Fuller Wiser

I got an odd sort of Christmas present today, one that on its surface would seem to be a lump of coal. After a blood test, I’ve just been informed that I most likely have hypothyroidism.

For those unfamiliar, here is a brief breakdown, via WebMD:

“Hypothyroidism means your thyroid is not making enough thyroid hormone. The thyroid is a butterfly-shaped gland in the front of your neck. It makes hormones that control the way your body uses energy. Having a low level of thyroid hormone affects your whole body. It can make you feel tired, weak, and depressed.”

Well, holy shit. Guess who’s been tired, weak, and depressed?

It is true that humans like to find excuses for themselves and their behaviors. This tendency is a favorite target of conservatives against liberals and vice versa. Scapegoating is as old as politics, which is as old as civilization, which started the minute someone threw an insult instead of a rock, a moment which, depending on your outlook, was either the start of enlightenment or the beginning of the pussification of man.

True scapegoating has had consequences for our culture, and blowback. How many times have you seen a comic deride a fat person by mocking their claim of a “glandular problem?” Or heard someone blowing off another person’s depression, saying they just need to toughen up?

So what does one do when a real culprit springs into view? How much weight should someone give to this possible explanation of their undesirable behavior?

The wisest thing to do, logically, would be to wait and see what, if any, changes occur after a month or so of treatment. But I can’t help a little squee of excitement rising inside just by knowing that maybe, just maybe, my fatigue and depression may not be my fault.

We in the United States like blame. We aim it everywhere: The government, minorities, the opposite sex, these kids today, and in varying degrees, ourselves.

Self-blame, or as I called it, personal responsibility, has been the petard on which I’ve hoisted myself from a very young age. If I couldn’t accomplish something I wanted to, it would not, could not, be anyone else’s fault but mine. I simply wasn’t believing in myself enough, or working hard enough, or thinking correctly. Outside factors beyond my control could never be considered, lest I be convicted by a jury of myself of making excuses and being weak.

And of course, this judgment extended to others. If someone wasn’t successful, well, it had to be their fault, didn’t it? They weren’t doing it right, and they deserved their ignominy.

If this is beginning to sound familiar, there’s a very good reason. I grew up in a Calvinist country. You can hear these same arguments being blared over thousands of watts of talk radio, blown windily through coaxial cable connectors and out your teevee hole, and shat upon the printed page all over this nation. That my old man was a subscriber to the Puritan work ethic, despite the fact that he didn’t call it Jesus, certainly didn’t help. Add to that my aforementioned mother’s insistence on the best possible world for all who simply believe in themselves against all odds, and you can see the big failure souffle bubbling, just waiting to bust its bloated crown at t-minus 30 years or so. Blammo, and now you need a new oven.

If you had suggested to 20-year-old Fuller that he should seek psychological advice on his many neuroses, he would have treated you to a lengthy diatribe on what the hell was wrong with you and why his life wouldn’t turn out crappy like yours. True, many 20-year-olds would give you the same sort of spiel, or just ignore you, but such was my confidence that it actually drew a great many followers at that time. I believed my own delusions so much that I convinced other people to follow them.

The George Bailey bit, the world that would’ve existed in your absence, cuts both ways for me. Certainly there are people who I’ve helped, some in fairly substantial ways, who might not have found that help elsewhere. But then there are others, those who I led on crusades through the murky swamps of Mordor, seeking our destiny, the one that we were due because I said so. I sometimes wonder if they really are better off than before they met me.

I’ve contributed to derailing careers, relationships, education, happiness in obscurity, and most of it with a poor facsimile of altruism, masking the opportunism that led me to bend people around my path and accept it, at least in part, as their own. I threw my tractor beam in all directions, drawing in those with the lowest self-esteem, and driving away all others. When it became apparent that someone was no longer of use to me, I cast them off, with a heavy heart and apologies galore, but always with an eye to my own success and the belief that they would find the future that best fit their ability to accurately follow their fate.

Were it not for my being self-aware about this sort of behavior, I might fairly accurately be called a psychopath. Many successful people are, and indeed if I had allowed myself to follow through on some of my more draconian ideas, I might well be both successful and psychopathic.

And yet the very stumbling blocks I’ve cursed for being obstacles to my career success are the things that have kept me human: Consideration for the feelings of others (leading me to associate with dubious talents for far longer than was healthy), acknowledgement of my responsibility to be fair and honest in relationships (a rare quality among successful artists), and a belief that the world should be a fair place, the responsibility for which lies on all of our shoulders.

