Enlightening Nonsense

About a year ago I had a filling put in a wisdom tooth and after this the tooth never felt right. So recently I went to a different dentist than the last hack and had him take an X-Ray to see what the “f” was going on in there. I said, “Hey Doc, the lead vest seems a little lighter than I remember.” He told me that it doesn’t do anything anyway, as he left the room and hid in a lead bunker across the hall.

On returning, he explained to me that my sperm count would drop to the point where there would be just a few little guys remaining and I would have difficulty impregnating a woman because they would swim so slowly on account that there really wasn’t that much competition anymore, most if not all probably dying before reaching the coveted egg. Making light of my new sterile condition, I asked if it would be easier for me to impregnate a man but instead of answering he just gave me a strange look and slipped me his number into my palm on the way out of the office.

Sure enough, there was decay under the filling. So he drilled and filled. I said, “Doc, when I rinse and spit it looks red. Is that some tooth cleaner in the water?” He said no, that it was my blood and that I shouldn’t worry, that a nicked artery is really just par for the course. Not being a golfer, I didn’t appreciate the full “par” metaphor but I did think that gay bastard wanted to stick his ball in my 18-holes (mouth, ass, urethra, ears, eyes, belly button and under all my fingernails from the time I was a POW in ‘Nam and tortured while John McCain got treated like royalty in the Hanoi Hilton.)

A couple of days later, my parents came in for dinner. We got to talking about my teeth. I noticed that Jews tend to care more about how much it cost than whether the procedure helped you or not. When my father finally got around to asking me how it felt, I told him that it felt okay but not great. He said, “If it doesn’t feel better in another week, you go in there and tell the dentist so he can take a look and fix it up.” I wasn’t sure whether my Dad was concerned for my comfort or, more likely, concerned that the money spent was in vain.

Nothing unusual, just a father looking after his son. Or was it? Maybe he was trying to live the Jewish parent’s dream of having me marry a Jewish doctor. I don’t think that was it, basing this conclusion on the fact that out of all the plays my parents came to see me in, the only one that my father didn’t care for was Alex: The Disco Musical, where I played Alexander The Great, we all lip-synched to disco music and I passionately kissed my gay lover–uh, in the play. My gay lover at home didn’t even come to see me perform, that bitch!

I asked my father, “Dad, for as long as you have known me, and that’s…carry the two, divide by three…probably my whole life, have you ever known me to have an assertiveness problem?” He answered in the negative. “Then why are you giving me this piece of advice which is like telling a guy that when he urinates he should not piss on his shoes?” My father agreed it was pretty useless advice but disagreed with the simile, pointing out the fact that some people think pissing on their shoes can add a nice shine and from his experience all it really ends up doing is having you walk around in soggy socks for the rest of the day.

My father was playing the role of “Protector” but I was no longer playing the role of “Young Stupid Kid” and so we weren’t effectively working off each other. He was reciting flowery lines with a Shakespearean tongue and I was talking like a New Yorker with a friggin’ attitude. He was using two cups connected by a string to communicate while I was–you get the point.

It’s interesting how we get attached to certain roles and, like Christopher Reeves, it seems that we’ll be dead and buried before the role ever is. When we hold onto anything, be it a role or an emotion or a belief, we crystallize ourselves into a small, finite aspect of existence and essentially stop living spontaneously, instead just recite lines on queue. It is like keeping a stream permanently frozen. There comes a time when you can no longer really call it a “stream,” which requires some sort of eventual flowing to be one, and have to rename it “a back-breaking fall waiting to happen.”

It’s easier to see ourselves acting our role, playing our character, in relationship to another person. “I am his father.” “I am her lover.” “I am their boss.” Even an emotion is still generally related to another person. For instance, you get angry with your friend for having a little joke with you at the urinal and pissing on your shoes. In your anger you are living, you are flowing, you are spontaneous.

But when you see him next time and before he even opens his mouth you kick him in the groin and say, “Now for the next few times you take a piss, you’ll think of me,” you ceased to be a flowing human and became a crystallized emotion, trapped in time an space like a hamster in a cage forever repeating your round and round wheel antics. For all you know he was coming to apologize to you for being so sophomoric. Had you been in “flow” you could have listened and acted, instead of reacted with a frozen emotion to an action that was already buried and decaying in an extinct past.

But it is harder to see your crystallization when it doesn’t seem “in relation to” another person. And your belief system falls into the category of “Having to be continuously discarded and reinvented” as well. You believe that you can’t lift 100 lbs. over your head. You think that this is based on reason, logic, science. “Hey, I haven’t been lifting weights. My doctor says I’m old and decrepit and shouldn’t do anything straining…” Regardless of what it is based on, holding onto a belief system is crystallizing you once again. So now you won’t even attempt to lift the weight because “logic says,” “he says,” “she says.”

If you think black people are untrustworthy, whether based on what the Grand Wizard told you at your last KKK meeting or from personal experience having them steal from your watermelon patch, how can you look at a “new” black person and see him with fresh eyes, giving him the benefit of the doubt? He might offer to watch your bicycle while you go to the store for groceries and you think, “That jigaboo is going to take it for a joy ride and drip that Jerry Curl crap all over it!”

We’ve all done it. Not necessarily had the “Jerry Curl” thought, but lived in the present based on a consolidated, outdated, ill fated, eye-shaded, Puerto Rican Day-Paraded, past. Maybe you were hurt badly in relationship and reacted with the silent thought of, “I’ll never allow myself to get hurt again.” And so now when the cute guy asks you to go for a drive with him to Lover’s Lookout, you decline and justify your decision with the thought that you don’t want to get Jerry Curl on your new dress, or in the case of Monica Lewinsky, President Clinton’s jism on your blue dress. Nonsense. You’re just too scared to live life so instead you choose to live history. But unlike the history books which are always written by the winners, a loser writes your history, or rather, your focus is on situations where in your perception you “lost” and you are doing your dandiness to avoid losing in the future edition. But an exciting future cannot be built on a boring past.

Most would look at my father as just being caring and supportive and concerned for his kid. He was all of these things. Unfortunately, the scene he was playing was written to be acted between himself and a child, and I could no longer be legitimately cast in that role, having outgrown that costume long ago. He was talking in, “Son, ’twas a fortnight before that you spent a farthing on lollygags and ballyhoos” and I was speaking in, “What the fu–? You shut your goddamn pie hole, Pops, before I shut it for you!” [http://www.hulu.com/watch/73578/family-guy-first-lieutenant#s-p3-sr-i1]

It was a strange scene indeed. Two characters reading lines but no real chemistry between them. I felt a little like Harvey Keitel in The Last Temptation of Christ, a good actor when I want to be but totally miscast in this role.

REFECTION:

What is it that you hold onto? Do you see your friend and know she’s not going to have fun at the party? Do you know that the movie is going to blow chunks? Do you know that you’ll be disappointed if you order a different meal than the one you always order? Whether you seem to be always right in your assessment, all this kind of crystallized thinking does is disturb your party, have you looking for flaws in the movie and ordering the same meal every time, never risking finding another meal that you may like just as much as “the old standby.”

MEDITATION:

Instead of giving up food or sex or rock ‘n’ roll for “spirituality” or Lent, why not try taking a fast from your ideas? Put your preconceived ideas/philosophies/beliefs aside altogether and see everything completely fresh. In this way you will regain your spontaneity and act according to the situation in front of you not ghosts in your mind. Notice how hard it is not to “know” or “expect” a certain outcome. Can you see how this is a lot more useful to your life and understanding of Who You Are than starving yourself or not getting laid?