Category: Confidence

Yesterday a lady told me, “I like men who are gentlemen. Until it’s time for them not to be.”

Well crap. I’m confused enough about this gentleman thing without having to figure out when it’s time to stop being one. It’s like saying, “I like freezers that make ice. Until it’s time for them to stop making ice. And I’m not going to tell the freezer when to stop making ice, or what it should start making instead. Maybe the freezer should start making bran muffins. Yeah, let it try that, and then I’ll tell the freezer whether more bran muffins are really what we need around here.”

My parents never told me what it means to be a gentleman. I think they were too busy paying bills and fixing whatever I broke, insulted, or destroyed. So I just watched my dad and figured I was seeing the gentleman thing in action. I carried those nuggets of gentlemanly behavior with me out of childhood, and when I set off on my young man’s life I forgot every one of them. Who needs to be a gentleman when you can drink 160 proof punch, mumble at girls in a language that doesn’t exist, and puke indiscriminately?

When I outgrew all that, I found myself puzzled about gentlemanly behavior. I did some research. No joking. I discovered that a gentleman did things like hold chairs, hold doors, and hold purses for his lady. He would kiss her hand, kiss her forehead, kiss the back of her neck, and kiss her nose. He would be confident, be humble, be polite, and be willing to punch somebody for her. He would dress well, but not better than her. He would never keep her waiting, but he’d be okay if she kept him waiting. He’d never forget anniversaries or birthdays, and of course he’d learn to play the guitar.

There was a lot more like that.

The thing bothered me about these recitations of gentlemanly behaviors was that all of them are directed at the object of the gentleman’s matchless love. It seemed as if being a gentleman, as opposed to being just a man, springs from how a man treats the woman he loves. That seemed unlikely to me. I figured there were about six billion people on the planet. Am I a gentleman because of how I treat one of them, or because of how I treat 5,999,999,999 of them?

I thought about that for a while, and I tried to separate being a man from being a gentleman. A male human can be a man without being a gentleman. I do not cling to any doubts about that. I’ve known a lot of honest, courageous, faithful, and generous men, enough to demolish all the hot wings a large sports bar—but many of them were not gentlemen. (And by the way, when did it become okay to charge seven bucks for a plate of chicken parts that we used to throw away?)

So you can be a man without being a gentleman, but you can’t be a gentleman without being a man. That’s axiomatic. I think maybe Pythagoras even said it, or one of those other ancient smart fellows. And if that’s true, then I can only be a gentleman if I do something extra, something more than the things required to be a man. Something I can do for everyone I meet, and not just for the woman with whom I share saliva.

A list of those things might be pretty long. I could give everyone I meet a puppy, or a popsicle, or a t-shirt that says “Kiss Me If You Have A Strong Immune System.” I could tell them a joke. I could refrain from singing them a song. I could compliment them on one of their entirely unexceptional physical features. I could give them a massage in a way that’s friendly, and not like an unwashed creep with baggy trousers and an under bite. I could do all those things, but what I’m really looking for is a unifying principle for being a gentleman. What is the theme here?

I thought back to my dad and tried to remember if he gave everybody something. It couldn’t have been much, because his Sears credit card was generally charged to the limit. He didn’t tell jokes or give compliments, and he sure as hell didn’t give massages. He gave us a puppy once, which is a point in his favor. It was a toy poodle as dumb as a chunk of excrement and mean as a snake, so I’ll take that point right back.

I only remember one thing that my dad gave everybody. He did whatever he needed to do to make everybody around him feel comfortable. Even safe. No matter who he was with, they didn’t need to worry about being embarrassed, or left out, or the point of someone else’s joke. He didn’t try to make them happy. In fact, it’s impossible to make some people happy. But they could feel respected, even if they weren’t too respectable themselves when you got down to it. They might even feel that nothing horrible could happen to them right then, because my dad had banned horrible from the room. As a boy, I felt safe when I heard him snoring in his bedroom. If I heard him snore today, I’m sure everybody around would feel safe too.

A gentleman does whatever he needs to do to help the people around him feel comfortable. That’s my working definition. So when in the name of Gregory Peck is it time to stop being a gentleman? I suppose that would be when it’s time for people to stop feeling comfortable. I can think of two times that would be true.

