Outer Life

Aruba

     In college he was known as “Aruba.” 

     Freshman year, he was always telling us he was “off to Aruba” or “just back from Aruba,” so if you were describing him to someone, you’d say “you know, that guy who’s always in Aruba” and they would know exactly who you meant. Eventually you’d just say “Aruba’s coming to dinner” or “I saw Aruba in the Quad.”

     But I never called him “Aruba” to his face. Somehow I could tell from the beginning that he was not the sort of person who could gracefully wear an effacing nickname, so I’d make a point of addressing him by his real name. Others were not so sensitive. As the years went by, I noticed his circle of friends constricted to the point where he hung out with just a few of us, none of whom uttered the forbidden nickname in his presence.

     I’m not sure exactly why I hung out with him. We had little in common. He was rich -- I later learned his Aruba place actually belonged to his uncle, who was very rich -- while I was poor. He jetted about the world, while I’d never left the country. He never seemed to study, while my head was always buried in a book (though, come to think of it, I wasn’t studying either, as those were usually not the books assigned in my classes). He dressed like a peacock while I wore the same tired uniform of jeans and t-shirt everyday.

     I’m pretty sure I hung out with him only because he wanted to hang out with me. He was very good at hunting me down -- this was in the days before cell phones, text messages and even email, and I didn’t have a landline, so finding me required effort. That he exerted the effort was very gratifying, coming at a time in my life when no one else bothered.

     One oddity: I couldn’t hunt him down. I tried, sometimes, but he never answered his phone or, when I later got a phone, returned my calls, if I dropped by unexpectedly he'd ignore my knocks and never responded when I left messages on his door's white board, and he was even cold to me when I saw him walking on campus. It was as if our friendship was exclusively one-way; only he could control it.

     He was a great talker. He’d spin these stories that went on for hours. He’d swear they were true, but I wondered. Could anyone’s life possibly be this entertaining? Could he possibly be such an infallible superhero? Could others truly be responsible for all his problems? Of course not, but I held my tongue, never expressed any doubts, and truth be told I did find his stories entertaining. I was, in short, a good listener, just what he needed.

     He was also a great source of information. He had strong opinions, and was often right. He knew which shoes were the best, what time of year you needed to visit Paris, what haircut looked best on your head, which tie worked with that shirt, which girl was right for you, how to achieve that particular slide guitar sound, all sorts of stuff. I was a sponge for his information, but never an acolyte, as I couldn’t afford to implement most of his advice ($200 for shoes?!), but he didn’t seem to care. The advice just kept flowing.  

     He did have an unpleasant habit of inserting little digs against me into his stories, and advice, but given my own low self-esteem I didn’t disagree with a lot of them and shrugged off the others.

     So even though I found him strange and off-putting, and even though I could never really develop a real friendship with him, given the one-way artificially stilted nature of our interactions, I continued to respond when he called.

     After college we went our separate ways but I never completely lost touch with him. Every so often, out of the blue, I’d get a call from him, and after his perfunctory “how are you doing?” he’d ignore my response and spend an hour or so spinning another story, just like in college. Occasionally he’d leave me room to say something, which he then usually treated as an open invitation to deliver more advice. By this point he knew so little of my life that his advice was often ridiculously wide-of-the-mark, but his certainty never wavered.

     Then a few years ago another friend emailed me a news story with a note: “Check this out: Aruba’s going to jail!” Aruba had gone into business for himself, probably seeded by his rich uncle, and ran into hard times during the financial crisis. To stay afloat, he allegedly spun a story for some new investors, enticing money out of them before they realized he’d allegedly misrepresented the true state of his business.

     I called Aruba, and sent an email. True to form, he never responded.

     He hasn’t gone to jail but, from the limited news I’ve seen, he lost at least one investor case and must be spending a lot of his time hunkered down with lawyers.

     I’m sure he will rise again, if only in his own mind, but until he does I am equally sure I will not hear from him. For he must always be the infallible superhero and, at this time in his life, not even he can pull that off. And if he falls far enough below me, I am sure I will never hear from him again, for I am now convinced that the real reason he sought me out so assiduously in college was that I was the ultimate loser and, therefore, the perfect backdrop for him to display his relative greatness.

     Aruba is but a minor footnote in my life, or so I thought, for recently I have realized that my life is filled with Arubas. I am drawn to these charismatic narcissists, just as they are drawn to me. They offer me an enticing vision of a fully-realized self while I offer them the unquestioning affirmation they so desperately crave. In the process I make them worse, and they make me worse, thereby increasing our respective needs for each other.

     Sick, but there it is. At least now I know.

