or else.)

*                                                            *                                                       *

“Thank you for making my lunch this morning. I love that you stick notes in my sandwiches with toothpicks.” (But I don’t always get what they mean. For instance yesterday you punctured my bologna with “Consider alternate route”.)

“I love writing you notes that you don’t read until you’re at work.” (I’m watching you, pal. Don’t even think of looking twice at that new intern. I know you too well.)

*                                                            *                                                      *

“I love you.” (Thank you for taking the dog out.)

“I love YOU.” (It wasn’t my turn, but I respect the fact that whenever he has diarrhea, it’s automatically my turn.)

“You’re the best.” (Please wash your hands.)

*                                                            *                                                    *

“You’re the best.” (I’m glad we both work, because sometimes it’s easier to be in love with you from 30 miles distance than it is in person.)

“Thanks honey, you too.” (I agree. Sometimes when we’re home together, I’d prefer to get on the phone with you, because at least then you carry on one conversation instead of ignoring me in favor of tablecloths.)

“Can I get you breakfast?” (The table cloths are always dirty because you eat breakfast on them and have not yet figured out how to pour your milk without spilling it.)

“Thanks. I’d love some.” (That’s our seven-year-old, I pour milk perfectly well, thank you very much. Do you ever just break down and actually wash the damn thing?)

“Don’t give me that look.”

(Fuck you.)

*                                                          *                                                           *

“You look cute today.” (Is there sex in our future?)

“Thanks hon.” (Do you have your kneed pads?)

“I like your hair.” (I strained my left knee, could we try the bed for once?)

“Sure, thanks. You’re sweet.” (If  you make the bed first, get me a towel, find my pajamas, light a candle, warm the massage oil, put some music on, feed the dog, put the kids to sleep, help me print this out, fix my website and put insulation tape on the windows first.)

“I’ll be right back.”

*                                                             *                                                        *

“You’re my lover.” (I like what you do.)

“You’re my woman. We were meant to be. (No one else would put up with your shit.)

“Sweetheart.” (That’s funny, I was thinking the same thing.)

“Your smile turns me on.”

“You’re the single most important person in my life.” (Despite the fact that I don’t always love you.)

*                                                           *                                                         *

It is daily work simply understanding each other using so few words but somehow we’ve accomplished it. When nerves are unraveling we slap a sloppy coat of love on them and they ravel back up.

In addition to using love peanuts to pack away our problems, we’re currently deep at work on the cardboard box itself.  One of the biggest surprises of our marriage is that the great 70s philosopher Billy Joel was right. He said, “Blame it all on yourself, ’cause she’s always a woman to me.” This is truth.

We used to have enough cardboard construction between the two of us to start a small moving company. Now we have managed to lessen the number of walls we put up between us, down to one. Ourselves.  We used to encounter it constantly and think smugly, “Oh my God, what a jerk he/she is.” The Blame Game was simply too much fun and too easy to play.  Ahhhhh, there were some great blames in the old days. Record blames. Infamous blames. Blames of note. Not any more. Counter-intuitive though it might be, it turns out that what I see in her actually are MY shortcomings, and vice-versa.

Now when we come up against it, though it SEEMS to be the other person, we recognize it as our own karmic wall shaped EXACTLY like our spouse. Our response therefore has also changed. We no longer run at it fiercely with spears, throw bodies against it in a smack-down, or even, frankly, scale it. Sometimes we still run away screaming, but then with the full knowledge of 16 years of marriage, we creep back coweringly; wonderingly –“Could that really be me? It sure looks like her.”

And yet, as we look at the sorry state of some of the marriages around us, so many spouses are either still running head-long at a wall they think is the other person, or have not yet been able to develop our “crawl-back” ability. No wonder. It’s downright humiliating. Where divorce is rampant, perhaps we should consider ourselves lucky. On the other hand, those couples don’t have to wear knee pads 24/7.

The frisson of marriage is not acceptance of who she is, it’s acceptance of who you are. Once that’s done, Rumi is right, “Your task is not to seek love, but merely to seek and find all the barriers within yourself that you have built against it.”

Our marriage is safe in a sturdy brown box with lots of bubble wrap for joy, peanuts for love, stamped, certified and addressed to the future. And here are the packing instructions…

– When she wakes up on the wrong side of the bed, turn the mattress over.

– Never engage in a conversation that she begins with “You should…” (Simply smile and nod and make yourself a nice ham sandwich, you’ll need it.)

