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It’s alright to cry…Crying gets the sad out of you.
Raindrops from your eyes…It might help you feel better.
—“It’s Alright To Cry” from Free To Be You And Me sung by Rosie Greer (former huge NFL player)
[http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KqFuhCfb3Fk]
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It was my first day in Florida and I was looking forward to an exciting week of eating, beaching, shuffle boarding, eating and eating with my parents. Jewish parents will wake you up at 9:00 a.m. and the first words that will come out of their mouths is where you’re going for dinner. I’m usually like, “Ma, if you’re not going to wack-off my morning hard-on, I want you the fuck out of here,” to which she always responds with the same, “You’re disgusting!” as she leaves the room. I wouldn’t really let her jerk me off, at least not without applying some Oil of Olay to those dried-out, pruney, age-spotted hands.
After pounding some all-you-can-eat-without-puking-and-if-you-do-puke-then-you-have-made-room-for-the-next-full-plate-of-food at the Golden Corral the night before and sleeping for ten hours straight and getting jerked-off by my mother, I was ready to hit the sandy beaches of Florida.
The beach ritual with my parents is always the same. I can imagine a National Geographic show where the narrator describes in a loud whisper, “Notice the settling down ritual where the female takes what seems like an interminable time to find a spot for the sunbathing ritual. And once she finds the spot, see how she bosses the male around as to where he should hammer the umbrella into the ground for the optimal shade coverage. This is done to remind him that she has his testicles in a jar stored high and out of reach back at home.” The narrator would know not to get too close to this wild female or else she would Steve Irwin him by thrusting the beach umbrella pole through his heart killing him instantly.
I sat in one of the chairs we brought and did some kriya yoga pranayama energy breathing, partly because I was in the mood and other partly to subvert the “another common settling down ritual…” which involves my parents asking me mundane questions, which are usually really comments disguised as questions like, “It’s beautiful here, isn’t it?” or “Very different from New York weather, huh?” or “Can you believe it’s March and you’re sitting on a beach wearing only shorts?” or “Did I do a good job jerking you off this morning?” to which I respond to any and all questions in the same way: “Dad has a much softer touch. Maybe next time you can take off your fuckin’ rings.”
I was facing the ocean, with a clear blue sky above, listening to the lapping of the waves, feeling the sand beneath my feet—even a yogi with A.D.D. could find Samadhi in this setting!
Near the end of my pranayama, my focus shifted from the meditative thought of, “Is it wrong to rub my penis against my yoga students when they are in corpse pose?” to the loud talkers behind me. I wasn’t annoyed in the least. This was not because I had transcended annoyance or because I was like, “Bless these children of God, they know not how loud they speak.” It was because the topic was somewhat interesting.
It was two girls talking, as opposed to “dead man walking,” and unlike what usually happens when two girls get together, where they spend several hours talking about menstruation and how cheap toilet paper leaves clumps in their cooch, these girls were talking about matters that some might call “spiritual.”
“I am agnostic: I don’t really know if there is a God or not. I just believe that if you do good deeds here, when you die you will be rewarded.”
I finished up my round of pranayama and went over to the girls. In the old days if I saw two young, cute girls I would have wanted to see if I could get laid. Today, the only “action” I wanted was to throw a monkey wrench into their discussion and see if I could break down the machinery of their minds. Hearing people talk on spirituality is clay pigeons to my ears and all I want to do is get out my shotgun and blow them to pieces.
“Hi, I heard you talking and I thought the topic was interesting. Do you mind if I join in on the discussion?” I assured them that I wouldn’t just sit there like a dog drooling and hoping someone would throw me a bit of food but that I may just drool a little and if either one of them had any food they wanted to toss in my direction that I would be very appreciative if they did so, rubbed my belly and said, “Good boy!”
