Another Post that Begins with "When I Was a Kid"

When I was a kid I watched a lot of sitcoms. New ones, reruns, old ones on Nick at Nite. When people complain now about how kids don't spend any time outside while my generation totally did I just laugh and laugh. During summer vacation I had the TV schedule memorized. Infomercials until two or three in the afternoon followed by the likes of Perfect Strangers, Small Wonder, Dobie Gillis, Leave it to Beaver, My Two Dads, its bizarre prequel My Three Sons, and the strange dual male fantasy of being married to a woman who was magic and having a horse that can talk to you.

This doesn't even count the countless Nickelodeon game shows and a little crush on a gal named Moira "Mo" Quirk.

As far as I can tell, there are essentially two plots to all sitcoms that involve dads. As a dad myself I've been reflecting on these. The first one is the dad who refuses to be "spontaneous" on the family vacation. On this one our sitcom family is going on a very special trip to a destination location, whichever one paid the most money to the network. 

Dad, generally a buffoon who can't manage to dress himself for vacation without tucking his underwear into his fanny pack, has somehow learned to read and write well enough to design an itinerary covering every second of the vacation to an exaggerated effect. You guys he has planned this down to the very minute. "Here is when we take bathroom breaks," he mugs. The audience laughs. The child actors barter more of their fleeting days of cuteness to fund real-life parents' high lifestyle by rolling their eyes and saying "daaad." Their on-set tutor telling them about things like school dances like they are post-apocalyptic survivors being heralded on the days when Coca-Cola came streaming out of a fountain into a 64-oz-cup labeled "Big Dog."

The poor family, including its level-headed wife who in real life would have married this man again and again just to further savor the delight of divorcing him, struggles under this new-found dictatorship until mutiny ensues! After learning a valuable lesson, Dad throws out the itinerary and decides to have fun. Stock footage of people going on roller-coasters or whatever ensues.

That one's a good one. The real zinger, though, is the "mid-life crisis" episode. In this one our hapless dad, apparently after killing a kind of tipping point's worth of brain cells from all the noxious chemicals in the garage - that sanctuary from his beautiful and patient and generally perfect wife and children who rarely commit crimes worse than skipping school - decides that he's just getting too old. What follows is a new red car, a black leather jacket and some out-of-date sunglasses. You guys. Dad is so pathetic. Look at him try to capture just a moment of the bliss of youth. How dare he, after toiling daily at a job that basically defines ambivalence, enjoy a cool breeze in what hair he has left? Dad is happy and this just Will. Not. Do.

Tut-tut, Dad. The only thing left is to mock this shell of a human being for the folly of gazing into that inescapable maw of mortality and, for a brief moment, balking. The children are embarrassed. The wife just smiles at the camera, dazzling the live-studio-audience with her ironic dimples. The uncle who lives this life all of the time briefly sees in his brother's wrinkled visage an image of himself before quickly drowning it in bourbon so cheap and toxic that his doctor will someday publish a paper that will put him on the map in certain circles. He will dedicate his speeches at the cool doctor conferences in this uncle's memory before showing slide after slide of degrading human tissue.

Dad inevitably wrecks the car. His new bald-man ponytail gets caught in the seatbelt and scalps him. The shiny red convertible is a metaphor for his hubris, the wings of icarus, melting before his eyes along with any hopes or dreams he'd held on to thus far. As with the vacation episode, Dad is humbled to the dirt. His family hugs him. Why have dreams, they say together as the audience awwwws, when you can have mediocrity?

Happiness, dear Dad, is having one (1) best friend who is somehow the only person on earth who is a bigger loser than yourself. It is having sarcastic children who speak entirely in banter. It is in never striving to be anything more than the lowest common denominator of your imagined TV audience. If they have given up, your script-writer tells you at the beginning of every episode, then who are you to imagine anything more?

Do not be Dad! Dare to dream, reader! Snatch moments where you can! Write a blog and promote it half-heartedly! Update it sporadically and generally use it as a platform for berating people who are really just doing their best to keep their heads above water for not reading it!

Also, read or do not read The Woman Upstairs, by Claire Messud, I honestly can't tell you either way! In it Nora is 37, a school teacher who wanted to be an artist, a single woman who only dreamed of being a mother, a verbose narrator telling us her side of everything with lots of little barbs and jabs along the way. She refers to herself constantly as "The Woman Upstairs" which I found to be rather convenient given the title of the book. I don't know. She seems more like a teenager who just started reading Vonnegut and is mad about stuff. She uses big words because it's the easiest way to ensure that everyone knows she's smarter than they are.

She meets a family: a mother, father, and son, and falls in love with all of them in different ways. In the woman, she finds a best friend, in the boy, the perfect son she wishes she could have, in the father, a hapless pathetic man who tucks his underwear into his fanny pack (JK HE'S ACTUALLY VERY HANDSOME AND CHARMING).

Now that I think about it I didn't like this book very much. I know women my age (which is about how old Nora is) who are just starting to be in a place where they want to settle down and start a family after a successful start to a career and some life experiences, yet Nora believes herself to be half-dead and useless to society other than being a predictable matron rocking her chair in the second-floor window. I dunno. I liked it while I was reading it. There are some powerful insights, and some good quotes:

“I always thought I'd get farther. I'd like to blame the world for what I've failed to do, but the failure - the failure that sometimes washes over me as anger, makes me so angry I could spit - is all mine, in the end. What made my obstacles insurmountable, what consigned me to mediocrity, is me, just me. I thought for so long, forever, that I was strong enough -- or I misunderstood what strength was."

But listen. My favorite books leave me wanting to keep spending time with the characters, see what happens next, and what happens after that. In the end, though, we don't know what Nora is going to do next, the ending is open. Does she throw out the itinerary and ride the rollercoaster? Or does she see the beauty in what her life has become, regardless of what she imagined it to be? Honestly, I don't care. If finding out means spending any more time in Nora's head, I'm going to have to pass.

