How to Fix Your Head

1 How to Fix Your Head Introduction I’ve always been interested in things that go wrong in life. I'm not all that concerned about the good stuff. When good things happen to people, they usually (but not always) know how to handle it. But the stories about success or good luck strike me as bland. We all develop our own unique methods, however, for dealing with the things that go wrong. Sometimes we expect bad things to happen and they do, as if we will them to occur. If bad things happen too often we grow weary of the world and become cynical. But if you can avoid weariness and cynicism, you work out wonderful and peculiar strategies to overcome adversity. Sometimes people get angry and try to fix things that are wrong with the world using the energy of their anger. This covers everything from car repair to armed revolutions overthrowing corrupt dictatorships. As the title of the book implies, however, this is a book for fixing your head, not repairing the world. So, let’s start with the basics. Your experience of living is divisible by two. There are the things that happen physically to you and there are the things that go on in your head. There’s a powerful relationship between one and the other, of course. Yet much of what happens externally you can't control, while internally, you may be able to fix your head, if it needs fixing. This is not a smug, self-righteous book pretending to have all the answers. I don’t trust those kinds of books. My grandmother Minnie taught me that you could sometimes fix whatever 2 went wrong by telling little stories. She had a great way of taking my bad situation (as a fiveyear-old kid growing up in New Jersey) and making me feel better about it by telling me about something that happened to her when she was young. Half of those stories seemed to have no connection whatsoever to my problem -- pet frog dead or scraped knee from falling off my bike - but they worked nonetheless. And if that didn’t work she’d give me a piece of Juicy Fruit gum, which was way too sweet and it would make my teeth ache from all that sugar. Sometimes, I think, the gum even produced cavities that required drilling. Yet Minnie and/or the gum made me feel better and I got on with life -- no more moping or limping until the next tragedy struck. A couple of years ago I had a family of skunks nesting in the crawl space under my old farmhouse where I live in Nova Scotia. They had squabbles and let go a stench that made our home almost unliveable for an entire winter. At the time, my two daughters, my wife and I thought this was a horrible experience. I rose to the challenge of natural adversity by buying a Havaheart trap and catching them one at a time -- with no injury to the skunks-- all sixteen skunks. I drove each individual skunk fifteen kilometres away on the top of my car. In order to avoid getting skunked, I learned to talk to them to calm them down and the work went much easier despite the day- after-skunky day Twilight Zone theme of it all. Like Job, I queried why was this happening to me. I even put my car off an icy road while driving the final skunk. The skunks not only smelled bad, they nearly killed me. But after it was all over, I began telling my skunk story to people and it seemed to bring joy into their lives. My stinky bad luck made them happy. I wrote the story and sold it a couple of times, then made a film about it called The Skunk Whisperer (that’s me), which I sold to a TV broadcaster for enough money to buy a new car -- well, a used car in good condition. Beyond that, my fame as the skunk whisperer means that people I don’t know stop me on the street to tell me their skunk story, although, most admit, mine is the king of the skunk stories. 3 Skunks have turned out to be good luck for me and that was a surprise. I learned to not only have a good attitude while dealing with the skunks but I figured out how to turn something bad into something positive. I could probably stop right there and not write a book because it all boils down to that simple bit of wisdom. But then I wouldn't have a chance to pass on my insight on everything from insects and taxes to shattered dreams and death. And I wouldn’t have this opportunity to tell my stories about all the stuff that has gone wrong in my life in hopes of connecting it in some useful way to the stuff that has gone wrong in your life. 4 Anxiety So we live in an age of anxiety. This is an old saw that has been rasping back and forth now for a long time. There appears to be no cure other than certain prescribed drugs, but I hold the patent on none of those pharmaceuticals so my job is to steer you in other directions. Your anxiety, like mine, is not totally unfounded. You feel uncertain and uncomfortable with a lot of shit happening in the world around you. Stuff you cannot control and sometimes wish you could. You have this feeling that something bad will happen -- and it will eventually. You have a feeling that something is not right. This is not like ESP on my part. Nothing is perfect. You wake up at three in the morning and feel a powerful sense of dread. Well, you've joined the club that I started when I was thirteen years old. I had a math teacher who made me go to the blackboard at the front of the class and solve quadratic equations. I did not like quadratic equations, no one does, and I would stand at the front of the class and end up being publicly humiliated, psychologically flogged by an ex-Marine math teacher who took great pleasure in this because, in a previous life, he had been an emperor in Rome and I had been a Christian. I survived that year but began a lifelong cultivation of my own small but powerful republic of anxiety. Later, after I had immigrated to Canada, I had a bad habit of accidentally referring to my native land as the United States of Anxiety. At the time of my immigration, I believed I would feel less anxious living in a foreign nation and, lo and behold, it worked. So, maybe that is one of your options. You want to do away with your personal, powerful 5 anxieties that you have cultivated? Move to another country. But I doubt that it’s really that simple. Most people pack their anxiety with them when they travel -- and heavy luggage it is. If you were forced to leave your anxiety behind at check in, flights would take off on time, require less fuel and go much more smoothly. "Did you pack your own bag?" the airline representative will ask. "Yes." "Are you carrying any explosive devices, toxic chemicals or firearms?" "I don’t think so." "Are you taking any anxiety with you on the plane?" If you are troubled by anxiety, focus if you will for a moment on something called “anhedonia.” Anhedonia is defined as the "state of being without happiness or pleasure." I don’t know if this is some theoretical extreme or if people really fall into this category. But Anhedonia is one foreign country you do not want to visit or move to. Some people make a hobby or even a career out of their anxieties and become stand-up comedians or annoying colleagues at the office. That’s because they spend a lot of time and effort grooming their anxiety. Probably not the route to go. My best advice is to take another path. Unlike the anhedonists (the opposite, I suppose, of hedonists), there are quite a few things that can genuinely make you or me happy. Respond to anxiety, for example, by treating yourself to some small or large sampling from that quiver of possibilities. Some people say ice cream cures them of anxiety. Others say tennis. Drugs and alcohol may postpone the anxiety, but it will usually be there waiting for you when the potions wear off. When I was stuck at the blackboard with Mr. Milbut slamming his pointer stick down on his desk and calling me names because I did not know what X meant in the rococo equation on 6 the board, I had no way out but to focus on something that made me happy. In those days the thing that made me happiest was getting out of school at the end of the day. It was like a potent euphoric drug that actually worked. I was Pavlovian about it. The bell rang at the end of last period and then a great smile cracked my solemn face wide open and I was high on life. So, standing at the blackboard before my peers, having my personality assassinated by the ex-Marine math teacher was survivable because I could hear the bell ringing in my head and I was free. I was no longer a prisoner of math. Now I know that some anxiety runs deeper. You may not be able to verbally express it, but it is possible that your anxiety comes about because you have lost conviction in the so-called meaning of life. You have a gnawing sense that it all adds up to squat. You are a bug on the windshield of time. A fly about to be swatted by the heavy flyswatter of mortality. You are insignificant and every thing you have done is insignificant. We all say this to ourselves in different ways at certain points in our lives. "I'm really no good at golf," a voice in your head might squeak, or "Maybe there was no deep meaning to Flashdance after all." One thing leads to another in your tortured mental wranglings and you end up surmising there is little or no meaning to existence. Then, my friend, you are in deep philosophical scat. If you can't smack yourself on the head and go back to sleep, if you can't buy your way out of it with butterscotch ice cream, if making a list of all the good things in your life does not take it away, then you have moved from mere anxiety to anguish. If you've selected the extra large, double or triple dip of anguish you may be suffering from what philosopher’s call “existential anguish.” Existential anguish is where all the great writers and the artists of the world have gone when they’ve stared down their lives and accomplishments and discovered it was little more than "dust in the wind," as they said in the old Kansas song that I still have kicking around on an eight-track tape. Now, most of us don’t come right out and say, "Why do I exist?" all that often. This 7 would sound foolish in the kitchen when you are taking the lasagna out of the oven, or at parties where your friend wants to talk about mutual funds or feng shui while you want to revisit the meaning of the universe. (I’ve been there, so trust me.) At work, the meaning of existence topic could lead to arguments with the boss, more paperwork, or missed deadlines. Worse yet, it could possibly lead to bringing in one of those experts who teaches everyone to be a team player by rolling out a giant sheet of plastic with blocks painted black and white where humans become tokens in some communal game that is supposed to teach a lesson about life. No, you probably have to work out your existential anguish on your own. If you have some fundamental belief in higher powers and cosmic design, go with that, but you probably wouldn’t have been feeling E.A. if that belief was serving you 100%. So begin at ground zero. For starters, convince yourself that you exist. That’s something right there. Now I know this sounds lame but in order to feel E.A., you have to exist. Things that don’t exist don’t experience anxiety or anguish. Which of course is one positive argument for non-existence, but let’s not pursue that. So you exist but don't know why. You probably think you should know why, but no one is offering an answer that you are satisfied with. Confusion and doubt have led to where you are now. Confusion and doubt, however, prove that you are not a person stuck in any easy, fixed rut of thinking. More bonus points for you. You are out there, scraping your fingernails up against the wailing wall of reason, looking for answers. And there are no easy ones. What you have at the end of your despair, if you doubt everything, is a kind of freedom. If it all has no fixed meaning -- if there is no real answer to Mr. Milbut’s meaning of X -- then you are free to pursue your best guesses at why we are here. You are, perhaps, an end in itself, yourself, not a link in a chain (or even a link in a golf course.) You may still feel responsibility and that’s okay. You might still hang onto your job (or not, if it really sucks and you want to move your family to the Yukon and live the good 8 life). You probably will admit to yourself that, despite the fact that there may not be any ultimate meaning, the four or so tent pegs to your life are still rooted in the ground. Go find a pen and write down the things you believe in at the gut level. Some of them will be absurd and some profound but it’s your list and it will be a significant one. On my list of things to believe in are love, family, kindness, interrelatedness-of-allthings, and also surfing, the Atlantic Ocean and spruce trees. I used to believe in baseball but lost the faith along the way. I once even believed in Motorola: "Always buy when it dips," but I lost faith in Motorola kind of like the way I lost faith in the Dave Clarke Five whom I considered to be much better than the Beatles. I even thought that their lyrics were better than the Beatles -"I’m in pieces, bits and pieces" -- but I was wrong about that, too. In your darkest moment of existential anguish, the penultimate place that your anxiety will take you, you may be alone and have to stare it down on your own. This will not be pleasant but you can do it. Eventually, the bell will ring and you'll see the sunlight of the afternoon at the end of the corridor. Your feet will run down the hall and you'll take a deep breath. It will be a perfect afternoon. 