Sunday, November 30, 2008
Friday, November 28, 2008
monastery project - Dominican sisters live their lives supported by four common values, often referred to as the Four Pillars of Dominican Life, they are: community life, common prayer, study and service. St. Dominic called this fourfold pattern of life the "holy preaching." Henri Matisse was so moved by the care that he received from the Dominican Sisters that he collaborated in the design and interior decoration of their Chapelle du Saint-Marie du Rosaire in Vence, France.
Thursday, November 27, 2008
New Yorker article on rehab by Amanda Fortini:
Just before dawn one morning in June, Howard Samuels, the executive director of the Wonderland Center—a private alcohol-and-drug rehab facility in West Hollywood, California—was standing in the spacious foyer of his Craftsman-style house, greeting his publicist, Cathy Griffin. They were about to head over to Fox Studios, where Samuels, who frequently turns up on the punditry circuit when an actor overdoses, relapses, or checks herself in, was scheduled to discuss the recent drug bust of Tatum O’Neal and the apparent bisexuality of Lindsay Lohan, on “The Morning Show with Mike and Juliet.” “Do you want any coffee?” Samuels asked Griffin, adding, “I’ve had two cups already.” Samuels is a recovering cocaine and heroin addict who in August, at the age of fifty-six, celebrated twenty-four years of sobriety. Caffeine is the only addictive substance permitted in the Samuels household. (His thirty-eight-year-old wife, Gabrielle, has also conquered several addictions—alcohol, crystal meth, and compulsive eating.) Samuels is a tall, solidly built man with close-set green eyes, a prominent nose, and lips that cover his teeth when he talks, occasionally giving the impression of missing dentures. He was wearing a gray linen Armani jacket with cuffed jeans and Converse Chuck Taylor sneakers.
“Did you see the New York Post?” Griffin asked, wrestling a manila folder from her slouchy pink-leather purse. She began to brief Samuels on the celebrity stumbles that he’d be discussing. The day before, Tatum O’Neal had been caught attempting to buy crack on the Lower East Side of Manhattan. “Originally, Tatum’s story was that she was researching a role,” Griffin explained. “Now she’s saying her dog’s death prompted the drug buy.”
Griffin, who spent thirty years covering celebrities as a journalist for, among other outlets, “Hard Copy” and “A Current Affair,” is also Liz Smith’s “West Coast legwoman”—she provides items about the Hollywood set. When she was hired by Wonderland, the Daily News reported on the possible conflict of interest. Samuels told the paper, “We have a confidential facility. Anybody that leaks anything about anyone is automatically fired.”
“Lindsay has been photographed kissing Samantha Ronson,” Griffin continued, tapping a glossy nail on the kitchen counter. “Now she’s supposedly selling an exclusive story to a magazine for one million dollars.”
“That’s the addiction to fame,” Samuels said, looking pleased to have drawn the connection. “I mean, I have nothing against being with a woman, but it’s the selling of the magazine cover. It’s just another thing to fill the void.”
Lindsay Lohan, who spent a month at Wonderland beginning in January of last year, is perhaps the center’s most well-known patient. (Mike Tyson arrived shortly after Lohan and stayed for close to a year.) Lohan was later dismissive of her time there, saying that the staff had never treated anyone as “hard-core” as she was. Three months after leaving Wonderland, she was arrested for driving under the influence. She then entered Promises, the Malibu-based rehab center. When I asked Griffin whether it was appropriate for Samuels to comment publicly on a former patient, she replied, “He was able to go on TV and not ever cross the line when Lindsay checked into Promises. There was a total media blitz for two weeks, and you don’t get a lot of opportunities like that. He wasn’t her therapist, anyway; he’s the executive director.”
Samuels also maintains a private therapy practice, focussed mainly on issues of addiction, in the guest cottage behind his house. Griffin is a former patient. Samuels counselled her, in person and by phone, through her early days of recidivism. (One of her relapses occurred during a trip to Hawaii: “I said, ‘Howard, I’m drinking a mai tai, what’s the point?’ ”) Her faith in his talents is absolute. “Howard can help addiction to be understood by the public. He can simplify it and destigmatize it. The celebrities have brought it to the forefront—he’s just the right person in the right place at the right time.” Samuels puts it much the same way. “You know, celebrities mirror what is happening in the rest of the country,” he said, referring to the estimated 24.9 million Americans addicted to alcohol or drugs. “It’s so important to get that message out. . . . That’s the struggle, O.K.? Is to try to educate people who think the only reason I’m going to Fox today is Tatum O’Neal!”
At the studio, having received a dusting of powder on his tanned face (“I saw you on VH1, talking about Mötley Crüe,” the makeup artist told him), Samuels sat in a corona of bright stage light. He crossed and uncrossed his legs, waiting for a producer to give him the signal to speak. At one point, Griffin scurried up and snatched the tortoiseshell glasses from the lapel pocket of his jacket. A look of intense concentration came over his face as the first question was put to him through the headphones. “Well, absolutely there’s hope for these two,” he began. “In Hollywood, the greatest curse that someone can have is to be young, beautiful, wealthy, and famous. Because there’s only one place to go, and that’s down.”
Samuels has been treating a substantial segment of drug-addicted Hollywood for fifteen years. I accompanied him to several Alcoholics Anonymous meetings—he has been attending A.A. for eighteen years—and at every one he was greeted by people whom he had treated, or who were hoping to be treated by him. “Half of this town is in meetings,” he told me, “and we’re saving seats for the other half.” One Sunday night, after an A.A. meeting in Beverly Hills that had a particularly flirtatious atmosphere—dating within the program, though frowned upon, is known as “thirteenth-stepping”—Samuels and I were driving down Third Street when he suddenly leaned over me to point out a small red house. “Now, I’ve got to tell you, I did an intervention on a guy here,” Samuels said. He named a film-and-TV actor from the nineteen-seventies. “Remember him? He lived there with his mother. Unfortunately, you can’t use his name.” During another car ride, he drew my attention to the El Royale apartment building on Rossmore, where he had staged an intervention on a more current leading man. “I’ve pretty much worked with everybody in Hollywood,” Samuels said, listing several famous names as he guided his black Audi sedan through a turn. “I could go on forever, you know what I mean?” Above the fireplace in Samuels’s living room hangs a photograph of his beachfront wedding party: Christian Slater, at the back of the crowd, is making a victory sign with his arms in the air.
Samuels was, in a sense, a celebrity addict himself. His father, Howard J. Samuels, was a wealthy businessman who co-founded, along with his brother Richard, the Kordite Corporation, which manufactured Baggies and other plastic products; he also served as Under-Secretary of Commerce in the Johnson Administration. For the younger Samuels, using drugs was a way to rebel: “There was a huge amount of pressure to succeed, and I just said, ‘Fuck you.’ ” In January of 1970, while his father was campaigning for the Democratic nomination for governor of New York, the Times reported that the seventeen-year-old Samuels had been arrested in Greenwich Village two months earlier; he was charged “with possession of a hashish pipe and three amphetamines.” A year later, Samuels was apprehended at Kennedy Airport, for possession of cocaine and heroin. The scandal made the front page of the Daily News.
Samuels spent an unsuccessful year in rehab at a facility called Encounter (now closed), in lower Manhattan. Over the next ten years, his drug abuse intensified. He stole from his mother and his girlfriend, and from wallets left in coatrooms at Park Avenue parties. He overdosed on cocaine. One morning, lacking a syringe, he slit open his shoulder with a razor blade in order to rub cocaine directly into the wound. His family staged a series of interventions, and in 1984 Samuels agreed to enter rehab again, this time at Phoenix House, in Santa Ana, California.
The treatment at Phoenix House is based on what’s known as the “therapeutic community” model—in the eighties, this meant that residents, as members of a community that lived and performed chores together, were expected to challenge, badger, and often verbally or physically humiliate one another. (The approach, sometimes called “attack therapy,” was intended to wear down a patient’s defenses, but has mostly fallen out of favor. Phoenix House now employs a less punitive version of the model.) Samuels says he shared a room with twenty-five other men, who showered en masse. He was hollered at, made to wear dunce signs, and forced to scrub toilet bowls with a toothbrush. During his stay, his father suffered a fatal heart attack, and Samuels, released to attend his funeral, experienced a “psychic shift”: “I realized I did not want to die a drug addict. I did not want to be buried with the epitaph ‘He Had Potential.’ ” Samuels completed the eighteen-month program, and then went back to school, eventually receiving a master’s degree in psychology from Antioch University and a Psy.D. in clinical psychology from Ryokan College, in Los Angeles—an accomplishment he’s particularly proud of, because he suffers from dyslexia.
In 1994, he went to work at Promises, in West Los Angeles, first as a counsellor and later as the program director. In 1997, Samuels was part of a team that helped the founder, Richard Rogg, set up the center’s luxurious Malibu campus. Many of Hollywood’s high-profile patients of the past decade have been treated at Promises Malibu—Ozzy Osbourne, Robert Downey, Jr., Andy Dick, Ben Affleck, Charlie Sheen, Matthew Perry, and Britney Spears among them—and it was there that Samuels began to build the client base for his private practice and to form his own ideas about rehab. “At Promises, you know, we built a beautiful place under the philosophy of ‘Let’s seduce them into treatment; why punish them by having them go to a dump?’ ”
That philosophy represented a departure from traditional methods of rehab, even for celebrities. Twenty-five years ago, when Elizabeth Taylor checked herself into the Betty Ford Center, seeking treatment for an addiction to Percodan and alcohol, she shared an austerely furnished room with a roommate. She took her meals in the cafeteria, waited to use the communal phone, and performed the “therapeutic duties” required of all patients (bed-making, coffee-making, light sweeping). “We really believe that good treatment is the same for everyone,” John Schwarzlose, the C.E.O. and founding director of the Betty Ford Center, said of the program’s egalitarian ethos, which has remained consistent to this day.
The program at the Betty Ford Center has its origins in the Minnesota Model, a therapeutic approach rooted in A.A.’s Twelve Steps and developed in the nineteen-fifties at Willmar State Hospital, a psychiatric institution in Willmar, Minnesota, by a psychologist named Dan Anderson. At the time, alcoholism was still widely considered a failure of will; alcoholics were institutionalized, incarcerated, or left to sink into indigence. Anderson believed that addiction to alcohol (and other drugs) was a “multifaceted illness” (“physical, psychological, social, and spiritual”), and he sought to develop a more humane treatment. His method required a team of professionals—psychologists, psychiatrists, physicians, spiritual counsellors, nutritionists—and a minimum inpatient stay of twenty-two to twenty-eight days. In 1961, Anderson went to work at Hazelden, a rehab clinic in Center City, Minnesota, and, over the next twenty years, his model became standard at treatment centers across the country.
