It really is all about sex and death

So if our crazy all starts from the same place, some biological imperative, what makes mine different than yours? Your basic instinct, like mine, is to survive. But survival has two aspects, there is the first part---that is the not dying part but the second and much more colorful part is the continuing the species part---rounding out the whole biological imperative. Survival means more than just not being eaten it means procreation, establishing lineage and continuity to ensure the survival of the species. You are after all just another virus.

Here is a simple equation to illustrate the concept:

Survival = Fear of Annihilation multiplied by Sex + Death

S=FA(Sx+D)

Your crazy is a function of your basic biology, in fact it seems pretty necessary, yet everybody has his or her own style, depth and shade of crazy. Crazy that gets uniquely distilled in each of us by our environments-which is to say our exposure to other people’s crazy.

For example, your first serious girlfriend got drunk at a party and lost her virginity to the school soccer star a week before you were supposed to loose it with each other, decorated his neck with hickies and on Monday you made fun of him in front of the entire class, all of whom knew the source the hickies—all, of course, but you. When you eventually do find out about the tryst, you loose all trust and faith in people, experience a sense of vulnerability (Original Sin tie-in: love object becomes food) and humiliation (Original Sin tie-in: Wow do I look like a dick, I am less than a man, I will never get laid-no sex=death) so profound that you began a fuck war-that is to say a battle royale of infidelity that would go on to shape your entire world view on relationships and how they should evolve. This created your belief in a parallel moral universe, one where you were immune from the rigors of the day-to-day moral universe where the simple folk dwell, you then begin the slow compartmentalization of people and situations that ultimately allows you to section off feelings into manageable segments thereby mitigating any potential emotional risk by creating near total control of the interactions in these relationships.

You know, stuff like that.

Anyway a broad example there just about everyone has experienced to illustrate how environment-i.e. other people’s crazy takes the basic crazy and colors it yours.

So everything really is all about sex and death-the Victorians, and the Druids, and the whores at the temple gates before them knew it-they just didn't know why.

Acceptable Lechery

I watched a guy in his mid fifties turn and stare at a girl’s ass as she walked by him. She was this beautiful Latina girl about 24. This guy was some kind of sales guy, a guy that would make Arthur Miller shudder, the kind you don't see a lot of in the city but often enough to recognize. They wear slacks, what exactly defines slacks and where they come from I am unsure, I just know they exist and these guys all wear them. Always a shirt and tie-but the kind that come in a box set from a discount retailer, you will never see ties like that anywhere but bundled with a shirt in a box and these ties are also worn by television weathermen working in small mid-western markets. The best part of the their attire is instead of a sport coat they always wear a nylon windbreaker with some awful logo for the company they represent stitched on the right breast like, “Synlon-excellence in industrial fluid delivery” Rounding out the look are bad shoes, really bad shoes, either something that looks like 80’s era Capezio jazz shoes or a thera-sneaker-oxford monstrosity with a thick rubber sole-they are a hair’s breadth from having Velcro straps. Invariably these shoes have been worn so long that the cheap leather has softened and stretched the to the point where parts of the shoe hang over the sole in a grotesque, anthropomorphic way.

So I watch this guy, a component of some out-moded shadow economy I can’t comprehend, with his giant three ring binder under one arm holding an overstuffed vinyl attaché in the other check out this girls ass, turning his head shamelessly as she walked by. I shuddered. It was simply too lascivious for me pushing me far beyond my female objectification comfort zone. It was just gross. After observing this, and having this reaction, as I am checking out her ass, I begin to ponder where I fall on that scale of acceptable lechery. How long before I’m that guy. Am I already that guy-sartorial crimes withstanding.

I recall being at dinner with a friend when I was about 20 and he was about the age I am now. The waitress comes over to the table and makes some remark that I pick out some part of and reply to with some perhaps indelicate innuendo. She giggles, we flirt and she walks off smiling. Upon her return she says something that my friend then responds to playfully, she looks at him stone-faced, if not openly annoyed and asks for his order. When she left my friend looked at me and says you see the difference, at your age it’s cute-you're a smartass at my age you’re just an asshole.