Getting Your Shizz Together

"I’d been listening to men talk since I arrived in New York City. That’s what men like to do. Talk. Profess like experts. When one finally came along who didn’t say much, I listened."

That's the kind of quote that just stabs me to the core. Y'see, that's the kind of person I want to be but something in me just will not let that happen. I love to talk. Just can't stop. I'll talk about anything, regardless of how much I know about the subject, and I'll talk about it with a lot of authority. It gets me in trouble and I insist on not learning a dang thing.

The person I would like to be doesn't talk unless he has something to say, and that something is real good. Or at least real funny. The person I listen to chattering nonstop even though there's a voice inside saying "yo, you're good, give someone else a chance" frankly annoys me. I'd like to be more comfortable with silence, is all I'm saying. Is there something wrong with me that I need to tell you my opinion about every single book I read and then advertise it on every form of social media I use? Probably. I'm working on it.

Anyway, that quote is from The Flamethrowers, by Rachel Kushner, and hoo-doggies, what a ride. Reno, our main character, has just moved to New York City to pursue a combination of art and motorcycle riding. There she falls in with a growing art scene and radical 70's liberalism: a time when I hear folks say liberalism actually meant something not like today when everyone is too scared to firebomb a Starbucks but I say those who are nostalgic for the 70's must not have much taste when it comes to cars.

So yeah, when Reno talks about Sandro, a mysterious artist who she finds herself strongly drawn to, I get that little prickle, you know? Reno is awesome. She's a ski racer, world-record motorcycle racer, and an artist, and a keen dissector of human beings: “A funny thing about women and machines: the combination made men curious. They seemed to think it had something to do with them.”

There's a part of you when you're reading a book like this that says Reno is too good for this guy. But maybe she's too good for this guy, too, you know? Sometimes I get a little crush on a fictional protagonist, I'm not ashamed. Tell me it didn't happen to you when you read The Secret of N.I.M.H. and I'll call you well-adjusted and not a weirdo.

Also, if you're like me you're reading this and annoyed that the rad fictional girl doesn't like a fictional guy like you and then oh no, you realize you're a Nice Guy. Then you realize that even when you're reading fiction, you want to police what women do, not because you're trying to be empathetic and live their life for a moment to know what it's like, but because you know better.

Guys, quick aside. What's wrong with us?

I can't even begin to cover this subject, though I invite you to travel down that rabbit hole that is that above google search. If you're a man and it doesn't make you feel guilty about some point in your adolescence, you are a better man than I am or (and this seems likely given my history with you) you're a big ol' liar.

Have you ever had a crush on a girl who liked you "as a friend" and you blamed her for it? Have you ever followed around a girl with a boyfriend who is "a jerk" (which is to say not you) and sort of undermined him hoping that you'd be the next one in line?
Does it make any sense that she wouldn't be into this?
The idea that her friendship isn't enough for you, and in fact your side of the friendship is just a ruse? You love this girl so much, and respect her so much, and yet you think she's an idiot for the company she chooses to keep so much that you have to trick her into falling into your arms.
Here's a fun question: do you even know her? Or is she a stand-in for some ideal woman you've created?
Nice, dude. Real nice.

Listen, it's me too. I was that guy. I am a recovering Nice Guy. I still feel it sometimes, though not in the same way. Like, I'm ecstatically married, and being married has helped me understand what a terrible position men are putting women into on the daily. Nowadays it's more like a fatherly (synonym: patriarchal) disapproval of women's choices in partners. "What's she doing with that dirtbag," I say to myself, "she deserves better."

But let's give the Nice Guy the benefit of the doubt. This is not an unlikely scenario: The girl you like really is dating a jerk. She comes to you crying because he did it again. He cheated on her, or berated her, or blew her off again to hang out with his buddies.
Why isn't she dating you, though?
You're a Nice Guy. You would take care of her.
You're always the one to pick up the pieces when she's down.
Wouldn't it just be better if she was with you?
You'd never let her down.
Even worse, when she breaks up with that guy she starts dating some other guy!
Why not you?

Well. Let's break that down. Why not you?

Put yourself in her shoes for a minute. Is she interested in a man who is too scared to tell her how he really feels? Even if she suspects or knows you like her, you've shown her that you are incapable of communicating it. The only thing you've successfully communicated is that you're a wimp.

What if she's just not attracted to you? How is she even supposed to let you down easily if you have given her no opportunity?

OR, what if the only thing you have to offer is that you're Nice?

Guess what? Big whoop. Are you interesting? Is there something you bring to a relationship? Is your life together? Do you know what you want out of life and have a pathway to get there? Women love pathways.

If she could see in your mind, what would she see? If it's some combination of worship and disdain, it's probably not a very nice place. Oh, he thinks I'm physically attractive but also that I'm stupid for not seeing him as awesome and a b-word for not giving him what he wants. Cool. What a nice guy. I def see a future here.

Haha, you know how sometimes I'll say "an aside" and then it's like the whole blog post? I do.

Here's the rundown: The Flamethrowers is a book about being young and into a movement, maybe it's art or racing or radicalism or a combination of all of them.

"Ski racing was drawing in time, I said to Sandro. I finally had someone listening who wanted to understand: the two things I loved were drawing and speed, and in skiing I had combined them. It was drawing in order to win." 

Finally, it's about figuring out your shizz and letting other people do the same.

"But at the same time, Sandro understood that people only tended to allow their own contradictions, and not those of others. It was okay to be murky to yourself, to know you weren’t an angel, but other people had to be more cleanly divided into good and bad."

I thought it was pretty good.