You can see the problems here. Consider the feelings of others, and you’re stuck with Pete Best and no record contract. Be fair and honest with your love interest and you’ve gotten rid of a whole section of your standard artist biography. And as for the world being fair, well, I spend half of this blog covering that ball of crap.

It may be that the onset of depression in my 30′s is merely the soft, thudding sound of chickens coming home to roost. But if this psychological process has been aided in any way by a physical and chemical process, then I may be living in a personal hell that is not entirely of my own making. When “bad” becomes “the worst thing ever,” one might be justified in taking a closer look at the old spectacles to see if the prescription is correct.

Regarding roosting birds: Walking into work today, I stopped to read a historical marker (a weakness of mine). A horrible crack-thump a few feet to my left startled me, and alarm turned to horror as I saw the source of the sound. A pigeon, who knows why, had fallen onto its back there on the sidewalk, and could easily have been mistaken for dead but for the slow twitching of its claws.

Enter personal responsibility. It was pretty obvious that the bird was not going to make it, and anyone with half an ounce of empathy knows that quick death is preferable to slow, painful throes of mortal injury. I should’ve killed it. I don’t know how, but I should’ve found a way. And yet I hurried on down the sidewalk, cursing to myself for the thing I was allowing to happen with each step away from the hurt animal.

It wasn’t my fault, I reasoned. Birds die all the time, some of them horribly. If I weren’t there, it would suffer the same fate. But you were there, I responded to myself.

But this is the 21st century, I shot back. An office worker on the way to his desk job in the city doesn’t stop and kill a bloody pigeon. It isn’t the farm. The pigeon doesn’t know what your job is, I replied, it just knows that it is in agony, and no one else is around to help it.

I knew I couldn’t argue my way out of the moral wrongness of my actions, and so I got as far away from the scene of the crime as possible, as quickly as possible. I don’t know if that bird’s dead yet, and I don’t plan on walking back the way I came, lest I find out. I am a coward, and I can’t blame that on my damned thyroid.

There have been moments in the past few years when the real level of my delusion about the world has become painfully apparent. The most recent was a year or so ago. I’d ventured out to the local Bennigan’s to get a couple of beers, a benign enough expedition. A man, or more accurately, a dude, was perambulating around the bar, talking smack and making a nuisance of himself. A guy sitting next to me started talking trash about the dude, who very soon got thrown out for his behavior, and once the dude was gone, me and my neighbor cracked wise for a while about stupid people being stupid, and how stupid the dude was.

Upon leaving the bar an hour or so later, I was rather surprised to find a white Cadillac bearing down upon my tail on the highway. A passing streetlight illuminated the passenger: The dude in question. The driver looked less familiar, but it wouldn’t be a stretch to consider that he was a friend of the dude, and had overheard my trashing of his pal after the guy got thrown out. If they were mad enough to wait for me to leave the bar, they were mad enough to kick my ass, or worse.

It’s only in moments like these that it becomes starkly, horrifyingly apparent that I have never in my adult life contemplated, in advance, a way to defend myself if attacked. Once, alone in a park bathroom but for a crazy person eyeballing me through the stall door, I came up with the brilliant idea of throwing poo in his face to distract him while I made my escape. Thankfully he left, but he could just as easily not have.

So here’s this guy and his friend, obviously well-versed enough in fisticuffs to chase down a stranger with intent to clobber, and I have absolutely no idea what to do about it. My solution (thank everloving Jebus that I brought my cell phone) was to call the cops. Though I was on the line for several minutes and many miles trying to get across the nature of my emergency, I bought enough time and probably put on enough show that my would-be attackers peeled off their pursuit and, who knows, found another body to vent their frustration on. If that hadn’t worked, or if they’d gotten me in the parking lot, I would have been well and truly fucked.

In the adrenaline-fueled aftermath of that evening, I made a solemn vow to myself never to allow myself to be in that situation again. Not just by making sure never to hit the bar alone or talk smack about fellow patrons, but by acknowledging violence as a fact in this world and making preparations for its inevitable appearance. By learning to defend myself.

Well, of course a promise of personal productivity made by the father of a newborn is a check that a wise man might think twice before cashing, and thus far its corresponding funds have remained hypothetical. Doubly so if the signer is in the midst of a crippling depression, as I was at that time.

There are many realities that fatigue and depression have not allowed me to acknowledge, or even in doing so, to do anything about. If medical treatment of a chemical imbalance can give me just a little more possibility of following through on my responsibility to look reality in the face and prepare myself for its onslaught, then it is a good thing.