     But I also have to admit that if my phone rings and caller ID tells me it is Aruba, I’m still going to answer. And listen.

     Sick, but there it is.

Serendipitous Reading

     I live for serendipitous reading experiences. Take, for instance, four strands in my recent reading:

Strand 1: Errol Morris/Saul Kripke

     I am an avid consumer of the lengthy essays Errol Morris occasionally publishes in The New York Times and, in May, I eagerly devoured his latest three-parter: “What’s In a Name?”

     In his typically digressive footnote-heavy style, Morris explored the significance of naming, bringing to it the level of enthusiasm one expects from a not-yet-jaded philosophy grad student, which is what Morris once was. In the process, Morris weaves together disparate strands into an unexpected whole, seeing connections where, on first glance, there would appear to be none, which is mainly what I like about his writing (and his documentaries).

     Along the way, I encountered (again) the logician Saul Kripke. Morris drew heavily on Kripke’s Naming and Necessity for this latest essay, and has grappled with Kripke in prior essays. Naming and Necessity is a collection of three lectures on the significance of names that Kripke delivered at Princeton in 1970, supposedly without notes, to a group of grad students that included Morris. I’d long been meaning to tackle Kripke, so after finishing Morris’s essay I finally did. Naming and Necessity is out of print but a used copy was easily procured and I made my way through it, certain I had not divined the full extent of his ideas, but intrigued enough to explore Kripke’s other writings, of which there is surprisingly little. One of the few Kripke books is Wittgenstein on Rules and Private Language, which seemed promising to me because I thought seeing Kripke set himself against Wittgenstein would, possibly, help clarify aspects of Kripke’s thinking that I was unable to glean from Naming and Necessity.

     So my to-be-read pile now includes Kripke’s book on Wittgenstein but, in the meantime....

Strand 2: David Markson

     Years ago I read David Markson’s Vanishing Point, one of Markson’s last four novels. These novels, if you haven’t encountered them, are unique, constructed out of short seemingly random factoids, initially puzzling in the extreme, but quickly converting your resisting mind to the potato chip-like allure of consuming just one more factoid, until, by the end, the totality of factoids congeal into something much more meaningful, along the way giving you the powerful impression that you have become the writer, as you are the one constructing the meaning.

     Anyway, that’s my take on Markson and, for some reason, shortly before I started the Morris essay I had decided I needed to return to Markson. I ordered the three later novels I did not have and, in the process, noticed the novel he wrote before his last four: Wittgenstein’s Mistress. It was well-reviewed and, on my review of a few pages, appeared to be a precursor stylistically to the last four novels so, after giving it a minute’s thought, I added it to the order.

     Just after finishing Kripke’s Naming and Necessity, my Markson books arrived and I dove into Wittgenstein’s Mistress. At first I had no idea what he was doing, finding this book even more puzzling than Vanishing Point, as unlike the later novels Wittgenstein’s Mistress did have a character, albeit one about whom I could fathom almost nothing. After 30 pages or so, I paused, put the book down, and thought. The first thing that occurred to me was “Hey, this is a book styled after Wittgenstein’s Tractatus!” Obvious insight, given the title, and that both Wittgenstein and Markson largely employ short one-sentence-per-paragraph styles, but an insight that, nevertheless, had not occurred to me when I started reading.

     The second insight was that this must be a book written in a Wittgensteinian world. Armed with that insight, I quickly finished the book. I found it incredibly funny, meaningful and moving (I actually cried at the end). I marveled that I had the good fortune to stumble on a book with so much to say about loneliness at this time in my life. I doubt I would have appreciated it as much any other time.

     I then immediately dusted off my copy of Wittgenstein’s Tractatus and dove back in. I find much of that short book impenetrable, which is doubly frustrating because it is written in such clear and precise prose, but it provokes thought and so, for that reason, it is one of those books I will intermittently return to again and again throughout my life, yet never really understand. As I paged through Wittgenstein, I recalled the Kripke book on Wittgenstein and felt the first two strands meld. But then....

Strand 3: Logicomix

     One of the more unfortunate side effects of divorce is losing friends, both when couple friends dump you for your former mate, and when you move out of one community and into a new one.

     So as part of my multi-front campaign to replenish my stock of friends, I’ve been looking into joining a book club or two, given that I read a ton and actually liked my college English seminars. Searching around I discovered a club that would soon be discussing Haruki Murakami's Hard-Boiled Wonderland the End of the World. Having already read all the Murakamis, in the process all-but erecting a shrine to him in my living room, I figured this would be an easy one for me, so I RSVP’d and attended. Half the group hated the novel, half loved it, so we had a lively discussion, and I enjoyed it all very much.