You don’t want people to feel comfortable when they’re about to hurt somebody, and you don’t want them to feel comfortable when they’re about to hurt themselves. If someone is kicking his dog, or screaming at his spouse, then maybe it’s time for the gentleman in you to take a break. And if someone is throwing back his twelfth Wild Turkey shot, or committing professional suicide by doing something rude in his boss’s desk drawer, the gentleman in you should go outside, smoke a cigarette, and play with his iPad.

“I like men who are gentlemen. Until it’s time for them not to be.” When that lady expressed this astounding observation to me, I asked her how a man was supposed to figure out such a thing. She suggested that I might need a flow chart. Well, this isn’t a damned flow chart, but at least now I have something to go by. And now that I think about it, there may be a third situation in which the time arrives to stop being a gentleman. Sometimes the gentleman in you ought to stop outside the bedroom door while the rest of you goes on inside. Everyone’s better off if he hangs out in the living room and plays Wii for a while. I may run that concept past that lady and see what she says.

I made a history professor look like an idiot once. It was great. In fact, it is one of my most treasured college memories. This professor didn’t like to talk about history, although I think it was his job. He instead liked to spend 90 minutes twice a week explaining how stupid all of us were, and how inferior we were to the students at West Point. Yes, it confused us too. But the class was required and the professor didn’t care if we did any actual work, so we kept showing up.

One day the professor paused after an impassioned burst of disgust, in which he had uttered the word “extirpate.” He then stated that none of us probably knew how to spell that word, let alone what it meant. He paused again. I thought maybe he’d realized that this wasn’t an English class after all, but was instead History, and maybe he should talk about the Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act or something. But he continued to look at us as if we had fed his dog a poisoned toad, so I spoke up and spelled the damned thing for him. After flash of aggravation, he riposted with the equivalent of a schoolyard challenge, “Sure, you can spell it. But I bet you don’t know what it means!”

I gave this boob the definition of “extirpate.” He grunted like an alligator that’s been kicked in its scaly green scrotum, paused another moment, and went on painting his word picture of the glorious West Point quadrangle. If I recall, I made an A in that course, and I earned a memory to hold dear throughout all the subsequent years.

Until last week, when at the grocery store I ran into a college classmate I hadn’t seen since graduation. In fact, we barely recognized one another. But after we’d each bragged about our jobs and families and so forth, we naturally reminisced about college. And I brought up the “extirpate” incident with a certain amount of glee. As I began to remind him of the details, an uncomfortable feeling arose in my belly. My friend was not nodding at me in shared joyful recollection. He was squinting at me in puzzled incomprehension and possibly suspicion that I might be on drugs. I asked him what was wrong. Didn’t he remember this blow that I had delivered on behalf of all us moderately annoyed students?

He remembered it. But he didn’t remember it the way I was describing it. He maintained that the professor never talked about West Point. He talked about Notre Dame. In each class he only spent 30 minutes talking about how stupid we were. He then spent 30 minutes talking about actual history, and 30 minutes talking about his investments. He was especially excited about silver, and he advised us all to buy it quickly while it was still at $20 per ounce. With regard to the incident, the professor did make a “spell extirpate” comment, and I had taken the challenge. But as I spelled the word correctly, most of my classmates lounged behind me rolling their eyes. The professor did not issue a ringing challenge to define the word. He mumbled a “probably don’t know the meaning,” and without pausing he drowned out my definition with some bullshit about the New Deal, ignoring me as if I were an aggravating freshman. Which I was.

As my classmate’s re-sculpting of the past sank in, I felt as if I’d just discovered I was nothing but a six foot tall Ken doll. This had thrown my entire history into question. Not just my college history. Everything was uncertain. If I was so mistaken about the “extirpate” incident, what memories could I count on? And memories are important. I felt sure about that. Almost my entire understanding of my existence depended on my memories. In fact, everything except the moment that is currently in progress is nothing but memories.

I sat down in the produce aisle, squishing two grapes and a kiwi with my right buttock. I began hyperventilating. My friend couldn’t find a paper bag, so he tried to help me breathe into a plastic produce bag. I inhaled the plastic and almost suffocated. While I was blacking out, so many things became clear to me. I recalled the dozens of times I had felt sure my wife was crazy for telling me I’d seen a movie, when I knew perfectly well I hadn’t. She hadn’t been crazy after all. I had just failed to grasp the reality of my own existence. When I’d met people from a recent party, and they looked at me with admiration because I’m such a fun guy—those looks were full of something other than admiration, weren’t they?