9 Bad Attitude This is a big-ticket item when it comes to fixing up your head. If you are like me, you may occasionally be annoyed by people who are too cheerful. However, suppose you are on an overcrowded ferry going from, say, Java to Sumatra as it starts to take on water and go down. Things look really bleak. Would you rather share a dinghy with a pessimist computer chip designer from Taiwan or a podiatrist from India trying her darnedest to put a positive spin on a dreadful situation? "Cheerful defiance" is one of the slogans I toss off now and again to label a sometimesnecessary attitude. Some days are pure conspiracies against you and it’s hard seeing it any other way. You dump your coffee on your clothes, you get a flat tire, you get stuck in a traffic jam, the kids are coming down with the flu, your boss is more of an asshole than usual, taxes are going up. It’s going to sleet this afternoon and you have a long-awaited six o’clock dentist appointment where you know the dentist is going to announce that you have to have your wisdom teeth out. You try to tell yourself it could be worse. My grandmother Minnie, of course, had a good attitude about most everything. She savoured the things that were good in her life and dealt with all the other problems on a firstcome, first-serve basis. As a child, I was often buoyed by Minnie's positive attitude and the way she played a song called “Oscar the Octopus” on the piano. She also played “Bicycle Built For Two” and her voice warbled in that angelic way that older women had in those days, turning a song into a merry-go-round. Napping was an important survival skill for both Minnie and my grandfather, fondly 10 nicknamed Gaga by my brother and me. Even today, contemporary twenty-first century people discover that napping solves most problems. It's cheaper, less complicated and less timeconsuming than prescription drugs or regression therapy. Corporations don’t seem to get it. Executives ands CEOs go to business lunches for a break but they really should be taking a nap. Every corporation should have napping rooms for the top dogs and for the employees down the line. Now, I am sure that napping would be abused like other employee privileges such as sick days and personal photocopying, but everyone would have a better attitude. Anyway, napping is one method of improving your attitude. If I start to get a little cranky after a morning of writing, editing or pushing numbers around on a page, I take an afternoon nap. Napping with someone you love is probably even better but that may require more time. At the university where I teach there is no policy about napping, which is unusual since there is a policy in print somewhere about almost everything: 1. Bomb threats 2. Water leakage 3. Sexist attitudes 4. Representing the university abroad 5. Smoking 6. Loud music 7. Tenure. But they have nothing about napping. Which is good. Faculty members can embrace the ambiguity for once and nap in their offices if they like. But there has to be more to life than a good nap, you must be saying. Yes, life will throw many punches at you and you will dodge and weave like a good pro bantamweight boxer set up 11 against a Sonny Liston heavyweight. But sometimes a negative turn of events will simply knock you down. You’ve been delivered a knock-out punch and the ref is counting above you. The crowd is cheering for your defeat. Well, embrace the bottom-most rung of the ladder you are clinging to, I say. Lick the basement floor with your tongue. If you are really not ready to have a positive attitude, don't fake one. And that means wallowing. Not for long, but long enough, as Minnie would say, "to get it out of your system." Don’t suck it in; admit failure, impossibility, unfairness, cruelty and injustice. Tell your woes to anywhere between two and five people but no more. After that, you become charmed by your story and keep telling it over and over like Coleridge’s Ancient Mariner and you shouldn’t do that. If you are alone, sulk. Or continue to nap. Then have a cup of dark roast coffee from Costa Rica and stare life straight in the teeth. And get one thing right. That’s the ticket. Just one thing. Even if it’s merely nail clipping. Do it well. Don’t screw up. Take off your shoes in your office, if need be, and clip your toenails like an Olympic nail clipper. Let the little sharp nail clippings zing around the room if you must. But do this one thing (and it could be anything) with your full attention as if this is what you were put on earth to do. When that task is accomplished, your work will be world class if you have the right utensils -- please don’t use scissors or the company paper cutter (ouch). Choose another small task and launch into it with the same or double the gusto if the coffee has kicked in. (Make sure none of the nail clippings ended up in your coffee.) Send an email to a friend on company time. Pamper yourself here. Write a really great e-mail to someone you’ve been meaning to contact. Say nothing dark. Be positive. Positive words keyed into a computer trigger endorphins in your brain. Speaking of endorphins, I once wrote an e-mail to a friend with cancer. I spoke there too about endorphins except I type fast and sloppy and, after that, I did a hasty spell check while on the phone to the 12 Purolator man. I ended up writing to her: "It will trigger the dolphins in your brain." The error cheered her up immensely. This goes to show that even typos can create a positive attitude. Next, you need to get back to work or to life or to whatever occupies your time. You are feeling better. You have a somewhat good attitude. Keep a list of all the things you’ve accomplished with your new attitude: 1.Toenail clipping 2.E-mail to old friend 3.Successful cup of coffee. Build on this mini-empire of good tidings and good attitude until you discover you are tackling monumental problems like plugged toilets or policy planning meetings with great aplomb. Others will be wondering, "How does she do it?" or "Doesn’t he ever have a bad day?" If it’s raining, remember that rain is good for the plants; if its sleeting, it will soon melt and that will be good for next year’s plants. If you just lost a year’s work to a virus accidentally e-mailed to you from the friend you wrote that cheerful letter to, admit that it's a good reminder to back up everything twice and that most of what was lost was not nearly as good as the work you are about to do in the upcoming year. My litmus test for attitude often involves surfing in the winter. The air is cold (minus 10 degrees), the water is cold (about freezing) and, when I wipe out, I get an ice cream headache -- a powerful, brain-shredding physical pain. I avoid it at all cost but when I fall off my board, I suffer; while suffering, however, I allow the boyish voice in the back of my skull to remind me that I have been here before. It will go away within seconds and everything will be okay. If I'm down in the water and another monster winter wave is about to thrash me and send me back to the depths, I curse out loud or just inside my skull if I don’t have outside air time. 13 Whenever you can get away with it, you should shout out loud your anger or pain. This does not go over well at those policy meetings so you have to be somewhere private and safe -for me, it' here getting thrashed around by North Atlantic waves in Nova Scotia in January. No one would begrudge a little bad language on my part in this circumstance. Now here's the interesting part. After the winter thrashing, after the cherry bomb explodes in my head, after the ice cream headache fades, almost every fibre of my being says, paddle ashore, go home; get the hell out of the ocean. But I know that if I do that, I go home defeated -- by waves, by life. My self-esteem is shattered and I will have a negative attitude toward other challenges like trying to figure out how to use the remote to the new DVD player or what to say to my publisher about the unfinished manuscript. So I get back up on my board, back up on the horse that threw me. When I’m down, when I’m suffering, when all hope of sanity is being skewed by the sea, I don’t fight it. I let go. Then, as soon as I’m back on my waxed nine-foot board sucking oxygen into my lungs, I retool the electro-chemical pathways of thought. I put a good spin on it all. And I don’t try to bash away at the big waves plowing shoreward right then. Like it says in The Art of War, there are definitely times for retreat; you do not want to try to win all the battles. You pull back, you save your energy when the forces are too great against you. Wait for the favour of the elements around you. Then push for your advantage. I scramble back up on my board and wait until there is a lull, and there will be one soon. Then I paddle back out to sea and catch one, possibly two of those pristine blue, ice-cold freight train waves of winter until I am totally stoked. No longer a suffering surfer, I am again a happy dude, even if there are stinging ice pellets pelting me in the face, driven by the north wind howling down from the Arctic. And I am fully aware at that moment that I am fully alive. 14 Bad Jobs There are a number of things you can do if you’re stuck with a bad job. The easy way out is to quit. Hey, it's your life. On the other hand, sticking out a bad job builds character. It's good to have a bunch of really bad jobs when you are young so you have them in your head as reference points later on in life. I was a janitor in a nursing home for about five years off and on. I had my own mop and bucket on rolling wheels and when some old sad guy threw up in his room I was called over the p.a. and the whole place knew that I had to clean up puke. Even the cute girls who worked there knew it was me cleaning up the vomit. I knew it would build character. I also knew I was not going to have a mop and a bucket my entire life and I would look back fondly on this job (as I am right now). The best part of my Joe job was that I got to talk to all the old people and they taught me stuff that regular adults were too scared to tell me. Many were about to die and they told me the truth because I had absolutely no authority in the nursing home and they had nothing to lose. It didn’t matter if I thought they were crazy. I loved a lot of those old people and danced with some of the eighty-nine-year-old women in the "day room" until some well-meaning nurse reported me to the boss. Her report said I was mentally unstable, but the boss -- an older woman herself -called me into her office and said she didn’t give a rat’s ass what the nurses thought about my mental stability. If I was crazy and enjoyed dancing with old women, then that was a really good thing for a janitor in a nursing home. I once loaded trucks in the middle of the night, too, and some of you know where that’s at. Everybody where I worked hated their jobs and that was another good reference point. I 15 earned some money and went back to school and was glad to have that experience stuffed in my head so that other times when I was alone hitch-hiking in foreign countries -- wet, cold, sleeping