     After the meeting ended, one of my fellow Murakami partisans and I spent the next hour discussing Murakami and then other writers, each of us, at the end, exchanging specific recommendations we eagerly typed into our iPhones. At one point graphic novels were discussed. I recommended she try Chris Ware’s Jimmy Corrigan: The Smartest Kid on Earth, which she, a fan of graphic novels, had inexplicably neglected to read, and she pointed me to Logicomix, one that I not only had inexplicably failed to read, but had not even heard of.

     Walking home, I popped into my local Barnes & Noble and found Logicomix. Once home, I opened it and realized almost immediately that this was a book about Bertrand Russell, who was Wittgenstein’s teacher, then student of a sort.

     Every reading path leads to Wittgenstein, I thought, as I finished Logicomix and....

Strand 4: David Foster Wallace

     … turned to my next book club book, for in my eagerness I signed up for a second book club. This one would be reading a book I hadn’t read before, David Foster Wallace’s first novel The Broom of the System.

     Imagine my shock on reaching page 42 and encountering Bertrand Russell again, as one of the characters recites Russell’s famous barber antinomy. This character, I later learned, was a student of Wittgenstein’s at Cambridge.

     Four strands in one month, each starting from completely separate points, all converging on Wittgenstein. And I don’t even read much philosophy. 

     But wait, there’s more!

Random Serendipitous Encounter

     This weekend I checked my heretofore all-but-dormant Outer Life email account and noticed the first page filled with the emails Twitter sends me when someone new starts following me. First thought: I’ve been hit by a Twitter spambot. Next thought, after checking Twitter: Saturday night The Epicurean Dealmaker recommended my writing and many of his many followers decided to follow me too. What is especially cool about this is that I’ve read The Epicurean Dealmaker for years: his is one of the longest-standing blogs on my RSS reader.

     I clicked through to his actual blog to check it out -- reading his posts through Google Reader, I never actually see his blog -- and what did I see? At the top, under the heading “Food for Thought,” he lists three quotes, the first of which is “Wovon man nicht sprechen kann, darüber muss man schweigen.” (“Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent.”) It is the final line of Wittgenstein’s Tractatus, and the only one of the seven propositions in that book that stands alone without further explication.

     Wittgenstein everywhere! Am I going mad? (This is not an idle speculation, given the predilection for madness in logicians, illustrated so vividly in Logicomix.) No, what I think is happening is I’m living what Wittgenstein called Übersicht, or an ultimate sight that gives us a heightened ability to see connections, so that I cannot open a novel these days, or click through to a blog, without seeing connections back to Wittgenstein.

     It is particularly appropriate that this is happening at a time when I have, for reasons not entirely clear to me, mostly shifted my reading diet from non-fiction to fiction, perhaps unconsciously turning to the metaphysical side that Wittgenstein, misclassified by so many as a cold logician, actually considered to be the best path to discover the meaning of life. This is the path he was referring to in the quote above, the path that must be felt and cannot be explicated by mere logic. Feeling over theory, insight over fact, that is the direction in which my thinking has moved recently, unconsciously walking Wittgenstein’s path.

     And in that process I am seeing Wittgenstein everywhere. Maybe that is madness, of a sort, but it has been such a pleasure to experience these disparate strands unexpectedly weaving together into a cohesive whole that I can’t help thinking that if this madness, more please!

Denominators

     In my quest to be a cliche, when my wife and I separated I moved to the beach. 

     So to get my kids, I now drive a long, windy canyon road that’s just a single lane in each direction.

     Its many twists and turns prevent passing. Its sliver of a shoulder and lack of turnouts means the slow driver ahead of you cannot, even if he wanted, pull over to let you pass. Mile after mile, you cannot go any faster than the slowest driver ahead of you.

     This is life at the “slowest common denominator.”

     For me, this is a real challenge. I am a very fast-paced person. I walk fast, I talk fast, I think fast. I’ve elevated impatience to an art form (albeit one that is appreciated only by me). Living in fast forward, everyone else appears to move in super slow-mo. It’s a real Mercury/Jupiter thing, with me being Mercury, orbiting the Sun in the 88 days, while so many others are Jupiters, taking a leisurely 4,329 days to complete their orbits.

     So driving at the slowest common denominator can be a thick slice of hell on earth, sure to drive me insane, or at least goad me into bumping cars off the road Spy Hunter-style, if not for my concerted efforts to convert this into a valuable learning opportunity.