Shit. I owe my sister a whole lot of apologies.

When I got home from the hospital I sat in my office, reconstructing my entire life from a whole new perspective. I wondered if I could buy “Sorry I was an unfathomable jerk” cards at a quantity discount. After a time the uncertainty made me want to move into a mountain cabin and grow a beard that could be woven into a bathmat.

And then I grabbed for a branch of sanity. I got on the internet and looked up that surly squid of a history professor to see what had happened to him. It took a while, but I tracked him down in an insignificant article from an obscure newspaper. A number of years after I graduated, he was “arrested after a student claimed he had tried to lure her into a prostitution ring.”

Ah, salvation. Although the charges were later dropped, this fact halted my memory’s mudslide into oblivion. If I’d been right about that bastard, maybe I could count on some of my other recollections. I launched another Google search and found the official definition of “extirpate.” It was close enough to the one I’d flung at that unwholesome chunk of liver in a tacky JC Penney sport coat. “To exterminate; to do away with.” As in to extirpate my sense of existential panic. At least I got that right. Who knew what else I could salvage?

But for now, I have to go apologize to my wife for bitching about all those movies I “never saw.”

I think that a Rolex watch is a foolish thing to own, so I guess it says something that I own one. In my defense, I didn’t buy it. Some nice people gave it to me as a gesture of appreciation. But now I own it, and I have to figure out the proper way to use it. I can’t bring myself to slap the thing on every morning and wear it to the gas station and Tom Thumb and the donut shop. That seems massively ostentatious, right? But I don’t want to wait until that date where I try to seduce some exotic, European babe and assume that flashing the Rolex at the critical moment will clinch the deal.

Over time I’ve figured out that the only way I can use my Rolex is to distract people while in the process of intimidating them. I know that sounds stupid as hell. It sounds stupid as hell to me. In fact, I was shocked and a little horrified when I discovered that my Rolex can be used in this manner. But it seems to work.

I have to be wearing my intimidation suit to properly employ the Rolex. If I’m wearing jeans and my Hoops and YoYo t-shirt, intimidation is pretty much out of the question. But I will put the intimidation suit on when I anticipate I’ll need to intimidate someone. It works equally well on surly mechanics and corporate executives. This also sounds stupid, I know. But it works as well as an alligator chained to my wrist. My intimidation suit is a non-flashy gray suit, light gray shirt, and plain tie running from light gray at the top to black at the bottom, plus some expensive Italian shoes. Who the hell knows why this works? I do know that a pop of color, like a Jerry Garcia tie, makes you seem human. And if you wear all black, then people think you’re from a bad gangster TV show and ignore you. Maybe this gray get-up says, “I’m not trying to make an impression on you, so you’d better be impressed by the fact that I’m not fucking around.” I just have no idea.

This morning I put on my intimidation suit and my Rolex. My mom broke her femur a month ago. Her femur, like the rest of her, is 75 years old. It broke kind of like a handful of dry spaghetti. So her past month has been hospital, surgery, hospital, rehabilitation center, nursing facility, home like a god damn moron, same hospital, different nursing facility. The place she’s at now is far nicer than most of the places I’ve lived. It has a phalanx of nurses, hot and cold running physical therapy, breakfast areas, reading nooks, wireless internet, a hair salon, and a damned player piano in the lobby. My mom of course refers to it as a “place of horrors.”

Despite the grandeur of the amenities, I had some insurance questions to ask on my mom’s behalf. I needed the answers pretty quickly. I was there last Thursday, so I went to the receptionist and said, “Hi, who can answer some insurance questions for me?” She said that the Business Director was out, but she’d pass on a message and the Business Director would call me back. No sweat. As the receptionist bent over the message book, revealing her Brown #7 dyed hair pulled into a bun tighter than my rectum, I began spelling out my name for her. She broke in, “There is no need to spell it. I am an excellent speller.”

Well, my name has often been mangled, but what the heck. It looked like she was getting it right, and we were all friendly. Hell, the piano was playing Rachmaninoff in the background, so who could get upset? She proceeded to explain how to properly underline the small “C” in my last name, evidently assuming that I needed help writing my own name. She began to remind me of my worst English teachers crushed together into a size 16 rectangle with arms and a head bolted on. But, I was being nice, so I thanked her and left.