So yes, I have a disease. And all things considered, I’m very happy about it. A month or so from now, getting to the root of what’s wrong with me will be that much easier.

Paths wind strangely at times. After blundering through a week of self-doubt, brought to the surface in part by health issues, I’ve sort of gotten a new fire under my ass, albeit a faint one.

Yesterday I was capable of doing little more than slumping in a chair and moaning to myself about all the things I didn’t feel like doing. The plague that has been visiting our house for the past months shows no signs of diminishing; indeed, my son had a nasty fever this morning and is seeing the doctor today. I’m getting an MRI done this afternoon, and my wife just plain feels like crap.

Desperate for something to take my mind off of the misery all around, I managed to make it down to Blockbuster. Nothing new caught my interest, so I went wandering around in the Drama section, which was thinner than I remember it back in the pre-Netflix days. Still, one item leapt out at me. My extensive mental to-do list for the past few months had included a viewing of A Love Song for Bobby Long, for reasons I’ll get to in a moment.

This is one hell of a movie, and marks one of those times when I’m glad I don’t always let my prejudices get the better of me. John Travolta can pick some crap-ass movies when he puts his mind to it, but his portrayal of the title character in this flick is astoundingly honest and spot-on. That I completely forgot it was him about midway through underscores how well he inhabits the old, drunken, out-of-work literature professor, down and out in pre-Katrina New Orleans.

But unlike so many movies, the title character is actually not the main character. If there is a main character, or rather one through whose eyes we discover the world of the film, it is Purslane Hominy Will, portrayed expertly (and hotly) by the amazing Scarlett Johansson. I won’t give away the movie, or even review it, because that’s not really what this post is about.

The movie had an effect on me in several ways, its quality being only one. I happen to know some background about how the film came to be, and this is what arrested me upon viewing it. Some months ago, I saw a performance by Grayson Capps, whose music is featured in the film. At the show, he went into some detail about his connection to the story.

Some years ago, his old band was playing a club somewhere in Louisiana, and he was approached by a young lady who introduced herself as a documentary filmmaker. She was doing a film on the local music scene, and wanted to know if she could film them, to which he agreed.

Talking later, though, she mentioned that she was looking for good stories from the area that might make a good feature film. In an old drawer at his place, Capps had been keeping a manuscript written by his father that had never seen publication. He gave her a copy, and didn’t hear from her for quite some time. But one day, he got wind that someone had adapted his father’s novel for a screenplay, and then the young director was calling him about providing music for the film that would be starring major Hollywood talent.

This story is incredible enough, but more so when you actually see the characters onscreen. These are damned interesting people, in damned interesting circumstances, and if Capps is to be believed, it’s mostly a true story.

It set me thinking about all the damned interesting people I know and the sorts of stories they’ve told me over the years, many of which are easily fodder for books, movies, and who knows what all. But I think of Capps’ father, who no doubt put hours, months, maybe years of his life into writing down this story, and died without anyone but friends and family being aware of it.

It’s a foolish sort of hope for an artist to count on the future. For every great work that has only been appreciated long after the creator’s demise, there are surely hundreds that have ended up in the dumpster. The future doesn’t care about justice. We who create in obscurity should not make our sole hope that posterity will vindicate us.

But perhaps in the deluge of rejection and indifference as we put our works into the world, we can reasonably imagine that the one person who will make all the difference, who may shine a light onto the fruit of our angst-ridden labors, may be someone we’ve already met, and they just haven’t become that person yet.

I once worked with a singer for a rather good band who had sank into obscurity as they entered middle age. As we sat at our desk jobs one day, he got an unexpected email from a old fan. Apparently they had heard one of his band’s oldest songs on a daytime soap opera that afternoon, and wondered if he knew. Upon doing a bit of research, he found out that one of their early fans, who’d bought their first cassette demo ages ago, had recently started working for the soap’s production company, and had finagled the tune into the show. This came more than a decade after the tape had been released, and though the new exposure didn’t lead to riches, it gave my friend a boost during a trying time in his life. Someone cared about something he made.

I’ve had that experience myself, finding out that someone I’ve never met has appreciated something I created, and it’s very helpful in the continuing quest to feel real. Those of us who create in our spare rooms and throw the result out into the interwebs, never to be seen again, can often get the impression that our creations mean nothing, that they are swallowed up by the vastness of the information glut as a drop is swallowed by the ocean. But when it turns out that you’ve actually reached someone, the feeling is as heartening as it is surprising.