By the nineteen-eighties, insurance companies intent on containing costs began to suggest that the Minnesota Model was excessive. They maintained that there was little evidence that residential treatment was any more effective than a less expensive outpatient version. (Many plans now cover only outpatient treatment, or limit in-patient stays to between three and seven days.) According to the Treatment Research Institute, nearly half of all residential treatment centers in this country have closed since the early eighties. In the late nineties, luxury rehab centers, catering to self-paying patients, began to proliferate. Today, with a twenty-one-mile coastline and a population of roughly thirteen thousand, Malibu alone has twenty-nine licensed rehab establishments. Many are operated out of palatial estates; most are for-profit, do not take insurance, and expect their fee, sometimes as high as sixty-eight thousand dollars a month, to be paid up front. (Hazelden and Betty Ford, both nonprofit clinics, charge twenty-six thousand dollars and twenty-four thousand dollars for twenty-eight and thirty days, respectively, and will accept insurance.)
Samuels and his wife founded the Wonderland Center with Bernadine Fried, the clinical director, and her husband, Alex Shohet, in early 2006. Wonderland charges forty-eight thousand dollars a month for a shared room and fifty-eight thousand dollars for a single room, and does not take insurance. The usual length of treatment is thirty days, although, unlike most rehab clinics, Wonderland will allow shorter stays, sometimes of a week or two. On occasion, the center offers scholarships. I witnessed Samuels arrange for a scholarship for a woman I’ll call Greta, a singer from an early-nineties band, after he heard her speak about her fifteen-year struggle with heroin addiction at an A.A. meeting. (“I’ll do your shit work—I’m just having a hard time and really need some help,” she told him.)
Like many rehab facilities, Wonderland bases its treatment on the principles of Alcoholics Anonymous. But Samuels and Fried assert that their establishment offers a uniquely “individualized” program. Residents are permitted to use cell phones and computers, for example, and many continue to conduct business during their stay. They are taken on shopping trips, and are allowed to bring their dogs. Actors are sometimes released to work on films; musicians can travel for tours.
Many treatment professionals argue that granting this much agency to addicts is no way to treat a condition that Bill Wilson, the co-founder of A.A., described as “self-will run riot.” “Addicts need frustration; they need limits; they need structure. They need to learn how to tolerate those things,” Dr. Drew Pinsky, the service director of the well-regarded rehab program at Las Encinas Hospital, in Pasadena, said. “The more you cater to an addict’s demands, the more you support their disease. Our approach at Las Encinas is ‘Get with the program or get out.’ ” John MacDougall, the director of spiritual guidance at Hazelden, told me, “No one leaves here—except for a funeral, if a close relative dies. We ask you to commit for twenty-eight days. Actually, I can only remember one exception in the fourteen years I’ve been here, and he had to present a treaty at the United Nations.”
The Wonderland Center occupies a seven-million-dollar property on Mulholland Drive, in Laurel Canyon. Behind a massive iron gate, three cream-colored houses with terra-cotta roofs are set back from the road by a long, winding path that staff members navigate with golf carts. The bedrooms are simple, with crisp white duvet covers and wooden armoires. (There are only six single rooms, because clients often have, in the parlance of Wonderland, “a tendency to isolate.”) There are two small kidney-bean-shaped pools, and two sprawling patios. Here, between sessions, clients lounge on wrought-iron furniture and talk and text-message and smoke, flicking their ashes into lidded ashtrays. One has the overwhelming sense of attending a weekend party at a cozy but understated house.
Late in the afternoon on the last Friday in June, Wonderland’s eight in-residence patients—Wonderland has fourteen beds, but the summer months are slow—had completed their “Bridging Mind and Body” group session, in which they had written letters to themselves (“Remind yourself what skills and abilities you have, what you are good at . . .”) and enjoyed a lunch of grilled lobster tails with garlic butter. Every morning, the residents, whom the staff refer to as “clients,” are awakened between seven-thirty and eight. They meditate, eat breakfast, and exercise, either performing yoga poses with an instructor who comes to Wonderland, or working out at Crunch on Sunset Boulevard, under the supervision of a Wonderland employee. During the day, they attend two or three group sessions—“Anger Management,” “Sex and Love Addiction,” “Music Therapy”—and in the evenings they are driven to an off-site A.A. meeting. Samuels declines to push A.A. on resistant patients, though he says that most will relapse “until they finally surrender to the reality of doing it through A.A.”
Around three o’clock, the clients, along with several day patients, began taking seats in the large living room for the last group session of the week, “The Beast,” which is run by Samuels. “The Beast,” Samuels told me later, “is the drug, the alcohol, the unavailable man, the depression. It is that self-destructive energy that destroys us, which we can’t stop.”
Samuels lifted a glass of iced tea—“Cheers, everybody!”—and called the session to order. Dressed in a pink button-down shirt, the cuffs undone and the collar open to reveal a patch of graying chest hair, he began to pace back and forth. “The great news is that it’s Friday, right? So what does that mean? That means that tonight you’re still in rehab. That means there’s no drinking tonight, no crack pipe tonight, no little line of blow, no pills, no weed.”
The clients, looking drained at the end of a long week of self-scrutiny, laughed ruefully. Samuels went on, “But you’re still going to be dealing with the Beast, O.K.? Because the Beast is going to tell you that it’s Friday night, and it’s time to get loaded! I gotta say, normies have that voice, too.” “Normies,” or non-addicts, are frequently invoked by the residents of Wonderland as an impossible ideal; normies are thought not to suffer from pain or depression or obsessions. Samuels is fond of reminding people that he is not a normie—“Howard Samuels: dope fiend, convicted felon,” he routinely announces.
“Who has a Beast?” Samuels asked, scanning the room.
Max, a college professor of finance who was at Wonderland to kick a five-year pill-and-cough-syrup habit, spoke up from the far end of the sofa. (All the clients’ names have been changed to protect their privacy.) “You know, I have a pretty empty kitchen,” he said, “and when parents and friends ask me why I say, ‘Because if I had anything in there that I liked, I’d eat the whole thing.’ I can’t go buy a package of Oreos, because I’ll eat it in one sitting. That’s the Beast, too. I can’t just take one Oreo. I’ll go back and I’ll go back and I’ll go back. It’s not a drug but it’s . . . out of control.”
“Well, you know, Max, you’re obsessive-compulsive, and the obsessive-compulsiveness isn’t just centered around drugs and alcohol,” Samuels said. “Once you get sober, you’re still going to be obsessive-compulsive. But I’d much rather have you deal with not being able to stop eating Oreos than not being able to stop—what’s your drug of choice?”
“Opiates.”
“Opiates, O.K. Let’s move out the opiates—I’m happy with the Oreos.” But Max did not look happy. He was clearly disturbed by the Oreo obsession. Samuels went on, “Now, once you get to be about two hundred or three hundred pounds, we’ll have to deal with that. We’ll send you to an Oreo twelve-step meeting, all right?” Max mustered a chuckle.
Samuels uses an avuncular, teasing sense of humor to draw people out. Several members of the Los Angeles recovery community told me that they felt he did not maintain sufficient professional boundaries—that it was inappropriate, for instance, for him to frequent the same A.A. meetings that his patients attend. One woman recalled seeing him whiz down the street in her neighborhood: “He’s got a patient in the passenger seat, and is test-driving the patient’s new hundred-thousand-dollar Mercedes.” But I was told by an entertainment executive who is being treated by Samuels for his cocaine habit, “He cuts through the bullshit; he’s not playing footsie.”
Samuels took a gulp of tea and continued pacing. “Who else?” he asked.
Nicole, a young woman with dark, sad eyes and strawberry-blond hair pulled into a loose ponytail, spoke next. “My Beast says that . . . it wouldn’t really be a big deal if I had a drink today,” she said, in a voice so soft the others in the room had to lean forward to hear her.
“Let me ask your Beast some questions,” Samuels said. His tone was gentle, not jesting.
“What was your drug of choice?”
“Alcohol.”
“How often did you drink?”
“Every day.”
“What was your drink of choice?”
“Anything.”
“How much would you drink during the day?”
“I’d have two bottles.”
“Two bottles of what?”
“Vodka or rum.”
“And how long did you do that for?”
“Four years.”
“And how old are you?”
“Twenty-one.”
“So when did you start drinking?”
“When I was seventeen.”
“When you were seventeen. And you were able to not go into treatment until you were twenty-one, huh?” He lowered his voice further.
“Yes.”
“Wow. Do you think that that’s normal?”
“No, but I think that . . . I think I can control it now. That’s what my Beast says.” As basic as Samuels’s premise is, the metaphor seems to give the patients a way of talking about their addiction.
“And I want to ask your Beast, have you ever been able to control it?”
“Sometimes. . . .”
“Right, but how many times?”
“Not that many.”
“Now, did some horrible things happen to you when you were drinking?”
“Yeah. . . .”
“So why would you want to drink? I mean, think about it, if horrible things happened to you because of alcohol . . . and you got locked up in treatment, ruined relationships, ruined years of your life, then why would you want to risk all of that for a liquid?”
“I just miss it.” Nicole looked down at her lap. Three of the women in the room began to weep softly. The only other noise came from the adjacent kitchen, where the chef, Chris Wilson (“Tom Hanks’s brother-in-law,” Cathy Griffin informed me), was shredding carrots for the evening’s salad.
Later that afternoon, Marvin, an eighty-year-old cocaine addict who had been at Wonderland for three weeks, agreed to show me his room. A white cardboard bakery box containing a dozen cupcakes with pale frosting sat on his desk (“so I can give them only to who I want to have them”). After his wife died, several years ago, Marvin took up with a much younger woman who turned him on to cocaine. The Wonderland staff had set him up with a team of doctors at Cedars-Sinai, who examined his heart, which can be strained by cocaine use. (I later observed one of the Wonderland staff members helping Marvin navigate Matchmaker.com, in the hope of finding him a non-enabling girlfriend online.) I asked Marvin whether he felt he had recovered. “I’m already a recovering optimist,” he joked, deflecting the question. “My problem was depression—the drug was incidental. I don’t do the twelve-step program. I don’t go to the A.A. meetings. I don’t need it. Yeah, and I needed a vacation anyway.”