     I ask myself “why do these people drive so slow?” Perhaps they are old, they are lousy drivers, they cannot see well in the dark, they are fearful, they cannot get another ticket without losing their license, or for some reason their car has a lawnmower engine. Lots of possible reasons, none of them having anything to do with me. So I try not to personalize this.

     Then I ask myself “what can I do about it?” Apart from bumping them off the road Spy Hunter-style, there is nothing I can do to speed them up. So I breathe. Having recently started yoga, I use this extra time to practice my meditative breathing, focusing on the inhale and the exhale while maintaining mindfulness. I don’t always succeed in losing myself this way, but at least it gives me something to do while forced to putter along at the slowest common denominator.

     And if I manage to make it to this higher state of mind, I might even wonder “why do I need to go so fast in the first place?” The rest of the world seems happy enough puttering along Jupiter-style, yet for some reason I feel compelled to zip around Mercury-style. Why am I in such a hurry? Who am I to presume that you should drive at my crazy pace? Could it be that I’m the one who’s in the wrong here, driving myself through life at a ridiculous pace? I can be so pushy.

     And then there are broader questions to consider: If I am not the slowest common denominator on this road, could I, nevertheless, be the lowest common denominator in other ways? I fear that much of my life is, indeed, a lowest common denominator life, as so much of what I do is automatic and easy, most likely because I race through life so fast there’s no time to think. Perhaps if I slowed down, savored life, thought a little more about what I was doing, and why, I could elevate my life to the highest uncommon denominator.

     Surely that is something to strive for, I think, as I putter along this road, driving so slow it feels like reverse, with no end in sight, my enlightened state evaporating, but not fast enough for me to realize, as I contemplate what I’ve written here, that this post was never really about a road.

Karma

     Karma is a bitch.

     E.g.,

     Snow Day at Shady Glen! Not a real snow day, mind you, this being Southern California, where it’s 80 degrees in December, but a Snow Day Shady Glen style. This means tons of shaved ice trucked into Shady Glen’s park first thing in the morning, piled into a hill by a crew of day laborers, then smoothed out by a sledding expert to create a nifty sled run for the kids. Add in a coffee cart for the adults and you’ve got yourself a day full of fun.

     All that’s asked of you is to bring an unwrapped new toy, worth about $20, for the Fire Department’s toys-for-tots campaign. At the end of Snow Day the firemen show up in a hook-and-ladder, give the kids a tour, let them sit behind the wheel, that sort of thing, and then load it up with the toys and head off to spread the Holiday cheer to those kids whose parents cannot afford to truck tons of fake snow into their communities.  

     So there I was, working the toy table at the entrance like the good Shady Glen citizen I was, when she showed up with three kids in tow. And no toys. I’d been there for two hours, collecting toys from maybe 100 people, and she was the first to arrive without a toy. Most brought one for each kid, some brought even more, considering it was such a good cause and all, but she had none.

     Sometimes time slows down, seconds crawl by, perception tingles and you notice every little thing. Something like that happened to me then. Her eyes hit on me, then darted down to the table, strewn with new toys, then over to the poster informing entrants of the new toy entrance requirement, then back to me, my mouth starting to form the question “Do you have a toy?,” but before I could get to the “have” she turned away, put her head down, grabbed her nearest kid and barreled past me, pretending not to hear me as I finished my sentence.

     Standing there, my sentence finished but now discarded on the ground, I watched her back recede from me. What to do? Only one thing. I abandoned my post and ran after her.

     She had made it to a group of women when I caught up to her. I sidled into their circle, turned to her, and repeated: “Do you have a toy?” This time she glared at me, didn’t look away, and said she hadn’t, that she’d been very busy, what with being a working mother and all, and she was sorry but no, she hadn’t brought one, she said as she turned away and started to walk away, continuing her retreat.

     Visions of underprivileged children danced through my head. Visions of the many working mothers who’d managed to find the time to buy a toy for these underprivileged children also danced through my head. So I called out, loudly, to her rapidly receding back: “Everyone else is busy but no one else is stiffing the poor kids!”

     That got her attention. And others’ as well. Faces turned to me, hers included. She reached into her purse, pulled out a $20 dollar bill, crumpled it into a ball, and threw it at me. As it sailed through the air she yelled out “Fuck you!” and continued walking away. The $20 fell short. I left it there and returned to my table, now deprived of whatever good cheer I’d accumulated that morning and questioning whether I was wrong to confront her like that.