In my earlier post, I spoke of the impending transition from aspiring artist to hobbyist. The arguments I made may be sound, but they’re not the sort of thing that gets you up in the morning and inspires you to do your best work. A Love Song for Bobby Long has done that for me. As I mentioned in my first post on this site, all artists are documentarians of a sort. To capture time, people, places, and feelings; at our best, those are our goals. If there’s even a sliver of a chance that I can capture a piece of the lives I come into contact with on a regular basis, to explain why they mean what they do to me, I have a hard time taking that lightly.

Yes, it will mean more sleepless nights. But I’ve had more of those since I started contemplating giving my life over to normality. Certainly, my illness has made these emotional roller-coasters more dramatic, but I don’t think my feelings on the matter are any less real.

I need to do what I need to do, and it doesn’t matter if it hurts like hell. Life without it hurts worse.

In coming months, I will attempt to tell some stories. I’ve got this big scratch pad, might as well use it.

Normal. I’ve never been entirely sure what that feels like. What worries me is that I may be headed that way.

I was raised with the idea of individuality. That’s unusual in my part of the world, where people idealize the rugged pioneer, but in practice really want everyone to sit quietly in their place so as not to lump the gravy. My parents, though, were people who never fit in, plus they had a touch of that West Texas isolationism, and it was always made very clear to me that there was something very wrong with the majority. It almost didn’t matter what the majority was promoting, it was probably suspect if most people were in favor of it.

A good portion of my twenties was spent ironing out that problem, getting rid of my inborn knee-jerk rejection of anything remotely popular. My father never got rid of it, and his blindness on that front makes our interactions very frustrating. My mother has it in the way that I do, which is cautious skepticism. I find that to be healthy, but then I would, wouldn’t I?

Mistrust of majorities can lead to exceptionalism. If you’re going to be different than everyone else, why not be different because you’re a shining star, instead of an irregularly lumped rock? When I cast a critical eye over my aspirations to be a famous this or that, aspirations which I have never completely shed, the obvious root is a need to provide a good reason for not fitting into normal society. The reasons are very simply dichotomized: Either it’s because you’re a freak, or because you’re special.

I’ve always opted for the special, and not in the euphemistic mental health sense. I was always going to be the famous this or that, the one who couldn’t fit in because his vision was just too blindingly bright to be contained by workaday life. I won’t go into all the different fields I’ve tried to establish myself in, but suffice it to say that I’ve remained the virtually unknown this or that despite my best efforts at notoriety.

The denial of reality is something I attack on a regular basis, particularly where it concerns religious believers, a group growing frighteningly large despite–and likely in reaction to–the advance of reason and science. These people live in a fog of preconceived notions that no amount of logical analysis can penetrate. Facts pile up at their doorstep, only to be swept aside as they shovel their way into the street with their blunt instruments of coercion, chief among which is the possession of the majority opinion. To attack them, you must attack the society at large, and that is a thankless and often futile task.

Yet if I am to be honest, I must aim my penetrating laser of reason on my own life. Years of extremely hard work and agonizing nights of angst have completely and utterly failed to give me the life I set out to achieve. What is one to conclude from that? I’m often tempted to revert to determinism, and take comfort in the belief that since I’m different from everyone else, my path to success must also be different than everyone else, and so I must keep trying until I find the “œright” path. But of course that assumes that there is a “right” path and that I will find it, and that I haven’t already missed it.

An honest assessment might suggest that though I have received some rewards for my hard work, the pursuit of my unrequited desires is in fact detrimental to my happiness. Buddhist thought supports this, and indeed Siddhartha’s insight into this fact of life is one of the glaring truths that keep me tossing and turning at night. Giving up my youthful desires is to give up on everything I’ve ever believed about life, about myself.

But is asking myself to release those desires any more demanding than asking Christians to give up their god? If a god is the bedrock of their entire sense of themselves, as it was more peripherally for me, the two situations are more analogous than not. My religion, my immovable object, is the belief in my own exceptionalism.

As with all such conundrums, though, there is a significant amount of gray area. In the course of pursuing these various career plans, I have gained a considerable amount of skill in those areas. Not top of the heap, but well above average. The fact that these pursuits (you’ve no doubt deciphered that they are artistic in nature) have yet to yield a substantial paycheck doesn’t keep me from believing that it would be a waste to just toss all of that collected experience just because it won’t make me a living, especially since I enjoy the projects while I’m doing them.