– Eschew prepared statements. Better to sincerely open your heart and just talk to her.

– Don’t cry. You’re supposed to be the strong one.

– Don’t whine, you’re not ten anymore. (Unless of course whining still works in which case, whine away, they deserve it.)

– Never let  a computer come between you and your spouse.  All computers are mirrors of human inadequacy. If we were meant to be that logical, we wouldn’t drink beer.

– Learn to listen, whether you’re listening or not.

– There is no substitute for Date Night; no matter how good your Netflix subscription is or what game is on TV.

*This article has been approved by HRH, my wife, the Love Queen.

 

Time Aggregates

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The Truth of How We Age

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Why I Can’t Remember

When a child is born he is a vast expanse of unmarked brain cells to be put to the use of time. An untouched memory bank. A clean data base. A blank slate. An empty canvas. A tabula rasa. An humongous, honking enormity of space.

In the first five years, he has not yet truly joined the time/space continuum. A very young child doesn’t remember a thing really, because, as most programmers know, downloads cannot be started until formatting is finished. Formatting is done with strained spinach. If the rate of spinach slows below 2 mg per day, we get a condition known as Cerebral Warming. The Bozo Layer gets a hole in it and early memory is the result. Usually clowns.

After five, formatting is pretty much complete. The die is cast. The turkey is done. Experiences begin turning to memories at an alarmingly fast rate. Some children with high experience to memory ratios have been know to run small countries. Others like goldfish as pets. Still, with so much RAM available to 5 years olds, each moment in time, each experience of theirs that becomes memory, is a little like watching an ant in the desert from a 747. It is only when a few ants get together and build an anthill that you get your first time aggregate. This usually occurs when the goldfish dies.

Youth are bored. They rush to fill their database as fast as they can, because experience is the candy of the brain. They are hungry, lustful, greedy little creatures and they think that filling up the brain with anything, willy nilly, is okay (See Youtube). However, no matter what you think of Mozart’s father, he at least understood you need to harness your ants. To get the ants to build the right kind of anthill, you’ve got to have a hook.

Mozart’s hooks were piano keys, and his father hooked a big one. As early as three, Mozart wanted to play like his older sister. He was fascinated by the thing she played. He would crawl up and try to do better than she did. Hooks beget ants and Mozart’s ants wrote symphonies. Go figure.

Hooks also explain what will turn to ants. Let me give you an example. It’s nothing for New Yorkers to walk several miles each day. And yet, if a New Yorker actually SET OUT to walk several miles each day, in the desert for instance, it would never happen. Imagine a New Yorker saying, what a nice Mojave Desert this is, I’m going to walk several miles. No. They would walk ten feet, stop and look for delis. There is nothing to motivate them in the desert. No hooks. Okay maybe a cactus or two. But just TRY walking in Times Square with a blank mind. Oh my God, hooks–visual hooks, advertising hooks, traffic hooks, transvestites dressed as Captain Hook, hookers…frankly, it can be a harrowing experience. But before you know it you’ve walked two miles!

You get my point don’t you? A youth understands the nature of time by the number of hooks (ie. ants) he has experienced. An older person has Times Square. Ergo, time aggregates or moves faster for the older person than for the younger person because of the multitudinous hook factor.

An  older person is an anthill of memory. Ants are everywhere, in fact sometimes they are climbing all over each other (see antediluvian). A younger person is more of an antibody. They have one ant and they play with it.

In early childhood there is no time because there are no ants. In later childhood, they should be home by five. After age six they get bored and start walking in the desert looking for ants. The older they get, the more they experience, the larger the anthills, the closer they get to walking in New York. Some in their 20s just cut to the chase and move to New York.

The older a person gets, the more time aggregates and turns to memory. The more the memory, the more the ants.The more the ants, the less the desert, until the database is full. That is the reason that time seems to go by so much faster in old age than in youth–more ants. And the more the ants, the less the desert (see Las Vegas).

Then Alzheimer’s sets in and a person starts to shed, or literally, ‘kill ants.’ Originally Alzheimer’s was thought to be a narrowly focused disease, but deep alphabetical research has discovered an extra ‘L’ invisible to the naked eye. Ergo, Alzheimer’s or ALL-zheimers applies to all wisenheimers. This means you. The only immunity is death or taxes.

Time aggregates, incorporates, masturbates (see hookers) and finally segregates, or snows, leaving little brain cell snow drifts in your wake. Once Alzheimer’s sets in, all bets are off and ants have little meaning. Unless of course, you like ants.