in a graveyard, depressed as only you can be in the middle of the night in Europe in such situations -- I’d remember back to my nights of loading barrels of toxic waste into tractor trailers and realize that at least I was in Europe somewhere and I didn't have to go to work loading trucks. Loading trucks gave me a chance to hone survival skills and introduced me to some sorry but interesting characters -- people so screwed up that I would use them as reference points for my life, too. So, when I've done something so stupid that even I couldn’t forgive myself, I'd realize I still wasn’t as messed up as -- let's call him Bill. That's what bad jobs are about. The worst bad jobs are the ones that pay really well. If you have one of them, you are in trouble. You've probably worked your way up some god-awful ladder of ascendancy to this place that you thought you wanted to be -- I don’t know, head of accounting maybe, and it sucks just like a Hoover. You probably have adapted your lifestyle to this high plateau of economic achievement and you’re addicted to buying expensive consumer products. You want out but can’t bring yourself to reach for the doorknob. I probably shouldn’t give advice on this one because I would always bail on those ladders things long before I could get past the third rung. But I'll say it anyway. Buy your way out of that sucker trap. Lower your lifestyle, get rid of the debts. Make sure your family is onside. Convince them. If they love you, they probably will be right behind you. Seek an alternative. The easiest way into this is to turn your full-time gig into a part-time one. So you keep earning bread but you can start living too. Money and time are part of some big human equation. For most of us, you have too much of one and not enough of the other. So let’s say you have money but no free time. Buy it back. Earn less and save some on the side. Your spouse will like you better, your kids will think you 16 are nuts but they'll appreciate it anyway. Ignore people who give you bad advice. Listen to your heart. Boring jobs pose particular problems. Usually they are boring because they are easy (no challenge) or because you have to spend a whole lot of time at meetings where almost nothing gets accomplished. Meetings are events conspired by satanical committees to make life less than it should be. Maybe you can write a really good novel at your boring job and make the time go quickly, but usually boring jobs require just enough of your attention to make it appear to bosses that you are a good worker or, worse yet, a team player. If you are reading this, you are probably not a team player unless you have created the team. Notice, I've been avoiding the cold turkey routine. Just quitting for quitting sake. Life is usually a complex array of inter-related nuances and just quitting -- the old “tell your boss to screw himself and walk out the door” routine -- doesn't work in real life nearly as well as it does in the movies. If you desperately need out, explain it to everyone, including your boss and be honest. Be polite. No kidding. Politeness works really well even in bad situations. Be humble, too. You can celebrate later, but don't be theatrical about your exodus unless you absolutely have to be. There are almost always alternatives to job traps. If yours is starting to smother you, if you are convinced that your career is a disaster, tilt your head up towards the horizon and watch for rescue. If no rescuers are coming to save you, you may have to save yourself. 17 Chaos Some people are always cleaning up and getting organized and there is a certain satisfaction in that as I understand it. But many of us cannot keep our homes, offices, yards and minds clean and orderly. By the old standards, we are somehow bad citizens and unsuccessful in that we have not been able to tame the chaos or the clutter of our lives. You’ve probably walked into someone’s house once and been amazed that it was clean and orderly. There was no clutter at all and no dust. And you thought your house should be like that. That feeling is all wrong. People who lead clean orderly lives and have homes to seemingly prove it are a menace to us all. I urge you to embrace the chaos of your life. Sure, dig out from under the mess once in a while just so you can breathe. But don’t be deluded by the CLODs (clean orderly dopes) into thinking you should join that insidious cult. A clean orderly life is a sterile one. We have evolved from creatures that lived in jungles and caves. We piled up the bones of the beasts we consumed or made ornamental junk out of them. Our ancestors were content with such things and we should not refute our heritage. If you believe that too much crap surrounds you in your house, have a yard sale. Yard and garage sales and flea markets are rituals we have created to get rid of some of our own junk and collect more of somebody else’s. Yard sales perform the valuable function of redistributing the wealth of junk that is our lives. I buy things at yard sales because they are cheap and afterwards I have no idea what to do with the stuff I bought. Some of it is so loveable that I will never part with it. My daughter gave me a present for my forty-ninth birthday that she bought at a yard sale 18 for next to nothing. It was the best birthday present I've ever received. The present was a polypore. Some of you don’t know what a polypore is but it is a large, hard fungus that grows on the side of trees as they die. I’ve always been a major fan of polypores. They look like ornamental shelves on the side of oaks and locust trees and maples. The birthday fungus given to me by Sunyata was shaped like the saucer section of the Starship Enterprise and it was nearly two feet across. It was old and had belonged to a man who may or may not have cherished it for decades. The man's wife was selling it at the yard sale, I believe without the owner's knowledge. I feel a little bad about that but I’m not giving it back. It sits in my office as a kind of fungal anchor to a pile of unpublished manuscripts. If you want to be a person remembered for how well organized and "neat" you were when you were alive, I feel bad for you. Some of us are satisfied to lead unruly cluttered lives and have already decided our offspring will be responsible for figuring out what to do with the junk we leave behind. In my life, piles of junk often represent things I intend to do. By my chair in the living room (and it is my chair in the way that Archie Bunker had his chair) are magazines that will never be read, a biography of Patsy Cline that I’ve been meaning to peruse, a fill-in-the-blank style will that has been crying out for completion, watches that need fixing, damaged sunglasses, manuals for operating several generations of VCRs, other people’s unread manuscripts, volumes about Scottish architecture, and piles of notes I write down. While sitting in my chair watching television, I jot down many forms of notes concerning things like how to end war and pollution or ideas for new novels and poems. I write down various schemes for making money if I ever wanted to get rich and the like. The clutter builds up because television provides such an intellectual vacuum that my brain teams with possibilities just to keep itself entertained. I actually like coming up with ideas while watching television, as opposed to just 19 thinking up ideas and not watching television. Not watching television is somehow more intellectually demanding and thus I don't come up with as many interesting, bright ideas. My life is as disorderly as my office and I've learned to adjust to it all. Life is complicated, irrational and chaotic but meaningful in its own way. Nothing really fits in a tidy little pattern except perhaps the curious notion that one day follows the next. Dark tonight, light tomorrow, says the weatherman. I’ll admit that we all have too much of everything. We are a consumer society but we don’t really consume that much. We buy it or accumulate it and hang onto it. Or we throw it away, which is not consuming. I like that Zen Leonard Cohen idea of living in a smallwhitewashed room (in Greece or someplace foreign) with one wooden chair and a table with a wobbly leg. No TV, no magazines, no junk. But that will not happen in my life unless I get sent to prison in a third world country. Even if I was there in that whitewashed room with not a chance of accumulating anything more voluminous than navel lint, my mind would probably want to clutter the place up with its own hallucinations of something or other -- imaginary knickknacks to keep me happy. There is a myth about leading a simple life and that myth for some requires control and order of your physical environment. I like the idea of simplifying my life. I just don’t think it is possible. Instead, I invent small silent spaces in the heart of the chaos in order to sit quietly and breathe in and breathe out. I am no longer at war with the overpowering chaotic forces of the universe, but I embrace them and chart the swirls and eddies of each paradox that presents itself. Clutter and chaos do not beget confusion and madness. They breed children with imagination and wonder. Most of us don’t really need big, clean, sterile homes to live in. We need a warm cottage 20 of some sort filled with the particulars of our busy lives with a well-worn path leading through the maze of all our junk, real and imagined. In the mass of accumulated fodder, there is information as to who we really are. You may want to eventually give it all away or leave it for your kids, but if you send it all to the dump, you may wake up one morning and not know who you are. 21 Crazy People Society in general is pretty darned quirky with its decisions as to who is sane and who isn’t. People who do physical harm as the result of their madness need professional help but the rest of us have to generally cope on our own with a handful of clues and lots of practice at bluffing that we are normal. If you spend too much time trying to figure out who the truly normal and sane people are out there you will become very frustrated. My assumption is that there are none. Everyone is crazy, each of us in our own unique way, and so let’s have a little mutual respect for that and move on. When I tell people that I surf in the winter, they always smile and ask the same question: “Are you crazy?” I lie and say not really. Surfing in Canada in January seems like the sanest thing I do. But it’s hard to convince others of that. I may think a person is crazy if she likes to listen to Buck Owens songs or if he drives a race car that flips over into the crowd now and again. A lot of folks have those legendary bad jobs and you’d have to be at least mildly insane to put up with such boring, torturous or dangerous work. I, for example, will never be an undersea coal miner like all those men on Cape Breton Island. But I will not call any one of them crazy –- at least not to their coal-blackened faces. Some street people appear to be crazy. Walking around a big city like Toronto or New York, you see people talking to themselves or saying crazy things to passers by. I’m a country person and unnerved still to see homeless people huddled by doorways begging for money. I don’t know what to do except give out quarters here and there but I know that’s not much. One 22 time, I went into a little Chinese grocery store and bought a big bag of oranges to give away to people asking for money. But I couldn’t give the oranges away. “Here, have an orange. It’s healthy,” I sais to a sad looking woman wearing two men’s coats. She looked at me and my oranges and then spit on the ground. “What are you, crazy?” she said. I tried my citric compassion on others and drew similar responses. Later, back in my hotel room with the bag of oranges, a local city person explained to me that a while back someone had given out poisoned oranges and apples to homeless people and someone had died. These people were crazy, yes, but smart. I think you should cut some slack for all the people in the world you think are crazy: your wife’s best friend, your uncle Ed, the teenage kid down the street with the trench coat, shaved head and pierced eyebrows. The kid has seen you, let’s say washing your car and waxing it and treating it like some kind of Japanese god, and he thinks you are a freaking lunatic. But he probably doesn’t say it to you outright and he hasn’t slashed your tires yet or run a ring across your freshly polished Honda. The heated debate over what is rational and what isn’t continues. R.D. Laing, that Scottish psychologist who wrote The Politics of Experience, suggested that all truly crazy people needed was a safe place to live without judgement. This would cost a lot of money but might be worth it. Instead, we try to fix people who don’t fit in and this requires a lot of money, drugs and manpower. We are very judgmental sometimes thinking people should act and think just like us. But that makes very little sense because we all think irrational thoughts and we cultivate our own eccentricities. 