At dusk, as dinner wound down (Chilean sea bass with plum syrup, mini lamb-meat loaves with mint), a few of the clients lingered on the patio. A ghost of a girl, with troughs the color of bruises beneath her eyes and track marks up and down her arms, could be heard on her cell phone, crying. Earlier that afternoon, she had staggered over to me, a long silk scarf tied around her neck, and said that she was horribly “dope sick” and had spent the previous night at the hospital. This was her second visit to Wonderland. Nearby, a lanky young woman with dyed-blond hair was talking to a guitarist from an eighties pop band. “I’m on Suboxone now,” she told him. (Suboxone is commonly used instead of methadone during heroin withdrawal.) “I’m coming off it. I’ve been through it before, but I’m scared.”
Wonderland’s co-founder Bernadine Fried met Samuels while lecturing on addiction at Antioch. Both worked for a time at Promises before leaving to start their own practices. “We developed these private practices and were really, you know, wildly successful. But we both missed working in a treatment environment,” Fried said. Fried is forty-six, and has been sober for twenty years. Like Samuels, she is a former heroin addict; her husband, Alex Shohet, was once her dealer. Shohet suffered a relapse in 2000, but has now been sober for four years.
There has been tension among Wonderland’s founders from the time the center first opened its doors. Samuels and Shohet clashed over the question of who should act as C.E.O., as well as over a “sober living” facility that Samuels was running out of one of his four homes. Shohet and Fried felt it was a violation of their non-compete agreement. (Samuels’s neighbors were also upset. “He never brought it to the attention of anyone,” one of them told me. “There were all these people going in and out of the house, and up all night, and this is a very residential neighborhood.”) By December of last year, Samuels, Shohet, and Fried had begun attending “business therapy” together once a week. When that didn’t help, they hired Andrew Spanswick, a social worker with a background in hospital management, to act as C.E.O. He was unable to resolve the dispute, and the partners agreed that each side—Shohet and Fried on one; Samuels and Spanswick on the other—would begin raising money to buy the other out.
On a Thursday morning in late June, I met Bernadine Fried, who has dark wavy hair and a gentle manner, at a ranch in Malibu, where she led a weekly session for Wonderland patients known as “equine-assisted psychotherapy” (an offering at many high-end treatment centers). During one of her sessions, clients would spend time with the ranch’s five horses—grooming or feeding them, sometimes even painting on the horses’ sides with watercolors. “I’ll say, ‘Paint something from your past, present, or future. Do half the horse from your past, half the horse from your future,’ ” Fried explained. (For the more apprehensive patients, there was a miniature donkey named Waffles.) The therapy is said to have originated in a treatment developed in Denmark in the nineteen-fifties; horseback riding, or hippotherapy, was believed to alleviate the physical effects of diseases like cerebral palsy and polio. Today, the idea seems to be that simply being around a horse can confer psychological benefits, and that horses can reveal a patient’s unexpressed emotional states—reacting to feelings of fear or anxiety or aggression by whinnying, say, or by stamping their hooves. “Horses are able to read energy,” Fried told me, as we brushed a palomino gelding named Chex. “They are incredible therapists. I let them show me what’s going on with a person.”
Fried claimed that the method was especially useful with clients who were hardest to reach by traditional means: those with a history of trauma, or who had repeatedly failed at recovery. These patients are the reason that she founded Wonderland. “I would have, like, the relapsing heroin addict that’s been in rehab twelve times, and I’d think, What am I going to do with you? I have nowhere to send you,” she said. Wonderland’s patients also tend to be wealthy, and therefore to have considerable resources for masking their addictions. “Most people are like, ‘I totalled my car, I better go into rehab,’ ” Fried said. “These people are like, ‘I totalled it, I’ll get a new one, or I’ll drive the Porsche today.’ ”
Several of the patients I spoke with complained that Wonderland affords unfair privileges to its wealthiest or most famous residents. Mike, a commercial real-estate broker and recovering cocaine addict who was an outpatient at Wonderland in January, 2007, described the hoopla surrounding a celebrity client—paparazzi circling the property, spectators at Wonderland’s regular Thursday-night A.A. meeting. “To have a little entourage with you in rehab is . . . it was crazy,” he said. “The driver sat outside. The publicist hung out with the driver or the personal assistant. People were in and out and coming and going. It was chaos.”
During Lindsay Lohan’s thirty-day sojourn at Wonderland, her many comings and goings perplexed the tabloid media. There she was in the lobby of her apartment building, on the set of her film “I Know Who Killed Me,” taking her SL500 to Beverly Hills Mercedes to be serviced. “Does the treatment involve the attending of Mad Tea Parties and the chasing of white rabbits? Maybe for Lindsay, but not for anyone else in residence,” one blogger wrote. “I even had that conversation with Howard,” Mike told me. “I said, ‘Well, I think some people are a little bothered that their program and their stay at Wonderland is being negatively impacted by this craziness and why rules don’t apply to her that apply to us. I mean, there is some resentment building up.’ And he said, ‘You know what, Mike, I hear you, but we have to cater our program and our treatment center to each individual to make it work for them. Because if we didn’t do that for this individual, she would have been gone on Day One.’ ”
The following Monday, after an art-therapy class in which clients painted raw wooden birdhouses and trimmed them with pompoms and pipe cleaners, the objective being to “create a home” for themselves (Max: “What’s the sobriety angle on this?”), the group gathered to celebrate the third “sober birthday” of Susan, the E.M.T.-certified health-services coördinator responsible for distributing client “meds,” with a round of singing and a Key-lime pie decorated with candles.
The previous day, Greta, the nineties-era singer, had been allowed to leave the center to perform the national anthem at a sporting event. (For any off-site business, Wonderland supplies residents with “sober companions”—Wonderland employees who are usually introduced as a friend or a cousin from out of town.) It had been a month since the A.A. meeting at which Samuels first met Greta. Her hair, formerly unkempt and mousy, was now layered into a modern mullet and dyed a variegated blond and brown. Her nails were painted in a punk-rock French manicure: blue with black tips. (The staff at Wonderland had arranged for her to have her hair colored, and had also driven her to get her guitars out of the pawnshop.)
“How was it yesterday, singing sober?” someone from across the table asked.
“Ah, dude, it was really amazing,” Greta said. “It was the first time ever. Once, I had ninety days and I booked at the Knitting Factory on a Wednesday, which is, like, when no one is there, and I showed up and there was, like, thirty people there to see me. I was like, ‘Who are all these fucking people?’ . . . I thought, Oh. My. God. So I went and did a shot of vodka.” The discussion came to a halt when Susan materialized at Greta’s side.
“You need to come take your meds,” she told Greta. Though its residential-rehab license stipulates that Wonderland’s staff cannot administer medication, they watch to make sure the patient swallows it. Nearly all of the Wonderland clients are on some type of medication, whether for detoxification (such as Suboxone, for opiate withdrawal) or to treat an underlying psychiatric disorder (Zoloft for depression, Klonopin for anxiety).
“I can’t take them without having something to eat,” Greta replied.
“You didn’t come at breakfast.”
“I know, but I was in the shower, and then I was late for Group.”
“You were late yesterday. After you finish eating, I need you to come take them.” Susan was calm but firm.
“This attitude isn’t making me want to do it,” Greta said.
“But it’s also, like, the ninth time, since you got here, that I’ve had to remind you. . . .”
“O.K., but the attitude is not helping me.”
“Well, it’s getting a little bit old. I’ll do the best I can to help you, but it’s getting to the point where it’s your place to remember.” Susan walked away, the keys to the medication storage room jingling from her belt.
“You all right?” a lunch companion asked Greta.
“It’s all right. She’s right,” Greta conceded. “It’s just the attitude; it’s always like that.”
In August, Wonderland celebrated its second anniversary. The center has treated approximately two hundred and forty clients and employs an “alumni coördinator” who keeps up with them: sending cards for sober birthdays, tracking changes in address. He does not, however, track Wonderland’s success rate. This may be because residential treatment programs have abysmally low rates of success—from about ten per cent to about thirty per cent, depending on where you get your statistics. Or it may be because Wonderland is still so new that any statistics would be meaningless. Dr. Steven Jacobs, an internist and addiction specialist who has served as a medical consultant to Wonderland, told me, “Twenty-five years ago, when I first started, the notion was that if you stayed abstinent for two years, you would have a ninety per cent chance of staying clean and sober. Now the disease is thought to be more pernicious. It isn’t until a person has had about five years that we think it’s really likely he’ll have a lifetime success of staying sober, from a scientific point of view.”
Even established clinics don’t offer much in the way of useful statistics. “Do we know what our relapse rate is? No,” Betty Ford’s John Schwarzlose said. “We know that our physicians and dentists do well, at about an eighty per cent success rate”—these doctors, who are monitored for five years after completing treatment, must pass random urinalysis tests or lose their license, so the incentive to stay sober is high—“but to give you a percentage would just be pulling it out of the air.” Hazelden, which claims a success rate of between fifty-three and fifty-six per cent, tracks the abstinence of its patients for only one year.
On the Saturday morning after the Fourth of July, I met Samuels in the small guesthouse where he sees his private clients. His gray hair had recently been cropped close, and he was doing the “Master Cleanse,” which meant he had consumed nothing but lemon juice, cayenne pepper, maple syrup, and water for five days. “I like doing it, because I’m sort of an extremist, you know? I think it builds your sense that you can do anything you set your mind to,” he said. Samuels’s wife, Gabrielle, could be glimpsed through the window in a maroon bikini with blue trim, sunning herself alongside the extra-wide lap pool in the back yard. “Success rates are bullshit,” Samuels told me. “The first time somebody goes to treatment, yes, the success rate is low . . . but I failed after my first treatment, O.K.? So does that mean I’m a failure?” The ringing of his office phone interrupted him. It was one of Samuels’s regular clients, an actor and former cocaine addict in his late thirties who, while on location, had cheated on his wife with his twenty-three-year-old co-star. Samuels counselled him for several minutes; I petted Hank and June, the collie-Lab-German-shepherd mixes who had left their olfactory imprint on the office. “I think without question you’re a good person,” Samuels was saying, stressing his syllables with care, “but you have character defects, and you have self-destructive aspects, that, you know, you’re not in control of yet. . . .”
When he hung up, I returned to the question of recovery. “It really is about the willingness of the client,” he said. “That’s going to be the key to long-term success. I’m not a believer that treatment centers save people’s lives. I think if you’ve got a really good treatment center you can go a long way toward helping a person, but at the end of the day it’s not about the treatment center. It’s about the individual, and about whether or not they’re at that place to change.”
