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How to stop stressing and believe in yourself

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“Listen to me,” said the counselor, “your ideas are as good as anyone else’s.”

The young man shifted his weight and looked down at the floor.

“I guess so.”

“What do you mean, you guess so? It’s true. You need to stop comparing yourself to others. That way only results in feelings of inferiority.”

“But, maybe I am inferior. My ideas sound so vague, so simple. If you read what everyone else writes, it’s all so subtle, so well thought out.”

Silence. The ticking of the big mantle clock seemed to fill every moment with anxiety. The counselor let out a long sigh, tapped his pencil on his pad, and looked directly at his young client.

“First of all, you’re comparing yourself with published authors, people who have had time to elaborate on their ideas, and anticipate objections.”

The young man looked dubious.  “But you don’t know my work.  You don’t know if my ideas are good or not.”

“That’s not the important point here.  What’s important is that you are a unique person, and no one else has your viewpoint. If that’s not worth sharing with the world, I don’t know what is. Look inside your own heart for answers, not in some books written by people who will never know you, the real you.”

The young man looked up.

“Really? You really think my ideas are as good as anyone else’s?”

“Absolutely. You’re unique, you’re you. Don’t let others control your self respect. If your so-called friends constantly criticize your work, you need to find better friends. Surround yourself with people who lift you up, not drag you down.”

The young man stood up, took a deep breath, and extended his hand.

“All right, then! I’ll do as you say.”

“I’m so glad we could have this talk,” said the counselor, giving him a sidelong glance. “Keep your chin up. I look forward to hearing good things of you in the future.”

They shook hands, and, with a bounce in his step that was utterly lacking before the meeting, young Adolph strode out into the sunlight.

The day Vukovich died

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I wrote this as a memoir in a fit of nostalgia after watching the Indy 500 on Memorial Day. Then I decided to check names and dates, and discovered that, as often happens with memories, I had conflated several events, and the story was incompatible with reality. I tried changing it to reflect that, but couldn’t satisfy myself with the result. The original story, though inaccurate, was simply better. I see now how easy it is for memoirists to get caught up in these traps you read about, when someone exposes their work as false. I decided to leave it as it was, along with this caveat: make of it what you will. Call it memoir, call it fiction, but enjoy it if you can.

Memorial Day, 1955, Indianapolis. Me and Hughie on the railroad tracks with a portable radio, listening to the 500. Just that; there was no Indy then, the only nickname we knew for our city was Naptown, and it seemed appropriate. The race itself in those days was as pure and innocent as we were. It was before the big global car companies got involved, before Ford brought the refined, expensive high-pitched whine of its V-8s to the track, when the deep, throaty roar of the big 4-cylinder Offenhauser engines ruled the pack, when a boy could walk the alleys of Indianapolis, and catch a glimpse of an open wheeled racing car in someone’s garage, when a neighborhood grease monkey could still dream of building and driving a car in the big race without being laughed off the street.

The race took all day back then, when people in the know would say that for a car to circle the track at more than 150 mph was against the laws of physics. And so we climbed to the tracks to listen, and spend the day talking and dreaming. It was a tradition, or such tradition as not-quite-10-year old boys can have; we had resolved to do it some months before, after I had found a semi-functional radio in someone’s trash. The knobs were long gone, as was the antenna, but we put new tubes and a battery in it and tuned to WIBC as best we could. I will never forget the crackling, distant roar of the Offenhauser engines, the changing pitch of the announcers’ voices, fading in and out to the accompaniment of various screeches and howls. The few passing freight trains only added to the romantic lure for a couple of  boys.

We sat at our favorite spot, above the ruins of a factory, whose broken windows and random indecipherable gears and brackets were sheer heaven for the imagination. To us it was as mysterious as Pompeii or Stonehenge, and we spent long hours devising theories about what had been made there, and why it had been abandoned, and whether there were ghosts. All the while, the sun shone brightly, the breezes came always just in time, and the radio droned a hypnotic backdrop, as close to paradise as anything on this earth.