Yes, I received no call that day.

I called back the next day, and I again spoke to Frankenstein’s English Teacher. I asked for the Business Director, and she told me that said person was on vacation that day. This was the second day of my efforts, and I was being nice. I politely asked whether anyone else in the building knew enough about insurance to help me. She told me, in an equally polite tone, that she’d pass the message on to someone else in the office.

You guessed it, no call that day. I called in the afternoon, and Frankenstein’s English Teacher told me that everyone was in the staff meeting, but she’d pass on the message. An hour later I called back, and Frankenstein’s English Teacher told me everyone had gone home, and that no one from the Business Office would be there on the weekend, but they’d be back Monday and she’d pass on the message. I refrained from saying that clearly no one from the Business Office was there on business days either.

Clearly I needed to change tactics. I needed the intimidation suit.

This morning at 9:00 am I was standing at the reception desk, clad in the intimidation suit and sporting my Rolex. In my most business-like, cordial, and “you should in no way consider me your friend” manner, I asked for the Business Director. Frankenstein’s English Teacher looked at me with doubt and asked who I was. This is common when wearing the intimidation suit. People think you’re there to audit them, or sue them, or maybe give them an unpleasant medical examination.  I explained who I was, and she relaxed, telling me that everyone was in the staff meeting. It would end at 9:30 and she’d pass my message on to the Business Director. I said that would be fine, and I thanked her in the tone that a lion would use to thank a wildebeest for wandering around on the veldt.

You may wonder why I wasn’t yet actively intimidating, or maybe screaming and throwing things. That’s a great question. I’ll answer it in a moment.

By 10:00 am I had received no phone call from the Business Director. I asked my mom to excuse me, and I walked to the reception desk. I picked up speed as I got closer, so that by the time I arrived my Italian shoes sounded like Joe Frazier punching the heavy bag. I interrupted Frankenstein’s English Teacher in the middle of whatever bullshit she was doing and said in a crushed gravel voice, “I’d like to speak to the Business Director.”

She said, “Oh, she’s on the phone dealing with a resident issue right now, but I did pass on the message.”

This was the most delicate time in the intimidation process. I had to handle it just right. I had to show that I’d had enough of this shit and wasn’t going to put up with any more. But I also had to show that I was not out of control in any way, so that if I possessed the means to hurt them I would have no problem employing those means with dispassion and efficiency. But most of all, I had to make it evident to them that THEY HAD DONE WRONG.

I leaned on the desk, subtly flashing my Rolex, and raised my voice somewhere between speaking and shouting. I said, “I do not intend to wait for her. I’ve been put off since last Thursday, and I am not happy about it!”

I know that sounds weak. But consider that I was leaning forward and looming above her, I had pulled a moderately furious expression, and my tone of voice sounded the way a shark must sound when its eyes roll back. It was important that I speak no words that were improper in any way, while I put serious threat into my body language and tone.

Frankenstein’s English Teacher’s eyes flicked to my Rolex. I swear they did. She sure as hell didn’t want to look me in the eye, because I was mad and she knew I was mad for a good reason. And if she wasn’t looking at my eyes, she had to look somewhere, and my watch was the sparkliest thing around.

She began explaining and apologizing at the same time. I turned my back to her as she was babbling and stalked away to a chair across the lobby. I sat in the chair, pulled out my phone to check messages, and pretended that she didn’t exist.

Forty-five seconds later she scurried over to me and said the Business Director would be with me in just a minute. Thirty seconds after that she invited me into the back office to meet with the Business Director. As she did so, I smiled at her and thanked her with all the sincerity in my being.

What the fuck? Why did I do that?

I was walking the fine line of intimidation. When people are doing wrong, and they know it, that’s when I have to give them negative feedback. If they don’t know they’re doing wrong, raising my voice and so forth will do no good. But once they start doing what they should do (such as finally letting me speak to the god damn Business Director), that’s when I need to give them positive feedback. Then they’ll want to start doing the things I want them to do.

Is it sneaky? You bet. We’re talking about intimidation here, not the three-legged race with your sweetie on Fourth of July.