I was going to offer the question, “If there is no afterlife, would you still think there any point to doing ‘good deeds’?” Many do “good deeds” just as a business. Christian soldiers think they’ll be able to take up residence on the sunny spot of the cloud if they convert some heathen Jews. Moslems think that they will bathe in rivers of wine and fuck 72 virgin girls if they blow up some heathen Jews. And even Jews think if they can work not to hate their annoying, money-grubbing heathen brethren that God will pat them on the yarmulke and tell them they’ve been a good boy.
How many Moslems would blow themselves up if there were no virgins waiting for them, not even a fat ugly drunk chick? They’re not committed to a Jihad; they’re just in negotiation for a life that is better than the current dog shit one they are living. How many Christians would bug everyone about Jesus if there were no pay-off in Heavenopoly money? How many Jews would not turn on the basketball game because it’s the Sabbath if they didn’t think that the peeping Tom God was watching them? Most religions are not religious, they’re business.
But the topic had moved on and so I had to relegate all of my brilliant “life as a business” monkey wrenches back to my tool bag, which I got from graduating the DeVry Institute.
One of the girls mentioned how crying was useless and served no point and that anger is much more functional. “When I have cried, it doesn’t help anything. I still feel sad and nothing has changed. When I get angry, I feel better.”
The other girl was like, “I totally agree. Most people don’t understand crying but everyone understands and accepts anger. My friends wouldn’t know how to handle me if I was crying and so I wouldn’t cry with them. But all of them understand anger.” and suddenly I felt like I was having a discussion on feminism in a room full of lesbian man-haters.
I said, “I don’t want you to take this the wrong way, but that sounds totally dysfunctional to me. If these people are really your ‘friends’ and you are sad and crying, I would hope that they would do their best to be there for you and support you and not be like, ‘Listen Whiney McTears, you need to get a grip!” If she responded, “I almost took that the wrong way, that you think I’m a moron,” I would have responded, “No, that’s the right way to take it.”
The first girl said how she was a real “task” oriented person and if it didn’t serve helping the situation, it just didn’t serve—and tears don’t serve. I said how if one’s parent died, tears wouldn’t help her to make the funeral arrangements but that they would probably help release a lot of grief and sadness from inside of her.
“People just function differently and I don’t function that way,” she said. I totally agree that people have different ways of acting and reacting. But…
“If you are trying to build a house and you are banging nails with the wrong side of a hammer, you could say, ‘Hammers don’t work for me; I just build houses differently.” But maybe your opinion comes from a limited understanding of hammering and if you explored more thoroughly how to use a hammer your opinion might be different.”
She told me how her parents never made themselves available and that in her family they didn’t really express their feelings with each other. I brought up a question about conditioning versus perceived freedom.
“We all like to believe we have free will but do you think that if your parents had opened their arms for you to cry into when you were feeling sad as a little girl that you would think the way you do today about the uselessness of crying?”
She acknowledged that conditioning does affect how we act today and probably had an influence on her but still couldn’t grasp how crying served any purpose.
But why does everything even have to serve a purpose? In our utilitarian society, if someone doesn’t serve the collective we think they are a “useless feeder,” to borrow a term from the New World Order that wants to kill 80% or more of the population. Why can’t we just take a walk without the “purpose” being to get anywhere? Why can’t we just ball our eyes out because we are sad and not think, “How is this bringing me to a better place.” Jesus F. Christ, if we wait to process all our thoughts before we express an emotion, we will be like a planet full of Mr. Spocks: a bunch of logical, pointy-eared bores who are very “useful” but emotionally dead.
“Some might say that you lying on the beach here and sunning serves no ‘purpose’,” I challenged. She came back that she had worked hard to “earn” this time to relax and that she enjoyed it.
I finally brought in my probably double their life experience into the equation. “Look, I do energy healing work which often involves people releasing stuff they’ve been holding onto for years, sometimes decades. I have had many people cry on my table and every one of them felt a tremendous burden lifted from them and felt phenomenally better after their tears.”