The Wonderland Center recently underwent an organizational overhaul—several employees were fired, including Bernadine Fried. Samuels and Spanswick were able to terminate her because together they formed two-thirds of the board. (Alex Shohet was let go last April; Shohet and Fried, who still own a 49.5 per cent share of the company, are planning to seek an injunction to reverse the takeover of Wonderland by Samuels and Spanswick.) “I wanted a new start,” Samuels said simply, referring to the changes. Samuels and Spanswick now have ambitious plans for Wonderland’s expansion, the first step of which is to open an outpost in New York City. They imagine that New York clients will appreciate a program that allows them to receive treatment while continuing to work. From there, the partners plan to move on to additional cities, by acquiring existing treatment centers and remaking them according to the Wonderland model. Samuels considers rehab a recession-proof business. “We’re looking to expand the sober community,” Samuels said. “To get the message out that it’s cool to be sober, that your life isn’t going to be a drag, that you can kick ass and have an amazing life—you can take over the world.” ♦
Wednesday, November 26, 2008
Hegel's myth
In order to explain how this works, Hegel uses a story that is in essence an abstracted, idealized history, about how two people meet. However, Hegel's idea of the development of self-consciousness from consciousness, and its sublation into a higher unity in absolute knowledge, is not the contoured brain of natural science and evolutionary biology, but a phenomenology construct with a history; one that must have passed through a struggle for freedom before realizing itself.
The abstract language used by Hegel never allows one to interpret this story in a straightforward fashion. It can be read as self-consciousness coming to itself through a child's or adult's development, or self-consciousness coming to be in the beginning of human history, see hominization, or as that of a society or nation realizing freedom.
That the master-slave dialectic can be interpreted in these two ways (as an internal process occurring in one person or externally between two or more) is a result, in part, of the fact that Hegel asserts an "end to the antithesis of subject and object". What occurs in the human mind also occurs outside of it. The internal and external, according to Hegel, sublate one another until they are unified.
The story occurs in a number of stages, and proceeds through Hegel's idea of "sublation" (Aufhebung), the lifting up of two contradictory moments to a higher unity.
[edit] Initial encounter
First, the two "self-consciousnesses" meet and are astounded at coming to see another person. They can choose to ignore one another, in which case no self-consciousness forms and each views the other merely as another object. Or, they become mesmerized by the mirror-like other and attempt, as they previously did with their own body, to assert themselves.
According to Hegel,
- "On approaching the other it has lost its own self, since it finds itself as another being; secondly, it has thereby sublated that other, for it does not regard the other as essentially real [real in the concepts a pre-self-consciousness] , but sees its own self in the other."[1]
[edit] Reaction
The "I" sees another "I" and finds its own pre-eminence and control as compromised. It ignores this other or sees it as a threat to itself. Its own self-certainty and truth has forevermore been shattered. The only means of re-asserting itself, in order to proceed toward self-consciousness, is by entering into a struggle for pre-eminence.
[edit] Death struggle
A struggle to the death ensues. However, if one of the two should die, the achievement of self-consciousness fails. Hegel refers to this failure as "abstract negation" not the negation or sublation required. This death is avoided by the agreement, communication of, or subordination to, slavery. In this struggle the Master emerges as Master because he doesn't fear death as much as the slave, and the slave out of this fear consents to the slavery. This experience of fear on the part of the slave is crucial, however, in a later moment of the dialectic, where it becomes the prerequisite experience for the slave's further development.
[edit] Enslavement and mastery
Truth of oneself as self-conscious is achieved only if both live, the recognition of the other gives each one the objective truth and self-certainty required for self-consciousness. Thus, the two enter into the relation of master/slave and preserve the recognition of each other.
[edit] Instability
However, this state is not a happy one and does not achieve full self-consciousness. The recognition by the slave is merely on pain of death. The master's self-consciousness is dependent on the slave for recognition and also has a mediated relation with nature: the slave works with nature and begins to shape it into products for the master.
Monday, November 24, 2008
Don't buy the liverwurst
Don't buy the liverwurst
Don't buy the liverwurst
I repeat what I just said before
Don't buy the liverwurst
Don't buy the liverwurst
Oh, buy the corned beef if you must
The pickled herring you can trust
And the lox puts you in orbit A-OK
But that big hunk of liverwurst
Has been there since October first
And today is the 23rd of May - Alan Sherman
Sunday, November 23, 2008
Saturday, November 22, 2008
Friday, November 21, 2008
Someone really loves you
Guess who
Someone really cares
Guess who
S'open your heart,
oh, then surely you'll see,
oh, that the someone who really cares is me
Someone will wait eternally
Someone who'll want your love,
oh so desp'rately
Open your heart,
oh, then surely you'll see,
oh, that the someone who really cares,
who really cares is me
Thursday, November 20, 2008
Wednesday, November 19, 2008
1. Stand apart from oneself, knowing that there is an eye that keeps itself without the emotional state
2. Know that the eye exists without and within the emotional state. So stand in the mire and kep perspective somehow.
Sunday, November 16, 2008
Wednesday, November 12, 2008
Tuesday, November 11, 2008
Monday, November 10, 2008
One day Amory and Howard Gillespie meeting by accident down-town took lunch together, and Amory heard a story that delighted him. Gillespie after several cocktails was in a talkative mood; he began by telling Amory hat he was sure Rosalind was slightly eccentric.
He had gone with her on a swimming party up in Westchester County, and some one mentioned that Annette Kellerman had been there one day on a visit and had dived from the top of a rickety, thirty-foot summer-house. Immediately Rosalind insisted that Howard should climb up with her to see what it looked like.
A minute later, as he sat and dangled his feet on the edge, a form shot by him; Rosalind, her arms spread in a beautiful swan dive, had sailed through the air into the clear water.
"Of course I had to go, after that - and I nearly killed myself. I thought I was pretty good to even try it. Nobody else in the party tried it. Well, afterward Rosalind had the nerve to ask me why I stooped over when I dove. 'It didn't make it any easier', she said, 'it just took all the courage out of it.' I ask you, what can a man do with a girl like that? Unnecessary, I call it."
Gillespie failed to understand why Amory was smiling delightedly all through lunch. He thought perhaps he was one of these hollow optimists. - F. Scott Fitzgerald
Sunday, November 09, 2008
Saturday, November 08, 2008
A
A Band Named Bob
A Box of Fish with Tartar Sauce
A Boy Named Gomer
A Cat Born In An Oven Isn't A Cake
Above Average Weight Band
Abracadaver
Abstract Penis Brigade
Actual Size
Adickdid
Adios Pantalones
Admiral Poopy Pants and His Dancing Teeth
Adult Children of Heterosexuals
Adventures in Shrubbery
The Advil Monkey
Aerosol Methods
Afghanistan Banana Stand
Afrodiziac
Agnes Morehead
Aha, the Attack of the Green Slime Beast
The Al Roker Death Cult Wind Ensemble
Al's Heimers
Albino Toilet Boys
Alcoholocaust
Alien Ant Farm
Alien Nymphos from Uranus
The Alien Puppets
Alien Sex Fiend
All You Can Eat
Almighty Lumberjacks of Death
The Amazing Embarrasonic Human Karaoke Machine
Amish Meth Lab
Amputatoe
The Anally Devoted Husbands
Anal Speech Therapy
An Emotional Fish
Angry Amputees
Angry Salad
Angry Samoans
Anus the Menace
Apocolypse Hoboken
Are These My Pants?
Armed and Hammered
Armpit
Army of Prawns
The Arrogant Worms
Arthur Loves Plastic
Ashtray Boy
The Atomic Bitchwax
Automatic Daffodils
Attila The Stockbroker
Avenging Lawnmowers of Justice
Ayatollah Mama Please
B
Badical Turbo Radness
The Bad Livers
Bad Mutha Goose
Bad Tequila Experience
Baldilocks
Ball Point Banana
Baloney Ponys
Bananafishbones
The Band Formerly Known As Sausage
Band Over
Band That Shot Liberty Valence
Barbie Bones
Barefoot Hockey Goalie
Barenaked Ladies
Barf
Barnyard Slut
Barry White Boys
Barstool Prophets
Bassholes
BBQ Platypus
Bearded Itchy Lover
Beats the Hell Out of Me
Beatnik Termites
Beef Masters
Beerbellied Scum From Central Bucks County
The Bendy Monsters
Ben Dover and the Screamers
Ben Wa and the Blue Balls
Bernie the Trailer Park Queen and the Deadbeat Dads
Bertha's Mule
Betty Ford
Betty's Not a Vitamin
Beverley Beer Bellies
Biff Hitler and the Violent Mood Swings
Big Ass Truck
Big Balls and the Great White Idiot
Big Dead Fish
Big Fat Pet Clams From Outer Space
Big Fish Ensemble
Big Head Cat
Big White Undies
The Biggest Freak in New Jersey
Bimbo Toolshed
Bionic Roomate
The Bisquit Tits
Bitter Enemies/Butter Enemas
Bizzare Czars
Bjorn Again
Bleeding Rectum
Bloated Scrotum
Bloated Tick
Blood Sledge Electric Death Chickens
Bloody Stools
Blueballs Deluxe
Bobby Joe Ebola and the Children MacNuggits
Body Falling Down Stairs
Boiled Angel
Bondage A Go Go
Bongzilla
Bordering On Retarded
Boris the Sprinkler
The Bourbon Tabernacle Choir
BowWowWowHaus
Brady Bunch Lawnmower Massacre
Brad Pitt Live and Nude
The Brian Jonestown Massacre
Broadzilla
Brutal Juice
Brutal Noodle
Buck Naked and the Bare Bottom Boys
Bullwinkel Gandhi
Buck Satan and the 666 Shooters
Buddy Wasisname and the Other Fellas
Bulimia Banquet
The Bumpin' Uglies
Burger Pimp
Bus Station Loonies
Buster Hymen & the Penetrators
Butt Trumpett
Butthole Surfers
C
The Callous Taoboys
Caltransvestites
Candy Striper Death Orgy
Cap'n Crunch and the Cereal Killers
Captain Cardiac and the Coronaries
Captain Drinking Binge
Cardiac Zach and the Defibulators
Carter the Unstoppable Sexmachine
Chain Smokin' Alter Boys
The Charging Tyrannosaurus of Despair
Cherry Coke Enema
Cherry Poppin' Daddies
Chia Pet
The Chicken Charmers
Chickens On Smack
Chief Brody & the Bigger Boat
Children of the Vending Machine
Chocolate Bunnies From Hell
Chocolate Watchband
Clive Pig and the Hopeful Chinamen
Cobaine's Brains
Colon On The Cob
Colostomy Grab-Bag
Compulsive Gamblers
Concrete Octopus
Cookie Mould and the Smegmettes
The Couch Slugs
The Crab Cometh Forth
Crappy the Clown and the Punch Drunk Monkies
Crazy Taco Cafeteria
Crazy Uncle Larry and his Troupe of Molotov Cocktail Jugglers
Crispy Ambulance
Crocheted Doughnut Ring
Crosseyed Chicken
Cultivated Bimbo
The Cunning Runts
Curious George and the Homophobes
Curl Up And Die
Cycle Sluts From Hell
D
Dairy Queen Empire
Damn the Bad Luck
Dancing Cigarettes
The Dancing French Liberals of 1848
Danger Wank
Dead Fish Prophecy
Dead Kennedys
Dead Milkmen
The Dead Pants (Die Toten Hosen)
Debbie Harry's Armpit Crew
Deepthroat Shotgun
Dick Cheese and the Crackers
Dick Davis and the Dicktones
Dick Delicious and the Tasty Testicles
Dick Donkeys Dawn
Dick Duck and the Dorks
The Dick Nixons
Dicky Retardo
Dicks on Fire
Did Lee Squat?
