Working my way toward a philosophy

The Column: 12.30.22

I had a dream last night in which I was a stand-up comic and I trained a dog to move his lips as if saying words and I stood in the wings and told jokes lip-synched by him, jokes about dogs (in the first person) and the audience loved it so much, to see a dog tell jokes, that when I came out on stage they were disappointed and wanted the dog to come back and even booed me. There is a lesson here: there is such a thing as Excessive Success, which only leads to high expectations that cannot be met.

This surely was true of Sir Walter Raleigh, a poet, soldier, Queen Elizabeth’s boyfriend, who sailed up the Orinoco in search of El Dorado and failed and came back to London to be accused of treason and thrown in prison and have his head chopped off, a warning to the rest of us: don’t rise too high too fast. A long fall for a great man, but he’d said as much in his lines: “Even such is time, which takes in trust
Our youth, our joys, and all we have,
And pays us but with age and dust.”

One day you’re a handsome dashing poet and pal of monarchy and the next day you’re a city in North Carolina.

Barack Obama suffered from unrealistic expectations, the first African American president, he was expected to usher in a new golden era, and look what happened. Meanwhile, Michelle Obama, in the role of FAAFL, kept a low profile and when she emerged as an author, she dazzled millions. If she ran for president in 2024, she’d win every state but Alabama and Mississippi. But she doesn’t want to; expectations are too high.

I know writers my age who decades ago were praised by the New York Times’sMichiko Kakutanias “dazzlingly erudite and lavishly layered, bold and riveting and exquisitely crafted” and they haven’t written anything since, whereas the warmest praise I ever got was “amusing but often poignant,” which leaves plenty of room for improvement. So I keep trying to rise above poignant amusement to something lavishly layered and thus my morning passes happily. Don’t hit your peak too soon, is my advice. Don’t be afraid to disappoint.

I begin every day with low expectations thanks to a showerhead in a former house, a nozzle calibrated so that a two-centimeter turn took you directly from Arctic waterfall to fiery brimstone. You had to stand under the showerhead to adjust the knob. You stepped into this shower like you’d step onto the gallows, not sure if you’d perish by ice or by fire. Thanks to this instrument of torture, I begin each day with the hope of showering without being scorched alive and leap out of the shower, slipping on wet tile and displacing a couple discs and entering a long painful journey from chiropractor to orthopedic surgeon to a mystic named Sister Melissa who uses crystals and whispers solipsisms.

This hope is fulfilled — we moved to an apartment with a shower with two knobs, one hot, one cold, and there’s no problem, and you can adjust the spray to Deep Massage, Scattered Showers, or Wistful Mist. The shower is pleasant and uneventful and from that I proceed to a day that gets better and better.

I believe in life getting better. I grew up in a Sanctified Brethren home with a plaque over the breakfast table that said, “Jesus Christ the invisible guest at every meal, the silent listener to every conversation.” Which I found frightening, the idea of divine surveillance — it certainly didn’t encourage jokes — it encouraged false piety, even though we know that God looks on the heart and can tell a fake. From there, I walked to school where bullies ruled over the playground and kids’d hold the chair for me to sit down on and then pull it away so I crashed to the floor with a helping of macaroni and cheese all over me. They’d tie my shoelaces together when I wasn’t looking. They’d throw water at my crotch so it looked like I wet my pants.

None of that happens anymore. There’s no repressive plaque over the table and nobody ties the shoelaces of a man my age. I live with a woman who can read instruction manuals and put things together and who doesn’t mind when I drape my arms around her and whisper endearments. This is what I consider real progress.

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