And of course, there’s the “then what?” Let’s say I rid myself of my artistic and exceptional aspirations. Who or what does that make me? My sense of self is almost entirely defined by what I am trying to be, given that it has never become what I am. If I accept that what I am at the moment is REALLY what I am, is that enough to make me happy?

Let’s take an inventory: Father, husband, son, secretary, friend, blogger, reader, writer, listener, art appreciator, thinker. Doesn’t sound like a bad life, really. But it’s awfully…normal.

And I think that’s what’s bothering me. Nowhere in there is the sparkle, the biographical verve that I always believed would constitute my life. I haven’t led one of those types of lives where nothing happens, certainly. But nor have I led the sort that is really different enough to take special note of. It isn’t the me that I’ve been expecting all these years. My being different hasn’t yielded unusual success, it’s yielded normality. What the hell?

Growing up, I got along well with my paternal grandfather. But he had a quality that perplexed me: Contentment. No amount of drama or complication in his life ever shook him from being content just to be himself.

It wasn’t that he never got mad. My father and his siblings can certainly testify to that. The thing with my grandfather was that he was perfectly content to know what he knew and not really bother with the rest. He was not learned in foreign policy, domestic politics, quantum weirdness, philosophy, or even, for that matter, Christianity, though he was a lifelong churchgoer.

But in his areas of interest, he could not be matched. He was a creator, mostly with stained glass, but also with stone, metal, and wood. His garage, largely untouched by my grandmother since his death a few years ago, remains a reflection of his passion, filled to bursting with tools and tiny found objects, components collected and saved with an eye to incorporating them into his work. By profession, he was a lumberyard manager in a small West Texas town, and knew his business inside-out. It provided him a livelihood and retirement. But his heart was in that garage, and you can still feel it there.

My father’s own path was not dissimilar. After a brief attempt at a musical career (the details of which remain murky), he fell into the family industry and became a lumber salesman at a large corporation, staying for 30 years, mostly in management. Like his father, though, his heart was elsewhere. Though he hardly touched his guitar, he spent untold hours out in his workshop, a dusty lair of wood, steel, and tools both ancient and modern. By the time his children woke up on weekend mornings, he had already been at work in the shop for hours, and would remain there until dinnertime. If it could be made, my father could construct it with wood. Like my grandfather, my old man barely made a dime from his creations.

But here the similarities end, for my father is one of the least contented human beings on the planet. It remains beyond me to catalog the demons that haunt him, or their origins. Though he served in the Air Force, he spent his entire four years stateside in an accounting office, so PTSD is hardly on the table. He is not an alcoholic, and hasn’t smoked in nearly two decades. Whereas my grandfather exuded calm and satisfaction, my father radiates discomfort and resignation.

Why the difference? I think our friend Siddhartha may have at least part of the answer: Expectation and desire.

Everyone I’ve spoken to who knew my grandfather agrees that he really didn’t have many preconceived notions of how his life would turn out. All he wanted to do was find something he could do to make a living, and to be able to do things he enjoyed, like hunting for arrowheads and fossils and practicing the aforementioned crafts.

That all seems fairly normal, though other details show a man who was not concerned with being terribly normal. He remained unmarried until age 35, when he married my grandmother, 15 years his junior. Surely people in a small town consisting mostly of farmers and oil workers with 13 kids apiece must have gossiped about this middle-aged bachelor, who my grandmother admits she saw as a bit of an interesting challenge. According to her and others who knew him at that time, he wasn’t bitter, though. He just liked things the way he liked them, and didn’t worry about what people thought.

Maybe it was a generational thing, maybe it was mass media, I don’t know, but from all accounts, my father has never been content. To an extent, it could be traced to class consciousness, having been raised in an oil town where the haves (bosses) and have-nots (my people) are dramatically divided, with a resulting effect on self-image. Maybe a regular diet of radio broadcasts from places that were not dusty oil towns raised hopes in my father’s heart that he could become something great, or at least something different than those he wasn’t fitting in with.

Maybe it was racism. My father’s skin is noticeably darker than mine, due to both his grandmothers being full-blood Cherokee. Were that a factor in his out-group status, the Republicanism of most of his adult life would be ironic, but hardly unprecedented among oppressed populations.

Whatever the reasons, the result was someone who wanted something that ultimately, he didn’t get. No son can ever be entirely sure what his father wanted from life, but in my dad’s case he clearly didn’t get it, and has been dealing with that sense of failure and loss for longer than I’ve been alive. He expected, he desired, and then he suffered.