The Business Director was a harried young woman sharing a tiny office with two other people. I immediately felt sorry for her. Then I metaphorically slapped myself around and focused on intimidating her. Apparently Frankenstein’s English Teacher had started the job by telling her about me—she looked terrified of me already. So I gave her a business-like smile that promised to smash her into splinters if she disappointed me, and I shook her hand. As we shook, she addressed me by something that was absolutely not my name. This thing and my name didn’t even have any letters in common. I corrected her, and she said that Frankenstein’s English Teacher must have written it down wrong.

“Really? I’m surprised since she’s such an excellent speller,” I said. I couldn’t resist, and the Business Director tried a smile that made her look as if her husband had just bought an emu farm.

Over the next five minutes she answered all my insurance questions. With each answer I became more polite and understanding. By the end of the conversation I had my answers, and we were both smiling and relaxed. I saw her about to stand and get me the hell out of her minuscule space, so I said, “Just a moment. I have a couple of other questions.” I swear to God, she glanced at my watch. Is it an expensive watch? Or is it a cheap knock-off of an expensive watch? As if it matters one damned bit.

I asked her who to talk to about food. I asked who was in charge of medication. I asked about therapy, diet, and transportation. Over the next couple of hours I talked to all of those folks, and I was as nice to them as I could possibly be. They had never done anything wrong by me. They were doing exactly what I wanted—they were talking to me and giving me answers. But I got the sense that they all expected to see me coming. By afternoon, I suspect the people running that facility knew I had been there.

So, this was all great. I got to intimidate, and I got to flash my watch. It was a fantastic distraction from the fact that I didn’t accomplish a fucking thing this morning. My mom’s hardly eaten in a month, she only gets out of bed when threatened, she’s not much stronger now than she was just after her surgery, and the whiny twit doesn’t want to do a damned thing to help herself if it causes her the least discomfort. The doctors and therapists are on the edge of giving up on her. I can intimidate answers out of people all day, and I still won’t have the answer to that problem.

I am a connoisseur of failure. I appreciate failure all across its breadth and depth, from the most innocent gaffe to the catastrophe of shrieking magnificence. Success never tells me who I am. But when I’m crushed by an avalanche of failure, then I can see myself with frigid clarity.

Failure hurts like drinking molten lead. I don’t love it. You’d be crazy to love it. Some people may seek out failure, but nobody loves it. Success is a lot more laughs. You don’t get congratulatory cards for failing to graduate high school, for not making it to your wedding anniversary, or for not getting that big promotion. People tend not to appreciate failure just because it hurts, it’s unpopular, and it sucks.

I feel qualified to speak about failure because I’ve had a lot of it. I dropped out of college like a dope. I pursued a string of one-sided romantic relationships with women who couldn’t distinguish me from a mail box. I got married and then divorced in an impressive 18 months. I lost my business, went bankrupt, and lost my house along with nearly everything else. The year I turned 30 I made less money than I did the year I turned 17. I delivered stage performances that made the audience resemble lizards in a hard freeze. I failed in my efforts to help dozens of family and friends, resulting in everything from having to flush a radiator all the way up to death. Believe me, I know failure.

When people are asked how to fail, they often say something like, “You just screw up.” There’s a certain purity to this answer, but otherwise it’s stupid. In fact, I can fail in six ways. I can fail by setting my goals so obscenely low that even if I reach them I’m still considered a big failure. Or, I can set my goals so staggeringly high that God himself would have to come down and alter the laws of the universe for me to reach them. That guarantees failure for me.

Even if I get my goals right, I can still fail by not paying attention to the details. For example, my car may never reach its destination because it ran out of gas, due to me daydreaming about the Cherry Slushee I want to buy and never looking at the gauge. I can also fail by paying too much attention to the details and forgetting what I’m trying to accomplish. Maybe I drive flawlessly, but I end up at the fabric store, not a promising venue for iced cherry beverages.

Failure is scary, so it may seem odd when I promise you that being terrified of failure is a sure way to fail. Failure is kind of like a horse. If it senses you fear it, it will turn on you, buck you off, chase you, bite you on the arm, and shit on your rose bushes. If I fear failure, I won’t be able to think of anything except failing. Then failure becomes inevitable.