Diesel Dick and the Dipsticks
Dirt Clod Fight
Disgruntled Postal Workers
Dog Food Five
Dogs With Jobs
Domino's Delivery Boyz
Don Knotts Overdrive
Doris Daze
Doug and the Slugs
Dow Jones and the Industrials
Downy Mildew
Dracula Milk Toast
Drag King
Dragmules
Draw Your Own Cow
Dreaded Apparatus
Drew Barrymore's Dealer
Drive By Crucifixion
Drive-In Funeral
Drunks With Guns
Drunken Ugly Basement Brothers
Duckbutter
Dukes of Hazardous Material
Dumpster Juice
E
e. coli
Earthpig and Fire
Ear Wacks
Edith Head
Ed Gein's Car
Ed's Redeeming Qualities
Elastic Sausage
Electric Al and the Poison Dart Frog McNuggets
Electric Blue Peggy Sue and the Revolutionions from Mars
Elegant Doormats
Elizabeth Taylor's Husbands
The Elvis Diet
Endangered Feces
Epileptic Disco
Ethyl Merman
Everpresent Fullness
Eve's Plumb
Evil Beaver
The Evil Elvii
Evil Weiner
Experimental BBQ
Exploding Boy
Exploding Head Trick
Exploding White Mice
F
Fabulous Pimps
Fangboy and the Ghouls
The Farting Ghosts
The Fartz
The Fat Chick from Wilson Phillips
Fat Luv
Fat Welfare Moms On Dust
Fearless Iranians From Hell
The Fierce Nipples
The Fifty Foot Hose
50 Naked Midgets
Five Fat Guys Who Rock
Fix My Head
The Flaming Donuts of Jesus
Flaming Box of Ants
Flaming Lips
Flamin' Schnanuses
Flavor of Uranus
Flogging Molly
Flopping Bodybags
Flying Dustbunnies
Flying Elmo's
Four Honkies In a Big Black Car
Four Nurses of the Apocalypse
Four Out of Five Doctors
The Fred Mertz Experience
Freda Fuselage And The Wingwalkers
Free Beer
Free Beer and Chicken
Free Range Chicken
The French are from Hell
Freud Chicken
Frogs Don't Cry
Fromage d'Amour
Frosted Suede
Frumious Bandersnatch
Full Throttle Aristotle
Full Metal Chicken
Funky Green Dogs From Outer Space
Furious George
G
GangGreen
Gangway Fathead
Garbage
Gaye Bikers on Acid
The Gaza Strippers
Gee That's A Large Beetle I Wonder If It's Poisonous
Gefilte Joe and the Fish
Gelvis Pressly
Genitorturers
Girl Scout Handgrenade
The Glands of External Secretion
Global Disrobal
God's Girlfriend
Goldfish Don't Bounce
The Go Kill Yourselves
Go Nad Go
Gonoreagan
Gonnorhea Pizzaria
Grand Master Ass-Blaster and the Pimp-Slap Crew
Gravity Ass
Grim Skunk
Gregg Turner and the Blood Drained Cows
Gringo Star
The Grilled Cheeze Fiasco
Guess My Perversion
Guitarantula
Guns N' Wankers
Gut Full of Cheese
Guyana Koolaid
H
Habitual Sex Offenders
The Hair & Skin Trading Co.
Haircuts That Kill
Hakan Sleeps Naked
Half Man, Half Biscuit
Halibutt Sharon
Halo of Flies
Hamster Sandwich
Han Solo and the Chewbaccas
The Happiest Guys In the World
Hard-drinkin' Housewives
Harry Palms and the Gym Towels
Headlice of Doom
Head Like a Hole?
Heavy Pink Insulator
Heavy Vegetable
Hefty Pink Labia Lips
Helen Keller Plaid
The Helicopter Barfs
Hellacopter Meat
Hello I'm A Truck
Henry Kissinger's Tits
Here, Eat This!
Her Majesty the Baby
Herpes Cineplex
He's Dead Jim
Heterophobia
Heywood Trout Festival
Hindu Garage Sale
Hitler Stole My Potato
Hitler's Missing Testicle
Hockey Teeth
Hollow Chocolate Bunnies of Death
Hollywood Chainsaw Hookers
Holy Mary, Mother of Bert
Homer and the Sexuals
Hornets Attack Victor Mature
The Hostile Amish
Hot Buttered Aspirin
Hot Rod Shopping Cart
House of Large Sizes
The Hurling Tandooris
I
I Buried Paul
I Got Shot By Dick Cheney
I Love My Shih-Tzu
Ice Cream Headache
Icky Boyfriends
Identity Crisis
If Cows Had Wings
If Pigs Could Talk Would You Still Eat Them
Immaculate Infection
Impotent Seasnakes
Individual Fruit Pie
Infected Mushroom
The Inflatable Boy Clams
Inflatable Dates
Inflatable Party Sheep
The Insult That Made a Man Out of Mac
Interspecies Love Child
The Introspective Playboy
Invisible Flintstones
Iowa Beef Experience
Iron Liver
Iron Prostate
Italians Obsessed with Cheese
IWRESTLEDABEARONCE
J
Jabbering Trout
Jason's Cat Died
Jason's Gay Haircut
Jazz Iguanas
The Jean Paul Sartre Experience
Jehovah's Waitresses
Jehovah’s Witness Protection Program
Jerry's Kids
Jesus Christ and the Nailknockers
Jesus Christ Super Fly
Jesus Chrysler Supercar
Jiggle the Handle
Jif and the Choosy Mothers
Jim Jones and the Kool Aid Kids
Joan of Arkansas
Jodie Foster's Army
Joe Puke and the Chunky Bits
John Cougar Concentration Camp
John Denver's Co-Pilot
John Holmes: Cucumber Smuggler
Johnny Panic and the Bible of Dreams
Johnny Uterus and the Fallopian Tubes
Jolly Naked Fishermen
Jonestown Punch
Juggling Death Squad
Junior High Burnout
Just Plain Cheese
K
Kamakazi Sex Pilots
Karl Maldens Nose
Kathleen Turner Overdrive
Kenfunky Fried
Kerrigan's Knees
The Kids Who Never Learned To Color Inside the Lines
The Killer Hayseeds
Killer Kiwis
Kinky Friedman and the Texas Jew Boys
Kinky Slinky
The Kitshickers
Knee Deep Shag
Kung Foo Dykes
Kung Fu Action Clergy Persons
K.Y. and the Backsliders
L
Lance Armstrong and the One Ballers
Lavay Smith and The Red Hot Skillet Lickers
Lawnsmell
Leonard Skinhead
The Leave It To Beaver Conehead Immolation
Lee Harvey Keitel
Lee Press-On and the Nails
Lesbian Dopeheads on Mopeds
Lick, the Dog
Lip Smacking Kitten Lunch
Lord Panic and the Exploders
Lorne Greene's Wet Nipple
Lost Underpants of Doom
Lothar and the Hand People
Lubricated Goat
The Luminous Toilet Bowls
Lung Mustard
The Lust Penguins
Luxury Christ
Lyin' Bitch and the Restraining Orders
M
Maggot Sandwich
Man...or Astro-Man?