I have never forgotten that because as I get older I look for that moment of open rebuke, signs of my wiles and charm sliding into assholeness. Granted I am youthful in appearance, well dressed, still arguably have my “hottie” days, and I have stretched the latitude that brings further than most, but I must accept those days are indeed numbered.

Were you walking with the wounded or wounded while walking

I am unfixable so how did I get this way? Well searching for the “it” usually gets the same boring answer, the one that makes your mother cringe when you tell her you going to see a shrink, saying, “they are going to tell you it’s my fault” pauses for a moment and asks, “is it?”

Hmmm.

So years later it does eventually come down to the realization that—yeah it is her fault, your dad’s too, they each bring their own level of whack to your pre-verbal pure. Imbuing you with their fears and insecurities, which you go on to carefully craft into something uniquely yours and that you will pass on in some form to your own progeny. But it’s not really their fault because their parents gave it to them and your great-grand parents to your grandparents and all the way back to prehistoric man and if you want from multi-cell organisms to single cell creatures to the stardust in the primordial ooze.

This trans-generational transfer of fear and insecurity is simply based on the most primal instinct any living organism owns—survival---therefore the biggest fear any organism has is fear of annihilation-everything we do, all that we are, starts and ends with it.

Envision a prehistoric scene, a baby is laying in a cave on a fur of some sort, happy as its mother coddles it, now the moment the mother has to go off to tend to some other matter about the cave that baby is no longer the love object, that baby is food. So without her “love” i.e. protection-that baby is bear food and be sure that baby knows it-it’s instinct, it’s in there. That fear, that sense of insecurity is there, imprinted-on a cellular level, and it is not going away. That fear is in us, so really we are hardwired with 30,000 years of crazy that got us here.

The entire concept of Original Sin I am dirty because of Adam and Eve’s lapse, taken out of the biblical metaphor becomes a much more viable concept when creating a corollary to fear of annihilation as something that is carried in us from some genesis point-Eden or stardust-your call.

Now I’m not trying to assuage a millennia or so of Christian guilt, I am just positing a parallel theory that takes a provocative religious concept and tethers it to biological moorings. If Original Sin, or something that is in all of us, is really the instinct for survival manifesting itself most profoundly as fear of annihilation and fear of annihilation still lives at the bottom of every fear and therefore every action/reaction you display which colors a whole rainbow of mal-adaptive or crazy behavior.

So you are crazy, but it’s what got you this far, and yes, it is your mom’s fault.

Everything is wrong to me but everything is what I need

The morning had started at 5:30 because of my obsessive compulsive drive to keep a 40 something body at sub 8% body fat and looking like a 20 something body which acknowledges in my world, fitness and well-being as merely a by-product of vanity. All was on track as I pushed through a somnambulant haze with caffeine, until the application of toothpaste ran awry somehow bending a toothbrush bristle with enough force that it catapulted a microscopic bit of toothpaste into my eye causing me to writhe spasmodically with one hand over the burning, minty eye the other giving the finger to the heavens. “What the fuck, how does that even motherfucking happen” I whisper in a guttural throaty tone through my clenched and still unbrushed teeth, it is a deliberately low hiss as to not to arouse my sleeping wife—yes it was a quiet anger. While quiet enough to leave my wife undisturbed it did however begin to stoke my own, as of yet unprovoked but ever smoldering rage as I felt the little flashes of fire dance across the coals.

After packing all my nutrition potions-proteins, specialized fats and other requisite foodstuffs in my bag, finishing my third cup of coffee I was making my dawn jaunt for the subway to get to the gym. It is a twelve-minute walk through urban neighborhoods that comprise a bizarre collection of working poor in subsidized housing, students in $3000 a month flats, professional folks and the people out of time-the elderly who have owned their homes since Eisenhower was in office, a few cleaned-up hippies who still run Marxist societies, tenet rights organizations and other well-intentioned poorly run ineffective causes. People who you can’t tell if they are trapped, lost, or simply confused and I always wonder what they are thinking.