And the last way to fail is to embrace failure. That certainly sounds nuts. But embracing failure is when I try something that I think I can do—maybe—but that I’m not sure I can do. Sometimes I achieve things I didn’t expect. Sometimes I fall straight onto my ass from a moderately great height. But if I’m in the market for failure, I think this is the best buy.

Say that I have walked one of the six paths to failure, and now I have stumbled into a smelly, leech-infested thorn bush of non-success. Now I have the chance to see who I am and what I can learn. But a huge barrier squats between me and all this good knowledge. That barrier consists of four words, and when they come out of my mouth they sound like, “It wasn’t my fault.” Do not misunderstand me. I would adore it if none of my failures was my fault. I’d throw a party. I’ve often claimed that my failures were somebody else’s fault. I was dumb to do that, because when I claim that a failure was not my fault I’m also admitting that there’s not a damned thing I can do to prevent it from happening again. If I had no hand in it happening, then I can’t do anything to fix it. I’ve had to admit that my hideous failures were at least partly my fault, or else I could look forward to them happening again and again until I die.

I despise it when I fail, but I’ve learned to savor failure itself and the happy toys it brings to the failure party. Embracing failure can be particularly sweet, because I’m going out and doing it on purpose instead of stumbling into failure like a toddler in a room full of coffee tables. So I shoot for a little failure occasionally, because now and then it’s nice to see what I look like.

They won’t let you cut out a guy’s kidney unless you have a college degree. I asked. And it has to be a medical degree. Medieval Russian Literature won’t convince them to let you scrub and order a nurse to hand you any of those obscure, scary surgical instruments. So, if you want to do something like this, I recommend snagging a college degree or two. Even if cutting out kidneys holds no appeal for you, a degree looks really snappy on a resume. It gives you something to list below your first job at Hobby Lobby and above your personal interests in Angry Birds and pornographic origami.

Keep in mind that if you don’t want to do something specialized like medicine, the exact type of degree may not matter much. I personally went for one of those degrees that makes some people say, “What do you expect to do with a degree in THAT?” Now, I would like you to please do me a personal favor. The next time you hear someone say that to a kid, look around for the heaviest thing you can lift and hit that person on the knee with it as hard as you can, because he is a damned moron who deserves to limp for the rest of his life.

I’m not the brightest guy on my block, but my degree never kept me from getting a job. Think of an employer’s problem this way. Employers only hire when they’re in pain. If everything was fine and they weren’t in pain, they’d just keep the money and not hire anybody. Now, if you were in pain, say from your hand being crushed in a car door, would you care whether the guy running towards you was a certified mechanic?

If you’re considering college, I’d like to share a little of my perspective. During my years in college there were facts being tossed around by the bushel basket. But in the end I learned only three significant things.

First, I learned what makes soap work. I mean how soap works from the chemical standpoint. I won’t go into the details, but this is the coolest piece of knowledge ever, and learning it justified every dollar and every hour I put into college.

The second thing I learned was almost as great. One day I was walking through the Student Union. That’s the place on campus where guys go to pretend to study while they look at pretty girls out of the corner of their eye. A crowd blocked the hallway, and I saw that the dean of my university was giving a speech. I had never before heard him speak nor even seen him in his actual flesh. Then I heard the golden, magical portion of his speech. He explained that he, the administrators, the professors, and the staff were the university. The students would come and go—we were transitory, and when we moved on the people who ran the place would still be there. We, the students, did not count—and we’d damned well better not forget it.

That did make me cock my head in a Scooby-Doo moment. But the more I thought about it, the more I wanted to kiss the man right on the mouth. Oh, certainly he was a nasty sack of moose piss, but amidst his mean-spirited locust swarm of a diatribe soared a single white dove. That dove landed on my shoulder and said to me, “Grow the hell up.”

The third thing I learned was, oddly, about learning. Sometimes people call universities “institutions of higher learning.” People do not call universities “institutions of higher teaching,” and there’s a reason for that. University professors will point you in generally the correct direction, but they have better things to do than spend a bunch of time teaching you stuff. It’s your responsibility to teach your own damn self. During my college career, the occasional dedicated teacher manifested, but as a rule my professors treated students the way alligators treat their young: “There’s the bayou, kid. Either teach yourself to hunt or get eaten by a muskrat, I don’t give a shit which.”