If you like ants, then it’s another story entirely. But you really must like them. You must do more than just think they are cool or buy them a plastic ant farm. You must truly understand them and offer them droppers of sugar water and keep them entertained and stroke their little exoskeletons. If you do, if you become invested, if you love them, you talk about them, you trade them with your friends, you take them to Little League games and buy them snow cones, you feed them legumes and antipasto, then you can truly cherish time.

Appreciate your ants and they will not depreciate you. That is time’s true antidote. Dote on ants.

The Spirit of ’13

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The Spirit of 13

The Spirit of 13

     2013 should, if we’'re to follow superstition, be the unluckiest year in
the calendar. Americans have this superstitious thing about the number
thirteen. Ok. Maybe it'’s not an easy number to live with. You can'’t multiply
anything by anything and get thirteen. It’'s clearly not a number that most 
Americans want to get in bed with (there are no thirteenth floors in most hotels).

     On the other hand, of all the numbers in the world, American’s should
be absolutely bowing down to the number thirteen.  They should have special
holidays on the thirteenth of each month, wear thirteen-leaf clovers in
their lapels and spend the day with three extra prosthetic fingers and toes
trying to grasp the meaning of life.   That would, in fact, be more
productive than trying to understand what makes Lindsay Lohan tick.

     I submit to you that Americans don’'t know how to appreciate any more
(unless it’s capital). Maybe if they honored what they THINK is difficult,
they  would learn to appreciate what they have just a little bit more. Not
be just vaunting ambition that o’'erleaps the American Dream and falls on the
other side.
     Let'’s start with poor, discriminated against, abused and neglected
thirteen. I mean, how in the Audie Murphy hell did thirteen wayward colonies
rebel, fight and beat the mighty British empire?  We became thirteen
original states, against all odds creating a way of government that lasted a
good long time before it merged with Wal-Mart.

     You want to understand bad luck? Follow Lindsay, the mistress of bad
causes. Good luck? Stick with thirteen. How about the fact that there are
thirteen full moons every year! Thirteen diamonds on a rattlesnake’'s back!
Thirteen cards in a suit. And four times thirteen is that magic number
fifty-two!  Oh my god, it'’s the natural cycle of things—--fifty-two weeks in a
year, fifty-two stages of boddhisatva practice, fifty-two cards in a deck,
fifty-two men on a dead man’'s chest. Need I go on?

     Artist Archibald MacNeal Willard made a painting in 1875 commemorating
U.S. independence called the Spirit of ’'76. It should have been called the
Spirit of '’13. Willard fought on the Union side in the bloody carnage that
was the American Civil War. He endured locusts, gunfire, and bad medical
advice so that he could paint scenes from the war.  Inspired by a parade he
saw, he used his own father for the model of a white haired man leading a
spirited march in the center of the painting. There'’s a little drummer boy
to his right, direct from playing a one-night engagement for the baby Jesus,
and a man to his left playing the fife. Painted one year before this country's
centennial where it was displayed, it reflects an American can-do,
tough-it-out, soldier-on, never-say-die, pioneering, hang-in-there,
grin-and-bear-it spirit.

     I'’m telling you, you don'’t need a drum and fife to lead the parade. You
have thirteen.  No one should spend this precious year waiting for Godot or
for Congress to pass a bill. No one. The Spirit of ‘'13 is you change it.
Stop waiting around for the ball to drop. Like the “ball” could unleash your
potential. Are you kidding? It’'s a TV show gimmick!

     So pick up your recycled spackle bucket and some chop sticks and fall
in. Others will join you and the Spirit of ‘'13 will live. Pretty soon Rush
Limbaugh will be marching and Jackie Evancho. You can bend your Spirit
towards Rush and believe that the world is a dolby loud preview of coming
attractions of The End of The World, The Movie, with Arnold Schwartzenegger
as a hero with an uzi and scenes of wreckage and destruction from the minds
of adult screenwriters who miss their Tonka trucks, or you could sing opera
with Jackie. Your choice.

     The key is, keep marching. And 2013 will turn out just the way you
thought it would, 365 days later, based on that choice! It will shine like
the finest aria if you put your heart into it like a 13 year-old opera
singer, or it will go to “hell in a handbasket” as my father used to say in
his declining years, and nothing will be right. Your choice.

     It’'s the Spirit of '’13 and you lead the parade.