Outer Life

Magical Realism

     Unpacking books, I hold a slim volume by Wallace Stevens. Opening it to a bookmarked page, I see “The Emperor of Ice Cream.”

     It’s been years since I read it. For some reason, I stop unpacking, sit down, and re-read it. Once, twice, thrice, its meaning seeping in. The jarring juxtaposition of vibrant life in the first stanza with cold death in the second stanza making its exhortation to “let be be finale of seem,” initially so puzzling, now so clear. Its second stanza’s picture of a dead body laid out, as its “horny feet protrude” from under an old sheet, given over to the eternal darkness, make its final two lines all the more meaningful to me: “Let the lamp affix its beam / The only emperor is the emperor of ice cream.”

     Tears stream down my cheek. I recite the poem out loud, but am incapable of uttering its final lines, my breath caught in my throat, overwhelmed by the realization that for years I had been living in the second stanza and was only now moving back to the first. I have not and will not escape the shadow of eternal darkness but now, for the first time in years, my eyes are open for the lamp’s beam, determined to move to the light for however long it continues to shine for me.

     That night she offered to show me some photographs she’s taken. She’s an avid photographer, taken many classes, would like to do it professionally someday.

     I rarely show my prints to others, she says, they’re very private to me.

     I eagerly assented.

     She disappeared into a closet and emerged with a short stack of large prints. Clearing a space on her dining room table, she looked for the first print to show me.

     My thoughts were along the lines of please oh please let me appreciate this appropriately.

     She placed the first print down on the table for my review.

     Blackness. A dark room. Illuminated only by a thin beam of light streaming in from the outside.

     Speechless, I can only stare, then I look up, my throat catching, and barely manage to recite, in my smallest voice, “Let the lamp affix its beam / The only emperor is the emperor of ice cream.”

     It’s been a few months since that magic moment and, as I continue to move to the light, I experience more and more of these magic moments. It may be that I always had these magic moments but failed to notice them, or that I had these magic moments but chose to dwell on the dark moments, but I doubt it. Magic moments like this are impossible to ignore. No, I prefer to think that magic simply does not dwell in the dark, but that the path to the light is paved with magic moments, so many you cannot miss them as they infuse your life with life, one that eventually may even live up to the title of this post. 

Tattoo You

     I’ve never wanted a tattoo. 

     As a kid, I met some of my father’s navy friends and saw what old tattoos look like on old skin.

     Tattoos are like skin grafitti. They can be clever, but how many are worth a lifetime’s contemplation?

     As one who strives to live in the here-and-now, I would find it distracting to have a constant reminder of the done-and-gone on my forearm, though I suppose I could tattoo “here and now” on my forearm to remind me.

     I don’t wear visible clothing. No t-shirts with messages, no designer labels, nothing like that, so why would I wear visible skin? My car doesn’t have any bumper stickers; why would I want one on my arm?

     That being said, I think about tattoos a lot. I wonder: “If I had to get a tattoo, what would I ink?”

     Most of my ideas range around the person-as-product theme. I am very intrigued by the idea of tattooing scannable codes such as a UPC symbol -- the only question is what amount it would scan to -- or an ISBN code to my favorite book or a QR code that brings you to Outer Life. These tattoos would be more than just ink on skin, but they would also be potentially obsolete someday as scanning code technology progresses.

     I also like the idea of an FDA Nutrition Facts label calibrated to me as if I were a food product. I could enhance the effect with a “sell by” date on my forearm -- probably the day I turned 40.

     Maybe a dotted line running down my chest with “Tear to Open”?

     Might be fun to tattoo a few designer labels on my body while I’m at it, though I’m not sure what I’d do if I got a cease-and-desist letter from Ralph Lauren or Marc Jacobs.

     Completing the product theme, I would probably need something like “SURGEON GENERAL'S WARNING: Thinking Causes Questioning, Undermines Authority, Alters Consciousness, And May Complicate Life.”

     Then, properly packaged, I could be consumed by the world.

Too True

     In the online dating world, you are your picture and your profile.

     So as I prepare to dip a toe into that world, I’m thinking a lot about which pictures to post and what to say in my profile.

     The profile — describe yourself in 1,000 words — presents an interesting challenge. Having reviewed a number of profiles to see how others manage this challenge, I can tell that people really struggle with this. Some are uncomfortable writing about themselves; others are uncomfortable writing. I do not have those problems (see, e.g., this blog). My problem is different:

     I am too honest.