23 Most creative things come from the irrational mind so we don’t really want to destroy that part of our psyche or we would be living on Planet Dull. Crazy people at parties can be fun. They won’t tell you about their golf score or how their stocks are doing. They will tell you about sword-fishing or their hubcap collections. They will speak about moving Ganymede, one of the moons circling Jupiter and explain to you why it would be better living on Ganymede than it is living in Burbank or Buffalo. While I was going to graduate school I lived in a rooming house in Montclair, New Jersey. Each tenant had one room and we shared a bathroom at the end of the hall. I thought I was the only sane person in the building. Even the landlord was what I would call moderately nuts. He lived two doors over but would always drive a very large black Lincoln Continental to our rooming house to collect the rent. He made a great fanfare out of trying to park his large car in the small parking lot that had once been someone’s backyard. He had named his small company after the model of the Lincoln he drove and he was constantly lecturing his tenants about water on the floor in the bathroom. He wrote long typed letters and posted them in the hallway. They sounded like a lawyer had written them. From here forward, it is imperative that tenants refrain from creating excess water surplus on the tiles of the bathroom floor. Such conditions cause the ceiling below the bathroom facility to incur serious damage resulting in financial loss. All tenants are warned that if there continues to be a concern over excess water on the floor of this bathroom that a surcharge will be applied to the rent due in order to compensate Continental Corporation for its losses. My neighbour, a young energetic Black man who was my friend, would tear the notice down and complain that all white people were full of shit. But he said this in such a way that I knew he wasn’t referring to me. Duane lived in his one room with his young wife and they both had good jobs and were saving their money for something better by living in one crummy room like me. Duane was the best dancer I had ever known and he and his wife danced in the hall to 24 Barry White albums. I drank sweet wine with him sometimes and he told me that some day he wanted to live in Alaska. He had grown up in Newark and he never could explain to me why he wanted to move to Alaska, but it was his dream. He and his wife argued about Alaska all the time when the door was closed and they weren’t dancing to Barry White. I think they fought too but I was pretty sure that she was the winner each time so I didn’t interfere. I knew they were both crazy but I liked them immensely and we all drank sweet wine sometimes and I’d read the bathroom notices out loud in a mock Shakespeare voice until they laughed. (I was studying the complete canon of Shakespeare in graduate school at the time and trying to put my knowledge to some good use.) Also living on the hall was Angela, a heavyset woman who hated police. That was all she ever talked about –- how rotten the police were and how all cops were trying to get sexual favours from her. She listened to a lot of old Moody Blues albums but I don’t think that had anything to do with fear of the police. She was often quite irrational but was polite enough to me and I never once saw her actually go into the bathroom. Angela either went in the middle of the night or used the facilities elsewhere. So she probably was not responsible for the excess water damaging the Continental Corporation’s building. Richard lived on the hall as well, and once a week he punched a hole with his fist through the plaster in the wall. Richard owned up to everyone that he was crazy but he had a kind of North Jersey bravado about it that made it seem admirable. He had experienced a rotten childhood and couldn’t help losing his cool. He had been in many fights and now made a rule of staying in his room when he felt really mad and punching a hole in the wall instead of going out and getting into trouble. The next day, he would repair the wall with supplies he kept in his closet for that purpose. It was the old lath and plaster type wall so it was really a pretty difficult job. Sometimes Richard messed up his hands and had to lay off the wall for a couple of weeks. He was a big fan of the Four Seasons and had once met Frankie Vallee and gotten into a fight 25 with the Four Season’s manager. Richard refused to get into a relationship with a woman because he was certain he would hurt her so he kept to himself a lot, damaging and repairing his wall. The landlord suspected Richard was responsible for the excess water on the floor of the bathroom but was afraid to say it to Richard’s face. Bill also lived on the hall. Bill supposedly painted houses and came home with clothes that had a lot of paint on them so it seemed convincing. He loaned me his Hank Snow and Buck Owens songbooks and I learned how to play some truly weird country and western songs on my electric guitar, which I plugged into the giant Marshall amp with faulty circuitry that I had bought for next to nothing. Anyway, Bill was okay until he began drinking Aqua Velva. I don’t know why he liked Aqua Velva over, say, gin or something similar, but Aqua Velva was his favourite. After drinking the stuff, he’d go crazy. He’d get wobbly on the stairs, kind of ping-pong from one wall to another, and start saying abusive things about the landlord. I’d offer him a beer thinking that it might somehow forge a bond and sober him up but he said he hated beer, that beer was too puny (the low alcohol content, I guess) and it always got him into trouble. He had never forgiven Pabst Blue Ribbon for something it had made him do. And then Bill would get incoherent and walk around the house with a razor blade in his hand. Often I could convince him to go back to his room and lie down and listen to Buck Owens on his eight track player. That almost always worked. The landlord, however, had heard stories about Bill and was threatening to throw him out. Maybe then, he was thinking, the excess water problem would be history. Finally, one night, the police arrived while Bill was ping-ponging around the hallway with his razor blade. The hallway stank of aftershave. As the police arrived, I could hear Angela barricading herself inside her room, pushing 26 her bed up against the door. Richard was taking a shower at the time. Duane and his wife had the Barry White music up loud so I don’t think they knew what was going on. Bill was slicing at the air with his small razor blade and singing, “They’re gonna put me in the movies” –- that Buck Owens’ tune that would one day be sung by Ringo Starr. But Bill’s slurred singing had a menacing tone. I got involved and tried to calm him down but the cops grabbed Bill and pushed him to the floor. I protested and they told me to shut up. I protested some more when they put the handcuffs on him and I said insulting things, but one cop just gave me a dirty look as they hauled him off. The next day I went to the landlord to see if he knew what happened to Bill. “He’s never coming back to that room, that’s for sure,” the CEO and one-man owner of the Continental Corporation said. I launched into a tirade in Bill’s defence. He was employed, he was a guitar player and a nice guy when he wasn’t drinking Aqua Velva. “Give him another chance,” I pleaded. But the landlord just passed a copy of the Newark Ledger my way and pointed to a picture of Bill with the headline: “North Carolina Murderer Found in Montclair Rooming House.” It turned out that Bill had escaped from a North Caroline prison where he had been serving a life sentence for murder. I admitted that my own assessment of Bill’s character might have been flawed and prepared to leave. But before I left, the landlord asked me, “I wonder if you could tell me the truth about something. I promise if you tell me who the culprit is I won’t say how I found out.” I said nothing. “Who is responsible for all the water on the floor in the bathroom on your hall?” “I can’t say,” was all I answered. The truth was, we were all responsible, but we wanted to keep the landlord guessing. 27 The moral of this tale is perhaps the fact that the world as I know it is like my old Montclair rooming house. We’re all in the lunatic asylum and most of us are harmless but once in a while someone gets dangerous. As far as I know, Bill was the only genuine murderer I have ever known or borrowed sheet music from. When he wasn’t murdering or drinking aftershave products he seemed okay but he hadn’t been able to control his madness, say in the way, Richard could. Richard had a system. Duane and his wife had a system too. I don’t know if they ever worked out the Alaska problem but they had sweet wine and Barry White and each other to make each day liveable. I had Shakespeare and a Marshall amp with wiring problems. Each of us discovers what we need to get by, what we need in order to live. Some of those necessities, other people will deem as absurd, nuts, insane, crazy, lunatic, eccentric, idiotic, maniacal, deranged or demented. So, for the most part, all we can do is respect each other’s complex craziness and sometimes even celebrate it. We need to be supportive and help each other out, avoid judgments until we walk in someone else’s moccasins and, of course, we should never turn in a tenant for sloppy showering. 28 Bad Decisions It's not mentally healthy to be right about everything. Most of us enjoy being around others who are not perfect. Some people screw up all the time and that is quite entertaining but it gets tedious after a bit. You probably remember the kids in school who celebrated their accidents, stupid classroom remarks, bad grades, and bad decisions. A few went on to write TV sitcoms and some went into politics. A few used this form of entertainment as a skill to rise to middle management positions in corporations too large to care if they had wellliked bozos giving orders based on a lifetime of bad decisions. Eventually the professional baddecision artists will make a really bad decision and get fired or a bad decision gets someone hurt. You do not want to aspire to be this type of person. On the other hand, the ultra successful people who make all the right decisions are not desirable to be around for very long. So you do not want to aspire to be that kind of person, either. Instead, you should try to tough it out in the middle ground. You make a few wise decisions and every once in a while you blunder. You are human; forgive yourself as always. If you make a bad decision around strangers, sometimes you can walk away from it with no one knowing -- except the strangers, of course, but you will never see them again. If you are on the subway, in say Tokyo, and discover that the zipper on your pants is all the way down, and some people are staring at you, you can zip up and simply stare up at the little subway posters for tooth whitener and pretend to be reading Japanese. And that's the end of it. When you make bad decisions around people you know, you should own up to it, 29 however. Act amazed at how dumb you were to go left instead of right at the crossroads while you were trying to find the "shortcut" to Montreal. Like the high school buffoons, celebrate your bad decision -- but don't go overboard. Sometimes you can put a good spin on a bad decision and it all becomes worthwhile. I remember one bleak Easter weekend that I drove my family to a remote beach in Nova Scotia. It was