“Really?” the first girl asked. This is one sign of spiritual immaturity, having difficulty understanding or empathizing with something that doesn’t fit into your current modus operandi. To have to confirm that, yes, many people feel better after a good cry to someone seemed almost bizarre to me, as if I had to explain something as obvious as how many guys think taking a huge dump is as satisfying as blowing a load.
Early on in the discussion, she had told me how she wanted to get married and have kids. She said that her parents were never available for her and she wants to be available for her kids. I brought up child molesters, not for any “purpose” besides the fact that I like to talk about Catholic priests. “Many people who are sexually abused go on to abuse others sexually. I think it’s great that you have seen a pattern of behavior that wasn’t ideal for you and are committed to not repeat it with your children.”
Their boyfriends came back with the I.Q. rallying cry of, “We got beers!” and I was waiting for one of them to imply that I was macking on his girl, to which I would have responded, “Listen brother, I would much rather punch you in the face than fuck your girl.” But that opportunity never came; some of my best material gets lost on the cutting room floor. I thanked them for allowing me to join them in conversation and excused myself.
I sat back in my chair and faced the ocean. A thought filled my mind of a future where the first girl had a couple of daughters and a son. I saw one of the cute little girls upset about something adorably childish, like how she dropped her teddy bear on the floor or how someone picked on her in the playground. I saw this young mother, instead of opening up her arms and hugging her tearful daughter, telling her that there was no point in crying, that she should instead shout in anger at dropping the teddy bear or scream at the person who picked on her in the playground and how this “parenting” might help turn another small girl into a young woman who doesn’t understand the beauty in experiencing anything fully, even crying.
A tear came to my eye and rolled down my cheek…and I was grateful for the blessing.
I looked over at my parents sitting there, my Dad reading his paper, my Mom reading her book, and got up and went over to them. I hugged my father and thanked him for being who he was. I hugged my mother and said, “Thanks for not fucking me up too much.” She responded, “You did that on your own.” I thought what a brilliant lesson she was sharing with me, that we are all responsible for our own lives and until we stop blaming everyone else for our misery and start to accept that our lives are our own creation, we will never be able to escape the pit of despair that we have dug by our own hands. I then realized she was just being a bitch. [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z05StkAKKF0]
I called this piece “The Crying Game” only in part because I walked in on my mother while she was taking a piss standing up [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T47kt6DuT-4]. Life is a game to be played and enjoyed—whether you feel happy or sad or miserable or glad. If you don’t savor each expression of consciousness that wants to be experienced, you are playing with only half a deck.
If you feel angry—be fully angry. If you feel sad—feel fully sad. If you feel sad and express it in anger, that is as stupid as if you feel happy and express it in sadness. This is not to say that if you are overwhelmed with happiness, you may not cry; this happens to me all the time. But those tears will be of gratitude and joy, a different expression than the ones that come when you drop your teddy bear on the ground.
If you don’t express the emotions that are being experienced, you will never know how to be fully happy. You’ll be like one of those pathetic New-Age “All is bliss” freaks who do their darndest to shut off any feeling that is “other than,” as if you can create bliss through suffocating frustration, which is trying to create peace through violence.
And even if you convince yourself that you do know how to be happy, because you read the secret to a happy life in the latest Eckhart Tolle book that Oprah is whoring, you won’t be capable of bringing those words from your dead brain to your living life. The sad thing is, you won’t even cry about this for you will have convinced yourself that you “know” what is right for you and you are “unique” and an “individual” and “crying is just not what I do.”
I’ll cry the tears you cannot, not just for all the suffering in the world, but for all the suffering that has not been allowed to express.
“And if the song has come out of some kind of madness, some kind of confusion, you will certainly feel good, but at a cost which is too big. Millions of people for thousands of years can be affected by it. You are relieved but you have not behaved responsibly. You have not behaved sanely, you have not behaved humanely. Your songs, your paintings, your dance will have all the qualities of your mind, from which they came.”
—Osho in A Taste Of The Divine (p. 89)