Manson-Nixon Line
Mao Tse Helen
Mary Carves the Chicken
Mary Kay and the Cosmetics
Mary Tyler Morphine
Mayhem Lettuce
McAlbert Fish Sandwich
Me and Sir Octagon
Meat Puppets
Mechanical Tampon Fish
Mega Smegma
Melissa's House of Crabs
Men Among Poodles
Men With Issuses
Mermaids In the Basement
Microwavable Tree Frogs
Mill Valley Taters
Minnie Pearl Necklace
Minnie Pearl's Jam
The Minstrel Cramps
Mr. Holland's Anus
Mr. Quintron and the Flossy Unicorn Puppet Show
Mr. Tasty and the Bread Healers
Mr. T Experience
Moist Fist
The Morbid Tavern Apple Choir
More Drunk Cowboys
The Morning Shakes
The Most Sordid Pies
Mother Theresa's Children [Moder Theresas Barn]
Mother Tucker's Yellow Duck
Mouse and the Traps
The Muscular Lesbians
Mussolini Headkick
Mustard Plug
My Dog Has Hitler's Brain
My Friend the Chocolate Cake
My Other Car is Even Crappier
My Three Scum
My White Bread Mom
Myth America
N
Naked Potato
Naked David Hasselhoff
Nascar Fanatics
Natural Fonzie
Naugahyde Chihuahuas
Navigators Of Carrots
Nearly Died Laughing While Shaving My Butt
Ned's Atomic Dustbin
New Squids on the Dock
Nip Drivers
No Pants Bandits
No Way Sis (Oasis tribute band)
Nocturnal Emissions
Nomad Nipples
Noodle Muffin and the Pig Squints
Norman Bates and the Shower Heads
Not Drowning, Waving
Not Now I'm Naked
Not With My Camel
Nurse With Wound
Nuts Can Surf
O
Oedipussy
Old Bathtub Hag
Old Lady Driver
Once I Killed a Gopher With a Stick
The Only Alternative and His Other Possibilities
Operation Cliff Claven
The Orange Jews
Orange Juice After Toothpaste
Organic Condom Mazda Drugs
Our Manager Told Us That Our Band Name Was Too Long and Difficult to Remember and That We Had to Change it So After a Long Brainstorming Session We Came Up With This One Because All the Other Ones Sucked
Outer Body Llama
Out of Godzilla's Butt
Out Vile Jelly
Ovarian Trolley
Ozzy Beard Spaghetti
P
Pabst Smear
Painful Rectal Itch
Paisley Brain Cells
Paul Minor's Great Big Ego
Paul Will Eat Himself
Peace Love and Pitbulls
The Peanut Butter Conspiracy
Pearl Harbor and the Explosions
People With Chairs Up Their Noses
Pepto Dismal
Peter and the Test Tube Babies
Phenobarbidols
Phil McAvity and his Gerbils
Philemon Arthur and the Dung
Phlegm Fatale
Phone Bill from Hell
Picadilly Circus People
Pieces of Lisa
Pimps of Venus
Pink Slip Daddy
Pissed Off Postmen
Planet of Pants
Plastic Nude Martini
Playdough Fish
Plump Harriet
Poo On A Stick
Poop Shovel
Popemobile
Pontius CoPilot
Pork Queen
Porn on the Cob
Porn Flakes
Pornhuskers
Possum Juice
Post Nasal Drip
Poultry in Motion
Pregnant Men
Pretentious Flamedogs
Printed At Bismarck's Death
Professor Morrison's Lollipop
Psychic Buddist Gorillas
Psycho Sluts from Hell
Public Enema
Pure Bastard Extract
Purple Earthquake
Q
Quasimodo and the Eunuchs
Queer Wookie
Question Mark & the Mysterians
R
Rainbow Butt Monkeys
The Rampant Hedgehogs
Rats of Unusual Size
Rebel Without Applause
Red Neck Girlfriend
Reluctant Stereotypes
REO Speed Dealer
Rhythm Method
Rodney King and the Nightsticks
Rolling Blackouts
Rolling Donut
Ronnie James Deoderant
Root Boy Slim and the Sex-Change Band with The Rootettes
Royal Flush and the Jacks of All Trades
Rubber Nipple Salesmen
Rugburns
Rumplforskin
The Runz
S
Sadista Sisters
Sandy Duncan's Eye
Satan’s Cheerleaders
Saturated Fat
Saturday's Garbage
Saturn's Flea Collar
Science Diet
Scary Chicken
Screaming Brocolli
The Screaming Hormones
Screaming Moist Accountants
Semi Digested Curtain Rail
Sensitive New Age Cowpersons
74 Megs of Ryan
Severe Tire Damage
Sex Clark Five
Skankin' Pickle
Sharon Stoned
She Stole My Beer
Shirley Temple of Doom
Shirley Temple Pilots
Shoot the Mime
Shorty and the Disappointments
The Shower Scene from Psycho
Sinus Envy
Sissy Boy Slap Party
Sister Run Naked
Six Organs of Admittance
Skadelic Smegma
Skanorrhea and the Burning Sensations
Skunk Death
Sloppy Seconds
The Slutty Nunz
Sluts for Hire
Sly and the Family Jewels
Smegma & the Nuns
Smelly Tongues
Smorgasborgnine
Snotty Scotty and the Hankies
Sodom & Gomorrah Liberation Front
Sofa Kingdom
Some Random Band
Son Of Sam Walton
Soothing Sounds For Baby
Sorry About Your Daughter
The Sound of Animals Fighting
Soup Dragons
Sour Puppet
Space Hog
Spaceman Bill and the Groovy Gravy
Sparky the Lizard Hermaphrodite
Spastic Colon
The Spastic Rats
Special Ed and the Short Bus
Stark Naked and the Car Thieves
Stiff Dead Cat
Stiff Richards
Stinky Binky
Stinky Fire Engine
String Cheese Incident
St. Mucous
Stockhausen and Walkman
Stop Calling Me Frank
Stop Lookin' and Buy It
Straight Jacket Lucy
Stud McCoy and the Creemy Twinkies
Stukas Over Bedrock
Stupid White People
Suicide Ninjitsu Penguin Assassin Squad
Super Sonic Soul Pimps
The Surf Maggots
Susanne and the Guys With Ties
Swearing at Motorists
Sweaty Bum Chunks
Sweaty Nipples
Swingin' Udders
T
Tastes Like Chicken
The Technochocolates
Technosquid Eats Parliament
Ted Bundy's Volkswagen
Ted Ed Fred
Temporary Darkening of the Stool
Terry Dactyl and the Dinosaurs
Test Icicles
Testostertones
Thank God We're Immortal
The Baby Won't Eat His Corn Dog
The Quilted-Quicker-Picker-Upper, Bounty!
They Might Be Giants
They Tried To Frame OJ
They Were Expendable
Thinking Fellers Union Local 282
This Bike Is A Pipe Bomb
This Is Serious, Mum
Thomas Jefferson Slave Apartments
Three Dead Trolls in a Baggie
350,000 Crazed and Fully Africanized "Welcome to Disneyworld" Bees
Tickle Me Pink
Titty Bingo
To Live and Shave in LA
Toiling Midgets
Tonto's Expanding Headband
Too Fat to Skate
Toxic Shock and the Tampons
Toys That Kill
Tracy & the Hindenburg Ground Crew
Trailer Park Casanovas
Transatlantic Chicken Wicken No. 5
Traveling Dingleberries
Trench Coat Yuppies
Trotsky Icepick
Trout Fishing In America
Tupperware Death
Turkey Makes Me Sleepy
22 Toxic Chemicals
Two Cow Garage
Two For Flinching
Two Minute Sinatra
2000 Flushes
U
UFOFU
Ugly Head
Ultimate Spinach
Umbrella Full of Semen
Unidentified Rocking Objects
Uncle Bob Touched Me
Underpants Machine
The Urinals
Urine Specimen
Usless ID
V
Van Gogh's Ear
The Vast Void of Empty Nothingness
Vegetarian Meat
Venus and the Razor Blades
Vermin from Venus
The Veronica Cartwrights
Vic Morrow's Head
Vic Vaccume and the Attachments
The Voluptuous Horror of Karen Black
Vomit Launch
W
Waffles Against AIDS
Was I Naked
We Go To 11
The Well Hungarians
Well Strung
Wendy and Her Menstrual Cycles
What Made Milwaukee Famous
When People Were Shorter and Lived By the Water
Where's The Pope?
The Whip-M-Out Girl's
White People Lie
White Trash Debutantes
Whorehouse of Representatives
Who The Hell Are You?
Willie Nelson Mandela
Woke Up Falling
Wonderbred, the Refined White Flour Children
Wrecked ‘Em
The Wrench Twisting Streetlickers
Wynona Ryders
Y
The Yams from Outer Space
The Yeasty Girls
Yellow Snow
The Young and the Uselsess
You Need A Spanking
Your Damn Neighbors
Your Naked Mother
Z
Zombies Under Stress
Zombina & The Skeletones
Zorro and the Blue Footballs
Zsa Zsa
Zulu Leprechauns
Of course all life is a process of breaking down, but the blows that do the dramatic side of the work -- the big sudden blows that come, or seem to come, from outside -- the ones you remember and blame things on and, in moments of weakness, tell your friends about, don’t show their effect all at once. There is another sort of blow that comes from within -- that you don’t feel until it’s too late to do anything about it, until you realize with finality that in some regard you will never be as good a man again. The first sort of breakage seems to happen quick -- the second kind happens almost without your knowing it but is realized suddenly indeed.
Before I go on with this short history, let me make a general observation -- the test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time, and still retain the ability to function. One should, for example, be able to see that things are hopeless and yet be determined to make them otherwise. This philosophy fitted on to my early adult life, when I saw the improbable, the implausible, often the “impossible,” come true. Life was something you dominated if you were any good. Life yielded easily to intelligence and effort, or to what proportion could be mustered of both. It seemed a romantic business to be a successful literary man -- you were not ever going to be as famous as a movie star but what note you had was probably longer-lived; you were never going to have the power of a man of strong political or religious convictions but you were certainly more independent. Of course within the practice of your trade you were forever unsatisfied -- but I, for one, would not have chosen any other.
As the Twenties passed, with my own twenties marching a little ahead of them, my two juvenile regrets -- at not being big enough (or good enough) to play football in college, and at not getting overseas during the war -- resolved themselves into childish waking dreams of imaginary heroism that were good enough to go to sleep on in restless nights. The big problems of life seemed to solve themselves, and if the business of fixing them was difficult, it made one too tired to think of more general problems.
Life, ten years ago, was largely a personal matter. I must hold in balance the sense of futility of effort and the sense of the necessity to struggle; the conviction of the inevitability of failure and still the determination to “succeed” -- and, more than these, the contradiction between the dead hand of the past and the high intentions of the future. If I could do this through the common ills -- domestic, professional, and personal -- then the ego would continue as an arrow shot from nothingness to nothingness with such force that only gravity would bring it to earth at last.
For seventeen years, with a year of deliberate loafing and resting out in the center -- things went on like that, with a new chore only a nice prospect for he next day. I was living hard, too, but: “Up to forty-nine it’ll be all right,” I said. “I can count on that. For a man who’s lived as I have, that’s all you could ask.”
-- And then, ten years this side of forty-nine, I suddenly realized I had prematurely cracked.
Now a man can crack in many ways -- can crack in the head, in which case the power of decision is taken from you by others; or in the body, when one can but submit to the white hospital world; or in the nerves. William Seabrook in an unsympathetic book tells, with some pride and a movie ending, of how he became a public charge. What led to his alcoholism, or was bound up with it, was a collapse of his nervous system. Though the present writer was not so entangled -- having at the time not tasted so much as a glass of beer for six months -- it was his nervous reflexes that were giving way -- too much anger and too many tears.
Moreover, to go back to my thesis that life has a varying offensive, the realization of having cracked was not simultaneous with a blow, but with a reprieve.
Not long before, I had sat in the office of a great doctor and listened to a grave sentence. With what, in retrospect, seems some equanimity, I had gone on about my affairs in the city where I was then living, not caring much, not thinking how much had been left undone, or what would become of this and that responsibility, like people do in books; I was well insured and anyhow I had been only a mediocre caretaker of most of the things left in my hands, even of my talent.
But I had a strong sudden instinct that I must be alone. I didn’t want to see any people at all. I had seen so many people all my life -- I was an average mixer, but more than average in a tendency to identify myself, my ideas, my destiny, with those of all classes that came in contact with. I was always saving or being saved -- in a single morning I would go through the emotions ascribable to Wellington at Waterloo. I lived in a world of inscrutable hostiles and inalienable friends and supporters.
But now I wanted to be absolutely alone and so arranged a certain insulation from ordinary cares.