Then, through the crackle, came the voice of Jim Frosch, the backstretch announcer: a horrendous crash involving at least three cars. The car driven by Roger Ward had broken an axle, causing the cars behind to swerve to avoid him. The race leader and favorite, Bill Vukovich, was hit with such force that his car sailed of the track, striking an abutment upside down and landing in a parking lot. Vukovich – for us Mickey Mantle, Johnny Unitas, and John Wayne all rolled into one – was dead. We came down from the tracks, stunned, and walked slowly home through the neighborhood, which suddenly seemed stiflingly hot.

Stories and rumors swirled. Boyd, whose car had sent him flying, had hit him on purpose. Roger Ward’s car had been sabotaged. As days passed, the stories grew less accusatory but more grisly. Someone had a cousin who knew a guy who had seen the crash at the race and swore he saw Vukovich’s head roll down the track a few dozen feet before coming to rest on the inner verge. None of it was true. None of it mattered.

That was the end of the “tradition.” It marked the first real disillusionment of our short lives. From that point, Hughie and I gradually lost interest in hanging out, although we were glad enough when our paths crossed, and exchanged stories, and asked after each other’s recent adventures. But we went separate ways, each choosing, or thrust into, our separate tunnels.  I longed to escape everything familiar, parents, neighbors, greasy streets with permanent potholes; Hughie seemed evermore welded to the neighborhood. After high school, I went off to college, a relatively rare thing in that neighborhood. He joined the Navy, then was back out almost immediately, on a medical discharge.

Years later, home on a visit, I gave in to a nostalgic urge and looked him up; he still lived in the same neighborhood. I knocked on his door. A woman I didn’t know opened the door.

It was a small rundown apartment with a musty odor. Hughie sat on the arm of a couch, eyes glazed with surrender. There were two other guys, a couple of girls, a half empty whiskey bottle. We said hello, and I said so long.

Nowadays. I sometimes find myself grieving for those old times when our lives seemed pure and holy, and I still think of that day so long ago, the day Vukovich died, and how the world seemed irreparably changed. How were we to know that it was only the beginning?

When work became work

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Work, for many, if not most, is a drudge.  As the saying goes, that’s why they pay you to do it.  We take it as a kind of law of nature.  We’ve elevated leisure time to a kind of sacred status; that’s what all the advertising and consumerism is about, isn’t it?  Get more stuff to make the time you’re off work more awesome.  Of course, very little is not awesome these days, but that’s another post altogether.  And what’s the pinnacle of awesomeness?  Why, retirement, of course.  Picture yourself, free at last of your pointy-haired boss (and he of you, for that matter), lounging on a sunny beach somewhere, umbrella-topped drink tipping in your drowsy hand.  Or finally getting your golf handicap down to single digits.  It’s you time, unproductive by sacred right.

Only, when the time comes, the euphoria lasts a month or two, and then too often leisure replaces work as the major source of drudgery.  Some people decline so much they slip into chronic depression; some even die not long after.  Cruelly, it seems that, after all, drudgery was a personality trait, not an externally imposed condition.  What’s going on?  Was it always thus?

There’s a Twitter meme that rises to the top of the sludge periodically, one of those quote things that you get to attribute to anyone you like, as long as they’re sufficiently famous, that goes, “If you see a difference between play and work, you’re not doing one of them right.”  Seems vapid enough, as these things go, but it persists because it has the ring of truth to it.  Or is it the desire of truth?

You might be tempted to dismiss this whole issue as a First World problem; the overwhelming majority of people throughout the world have no time to spare for thinking about the quality of their work experience, let alone of their leisure time.  What they do is integral with their survival.

Is it possible that such a clear link between work and survival actually makes work more satisfying?  There have been, to my knowledge, no studies of this, but, given that roughly the first 250,000 years of human development were spent hunting and gathering, I would say that it’s a distinct possibility.  For better or worse, though, since it first occurred to someone to plant food and raise stock about 10,000 years ago, the link has grown increasingly obscure, and therein may lie the issue.  Most of us no longer get food and shelter directly from our work; what we get is the means to obtain these things, and not always to the degree we think necessary.