ten miles down a potholed, icy road and when we got to the destination, the sand road by the beach that I had driven before was frozen over with a great sheet of ice. I assumed it was just a big slab of ice -- compact snow really, that was as stable as the pavement on a four-lane highway. I proceeded to entertain the family by driving our old grey Ford Taurus station wagon right across that sheet of ice. There were even tire marks on it where other fathers had driven their families across the small glacier. The Taurus unfortunately is a heavy car on its own and ours had a complement of Choyces inside as well (not that we are a large or weighty family -- but ballast nonetheless). Well, the Taurus got halfway across the ice when something cracked beneath us and we began to sink. Within seconds, the water was up to the grill and we were on the bottom of a small pond. The car was on a tilt in water three feet deep. It was brown, cold post-winter/early spring Nova Scotia water that had not been expecting a car to drive into it. My engine was still running and the tail pipe an inch or so below the water line was sending bubbles of exhaust to the surface and making an amusing sound like a large child blowing bubbles in his bath water. In complete confidence, I had made a boldly bad decision to drive onto the ice. Worse yet, my wife who was in attendance had announced only seconds before I drove onto the ice that I should stop the car and we should walk further, that driving onto unknown ice was a bad decision. My wife gave me the I-told-you-so look but the kids appeared quite cheerful about it all. Their father, the man who often gave them safety lectures about matches, sharp objects, bicycle 30 helmets and hair curlers, had just ploughed the family Ford into a pothole that had aspirations of being a lake. They loved it. They were smiling broadly and even cheering. I had flashbacks of all the other times in my life when I had got my car stuck in sand or in a snowdrift or had flat tires without spares and so on and so forth. My entire legacy of automotive bad decisions stretched out in front of me as my family had to climb out the back window of the station wagon. We all stood around the car, on a frozen empty beach far from anywhere. There was no way I could jack up the car or do anything to extricate it. We began to walk back towards civilization down the long potholed road that had led us to the demise of the Taurus. I felt surly at myself but everyone else in my family, even my wife, had a kind of cheerful enthusiasm for our plight. "We'll never get that car out of there," Sunyata said. "Maybe it will have to stay there until summer," Pamela added. "I didn’t think the ice looked safe," my wife Terry said. "But I’d driven out here before. I don’t remember there being anything like this," I said in my own defence. About ten minutes later, muddy of feet and foul of mood, I saw another automobile coming our way. I waved for the driver to stop and he did. It was a young guy, mid-twenties, wearing an old army jacket. He was a slack shaver and wore an orange hunter's toque for a hat. A cigarette dangled from his lip as if he was born with it there. "We're stuck. Do you know anyone with a tow truck?" It was Easter Sunday and we were far from civilization. The perfectly wrong set of circumstances for tow truck salvation. He squinched up his brow, thought long and hard as if trying to solve an elaborate math equation. Then nodded. "Buddy down the road has a homemade job." "Great, could you take us there?" 31 "Guess so. Pile in." And pile in we did. It was an old rusty Toyota. Japanese cars fared poorly after years of salty Nova Scotia roads. They rusted all to hell. We had had gone through several ourselves. The Japanese could solve many riddles and improve upon all sorts of technology, but they never figured out how to design a car that would not rust to pieces after a few years of Canadian road salt The inside of the car had clam buckets and shovels. A lifetime of litter filled the front and back seats. The muffler was shot and I would later notice it was an unlicensed vehicle. It was a car that a man drove to the beach to dig clams in. A clam car. Nothing more or less. And the guy driving it had the distinct look of a serial killer. I was sure there would be a rifle in the trunk. And I was certain that I had delivered my family into the hands of a very dangerous man. The car smelled of exhaust and we were urged to keep the windows open. The heater was broken so we were cold. The wind whipped cigarette smoke at me and stung my eyes. If he was a serial killer, it was his day off, perhaps to clam. We were delivered to a rural house where a man with a wooden leg was talking to an old grey-around-the-mouth Labrador dog. I explained our dilemma and he pondered the problem as his tongue seemed to count his teeth. "No," he said finally, his truck needed a new head gasket and probably wasn’t up to the job. "So you know anyone we can call?" He reminded me of the religious holiday and he studied my worry, looked over my shoulder and wondered why my family, still sitting in the semi-comfort of the rusty Toyota, was so cheerful. There was a protracted great communal family satisfaction over my bad decision. Nobody even minded climbing out the back window of the station wagon or the ride from the serial killer. The guy with the wooden leg saw my dilemma. "Oh, heck I guess we can give it a try. 32 But the truck doesn't have much compression." "Any help you can offer would be appreciated." So the family drove back to the site of the disaster with the Toyota driver and I went in the "truck." The truck turned out to be a 1962 Ford El Camino -- a half-car, half-truck invention of the 1960s. It had a jury-rigged winch type tow operation welded onto what was left of the frame. Back at the murky pond, I volunteered to go into the icy water and try to get the chain and hook around something solid underneath the rear end of my car. It meant wading up to my knees and reaching down underwater with my arms. It was cold and painful but it was my duty. Sadly, I failed miserably in my attempt to get the hook end looped around anything substantial. In the end, it was up to the guy with the artificial leg to do the task and I felt again a degree of incompetence. Despite an El Camino engine with minimal compression, the jury-rigged tow truck did the deed and miraculously my car started up. I thanked everyone profusely and gave a fistful of bills to my saviour. At first he declined but as I persisted he finally took the money and said, "I'll put it towards a new set of rings." I also gave some money to the guy who had given us a ride and he went off to dig some clams. We all agreed we had misjudged him and that you can’t assess character by the clothes a man wears, how he shaves or the car he drives. All valuable life lessons that would not have been learned had I stayed on the safe and narrow pathway of life. The mini-disaster is now, of course, part of family legend and useful fodder whenever the discussion comes around to my fallibility. 33 Other People's Success Perhaps you've admitted to yourself that you hate it when other people succeed at things. This response probably goes back to the second grade when you wanted to win the best costume contest on Halloween at some goofball event at school or maybe even your church. But you never got over it. If you had your wits about you, you would know that success rarely makes a person happier. Money, fame and all the jive that goes along with it seems to be what we all want but it is, like most other things, an illusion. I occasionally win awards or have my own minor successes in life. (And I do mean minor.) But I always find success slightly embarrassing. My successes make someone else unhappy, I am sure. Many people pretend to be happy for you. This is because we are very civilized about losing. At those writers’ awards banquets, I almost never see the losers actually fall weeping onto the floor or whine or complain or shout out that the jury was rigged. That would just prove you to be a bigger loser than you already are. Instead, like a good loser, you suck it in. There is a cave in your brain, a dark space that has cobwebs and bats where you go to sulk. When you're there you loathe many things about the world and you are certain that other people’s success is not fair. You do not want to spend too much time there. It's okay to walk through there on the way to some other cavity of your brain, like, let’s say, that great hall of nostalgia that always welcomes you with a warm breeze in your face and really great old early sixties instrumental songs with heavy reverb on the guitar. Think of how many people have become truly successful at doing something awful. If 34 you’ve ever read The Celestine Prophecy, you know what I'm talking about. An empire was created around a truly pitiful novel -- for my money one of the worst novels of all time. I even liked the guy’s ideas. He was out there in fuzzyland with whacky notions that I could embrace. Unfortunately, he created characters not nearly as lifelike as those Kodak stand-up cardboard people in the photography shop. And what about Paul Anka making all that money from writing, "She's having my Baby?" Men as dull-witted as George Bush and George Bush’s son get elected to be presidents. Well, I could go on with this but it gets depressing. Think of those who deserved success and then screwed it up so bad they ended up dead. Jimi Hendrix and Jim Morrison come to mind. Christopher Marlowe, the Elizabethan poet who gave us “The Passionate Shepherd to His Love,” couldn’t even make it past 24. (This is a guy who wrote poetry during the time of Shakespeare in case you missed my phase shift.) There's lots of carnage out there for talented, successful people who couldn’t handle success. And then there’s you. You think your life is a tad too dull and plain. You are not flying to Paris this morning on the Concorde. You will not be getting a gold medal at the Olympics tomorrow. You did not invest in an obscure genetics company at five cents a share and see it skyrocket to $70. You could go on with the list of things that you did not succeed at. My grandmother, Minnie, got up early in the morning to pick lima beans on her farm in South Jersey. She picked several baskets and was back in the house before ten o'clock. She only picked the beans in the cooler morning hours because she hated being out in the hot humid South Jersey middle-of-the day hell that summer can be if you have to pick a lot of lima beans. She’d sit in the cool basement and pop those lima beans out of their shells while my grandfather went out in the cancerous sun approaching its zenith to wrestle with something that had gone wrong with the tractor. 35 Minnie, as far as I can tell, was quite happy with her version of success. She was a fairly complex and educated person but I think her successful plan for dealing with lima beans made her happier than most people. She didn’t feel like she was missing out on a damn thing while she was down in the cool basement with the smell of the clean but sweaty concrete floor. At lunch she'd have to hear my grandfather's reports with what was wrong with the tractor and the rest of the world and she would continue to feel a great degree of satisfaction with her own version of success. If you truly find yourself wallowing in jealousy over other people's success, you probably need more exercise. You need to create small to humungous challenges for yourself and you need to confront the world on your own terms. You should determine your own self-worth, rather than allowing people you’ve never even met to do it for you. Make a list of all the good things going for you and stare at it for fifteen minutes. Then watch three really annoying sitcoms on TV in a row and realize how lucky you are that you don't have to create or watch that stuff. Drink lots of water to flush the venom out of your brain cells. Convince yourself that you are no longer in the second grade and that you should have loftier thoughts and a certain satisfaction in having succeeded in being yourself. What you need to focus on is your own success at being happy. And the next time you see an absolutely beautiful tree, ask yourself if you think that tree worries about other trees being more beautiful, taller, greener, stronger or more financially successful. 