It was not an unhappy time. I went away and there were fewer people. I found I was good-and-tired. I could lie around and was glad to, sleeping or dozing sometimes twenty hours a day and in the intervals trying resolutely not to think -- instead I made lists -- made lists and tore them up, hundreds of lists: of cavalry leaders and football players and cities, and popular tunes and pitchers, and happy times, and hobbies and houses lived in and how many suits since I left the army and how many pairs of shoes (I didn’t count the suit I bought in Sorrento that shrank, nor the pumps and dress shirt and collar that I carried around for years and never wore, because the pumps got damp and grainy and the shirt and collar got yellow and starch-rotted). And lists of women I’d liked, and of the times I had let myself be snubbed by people who had not been my betters in character or ability.
-- And then suddenly, surprisingly, I got better.
-- And cracked like an old plate as soon as I heard the news.
That is the real end of this story. What was to be done about it will have to rest in what used to be called the “womb of time.” Suffice to say that after about an hour of solitary pillow-hugging, I began to realize that for two years my life had been a drawing on resources that I did not possess, that I had been mortgaging myself physically and spiritually up to the hilt. What was the small gift of life given back in comparison to that? -- when there had once been a pride of direction and a confidence in enduring independence.
I realized that in those two years, in order to preserve something -- an inner hush maybe, maybe not -- I had weaned myself from all the things I used to love -- that every act of life from the morning toothbrush to the friend at dinner had become an effort. I saw that for a long time I had not liked people and things, but only followed the rickety old pretense of liking. I saw that even my love for those closest to me had become only an attempt to love, that my casual relations -- with an editor, a tobacco seller, the child of a friend, were only what I remembered I should do, from other days. All in the same month I became bitter about such things as the sound of the radio, the advertisements in the magazines, the screech of tracks, the dead silence of the country -- contemptuous at human softness, immediately (if secretively) quarrelsome toward hardness -- hating the night when I couldn’t sleep and hating the day because it went toward night. I slept on the heart side now because I knew that the sooner I could tire that out, even a little, the sooner would come that blessed hour of nightmare which, like a catharsis, would enable me to better meet the new day.
There were certain spots, certain faces I could look at. Like most midwesterners, I have never had any but the vaguest race prejudices -- I always had a secret yen for the lovely Scandinavian blondes who sat on porches in St. Paul but hadn’t emerged enough economically to be part of what was then society. They were too nice to be “chickens” and too quickly off the farmlands to seize a place in the sun, but I remember going round blocks to catch a single glimpse of shining hair -- the bright shock of a girl I’d never know. This is urban, unpopular talk. It strays afield from the fact that in these latter days I couldn’t stand the sight of Celts, English, Politicians, Strangers, Virginians, Negroes (light or dark), Hunting People, or retail clerks, and middlemen in general, all writers (I avoided writers carefully because they can perpetuate trouble as no one else can) -- and all the classes as classes and most of them as members of their class…
Trying to cling to something, I liked doctors and girl children up to the age of about thirteen and well-brought-up boy children from about eight years old on. I could have peace and happiness with these few categories of people. I forgot to add that I liked old men -- men over seventy, sometimes over sixty if their faces looked seasoned. I liked Katherine Hepburn’s face on the screen, no matter what was said about her pretentiousness, and Miriam Hopkins’s face, and old friends if I only saw them once a year and could remember their ghosts.
All rather inhuman and undernourished, isn’t it? Well, that, children, is the true sign of cracking up.
It is not a pretty picture. Inevitably it was carted here and there within its frame and exposed to various critics. One of them can only be described as a person whose life makes other people’s lives seem like death -- even this time when she was cast in the unusually unappealing role of Job’s comforter. In spite of the fact that this story is over, let me append our conversation as a sort of postscript:
“Instead of being so sorry for yourself, listen -- “she said. (She always says “Listen,” because she thinks while she talks -- really thinks.) So she said: “Listen. Suppose this wasn’t a crack in you -- suppose it was a crack in the Grand Canyon.”
“The crack’s in me,” I said heroically.
“Listen! The world only exists in your eyes -- your conception of it. You can make it as big or as small as you want to. And you’re trying to be a little puny individual. By God, if I ever cracked, I’d try to make the world crack with me. Listen! The world only exists through your apprehension of it, and so it’s much better to say that it’s not you that’s cracked -- it’s the Grand Canyon.”
“Baby, et up all her Spinoza?”
“I don’t know anything about Spinoza. I know -- “ She spoke, then, of old woes of her own, that seemed, in telling, to have been more dolorous than mine, and how she had met them, overridden them, beaten them.
I felt a certain reaction to what she said, but I am a slow-thinking man, and it occurred to me simultaneously that of all natural forces, vitality is the incommunicable one. In days when juice came into one as an article without duty, one tried to distribute it -- but always without success; to further mix metaphors, vitality never “takes.” You have it or you haven’t it, like health or brown eyes or honor or a baritone voice. I might have asked some of it from her, neatly wrapped and ready for home cooking and digestion, but I could never have got it -- not if I’d waited around for a thousand hours with the tin cup of self-pity. I could walk from her door, holding myself very carefully like cracked crockery, and go away into the world of bitterness, where I was making a home with such materials as are found there -- and quote to myself after I left her door:
“Ye are the salt of the earth. But if the salt hath lost its savour, wherewith shall it be salted?”
Matthew 5:13
In a previous article this writer told about his realization that what he had before him was not the dish that he had ordered for his forties. In fact -- since he and the dish were one, he described himself as a cracked plate, the kind that one wonders whether it is worth preserving. Your editor thought that the article suggested too many aspects without regarding them closely, and probably many readers felt the same way -- and there are always those to whom all self-revelation is contemptible, unless it ends with a noble thanks to the gods for the Unconquerable Soul.
But I had been thanking the gods too long, and thanking them for nothing. I wanted to put a lament in my record, without even the background of the Euganean Hills to give it color. There weren’t any Euganean Hills that I could see.
Sometimes, though, the cracked plate has to be retained in the pantry, has to be kept in service as a household necessity. It can never again be warmed on the stove nor shuffled with the other plates in the dishpan; it will not be brought out for company, but it will do to hold crackers late at night or to go into the icebox under leftovers…
Hence this sequel -- a cracked plate’s further history.
Now the standard cure for one who is sunk is to consider those in actual destitution or physical suffering -- this is an all-weather beatitude for gloom in general and fairly salutary daytime advice for everyone. But at three o’clock in the morning, a forgotten package has the same tragic importance as a death sentence, and the cure doesn’t work -- and in a real dark night of the soul it is always three o’clock in the morning, day after day. At that hour the tendency is to refuse to face things as long as possible by retiring into an infantile dream -- but one is continually startled out of this by various contacts with the world. One meets these occasions as quickly and carelessly as possible and retires once more back into the dream, hoping that things will adjust themselves by some great material or spiritual bonanza. But as the withdrawal persists there is less and less chance of the bonanza -- one is not waiting for the fade-out of a single sorrow, but rather being an unwilling witness of an execution, the disintegration of one’s own personality…
Unless madness or drugs or drink come into it, this phase comes to a dead end, eventually, and is succeeded by a vacuous quiet. In this you can try to estimate what has been sheared away and what is left. Only when this quiet came to me did I realize that I had gone through two parallel experiences.
The first time was twenty years ago, when I left Princeton in junior year with a complaint diagnosed as malaria. It transpired, through an X-ray taken a dozen years later, that it had been tuberculosis -- a mild case, and after a few months of rest I went back to college. But I had lost certain offices, the chief one was the presidency of the Triangle Club, a musical comedy idea, and also I dropped back a class. To me college would never be the same. There were to be no badges of pride, no medals, after all. It seemed on one March afternoon that I had lost every single thing I wanted -- and that night was the first time that I hunted down the specter of womanhood that, for a little while, makes everything else seem unimportant.
Years later I realized that my failure as a big shot in college was all right -- instead of serving on committees, I took a beating on English poetry; when I got the idea of what it was all about, I set about learning how to write. On Shaw’s principle that “if you don’t get what you like, you better like what you get,” it was a lucky break -- at the moment it was a harsh and bitter business to know that my career as a leader of men was over.
Since that day I have not been able to fire a bad servant, and I am astonished and impressed by people who can. Some old desire for personal dominance was broken and gone. Life around me was a solemn dream, and I lived on the letters I wrote to a girl in another city. A man does not recover from such jolts -- he becomes a different person, and, eventually, the new person finds new things to care about.
The other episode parallel to my current situation took place after the war, when I had again overextended my flank. It was one of those tragic loves doomed for lack of money, and one day the girl closed it out on the basis of common sense. During a long summer of despair I wrote a novel instead of letters, so it came out all right, but it came out all right for a different reason. The man with the jingle of money in his pocket who married the girl a year later would always cherish an abiding distrust, an animosity, toward the leisure class -- not the conviction of a revolutionist but the smoldering hatred of a peasant. In the years since then I have never been able to stop wondering where my friends’ money came from, nor to stop thinking that at one time a sort of droit du seigneur might have been exercised to give one of them my girl.
For sixteen years I lived pretty much as this latter person, distrusting the rich, yet working for money with which to share their mobility and the grace that some of them brought into their lives. During this time I had plenty of the usual horses shot from under me -- I remember some of their names -- Punctured Pride, Thwarted Expectation, Faithless, Show-off, Hard Hit, Never Again. And after a while I wasn’t twenty-five, then not even thirty-five, and nothing was quite as good. But in all these years I don’t remember a moment of discouragement. I saw honest men through moods of suicidal gloom -- some of them gave up and died; others adjusted themselves and went on to a larger success than mine; but my morale never sank below the level of self-disgust when I had put on some unsightly personal show. Trouble has no necessary connection with discouragement -- discouragement has a germ of its own, as different from trouble as arthritis is different from a stiff joint.
When a new sky cut off the sun last spring, I didn’t at first relate it to what had happened fifteen or twenty years ago. Only gradually did a certain family resemblance come through -- an overextension of the flank, a burning of the candle at both ends; a call upon physical resources that I did not command, like a man overdrawing at his bank. In its impact this blow was more violent than the other two but it was the same in kind -- a feeling that I was standing at twilight on a deserted range, with an empty rifle in my hands and the targets down. No problem set -- simply a silence with only the sound of my own breathing.