My father used to say there was no such thing as a job without dignity.  In my rebellious youth, I understood this to be a kind of statement of egalitarianism, a solidarity with the Working Class.  Collecting trash was just as good as producing it, from the standpoint of dignity.

Cool, I thought, that the stodgy old coot could express such an idea in spite of himself.

Although I can’t claim to be certain of what he actually meant to say, my own understanding of the sentiment has changed over the years.  Dignity, as such, is simply not a characteristic of work.  That is, such dignity as there is, is supplied by the worker.  Of course, it may be easier or more difficult, or even, rarely, impossible, depending on such things as difficulty, collegiality, and management.  This brings up the social factor, which I believe to be critical.

There has never been a documented case of a truly feral human.  Society, love it or hate it, is what we do; it’s how we’ve survived all these thousands of years despite our wimpy claws and fangs.  Maybe we find work satisfying to the degree that it enriches our social relationships, either by providing a context for them, or by creating a sense of significant contribution.  This is how cleaning sewers can be rewarding, and how pushing numbers around a hedge fund can be numbing, despite the vastly greater material rewards of the latter.  It’s why billionaires refuse to leave the rest of us alone, but insist on doing some kind of job, even (shudder) politics.

It also explains the retirement conundrum.  Even the most menial of jobs usually involves social contact with fellow workers, even if that interaction is limited to griping about working conditions, or tyrannical bosses.  Retire, and you’re suddenly booted out of a society that was, for better or worse, the milieu of the majority of your waking hours for most of your life.

I won’t say love your job and it will love you back, but maybe we shouldn’t be so hasty to jump the fence into those greener pastures.  We might find it considerably more swampy than we thought.

The way we (would like to think) we were

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People of a certain age, and of a certain background, when talking about poverty, have a tendency to minimize its impact.

“Hell, we didn’t have anything, but we didn’t even know we were poor,” they might say, and sage heads all around nod in agreement.

“We didn’t have television, or the internet.  We made our own diversion from stuff we found in alleys: a ball of tape for a baseball, an old broom handle for a bat.  We always had enough to eat, though.  We just made do.  We didn’t whine about our lives like the kids do nowadays.”

Two things strike me about such sentiments.  One is the inevitable filter of childhood memories.  We tend to remember things as much better than we thought they were at the time we experienced them; the farther away we get in time, the better things were.  Add the fact that, as children, we had a kind of natural optimism engendered by the fact that we weren’t responsible for keeping things above water.  It’s a certainty that our parents didn’t remember those times in such glowing terms.

Keep in mind we’re not talking about abject poverty; people who lived through that rarely even bring it up.  These are typically the lower middle class (working class, if you’re a socialist) reminiscing about days of yore.

The second thing that strikes me is the implicit sense of smugness, as if we were somehow superior to the young people of today.  I say “we” because I, too, come from that history; born in a refugee camp, I came to the US on the boat with my parents.

But what I feel, instead of smugness, is mostly good luck.

True, we didn’t have TV.  Hell, it was just invented.  Every block in my neighborhood had two or three houses with television; every other block someone knew of someone who had a color TV.  The internet simply didn’t exist.  There was radio, and the daily newspaper, and you could take in a movie twice a month or so.  Some of the theaters downtown even had AC, but you might pay a buck or more there; it was typically 25 cents elsewhere.  For anything else, you relied on the rumor mill.

The point is, we really had nothing to compare our lives with.  Like children everywhere, we looked around us, and thought that was what normal was.  You wore hand-me-downs because it was stupid to throw away perfectly good clothes.  You walked everywhere or took a bus because buses were ubiquitous and frequent, and cost pennies.  You’d cross the street to avoid some people, others would cross the street to avoid you.  Occasionally, if you saw someone coming, you’d turn around quickly, and hope you hadn’t been seen.  But nobody gunned you down (unless you happened to be black, and then it was open season).

I have to say, if I want to be scrupulously honest, that we whined as much as anyone today, though we called it grousing, or pissing and moaning.  There was one kind of angst, though, that we didn’t have a lot of, and that was class envy.