To summarize, my advanced university education consisted of the lovely mystery of soap, the revelation “Grow the hell up,” and the directive “Teach yourself if you don’t want to remain as ignorant as a sack of rusty screws.” Everything else was secondary, although I admit that lots of it was interesting.

I consider it all to be time and money wisely invested.

When I decided to become a writer, I received a license to whine. More correctly, I gave myself a license to aggravate everyone I know with my whining. They can’t shut me up, unless they want to beat me to death with my laptop and toss my body in a ditch. I think they don’t do that because I threw a great New Year’s party one time, and they’re hoping I’ll throw another one.

I whine about having no ideas, having bad ideas, not enough time to write, how much time writing takes, writing myself into a corner, hating the characters I created, having to kill characters I love, not knowing how to end a story, finishing a story and being depressed about leaving it, and reading books that make me realize everything I’ve ever written sucked. But my most profound whining comes when friends and family fail to show a slavering interest in my work and my writing process.

Perhaps a friend never gives me feedback on the 200,000 word monster I forced on her. Maybe a friend took three months to review my story, when I know that during that time he read someone else’s novel in two days. I may know that a friend read my book until four pages from the end and then let it sit on the desk for a week. Some friend may finish and point out a dozen typos, and when I press for details all she says is, “I really liked it.”

At these times I become dejected, and I whine. The fact that other friends provide me fantastic help doesn’t seem to lift my gloom.

But today I realized something. Writing isn’t an ego-boosting activity. Writing isn’t a holy calling worthy of everyone’s attention. Writing is a job. How many people have jobs about which they expect their friends to get all enthused? Sure, all of my friends read, so I expect them to be interested in my writing. But say I was a plumber. All of my friends use the toilet, but I wouldn’t expect them to get excited about how I replaced a P-trap at work today.

So I’m resolving to whine less and work more. Perhaps my friends will stop pretending they’ve snorted salsa up their nose when I approach them at parties. That would be nice. I just have to keep in mind that when I’m writing, it’s no more than the social equivalent of fixing a toilet.

I like experiencing things more than I like hearing about them, with the exception of earthquakes and family dinners. I imagine you do too. Most people prefer to smell and taste a homemade brownie or two rather than hear someone read the list of ingredients on a package of brownie mix. I learned this rule by violating it hundreds of times over years of acting and performing improv. As my audience’s eyes rolled back and they began to strangle on their own spit, I would ask myself, “Don’t they like hearing about the gag gifts at Cousin Skeeter’s birthday party?”

Mark Twain finally convinced me that my audiences hated the birthday party, hated Cousin Skeeter, and hated me. Mr. Twain wrote, “Don’t talk about the old lady screaming. Bring her on and let her scream.” Upon reading that, I decided to do stuff onstage, rather than just talk about stuff. I resolved to take action. This began a period in which I flailed around the stage like a beached halibut as I tried to find things to do. I swept floors, I carried boxes around the stage, and I waved my arms a lot. My audiences found this as fascinating as the re-oxygenation of my blood. They hated my action.

A subsequent thousand years of humiliating failures showed me why my action sucked. My action needed a clear target and a reason to go after it. Action is doing something, true. But it’s also doing something to someone or something for a reason. For example, when the old lady screams, that’s doing something. And when she screams into her sister’s face from a distance of one inch, that’s doing something to someone. But when she’s screaming to communicate outrage because her sister just snatched away her hash pipe, that’s when action is born.

I don’t mean to diminish the importance of good dialogue. The words and how they’re said are critical. But come on—old ladies screaming and grabbing drug paraphernalia is entertainment we can all appreciate.

These days I’m working to apply this principle to my writing. I’m astounded by the scope of action I can include in a story. I can incorporate literally cataclysmic events. The closest I ever came to that onstage was me dancing in Oklahoma! But I try to remind myself that the rules of action apply when I’m writing: do something to someone or something for a reason. So when my characters just walk somewhere, that’s not action. Even if they have a reason to walk, the walking itself isn’t being done to someone. If my terrorist releases a plague, but I never show what it does to anyone, that’s not action. Sure, I can say that the plague got released, but my readers don’t get the payoff of “seeing” what was done to the victims. If my hero sharpens his sword just because it’s sword-sharpening time, that’s not action. Any of these things may be fine additions to my story, but I shouldn’t fool myself into thinking that action has just happened. I’m better off fooling myself into thinking that a third brownie is no big deal.