Cue the son’s entrance. Individualism turns to exceptionalism turns to ambition, work ethic and commitment fail to deliver the desired result, and now the very things I enjoy are tinged with a pang of pain, an echo of what I once thought they meant about me. I am a career artist trapped in a hobbyist’s life, as far as my brain is concerned, and the inevitable dissonance is emotional, not logical. As the Jesuits say, give me the boy and I’ll show you the man. Much as my brain tries to tell me otherwise, my heart still wants what it can’t have.

Like most converted atheists, I mourn, in almost exactly the way one mourns the death of a loved one. Whether that entity being mourned ever existed seems to make no difference. Emotionally, it’s not a logical discovery, it’s a death in the family. For me, the belief in my exceptional destiny as conceived in my childhood may have been even more instrumental in the development of my sense of self than my belief in a nebulous god figure. I’m bracing for another death in the family, one that I didn’t even know could die. Can I pursue my artistic projects, knowing they’re now hobbies, and not feel as if that admission betrays my entire existence?

The only way that will work is with a sufficient replacement self-image. Is my psyche capable of finding itself worthwhile as a normal person with unexceptional goals? I fear it may not be, and I fear even the path to finding out. It is the most terrifying journey I’ve ever been on. When I started it a year ago, the gentle piercing of that protective membrane for the first time nearly drove me to madness. Therapy, good friends, and a few minor artistic breakthroughs kept me from bringing a quick end to the pain, but it was never far from my mind.

There is a disconcerting undercurrent that lingers ironically at the fringes of this story, threatening to turn tragedy into farce. That is the father/son conflict.

With disturbing consistency, I and male friends of mine have repudiated the lives, values, and attitudes of our fathers, only to find ourselves reliving key portions of their lives. What makes it worse is that often it’s the rejection itself that opens up behaviors that eventually drive us down our parent’s path. Worse still is abundant evidence that our fathers did the same thing in regard to their fathers, and who knows, that trend could stretch back for generations.

Realizing this, any belief in the power of the individual to determine our own fate starts to come under fire a bit. Sure, we don’t live exactly the same lives as our fathers, but obviously something very fundamental must change drastically in order to bring about an alteration substantive enough to actually change our fate. God is not required for damnation, only unwillingness to face root causes.

So here I am, in search of the root cause. What if I’ve found it? What if I can’t remove it? What if it’s like one of those parasites that, once attached, cannot be killed without irrevocably harming the organism? Who am I without my desires, and my pursuit of them?

Above all of this, though, has always floated a more cloudy, but persistent desire: To be happy. It is this desire that leads me to question the others, so I might logically conclude that it is more powerful, and thus more important. Whether it is achievable is quite another question, but if I’ve learned one thing from observing my father, it is that happiness is necessary in more than sporadic bursts. It is essential, in whatever form it takes, and regret is its enemy.

I cannot rewrite history and be reborn as a man like my grandfather, with modest goals and aspirations. But I can re-examine my ambitions in the knowledge that a greater desire may find them an obstacle to its own achievement. If I must sweep myself aside, let it be in the name of happiness.

While at work earlier this week, I succumbed to boredom and took a Meyers-Briggs personality test my friend sent me. It’s the sort of thing that usually fills me with contempt, in much the same way that astrology does. Simple people looking for simple instructions that are somehow the same for all people in a given category, which is of course clearly delineated and not at all complicated, not at all. Thank you, come again.

The crappy part is that, unlike astrology (read: bunk), this thing nailed me. It really did, down to a frightening level of detail. I’ve never read any Jung, but the guy obviously knew a few things.

So it turns out I’m an INFP. For those unfamiliar, that’s an Introverted iNtuitive Feeling Perceiving person. No, I don’t know why it isn’t just IIFP. Ask the dead guy who came up with it. The main thrust of the type is here, and it’s pretty comprehensive. Another description I read had the bullet point “attracted to sad things” which makes me sound a bit like the Screamapillar. Nonetheless, I can’t fault the analysis.

A bit more digging, and I came up with a page of famous INFP’s. Lo and behold, who do I see there but my good childhood friend Fred Rogers, Mister to you. It makes sense, he’s definitely an introvert by nature, and someone who feels and empathizes deeply. I’ve been watching Fred’s show early in the morning with my son. Mister Rogers has been dead since 2003, but the kid doesn’t know that yet, and I think he sees a little bit of me (and maybe himself) in the old guy, because he watches very closely. I’m glad to have the opportunity to reacquaint myself with Fred, and equally glad that his message of true individualism is still being broadcast. It’s a very necessary antidote to…well, pretty much everything else on television.