I was one of a very few folks out on a street that would be bumper to bumper with traffic in less than an hour but now it was just me and a smattering of other early risers and two cars. Two cars one of which found the need to honk on an otherwise deserted street. A jarring, unbelievably loud squelch of a honk in this otherwise serene scene-this sound electrified the caffeine in my bloodstream causing me to shake my head and bring my shoulders to my ears while my elbows clenched my sides. Why. Seriously, why is this person honking at 6 AM on a deserted street? I ponder this as I stare hatefully at the driver, has the honking affected positive change for the person, changed something that displeased them more to their liking? ….why, I continue to think, you stupid motherfucker, why…so yes that honk has effected something, but nothing positive.

……….and the embers are stoked…..

The indictments begin.

I begin a mental conversation over an email word choice with one of my two bosses, who are actually more like colleagues, the one with whom I have an extraordinarily complicated relationship who lives on Japan at the moment. This ends with me spewing a string of profanities at him out loud. Ashamed I look around to make sure no one has caught this, unsure of what I would do if someone had. How do you even play that off…you know…like you’re not crazy.

With no witnesses to shame me into humility and better behavior the indictments continue, every owner of every dead plant containing planter, each piece of litter-indicting both litterer and those who fail to care for their property. Leading to anger at the drunk retarded mayhem causing college students-probably because I'm jealous that they can be drunk retarded mayhem causing college students and then there are the generally ignorant folks who seem to think it is ok to throw their trash anywhere or do they consider it a control issue, some kind of mostly impotent power-play like when a group of teenagers walk with deliberate slowness across a street, they stop traffic, they are in control, they have power even if only for a moment.

I see no parallels in my life at all. None.

Then I mock a barking dog---I mean I mock a dog—I squinch my face up looking at the dog who is on a porch and use the universal high pitched, lower lip protruding, mock voice and proceed to make two barking sounds.

It is 6:15 in the morning and I am making fun of a dog, are you fucking kidding me.

Unfixable

It was there on the subway, a few minutes after the morning rush hour had ended, I found myself sliding into the same mental state I had known since I was a child. An awful default mode built on fear and ego the two parts of my conscious that conspire, to form an unholy cabal from which only wicked things come.

And these wicked things whisper me my truth.

Now it varies mind you and it has become more refined and specific with age but runs something like----Everything in my life is wrong and always will be and as much as I try I can't and don't know how to fix any of it---because I don't even know what “it” is. I am trapped with no way out and no way to change. All I know is it has always been this way and it will always be like this and I just want to be dead. Conjuring the mantras I have been compelled to chant in my head for years, the plea “kill me” and the jihad “burn it down” I slowly lower my head. My blood pressure spikes, my eyes squint and turn the color of coal and my heart fills with hate as I raise my head with a deep inhale wondering what is to become of me, how did I get this way and how have I possibly made it this far.

Yeah, it was one of those commutes.

It was in that moment between stops on the train, feeling that same feeling, thinking those same thoughts, knowing I could follow that feeling all the way back to beginning of my life, thinking about all I had done in an attempt to relieve myself of it, that I knew it would always be there, it was never going away.

Unconsciously and unaware I uttered aloud—“unfixable.” And I knew it was true, I knew I was unfixable.

The feeling was old but the word was new and that creepy sense of having a feeling of yours name itself, grammatically challenged as it may be---after all that therapy I would have thought my feelings would be more literate--was enough to send a shudder through me as I stood on the swaying train, holding nothing but a coffee. Because it is saying to me, as the clever name suggests, “I am here, I am not going anywhere and as much as you workout, work, fuck or otherwise ignore, avoid or push me into some dusty corner I am part of you, actually, I am you.”

“I am you…I am unfixable.”

There it is. The inescapable truth, that moving target of a feeling you have had since you were a kid just named itself, and you know you are seriously fucked.