     Then, in quick succession, the following happened:

     Her business failed. She designed items for the rooms of fashionable children (irony of ironies!). It turns out she sourced some of her raw materials from China, and said raw materials were so soaked in formaldehyde that they gave off noxious fumes, hardly the sort of thing one wants a fashionable child to breathe in his or her room. So when news of this broke her business broke leaving her broke.

     That meant the house had to go. She had just finished constructing a mega-mansion that must’ve cost many millions. She’d designed it herself, heedless of others’ advice, she being the expert, after all, on rooms for fashionable children and therefore, by close extrapolation, rooms for fashionable people. As far as I know, the house wasn’t soaked in formaldehyde, but some of her ideas were nearly as toxic, such as the dormitory-style kids’ room for her three tots in its own isolated second-floor wing, the stage with seating for 30 in case the kids every wanted to put on a play, and a slide from the kids’ wing down to the first floor that wasn’t completely enclosed and therefore conjured up visions in most people of kids spilling over the edge to their deaths. Hardly the sort of vision one wants when one contemplates buying a mega-mansion with a multi-million price tag. So her house just sat on the market, unsold, and as overall house prices plunged hers plunged faster.

     Around this time the husband left. I never knew what he did, other than look like a male model and drive the kids around, but whatever he did he started doing it without her.

     And then her youngest kid got cancer. Was it the formaldehyde? People wondered.

     And at that point even I could no longer derive pleasure from her karmic misfortunes. Yet when she organized a fundraiser to help pay for her kid’s cancer treatment, I initially considered attending, if only I could throw my money at her, but in the end I refused to go and, in so doing, I let her kid down.

     Karma is, indeed, a bitch, and when I reflect on this, and all the other valid reasons karma could cite for making my own life a living hell, I shudder.

Superpowers

     Sitting in another comic book movie with my 11-year-old son, my thoughts turn to my own superpowers.

      Yes, I have superpowers. At least three.

      One is the power to disappear. I am the invisible man. Especially at parties. One minute I’m in a circle of people, nodding my head, maybe contributing a word or two, the next I’m completely invisible to everyone in the room. Happens a lot. Even when I’m not trying. I’m also good at disappearing completely from people’s lives.

      Another is my ability to walk through people. At top speed. Slow-moving densely-packed urban sidewalks do not slow me down at all. I weave in, out and around the packs, never touching or brushing a person, constantly searching for seams to exploit, zigging where they zag and zagging where they zig, always heading for daylight. It’s like the other pedestrians aren’t there at all.

      Finally, I have the power to completely dominate a conversation. When I want, I can talk over anyone, twist any conversation to what I want to talk about. This power, I must admit, is sort of the opposite of my first power, the power to disappear, as instead of disappearing myself, I cause the other people who were ostensibly part of the conversation to disappear. 

      I am not yet comic book-eligible as I do not own a lycra body suit (yet), nor do I have a logo or a catchy nom de plume.

      I can't even call myself a superhero, as that implies using one’s power for heroic purposes, and my powers, such as they are, are hardly suited for heroics.

      And I must admit that my superpowers are a bit of a double-edged sword, though now that I write that I wonder why I did. Double-edged swords can be very handy, especially when one is surrounded by enemies, as they allow you to cut both ways, slicing through them on both sides, never wasting a swing, and I did not intend to imply that my superpowers are anywhere near that handy. Instead, I intended to imply that my superpowers aren’t really that super, certainly not as super as a double-edged sword when you’re surrounded by enemies. But then again maybe I did mean that, in a different way, because just as an effectively-wielded double-edged sword eliminates the people around you, so, too, do my superpowers.

      And for that reason I am now forging some new superpowers. 

The History of Today

     Never start a story before you know how it ends.

     In January I posted "The Headache, Part 1." This was intended to be the first of a multi-part saga chronicling my two-and-a-half year bout with migraines so severe they were, at my lowest point, hitting me four or five days a week. I planned to explore a variety of topics, including how an Alzheimer's medication led directly to my spotless office, how another medication led indirectly to the removal of my uvula, how I managed to turn my first massage into a stressful experience (for me and the masseuse), why my acupuncture experiences never healed or relaxed me and actually made my condition worse, my uneasy and heretofore undisclosed relationship with Botox (for migraines, not wrinkles!), and my predictably wacky experience in the medical marijuana world.

     The story, as I planned it, would end with my migraines reduced in severity and frequency and my life back to normal, though migraines would continue to lurk.

     After I started writing the series, though, two things changed. First, my marriage ended. Then, my migraines completely disappeared. Two twists that significantly changed the story. At this point I suppose I could rewrite it, but I am no longer interested in yesterday.

     Instead, I find my thoughts returning to the history of today.

     Which is probably a good thing for this blog.