True to my descriptor, however, part of me is very sad when I watch the Neighborhood. It actually doesn’t have anything to do with Fred being gone, though. It’s more that as hard as I’ve tried, I can’t be like him.

This became more apparent during one of the 4AM craps I’ve had of late (both perverse and annoying). I needed reading material, and I grabbed a little book my mom bought me a few years ago for Christmas: The World According to Mister Rogers. This, too, made me sad.

Fred was a man of many gifts, but chief among these was the ability to see good in everything. Some might call him naive for this, but I honestly don’t think there was a naive bone in his body. A man can’t live past 70 and not be confronted with cruelty, evil, and hate. Hell, you can’t live past 10 without encountering the dark side of human nature, which is exhibited in children far more plainly than in adults. It was a peculiar angle he could apply to everything, to see himself in them, and to see the painful causes of people’s darkness. He put himself in their shoes, and you can only do that if you understand and accept your own darkness.

To many, this would sound like liberal hippie mumbo jumbo. Which is funny, actually, since the man was a lifelong Christian, a minister no less, and one of the staunchest guardians of family values in the 20th century. Indeed, he got far closer to the ideals of Jesus than any high-profile preacher. Loving your neighbor as yourself? Check. Turning the other cheek? Check. Helping the poor? Bingo.

In reading the book, he repeatedly recounts times when he has been angry, spoken unkind words to loved ones, and felt like doing worse. But the key is his power to pull back, to look at the situation from a new angle, one that takes all factors into account, and not just himself and his own feelings. Contrary to what our culture might suggest, this is not weakness. It is true strength, the sort that I wish desperately to cultivate.

I am a bitter and cynical man. That has been my inclination for the past several years, and now it is my persona. It is my public face, and in many ways my private one.

Like all avowed cynics, I started life as an optimist, albeit a cautious one. My mother, who shepherded me towards Mr. Rogers’ neighborhood, was and is an uncrushable optimist, certain that given the right attitude, the best can come out of any given situation. My father is and always was such a hardened cynic that I look like Mary Poppins’ magic rainbow vajayjay by comparison.

For most of my life, I followed my mother’s example. Anyone upon whom life was emptying its foetid bowels was obviously not in the right frame of mind. Spielberg, Lucas, and balderdash parables like the Neverending Story (whose main character Bastian is also an INFP) reinforced my impression that strong will, hard work, and belief in goodness and justice would bring me happiness.

Then came adulthood. I tried, I swear I tried. Setback after disaster, hurricane after famine, blow after twisted blow, I kept my stiff upper lip and believed that the good fight was being waged, and that I was on the right side. Surely light would prevail.

But the facts kept spewing from the mangler: Luck does not discriminate between good and evil; kindness carries as much peril as reward; intentions matter less than circumstances; hard work by itself does not bring rewards.

This last was a very harrowing lesson for me. Like Boxer in Animal Farm, my belief in the intrinsic value of hard work was the very blade upon which I was impaled by opportunists of many stripes. In the end, unless you are very lucky, you will be sent to the glue factory.

Attempts to free my fate from the whims of others have thus far proved fruitless, as plan after plan for independence fall flat in the empty forest of circumstance and luck. Add my studies of history and politics to the mix, and the true nature of the beast became clear, the most horrific Magic Eye poster ever, revealing its twisted form in small glimpses, drawing my gaze as I hoped in vain that my eyes deceived me.

Beyond revulsion, the chief emotion I experienced was betrayal. How could so many people lie to me? But then, we lie to children casually all the time. Bears are your friends, Santa squeezes down the chimney, believing makes things so, people will like you if you be yourself. We try to shelter our children from unpleasant facts, singing happy songs so we don’t have to think about what will happen when those young adults splat face-first into the cold concrete wall at the gates of reality. A gray troll peeks out, opening the latch from within, saying “Come in, but know this: You are not special, and no one cares about the goodness in your soul.”

Hearing artists, authors, and sports figures thanking God for his good graces sets my teeth on edge, as certainly it must all the artists, authors, and sports figures languishing in failure, absent the largesse and opportunities offered by craven promoters looking to fill their coffers through the efforts of their hapless but talented charges. The world from atop the mountain looks perfect, the gory details in the underbrush hidden and blurred. Life is more accurately described from among the rocks and brambles, where the traps and snares are laid, and where hungry eyes scan for prey, the fauna that have stopped to smell the flowers.

Wild animals know this. It is only humanity which insists on deluding itself that civilization has rid us of the animal within. It has only masked it, given it mechanical arms and legs to carry out its brutal eviscerations. Nature kills and moves on to the next kill. We kill and make pretty stories about it.