36 Shattered Dreams Now we are into the meaty territory. There’s not much way around it. Your dreams are fragile, mostly ill-conceived products of a fantasy world in which you sometimes live. They allow you to get through the mundane day-to-day stuff. We are trained from birth to shoot high and some people actually make it to the summit. The rest of us have breathing problems on the way up, slip and fall on the icy slopes or simply figure out that it’s no big frigging deal to be at the top anyway. Dreams shatter in all sorts of ways but it’s worth remembering that Scarlett O’Hara was right: “Tomorrow is another day.” There are other people just like you in the space-time continuum and many of them have lesser dreams or some have given up on their high hopes long ago. And many of them are doing okay. Before this sounds like some tirade in favour of mediocrity, let me add this advice. As soon as you fail or give up on one shattered dream, you should probably replace it with something equally impossible. Your brain needs the fire from the illusion that you are your own super-hero –- and you are, in your own way. The movie is still playing inside your head. You are the main character. There must be a plot. And for there to be a plot, there has to be ambition, heartache, failure, recovery and a head held high against adversity. So you just got passed over as vice president of Colgate Toothpaste Corporation. You’ve been working your ass off for how many years and now they gave it to some computer nerd 37 nearly half your age. My advice is that you have been shooting too low. Being vice president is just another suit and tie job with a lot of paperwork and headaches about stupid things that have to do with market shares and worries about new toothpastes using tree sap from the rainforest. Get real. Who needs that crap anyway? Perhaps your dream is shattered and your wife is providing you with some really good sympathy. You needed that. She didn’t want you to be VP anyway. Because you’ve made all the money and she did not have to work, she’s had lots of time to dabble in New Age activities. She wants you to quit your job and together the two of you could open an ear-candling clinic. Ear candling to you, however, does not sound like fun. It makes paper shuffling at Colgate look like a pretty good time. You had good coffee there and a computer with Internet access for goofing off. What to do now? Well, you could write a novel, or invent something in your basement that will eliminate starvation. Go for the latter if it’s in you. Hell, you've learned a thing or two on the way up the slippery corporate ladder. Why not use it to better humanity and the planet? But maybe you shouldn’t quit your job or move to a tree house in Kauai just yet. If you don’t think of something quickly, your wife is going to keep pushing the ear candling business, so you have to start figuring something out to offset your disappointment. Try this. Learn something new. Anything. This is just a start but it will engage your mind and other stuff will happen. Read the Tibetan Book of the Dead or James Joyce’s Ulysses. Do this at home and occasionally at work. People will think it odd but they will find you interesting. You could buy a sports car but it’s a bit clichéd and, admit it, once you get used to driving the sports car it’s pretty much the same as driving the old family Taurus wagon. The important thing is to keep yourself open to the next level of discovery. Talk to strangers on the street. Take small forays into the forest or along the coast. Try to reconnect to the person you were before you got all caught up in the corporation. (This may not work for 38 everyone. I remember some kids back in third grade who were already there; they already were corporate vice-presidents in mind if not in reality.) I always wanted to be a marine biologist. Well, not always. Up until the fifth grade, I wanted to be a nuclear physicist like Glenn T. Seaborg. Glenn T. Seaborg was my hero because he had discovered a couple of new elements for the periodic chart. Each one only lasted for less than one millionth of a second but he had done this deed and now was onto the next nuclear subatomic discovery. I felt bad because I was only in the fifth grade and didn’t have a cyclotron. It didn’t seem fair. So I read every publication of the Atomic Energy Commission out there and believed that the atom was my friend. Then some English teacher sullied my view of atomic scientists by making me read James Hersey’s book Hiroshima. After that I read more about nuclear weapons and decided on my own that nuclear weapons were not as cool as I thought. They were bad and maybe, one day, one would blow up my hometown and wreck the parking lots where I spent my afternoons skateboarding. My dream was shattered like a small but sincere nuclear device detonating over a Pacific atoll. I threw away my AEC pamphlets and shopped around for another dream in the scientific world. I soon settled on marine biology. I would be like Jacques Cousteau and sail around the world on a really swift-looking yacht doing marine biology type things with whales and dolphins and we would sail from the arctic to the tropics. We would do good deeds saving sea creatures and there would be attractive young women in skimpy bathing suits on deck (well, maybe not in the Bering Strait, but further south). Every time I swam in the ocean, surfed the Jersey shore or watched a documentary about the ravages of pollution, I was reassured that I should follow my dream: I would be a marine biologist and nothing could stop me. 39 Nothing but math, that is. Some of us writers could write entire books about the pain inflicted by math in our lives. I was not very good at math and math was never part of my quest, my vision for the future. I didn’t know that Glenn T Seaborg knew a lot of math. I though he just split atoms like a guy with a kind of hi tech gun. On the TV shows about the ocean, they hardly ever showed any one sitting down doing math. Instead, they had one-man submarines, radar, sonar, and great seafood buffets on the deck of the yacht. Math had already destroyed my love of chemistry. As a kid, I mixed together chemicals and made them foam or change colour or get hot. I liked test tubes and pipettes and beakers. I think I had a kind of glass fetish. Copper sulphate was one of my favourite chemicals because of its blue colour. I bought hydrochloric acid through the mail and melted stuff with it at home. In high school, chemistry turned into math and sucked badly. Then nuclear physics turned out to be tainted with math too and I somehow thought biology, a living science, would not be so contaminated. But I was tricked again. I had one of those philosophical biology teachers in high school, though, so he shielded us from hard science. We dug around in dirt in the woods and collected plant life. We fermented sugar and water and turned it into alcohol during labs and some of my more adventurous classmates actually drank the brew despite the teacher’s admonitions. Protected from the harsh realities of science, I garnered a small scholarship and went to East Carolina University to become a marine biologist. The university conspired to destroy my dreams first by making me take chemistry (with almost no experiments with anything that fizzed or vented gasses that smelled like farts). Chemistry was almost all math of the worst kind. The kind that gave me nightmares. And the biology courses were all about enzymes and amoeba. There were no whales, no great white sharks, no porpoises and seemingly no purpose to it. Enzymes and microbes and their 40 attempts at their dull occupations of multiplying were all about counting and math and, oh my God, algebra. I started drinking in the bars of Greenville, North Carolina with southern girls about that time because my dream was shattered. The girls all told me I didn’t have to be a marine biologist; I could be the guy who drove the boat. But it wasn’t the same. No, I would not be a marine biologist after all. I grew sullen, depressed and went to concerts by Steppenwolf, Iron Butterfly and even B.J. Thomas to get my mind off it, but nothing helped. Fortunately, for me at least, the Vietnam War was raging and I took up the alarms of my generation, protesting wherever I could, even straight into the heart of Fort Bragg in a march led by Jane Fonda. Back then I would have followed Jane Fonda into the throat of hell – this after having watched Barberella in the movies. But the protests were pure and it was political and I channelled all my marine biology disappointment into shutting down the war. So it’s clear that good things can come from defeat. If I, and others like me, had not been disappointed in science or _____________(fill-in the blank) we may not have stopped the war in Vietnam. All energy goes somewhere. It really does. So you take the enthusiasm for your disappointment, your passion for the unfairness of the system and you channel it into something else. Shop around. I eventually started writing novels because it seemed like a way to avoid math and work in general. You have a world of opportunities before you. Your so-called defeat is just an opportunity. (I know – I lifted that one from the other books about how to deal with disappointments.) But it’s true. You can’t say this outright in public because you will sound like an asshole to your friends. They too have suffered defeat and loss and gone on to simply taking 41 up something really boring like golf and collecting Dinky cars. But not you. You have been handed a piece of destiny and it’s time to shed the cocoon (at least part of it) and look around. (It’s okay. I won’t pursue the butterfly metaphor any further.) You are a man or a woman with several good years left before your body starts to give out and you can’t just take naps and watch Mary Tyler Moore reruns. And if you happen to be good at math, do me a favour and become a marine biologist. Then someday let me know what I missed. 42 Plumbing Problems Problems with plumbing, automobiles and computers require a cool discipline that is not trained by parents, schools or religions. If you have the cash, you probably should just throw the money at all three until the problems go away. But even that doesn't always work. I come from the old-fashioned school of Henry David Thoreau, which means that I pride myself in possessing a noble, often foolhardy and unsupportable, sense of self-reliance. If a faucet drips, I should be able to fix it. If the water in the toilet tank keeps running, I should be able to convince it that there is an appropriate time to run and a time to rest, cease and desist. And so I blunder on into the new century with the ambition of a nineteenth-century New England transcendentalist, a few good screwdrivers and wrenches handed down to me by my father, and a modicum of pride left intact to approach the problems of home with the same idealistic concern as I would approach finding solutions to global warming or social injustice. The Canadian poet, John Newlove, once said, "If you know nothing, be pleased to know nothing." A man who truly knows nothing about plumbing would never even consider the installation of a new kitchen sink. For many, any act of plumbing is as far removed from their possibility as splitting an atom. My problem (and perhaps yours) is that I know a little bit about a lot of things and feel I am capable of solving all sorts of things on my own. Plumbing attracts various avoidance mechanisms. I am writing this right now, for example, as an excuse to avoid putting in new taps in the bathroom. On the surface it will seem like a simple job. I’ve thought it out. I’ve bought all the parts I need ahead of time at the Canadian Tire store. This will prove itself to be a boldfaced lie before the day is out because I 43 will probably find I require a certain 1/2 inch compression fitting at about ten minutes to nine tonight, just before the Canadian Tire store is about to close. Robert Service knew that "the happy man is he who knows his limitations," but you should adopt that code only if you are prepared to let the world solve your problems. And the world will want substantial sums of cash to solve them. It will also solve them in its own good time and will sometimes create other problems along the way. This sends you back to choosing the lesser of two evils. So to get on with it. Procrastination is a first step in curing plumbing ills. If you are like me, a small part of your brain actually believes that if you ignore a problem it will go away. This does actually work in the world of social interaction -- not always, but sometimes. Some health problems go away of their own accord. Colds, for example. Or small uninfected wounds. Let it bleed a little and then allow it to heal -- in its own good time. Luck and bleeding usually doesn’t work for plumbing, though. When I installed the plumbing in our old farmhouse, I did it on the cheap because we had very little money then. A friend told me how to sweat pipes and I learned how to glue together PVC plastics and the whole shebang. I lit walls on fire with propane torches while trying to melt solder. I injured my body and my spirit in innumerable ways and, in the end, the old two-hundred-year-old house had fresh running water coming from a well in my backyard. A well that I had dug with my own two bare hands. I did hire a few kids to help dig but they all quickly grew discouraged by the project and gave up after making very little headway in the rock and gravel hillside. It is important to remember that with plumbing, things don’t always turn out right the first time and if they do, you should be wary that something really big is wrong. This philosophy is true with investing in the stock market too. It's the code of the mutable, fallible world and you should tape it to your dashboard: if it looks like you're winning, you are probably not. When I plumbed my house, I put in only one valve against the advice of professionals. 