     The point of the profile is, clearly, to reduce yourself to words without reducing yourself. The tone of these profiles is relentlessly positive; never is heard a discouraging word. Apparently we’re perfect only in our mother’s eyes and in our dating profile.

     The problem for me is I seem to be incapable of writing about myself in anything other than a warts-and-all style (see, e.g., this blog).

     Part of this is functional. I simply do not have time to date the world. If there is something about me that will eventually drive you away, I’d rather you figure that out now on your own than after six time-consuming dates with me, time I could have better spent with someone who liked me, warts-and-all. Self-selection is a powerful force for the time-constrained. That being said, I’m concerned that if I admit any weakness in my profile, people will assume I must be severely damaged goods (after all, no one else admitted any weaknesses), so I will end up with too much self-selection and, as a result, too much time on my hands.

     So I am trying to accentuate the positive and eliminate the negative, but it is a real struggle.

     For example, I wrote “I am an incurable romantic seeking my one true love” but then had to add “so long as my one true love lives less than 15 miles away and west of the 405.” In Los Angeles seeing someone who lives more than 15 miles away, or on the other side of the 405, is, by definition, a long-distance relationship, and I have no interest in spending more of my life sitting in traffic, even if it is to see my one true love, so I question whether I’m even a romantic after all. I struck that sentence.

     Or I wrote “My job challenges me in all the right ways” but on reflection added “and many of the wrong ways.” No one has the perfect job, and I struggle, like you, with all sorts of crap at work, and the last thing I want to convey is that I am somehow the only guy in the world with a job that isn’t sucking his soul. So I struck that sentence.

     It is really tricky to describe honestly who you are looking for. Most people speak in meaningless generalities, saying they’re looking for “a strong, confident partner who seeks the best from herself and those around her,” when we know they’re really looking for a woman with a huge rack and loose morals. But you can’t say that. In my case, not being one of those body part fetishists, and being truly interested in mind as well as body, I’ve figured I can reduce this to a simple algorithm: “If IQ > lbs., yes, else no.” I’ve been persuaded to strike that and will go instead with the “strong, confident” blather that filters out no one. This means I will have to sift through a lot of women with less-than-stellar intelligence, including some with huge racks and loose morals. I guess it could be worse.

     One of the dating sites asks you “What do you do on a typical Friday night?” The right answer is something like “On a typical Friday night, when not fending off eager suitors, I am surrounded by my plentiful friends as we attend intimidatingly-intellectual cultural experiences or recreate the Algonquin round table or have crazy fun times of the sort only hinted at in beer commercials.” Clearly not my life, so instead I wrote “On a typical Friday night I am staring into the abyss as waves of existential dread wash over me. Or I go out.” I’m keeping those sentences.

Dying Alone

     It seems like everywhere I look these days I see dating advice articles. 

     When I was married I never saw them, but now that I am a newly single man contemplating entry into the modern dating world I see them all the time. And on top of that, friends send me even more dating articles, so I’ve read quite a few of them by now.

     The advice in these articles is almost always directed at women. I’m not sure if that’s because women are especially deficient in dating skills (seems unlikely) or because men don’t care or are beyond help (bingo), but I nevertheless find these articles very useful. Apart from giving me a better idea of what is concerning the women I’m going to meet, the best of these articles help explain the intricacies of a highly complex world of which I know nothing.

     Many articles are predicated on what I call the “dying alone theme”: “if you don’t want to die alone, you’ll need to do X and/or stop doing Y.” Dying alone figures so prominently in these articles that I must assume women have an especially acute fear of it.

     By “dying alone” they can’t mean “dying without a partner” because women live, on average, much longer than men, so even those women who do X or stop doing Y and find a male partner will see their partner die before them. Dating advice isn’t going to change the odds much here.

     This dying alone theme might refer to children who, presumably, would be expected to sit around the dying woman’s deathbed, particularly as her partner probably predeceased her, but then in my age range (mid-40s) I would imagine very few childless women still harbor hopes of having children, so for them dying alone seems to be pretty much guaranteed whether or not they do X and/or stop doing Y.

     Is that so bad? What’s doubly puzzling, to me, is why anyone would even want to die with company. As your body fails, often in embarrassingly fluid-leaking ways, and your mind is shot or, at best, drugged up beyond comprehension, I highly doubt you’ll want an audience or would even be aware of it. Cultures in which old people went to mountain tops or into the desert to die seem to have had a better grasp on the realities of the situation (not to mention having devised a much more cost-effective way to go).

     So the prospect of dying alone will not motivate me to do X or stop doing Y. What does motivate me is avoiding the prospect of living alone.