But then there’s Fred. My friend, Fred Rogers. He tells me that we can be greater than our flaws, and I can’t deny it, for I’ve seen it. He speaks of the darkness, and of our ability, even obligation to fight it, to be more than our brutal evolution has made us. To become good by force of will, if not by nature. We are not monkeys, we can make a choice. I want to choose. I want to be more than I have had to become. Being the irascible old bastard may get the job done, while garnering laughs and intellectual cred, but it doesn’t bring happiness.

So I suppose I haven’t given up on the light, on the vision of the world shown to me by my mother and her friend Fred. And I don’t want to give up on it, because there’s someone by my side who needs the world to be a better place than it is. He needs me to give him hope that he can accomplish anything he sets his mind to, even if I know for a fact that he may not succeed. Is this why we lie to our children? So that perhaps, in ignorance of the odds, they will hit the lucky number and become greater than life would seem to allow?

I don’t know, but Fred tells me I shouldn’t give up. And of all the voices that whisper in my head day after day, his is still the strongest. Good, like dignity and love, only exists because we say it does. And I will continue to speak of the power of goodness in hopes that it will be true.

Here’s a fact about me: I am criminally, unalterably horrible with money.

If there is a lobe of the brain which concerns itself with the management of fiduciary funds, mine is covered in some sort of sticky, caramelized plaque, not unlike Alzheimer’s goo. I can manage an office or writing project from stage 1 to stage 100, but I cannot get it through my head that when I spend twenty bucks, that means I’ll have twenty bucks less in my account. It’s not about what I actually have, it’s about what I should have, a level set arbitrarily in my head. Repeated overdraft penalties and weeks of poverty due to overspending have done nothing to correct this perception, so I have no conclusion left at which to arrive other than physical brain deformity.

And of course, as anyone who’s ever watched a Special Report on the news can tell you, money is the number one thing that married couples fight about. And unlike most things the news tells you (Democrats hate God, rock music makes killers out of your children, brown people are scary, etc.), the money/marriage thing is spot on. When arguments pop up in my house, you can be sure that there’s an empty bank account at the bottom of it.

The worst part is that my wife is no better. She’s no worse, at least, but setting the two of us loose on a bank account, or even two, is a recipe for deprivation and famine. Numerous reform programs have been instituted over the years, occasionally bringing about a momentary period of solvency, but generally the effects diminish within a month and we’re back to “œoh shit, we’ve only got $5.00 until Friday?”

When my son was born, and my wife was the sole breadwinner while I stayed home with the kid, I decided to take primary responsibility for the bill-paying, so as to lighten her load of responsibility a bit. Predictably, all it did was lead to her cursing loudly upon receiving regular phone calls from me informing her that once again, we were flat busted.

So a couple of months ago, in a fit of overcommitment stress, I pleaded with her to take over the bills, as I was obviously no good at them. Two months later…we’re flat busted.

Well, not completely flat. But not as unbusted as last week’s estimates had surmised we would be. We won’t starve, but neither will be wash all the laundry or have fries with that.

In years past, I would have cast a great deal of moral judgment on myself, expounding on my lack of discipline and resolving firmly to take control of my life and actions. That is one of the primary differences between then and now.

I have what is commonly known in political and humanitarian terminology as “outrage fatigue.” You can really only get truly pissed off enough to make major changes so many times. If you do it enough, and the changes do not make a measurable difference, you stop caring. I have come to the conclusion that this will probably keep happening for the foreseeable future, and possibly for the rest of my life. I’m done stressing about it.

My wife, however, has not reached that point, and thus there is now a new tension. She wants hard analysis, to get to the root of our trouble and stamp it out, while I’m convinced that the root goes all the way to the core, and that nothing short of a brain transplant can remove it. For the past decade, we have been economically merged, and each of us have had essentially the same financial life. Why my give-a-shit gave out before hers, I’m not sure.

Perhaps it’s because I have many other things to berate myself about. I relax when I should knuckle down, I play when I should work, and I have leaned on others and never given back.

To an extent, these shortcomings can be evened out by other behaviors. When I have money, I’m apt to spend it to help friends who are even worse off than me, or to take the wife and kid out for something special. Yes, I’m that guy. But I’m also the guy who plays with his son every day after work, takes out the trash without complaining, and honestly respects his wife as a person, not just a marital accessory.

No special insight here, just stating observations out loud, in the hopes that I’ll figure something out. Once again, I’ve failed.