In this silence there was a vast irresponsibility toward every obligation, a deflation of all my values. A passionate belief in order, a disregard of motives or consequences in favor or guesswork and prophecy, a feeling that craft and industry would have a place in any world -- one by one, these and other convictions were swept away. I saw that the novel, which at my maturity was the strongest and supplest medium for conveying thought and emotion from one human being to another, was becoming subordinated to a mechanical and communal art that, whether in the hands of Hollywood merchants or Russian idealists, was capable of reflecting only the tritest thought, the most obvious emotion. It was an art in which words were subordinate to images, where personality was worn down to the inevitable low gear of collaboration. As long past as 1930, I had a hunch that the talkies would make even the best selling novelist as archaic as silent pictures. People still read, if only Professor Canby’s book of the month -- curious children nosed at the slime of Mr. Tiffany Thayer in the drugstore libraries -- but there was a rankling indignity, that to me had become almost an obsession, in seeing the power of the written word subordinated to another power, a more glittering, a grosser power…
I set that down as an example of what haunted me during the long night -- this was something I could neither accept nor struggle against, something which tended to make my efforts obsolescent, as the chain stores have crippled the small merchant, an exterior force, unbeatable --
(I have the sense of lecturing now, looking at a watch on the desk before me and seeing how many more minutes -- )
Well, when I had reached this period of silence, I was forced into a measure that no one ever adopts voluntarily: I was impelled to think. God, was it difficult! The moving about of great secret trunks. In the first exhausted halt, I wondered whether I had ever thought. After a long time I came to these conclusions, just as I write them here:
(1) That I had done very little thinking, save within the problems of my craft. For twenty years a certain man had been my intellectual conscience. That was Edmund Wilson.
(2) That another man represented my sense of the “good life,” though I saw him once in a decade, and since then he might have been hung. He is in the fur business in the Northwest and wouldn’t like his name set down here. But in difficult situations I have tried to think what he would have thought, how he would have acted.
(3) That a third contemporary had been an artistic conscience to me -- I had not imitated his infectious style, because my own style, such as it is, was formed before he published anything, but there was an awful pull toward him when I was on a spot.
(4) That a fourth man had come to dictate my relations with other people when these relations were successful: how to do, what to say. How to make people at least momentarily happy (in opposition to Mrs. Post’s theories of how to make everyone thoroughly uncomfortable with a sort of systemized vulgarity). This always confused me and made me want to go out and get drunk, but this man had seen the game, analyzed it, and beaten it, and his word was good enough for me.
(5) That my political conscience had scarcely existed for ten years save as an element of irony in my stuff. When I became again concerned with the system I should function under, it was a man much younger than myself who brought it to me, with a mixture of passion and fresh air.
So there was not an “I” anymore -- not a basis on which I could organize my self-respect -- save my limitless capacity for toil that it seemed I possessed no more. It was strange to have no self -- to be like a little boy left along in a big house, who knew that now he could do anything he wanted to do, but found that there was nothing that he wanted to do --
(The watch is past the hour and I have barely reached my thesis. I have some doubts as to whether this is of general interest, but if anyone wants more, there is plenty left, and your editor will tell me. If you’ve had enough, say so -- but not too loud, because I have the feeling that someone, I’m not sure who, is sound asleep -- someone who could have helped me to keep my shop open. It wasn’t Lenin, and it wasn’t God.)
I have spoken in these pages of how an exceptionally optimistic young man experienced a crack-up of all values, a crack-up that he scarcely knew of until long after it occurred. I told of the succeeding period of desolation and of the necessity of going on, but without the benefit of Henley’s familiar heroics, “my head is bloody but unbowed.” For a checkup of my spiritual liabilities indicated that I had no particular head to be bowed or unbowed. Once I had had a heart but that was about all I was sure of.
This was at least a starting place out of the morass in which I floundered: “I felt -- therefore I was.” At one time or another there had been many people who had leaned on me, come to me in difficulties or written me from afar, believed implicitly in my advice and my attitude toward life. The dullest platitude monger or the most unscrupulous Rasputin who can influence the destinies of many people must have some individuality, so the question became one of finding why and where I had changed, where was the leak through which, unknown to myself, my enthusiasm and my vitality had been steadily and prematurely trickling away.
One harassed and despairing night I packed a briefcase and went off a thousand miles to think it over. I took a dollar room in a drab little town where I knew no one and sunk all the money I had with me in a stock of potted meat, crackers, and apples. But don’t let me suggest that the change from a rather overstuffed world to a comparative asceticism was any Research Magnificent -- I only wanted absolute quiet to think out why I had developed a sad attitude towards sadness, a melancholy attitude toward melancholy, and a tragic attitude toward tragedy -- why I had become identified with the objects of my horror or compassion.
Does this seem a fine distraction? It isn’t: identification such as this spells the death of accomplishment. It is something like this that keeps sane people from working. Lenin did not willingly endure the sufferings of his proletariat, nor Washington of his troops, nor Dickens of his London poor. And when Tolstoy tried some such merging of himself with the objects of his attention, it was a fake and a failure. I mention these because they are the men best known to us all.
It was dangerous mist. When Wordsworth decided that “there hath passed away a glory from the earth,” he felt no compulsion to pass away with it, and the Fiery Particle Keats never ceased his struggle against T.B. nor in his last moments relinquished his hope of being among the English poets.
My self-immolation was something sodden-dark. It was very distinctly not modern -- yet I saw it in others, saw it in a dozen men of honor and industry since the war. (I heard you, but that’s too easy -- there were Marxians among these men.) I had stood by while one famous contemporary of mine played with the idea of the Big Out for half a year; I had watched when another, equally eminent, spent months in an asylum unable to endure any contact with his fellowmen. And of those who had given up and passed on I could list a score.
This led me to the idea that the ones who had survived had made some sort of clean break. This is a big word and is no parallel to a jailbreak when one is probably headed for a new jail or will be forced back to the old one. The famous “Escape” or “Run away from it all” is an excursion in a trap even if the trap includes the South Seas, which are only for those who want to paint them or sail them. A clean break is something you cannot come back from; that is irretrievable because it makes the past cease to exist. So, since I could no longer fulfill the obligations that life had set for me or that I had set for myself, why not slay the empty shell who had been posturing at it for four years? I must continue to be a writer because that was my only way of life, but I would cease any attempts to be a person -- to be kind, just, or generous. There were plenty of counterfeit coins around that would pass instead of these and I knew where I could get them at a nickel on the dollar. In thirty-nine years an observant eye has learned to detect where the milk is watered and the sugar is sanded, the rhinestone passed for diamond and the stucco for stone. There was to be no more giving of myself -- all giving was to be outlawed henceforth under a new name, and that name was Waste.
The decision made me rather exuberant, like anything that is both real and new. As a sort of beginning there was a whole shaft of letters to be tipped into the wastebasket when I went home, letters that wanted something for nothing -- to read this man’s manuscript, market this man’s poem, speak free on the radio, indite notes of introduction, give this interview, help with the plot of this play, with this domestic situation, perform this act of thoughtfulness or charity.
The conjurer’s hat was empty. To draw things out of it had long been a sort of sleight of hand, and now, to change the metaphor, I was off the dispensing end of the relief roll forever.
The heady villainous feeling continued.
I felt like the beady-eyed men I used to see on the commuting train from Great Neck fifteen years back -- men who didn’t care whether the world tumbled into chaos tomorrow if it spared their houses. I was one with them now, one with the smooth articles who said:
“I’m sorry but business is business.”
Or:
“You ought to have thought of that before you got into this trouble.”
Or:
“I’m not the person to see about that.”
And a smile -- ah, I would get me a smile. I’m still working on that smile. It is to combine the best qualities of a hotel manager, an experienced old social weasel, a headmaster on visitors’ day, a colored elevator man, a pansy pulling a profile, a producer getting stuff at half its market value, a trained nurse coming on a new job, a body-vender in her first rotogravure, a hopeful extra swept near the camera, a ballet dancer with an infected toe, and of course the great beam of loving kindness common to all those from Washington to Beverly Hills who must exist by virtue of the contorted pan.
The voice too -- I am working with a teacher on the voice. When I have perfected it the larynx will show no ring of conviction except the conviction of the person I am talking to. Since it will be largely called upon for the elicitation of the word “Yes,” my teacher (a lawyer) and I are concentrating on that, but in extra hours. I am learning to bring into it that polite acerbity that makes people feel that far from being welcome they are not even tolerated and are under continual and scathing analysis at every moment. These times will of course not coincide with the smile. This will be reserved exclusively for those from whom I have nothing to gain, old worn-out people or young struggling people. They won’t mind -- what the hell, they get it most of the time anyhow.
But enough. It is not a matter of levity. If you are young and you should write asking to see me and learn how to be a somber literary man writing pieces upon the state of emotional exhaustion that often overtakes writers in their prime -- if you should be so young and fatuous as to do this, I would not do so much as acknowledge your letter, unless you were related to someone very rich and important indeed. And if you were dying of starvation outside my window, I would go out quickly and give you the smile and the voice (if no longer the hand) and stick around till somebody raised a nickel to phone for the ambulance, that is if I thought there would be any copy in it for me.
I have now at last become a writer only. The man I had persistently tried to be became such a burden that I have “cut him loose” with as little compunction as a Negro lady cuts loose a rival on Saturday night. Let the good people function as such -- let the overworked doctors die in harness, with one week’s “vacation” a year that they can devote to straightening out their family affairs, and let the underworked doctors scramble for cases at one dollar a throw; let the soldiers be killed and enter immediately into the Valhalla of their profession. That is their contract with the gods. A writer need have no such ideals unless he makes them for himself, and this one has quit. The old dream of being an entire man in the Goethe-Byron-Shaw tradition, with an opulent American touch, a sort of combination of J.P. Morgan, Topham Beauclerk, and St. Francis of Assisi, has been relegated to the junk heap of the shoulder pads word for one day on the Princeton freshman football field and the overseas cap never worn overseas.
So what? This is what I think now: that the natural state of the sentient adult is a qualified unhappiness. I think also that in an adult the desire to be finer in grain that you are, “a constant striving” (as those people say who gain their bread by saying it). only adds to this unhappiness in the end -- that end that comes to our youth and hope. My own happiness in the past often approached such an ecstasy that I could not share it even with the person dearest to me but had to walk it away in quiet streets and lanes with only fragments of it to distill into little lines in books -- and I think that my happiness, or talent for self-delusion or what you will, was an exception. It was not the natural thing but the unnatural -- unnatural as the Boom; and my recent experience parallels the wave of despair that swept the nation when the Boom was over.
I shall manage to live with the new dispensation, though it has taken some months to be certain of the fact. And just as the laughing stoicism which has enabled the American Negro to endure the intolerable conditions of his existence has cost him his sense of the truth -- so in my case there is a price to pay. I do not any longer like the postman, nor the grocer, nor the editor, nor the cousin’s husband, and he in turn will come to dislike me, so that life will never be very pleasant again, and the sign Cave Canem is hung permanently just above my door. I will try to be a correct animal though, and if you throw me a bone with enough meat on it I may even lick your hand.
Originally published in Esquire's February, March, and April 1936 issues.