44 One valve turns the water to my house on or off. So if anything leaks anywhere, you turn the water off to the whole house. Simple, neat, cost-effective. Other, more knowledgeable souls followed the professional’s advice and put valves at every outlet. If a faucet leaks, you turn off the water only for that outlet. So today, I'll have to shut down the water supply to my entire house to solve one problem. The time frame is unclear and if things don’t go well, my household will be out of water for a long time. In my own defence, I should say that by not installing a bunch of seemingly frivolous water valves in 1979, I saved nearly a hundred dollars (in 1979 currency). Had I invested that hundred dollars at a mere 8% interest per year -- well, you can see where this is leading. I could have put one of my offspring through a substantial part of university. Unfortunately, I put that $100 towards a new surfboard, which has long since been put to rest in my basement surfboard archives. And today I shut down the family water supply for an indefinite period until I install the new taps (and new valves for each). You may think you have it bad with plumbing problems. The world was, in some respects, a happier place before modern plumbing. No one was plunging away at smelly plugged toilets in the thirteenth century. Philosophers and poets did not spend hours and even days during the renaissance trying to stop a dripping faucet from playing Chinese music into the pots in the sink. I've come to accept modern plumbing by a circuitous route that involves living with a biological toilet. In 1979, when I hooked us up to running water as noted, we did not have a septic field. Nor were there any public sewage lines way out our way. And that well I dug in the backyard was full of water when it rained and the water reservoir diminished through the summer as the rains did. So I bought a state-of the art biological composting toilet. You plugged it in; you threw in some dirt (yes, perfectly organic dirt with enzymes and helpful bacteria that 45 supposedly broke down human waste into something that could ultimately be spread on your flowers). You didn’t need water to flush the damn thing and it did not require plumbing -- just a vent to the roof and you plugged it in the wall so the fan and heater inside could work. Aside from the electric part, Thoreau would have approved. I was content that the money invested in this earth-friendly disposal system was well spent. Like Samuel Johnson said, "Self-confidence is the first requirement of great undertakings." However, both Johnson and myself were wrong. The toilet did not perform as promised in the glossy brochure. When it rained, water came down the vent, filled the tank and overflowed all over the floor, having blended with the contents of the tank. When the rains stopped, the contents inside seized up like the V8 engine of an old Chevy running without oil. I had to remove the top half of the contraption, chip away at it with a small hand axe and then remove the brick-hard contents to a grave in the forest. We lived with this imperfect device for several years. Eventually, a septic field, a flush toilet and a lot of plumbing ensued. Water moves in and out of our house now, commuting from the well to the indoors and back out to the septic field on a daily basis. No one in my household misses the so-called biological toilet. This old house originally had an outhouse that I had left standing for many years, toppling it only to make way for the aforementioned septic field -- a kind of milestone in our family history. Outside (and that’s where the “out” part came from) was certainly a better place to store your compostables while it was composting. Henry Thoreau and even Walt Whitman had been great fans of outhouses. Going to the outhouse, for many in the old days, was not just a biological function but also an event. Summer or winter, it was an encounter with the elements. A lot of real thinking took place in outhouses, I would argue, and as Albert Schweitzer has pointed out, "Thought is the strongest thing we have." 46 But here I am stuck in another, more technically advanced century and I can’t turn back. So today I will try to fix a mere leaking faucet by tearing out the entire unit and putting in a new one. Sadly, my old unit requires parts that can no longer be bought in North America. The new set of taps I notice is called "Washerless!" (The exclamation mark comes from the manufacturer, not me). What the exclamation means is that you can’t fix the bastard. It suggests that it will never require plumbing work. Hey, guys, no more replacing the washer in your taps! But the truth, I reckon, is that if it starts to leak, you'll have to put in an entirely new unit. To that end, I'll install valves beneath the sink. I have some final words of advice about plumbing. 1.)It is humbling and that is always good if your ego tends to swell as a result of favourable book reviews or a really good golf game. 2.) Plumbing requires a kind of Zen purity of thought. If you can wrestle with plumbing without getting angry at it as if it is your mortal enemy, then you are on the road to enlightenment. Think pure thoughts; take your time. 3.) Be curious about how it works. Try to imagine that you are Leonardo DaVinci confronting modern plumbing for the first time. There is a world of wonder there, just waiting to be explored. 47 Car in a Ditch Getting your car stuck in a ditch may not be common in your life but where I live it's pretty common. It's a wonderful metaphor for just about everything that can go wrong so it may be worth paying attention even if you don't drive a car. Some day you will be stuck in one metaphorical ditch or another so listen up. Driving an automobile makes most of us feel somewhat powerful and strangely invulnerable. The power/invulnerability quotient is high in an automobile and that's reason for concern right there. No one ever expects he or she will get stuck in a ditch. My gravel driveway is on a hill and the driveway leads up to my house. It used to be muddy so I paid a guy to haul a load of crushed rocks -- some chunky like the size of Timbits mixed in with the really fine stuff called "crusher dust" -- to fill in the ruts and make the surface compact. After that, I didn't get my car stuck right in my driveway anymore. But there remained a parallel ditch alongside of the driveway that had been there since the beginning of time and it had always been a hungry sort of ditch. Its job was to run water down the hill into the deeper ditch by the gravel road. After that the water would commute into the lake and then into the river and eventually the ocean where it could evaporate back up into the sky to rain down on my backyard and driveway and back into the ditch. The rain, I would expect, in its own aqueous universal mind was probably disappointed that it could no longer flow so easily right down my driveway because of the build-up of crusher dust and Timbit rocks. But there was no real ill will on my part. Now this parallel ditch seemed like the logical thing to have as a companion to a steep 48 driveway. But then came winter. Periodically, and always at the most inopportune time, I would try to back the car down the driveway as malevolent forces of nature would conspire to slide my car sideways and, as if pulled by some infernal magnet, into the hungry ditch. It's always noble to try to get yourself out of a ditch on your own. I have heavy metal traction grips to jam under the wheels and I have some old orange shag carpet that I keep standing by for such a purpose. Often, I used both and couldn’t get any grip worth speaking of. I also had to shovel a great volume of snow from around the car for the ditch was still down there under the snow doing its dirty work. For these crises at home, I have a chain, a store-bought tow rope and two long pieces of polypropylene rope I found on the beach that were once used for lashing cruise ships to pylons in port. I think having a really heavy piece of rope on hand is something necessary in this life. Sometimes I could use another handy vehicle to tow the stuck car out of the ditch. On the worst occasions, I would have to call a tow truck but not before I had exhausted my range of potential ways for one man to get his car out of a ditch. Other people drove into that ditch and got stuck too, leading me to believe I should fill in the ditch. So finally I did. The water went back to travelling down my driveway but it seemed to flow well over the stony surface most of the year and so what the hell. No ditch to get stuck in. Yet winter brings out the worst in most of us and that includes my driveway. If the temperature drops quickly while the driveway is pretending to be the Amazon -- or perhaps the Yukon is a more appropriate river -- then the water decides to stop being liquid and has aspirations of becoming a glacier. If I see that my driveway has turned into a glacier I don’t drive on it. Maybe those Ford truck commercials show people driving jeeps on the Columbia Ice Field but they have not tried to match wits with my driveway. 