I find action challenging to write, just like I find action challenging to perform onstage. I could say that I struggle with action out of laziness—and that would be true. But I also struggle with it out of fear. Onstage if I talk about someone being a bastard, I can take it back later. I can distance myself. If I slap him because he’s a bastard, that’s harder to take back. I’ve got to commit and be willing to back it up in the rest of the scene.

Trying to write action hits me the same way. When my villain burns down an orphanage, I feel a little more comfortable just describing how my characters heard about the tragedy, and then letting them get on with walking someplace. Then I don’t have to commit to the reality of the action. I don’t have to write about teddy bears on fire, or the villain kicking the escaping orphans back through the flaming doorway into the conflagration.

So, those are my struggles with action, and it kicks my butt pretty often. One would think I’m the dramatic and literary equivalent of a Galapagos Tortoise. But I’ll keep working at it. It should help that I’m building up good artistic karma by never dancing in Oklahoma! again.

An example of action. You should have seen what happened to him 10 seconds later.

 

 

I once owned the greatest pickup truck on Earth. It was a three-quarter ton, 4-wheel drive International Harvester pickup the color of vomit. The bumpers had been cut off and replaced with cast iron pipes. That truck could perform any feat of hauling, pulling, or intimidating. They truly do not make trucks like that anymore, since International stopped building them 35 years ago. When my life no longer required a truck, I sold it to a good home, and I haven’t owned a pickup since.

When my wife and I bought a house, I considered buying an old pickup. Home ownership occasionally demands that I buy expensive, heavy stuff and cart it to my house, so a truck might prove handy. But we didn’t have a good place in our garage or driveway to park the thing. I suggested parking it in front of the house. My wife reacted as if I’d suggested we build a satanic temple in the front yard, adorned with fountains of blood and a few impaled babies. No particle of my being had considered that parking a truck out front would be a bad thing. So, I found myself confronted by the fact that I am white trash.

That explains a lot. I’ve spent years in academic and business settings around the country and in other countries. Occasionally I’ve said or done something that caused others to react with surprise or mirth. The phenomenon hasn’t caused me great concern, but I have noted it.

I recently read an article on this topic, written by a sociologist. She wrote about her rural-born mother, who got a job in the big city and was embarrassed at how people reacted to her country ways. The writer observed how she herself had experienced this in the past. But she was no longer ashamed of her origin because she had dropped her accent, and she been in grad school, and she had been socialized into academia. She had eradicated evidence of her origin and had assimilated into her new culture. She now felt less fear that she’d be embarrassed because she failed to blend in. But she still might slip, and that was the burden of her uncouth upbringing.

Speaking as a fellow with some Sociology degrees, let me say that no person on Earth is more pretentious, with less justification, than a student in the process of earning a Sociology degree—or than a low-level Sociology professor pursuing tenure. If we want to live and work in a culture, we should learn it until we can navigate it like a native. We should understand that cultural events exist other than the rodeo. But that doesn’t mean there’s anything wrong with the rodeo. The last time I went to the opera, nobody was selling cotton candy, and that’s hardly a big plus in my book.

I theorize that the “ashamed of our origin” problem stems from childhood. I like willful children. I don’t own one, and I’ll admit that if I did I might feel differently. But I identify with them. When I was one of them I required a lot of guidance and discipline so that I didn’t become a shrieking baboon with sticky fingers and snot on my upper lip. Of course, if I had been forced to attend today’s public schools I would’ve created problems. “Discipline” doesn’t describe what I would require. Alternative schools would be inadequate for me. I would probably end up in a forced labor camp guarded by insane clowns.

But here’s my point. If willful children reach adulthood without being murdered or sent to prison, they’re unlikely to worry about embarrassment or blending in. If they leave home for a fine university or a more cosmopolitan locale, they’ll certainly learn the culture, but they probably won’t hide their past. And any field of endeavor (especially Sociology!) is better off with some members who didn’t all throw spit wads in the same prep school.

In the end, shame over my white trash origin hurts me and also my new-found friends who brim with culture and grace. If they laugh then I laugh with them and show them I don’t care, because confidence is king. And if my paramount concern is to blend in and avoid embarrassment, I should just go back home and chop cotton.