49 My driveway glacier is quite beautiful to look at but in order to get in my house from the road you have to walk up it. Going down the driveway is not a problem as long as you have padded snow pants and a good sense of humour. Ascending is something different. One year it got so bad that I tied a rope from the house to the mailbox. Gold prospectors who made it through the Chillicoot Pass have much in common with my family or anyone who was bold enough to visit that particular winter. Overconfident visitors who tried to make it to our door without the rope found themselves toppled and sprawled. That's what overconfidence will do to you every time: you will be toppled and sprawled. Icy driveways breed caution, a noble thing. There is some perfect balance, I am sure, of caution and daring that needs to be found in life. Most of us waver as we walk that tightrope. The world is well populated with slow learners like myself but once a thing is learned it usually sticks. Another driveway tale that I hope will be of service. Despite the Timbit rocks and crusher dust, there had never been a truly flat spot at the top of my driveway. You drove to the top, put your car in “Park’ and left it on a gentle but obvious tilt. Back when I had cars with standard transmissions, if you had a dead battery, you left the car in reverse, pushed in the clutch, let her roll, then popped the clutch and your engine started before you made it to the road below. Unfortunately, gravity has a way of tampering with automobiles left on a slope. One day I woke up to find my old Chevette was not parked at the top of my driveway. It must not have been perfectly in "Park." Incredulously, the wind had come up in gusts that night and coaxed the Chevette to roll. It went down the driveway, across the road and missed the telephone pole on the other side by a few inches. It rested dissatisfactorily in the marsh below with its headlights aimed at the grey nimbus clouds above. There was no way I'd get it out of the ditch with a come-along so I phoned Onorio and his 50 tow truck for help. On another occasion, a second one of our cars, a Toyota, also rolled. It found a large rock left over from the ice age and the car suffered a significant dent on the rear right side that prevented the back door from ever opening again. After that I schemed to create a flat surface at the top of the sloped driveway and shovelled out a small trench across it, allowing for the front wheels to sit in the scallop each time anyone drives up. When my daughter began to drive, she had her first accident late at night in Eastern Passage. As she pulled out onto a country road, she discovered she was in the path of an oncoming speeding car. She swerved to the right and went off the road down a steep embankment into a ditch. She had her seatbelt on and was frightened but unharmed. The car was planted in some soft unpleasant smelling muck as she climbed out and walked to her boyfriend’s home nearby for help. It was late on a Friday night and pretty soon a large crowd of rowdy seventeen to twenty year old guys showed up to try to help get the car out of the ditch. It was a pretty impossible situation, but it was discussed and attempted and the crowd didn’t give up until the RCMP arrived and they all disappeared into the night. The Mountie called a tow truck and eventually the car was out of the ditch. The only damage was a big dent on the right hand side in the back so that the back door couldn’t open but we were used to that in my family. Somebody stole my daughter's wallet that night while the rowdy purportedly helpful crowd was swarming around the car discussing the extrication plan. We all get stuck at one time or another. Sometimes you can get yourself out. If you are just spinning wheels on ice, use the shag carpet or toss some sand or unused kitty litter under there. I think my wife read about carrying around kitty litter for traction but it somehow seems 51 unnatural. Most people know about rocking a car back and forth to get it unstuck in ice or snow. If that too is a metaphor (and everything is) for solving other minor problems in your life, then the tactic for solution is this: try going forward, then back, over and again. As long as you have a clear path, it doesn’t matter if you are going forward or backwards as long as you get moving. 52 Failure Many people don’t like to talk about their failures and I think that’s a mistake. Failures require public sympathy but they also require celebration. Once I started publishing books and doing TV shows, I discovered myself talking about my minor successes – as if they mattered. As soon as stuff starts going well for you in life, the best thing you can do is keep your mouth shut about it. Oh, sure, after couple of beers, the odd little bit of self-congratulation among family or close friends is okay but blurt it out quickly and then move on to something else. If you begin to cut a large swath with your achievements, people will begin to find ways to avoid you. People like to admire success and good luck mostly from a distance. Even accidental success can bring problems. Winning a million dollars in a lottery should happen to those people you have never met. It shouldn’t happen to your neighbour. The older I get, the more interesting I find my failures. Things that go right don’t seem to occupy that much of my attention because usually I don’t learn anything from them. And what’s the point of being alive if you don’t learn something new every day? You don’t need Continuing Ed for this. You just need to keep tabs on your own screw-ups. Don’t punish yourself for them but revel in the wonder of this crazy, incorrigible, convoluted, unpredictable plane of existence. All failures can most likely be broken down into two categories: those that are your fault and those that aren’t. It’s probably not worth distinguishing between the two in the way you react. Let yourself scream out whatever syllables feel right when the time comes. It won’t hurt anything. You are still you and the world will go on its merry way however you react. I’ve been surfing for over thirty years of my life and a few years back I watched some 53 hotshot California surf kids doing a manoeuvre called a “floater.” It looked impossible yet these guys could do it. A floater requires that you get going fast across the face of a steep, hardbreaking wave, drop to the bottom, then jam a turn so you are going straight up the wall of water, against the forces of gravity. Then you somehow gather up all this energy and smack off the lip of the wave and end up in the sky, your feet on your board as you turn in thin air and come back down over the big foamy collapsing wall of water, hit the bottom of the wave and turn again. It was one of the most amazing things I’d ever seen in the surfing world and I wanted to do it. So I tried. I failed 439 times. That meant I tripped, miscalculated, got whopped by the lip of the wave, fell sideways, forwards or backwards -- always ending up with a good thrashing. Now, unlike the young hot shots that surf in warm water in the Pacific, I surf in the North Atlantic Ocean off Nova Scotia and most of our good surfing is in the chilly waters of fall and spring and, of course, in the dead of winter. So a simple act of failure means being chundered by the sea with all of its hard-earned, volatile indifference. And it also means getting tossed under, and held under, salt water at or below the freezing point. It’s painful, humbling but of course enlightening – as all good failures should be. I wear a wetsuit or dry suit so that I can actually survive the failures of my selected maritime hobby, but I still feel the full blast on my head and face. To try and sort out if my 439 failures were my fault or the fault of the great indifferent forces of the universe is a mute point. I failed through three and a half seasons before I could complete the desired floater manoeuvre. In the process I called myself a fool (well, my wife called me a fool) over and over. Then the water warmed up to nearly fifty degrees Fahrenheit and I kept attempting my floater right into the summer. I got hit on the nose by my board and my face swelled up. I got the wind knocked out of me by a wave or two, I chipped a tooth and achieved at least one face-plant into the sand, surfing a wave too close to the beach. I was dedicated to failing so well at my manoeuvre. All the while I kept learning from my failures, 54 learning about attitude, gravity, wave vectors, public humiliation and the fact that a forty-yearold has a harder time getting airborne on a wave than does a San Clemente youth. But then, one foggy morning, I did it. I dropped, I carved, I stormed the heavens until I was airborne for probably 1/ 900th of a second. I turned the board mid-air and I dropped to the bottom of the wave where I maintained control. I had clearly evolved into a god. The only problem was I couldn’t do this again – not the next 325 times. It was a fluke. But I was still revelling in my attempts and learning from my failures. I was fine-tuning reality and me for the perfect surf marriage. And alas, the time came when I could do the floater a second time, then a third. Now I can do it 50% of the time I try. My humanity and yours is grounded in our failures more than in our successes. Accept defeat with dignity. Smile if you can. Stay humble. Like you, I have a c.v. or resume of my accomplishments: this job, that degree, some small award like the Cinnaminson High School Environmental Service Achievement Award (for emptying trash cans after the soccer game). But I think we should keep a list of all our dignified failures. For me, there are three novels I wrote that will never be published. I failed to learn to do the Eskimo roll in a kayak (more cold water on the head). I am an abysmal player of chess, darts, pool and miniature golf. I can’t sing – but I now do spoken word to compensate. And I’m not very good at math. Remember when you were young and an F on a test felt like a stab to the heart. Parents need to be very kind and helpful with their children’s failures or you could turn sad kids into unhappy adults. Explain to them how important it is to fail once in a while. Give them a break. Einstein’s teachers thought he was a dummy. Thomas Edison’s teachers thought he was uneducable and so forth. Together they gave us nuclear bombs and light bulbs, but not 55 necessarily in that order. Hitler failed to conquer the world and we are all better off for it. Tell me if I’m lying here. You have probably beaten yourself up over failing at all sorts of things that are not really important in the long run. Do a retrospective of your failures. Make a list and see if it looks all that bad. The important thing is that you can’t garner a fear of failure because that will get in the way of eventually succeeding at all kinds of stuff. So you forge out into the world, give the floater your best shot, take whatever punishment is to be doled out and then get back on your board and try it (or something else) again. All of your friends will enjoy hearing the stories about your screw-ups and failures. You will become very popular. They’ll admire you simply because you at least attempted to do the Eskimo roll on that stormy day in the fjord in Greenland. They will love your bad rendition of Elvis Presley’s “Suspicious Minds” in front of your colleagues. They will positively revel in your investment in the Indonesian gold field where no gold ever existed. I myself invested in a company called Livent, which had a hugely successful show called Ragtime running on Broadway. Under supposedly sound investment advice, I bought it at $15 a share. It went up to $17 and then dropped to thirty cents. Then the company went bankrupt or whatever they call it and the shares are supposedly worth a penny each but no one is lining up to buy my shares. I know that public failure is humiliating but it too shall pass. One of the beautiful things about other people’s failures is that they give you an opportunity to be kind and helpful. And it will be appreciated. When you fail and are still in the mopey stages about it, watch for someone who will be sympathetic and kind. This may be the person you should marry or at least become friends with. People who kick you in the head when you’re down are out there and you would do well 56 to steer clear of them. They have never gotten over unhappy childhoods. After a good solid failure at something, whether it’s losing money on the market, a rotten turn of events at the sled factory, or your latest movie proposals to Spielberg that has gone belly up, suck on it for a short time, then distract yourself with something radically different. Count your limbs and if you discover four of them, be wildly ecstatic about it all. If you are missing one or two, announce your good luck in what you still have. Most of us will die before making it to one hundred years of age, a kind of soft human failure in itself. With life being as brief as it is, you need to get a grip on that resume of failures and flaunt it. All of life is retreat and advance, not necessarily in that order. Definitions of success and failure are part of a complex modern mythology that deserves some reflection. You might have to simply toss most of what you learned in school and on television and get down to basics. If you can be compassionate with yourself and others when things go wrong, you are so far ahead of the game that the other stuff is minor league dandruff. Settle up your accounts with your list of failures and then tally up the good things. Do your lungs still accept oxygen in exchange for carbon dioxide? Put it on the resume.