Rich kids, if we even knew of any, just seemed incompetent, had to have everything done for them, judging from stereotypes in the movies and comic books; we felt sorry for them, though we had no real idea of how they lived.  We envied guys with construction jobs, or steady work in a factory.

In today’s connected world we all know how everyone else lives, or rather how commercial interests would like us to believe everyone else lives, so we’ll want to buy their stuff.  We are probably the most propagandized and pitched bunch of humans in history, and, for the first time ever, we’re in it all together, all of humanity, pretty much everywhere.  As a result, it’s very easy to become envious of others, even if we don’t have it so bad ourselves, from an objective point of view.

Why is that?

It’s because we’re humans; it’s what we do.  We are the social species par excellence.  There are no authenticated cases of feral humans, that is, humans who have grown up without the company of any other humans, anywhere, at any time in history.  I say this with full knowledge of the alleged cases, none of which stand up to scrutiny.  We’re hard wired to be keenly aware of our situation relative to other humans around us, our place in society, if you will.  Add to that the fundamental concept of fairness (and not just human apparently!) that informs our moral and ethical rules, and poverty becomes a relative thing.

In short, we weren’t any better or wiser then than young people (or old ones for that matter) today, just less informed.

For the first 2.5 million years of our existence as a distinct species, we lived in groups of fewer than a hundred people, all of whom were of roughly equal status; when we interacted with other groups, they weren’t much different either.  Still, forget the paradise of the noble savage; the latest studies suggest hunter-gatherers lives were filled with conflict and jealousy as much as ours, but they didn’t see global disparities, and certainly nothing like the magnitude of the differences we see today.  That, and the hard fact that killing someone put a significant dent in the work force, which for them had an optimum size within a pretty small range, kept actual killing at low levels.

Not us, more’s the pity.  Fortunately, we’re intelligent.

Aren’t we?

 

Peanut butter manifesto

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The coffee shop I frequent was out of peanut butter cookies today, again.  This may seem a minor issue to you, but there’s a backstory.

When I was very young, I put my trust in all the usual stalwarts of society – the used car salesman, the insurance company, the heroin pusher, even (against all my instincts) the priest – only to see my hopes crushed one by one, until all that remained was a bitter shell of a man.  I became a cynic, and believed that not only was everyone just out for personal gain, and to hell with everyone else, but they actively sought and enjoyed the experience of disappointing others.  Worse, I thought they had tumbled to my instability, and banded together to make my personal life miserable.  I would hear of a terrific sale, only to find that the price had doubled once I made an irrevocable order.  Or I would attend a formal affair, and find that, not only was my fly open, but the zipper was irreparably broken (I still don’t know how they did that).  Worst of all, whenever I would start buying something regularly, it would disappear from the shelves.

I know what you’re thinking.  That’s just crazy paranoia, and I should get over it, trust the used car salesmen again, get on with life.

Well, that’s exactly what I did. It was a tough, grueling road, fraught with traps and pitfalls, but with perseverance and, yes, positive thinking, I began to see these coincidences for what they were.

Then I started going to a small local coffee shop, just a hole in the wall, really, but with a friendly, quirky vibe.  They had a display case with a variety of munchies, including which were, regularly, peanut butter cookies.

Now, a peanut butter cookie is the perfect snack.  Fist of all is the delicious flavor, along with that unique and inexpressible texture, which together make for un unsurpassed snacking experience.  As if that weren’t enough, the thing is made of peanuts, a small amount of sugar, and eggs.  Nutritionally speaking, you couldn’t find a combination that could provide a better fuel for a human.  So I started buying one regularly with my breve.

It started slowly.  I would go in one day, and they would be out of peanut butter cookies.  No big deal; it happens, and the next day all would be well.  But it started happening once a week, then twice a week, until, now, I rarely find the cookies available, ever.  When I ask, I’m told the last one was sold just moments ago; once recently, they even went to the lengths of pretending their oven was broken, and they sold only funky looking things that looked like gravel encased in polyurethane.

Yeah, right.  If the oven was broken, how did they make the gravel cakes, hmm?

But this time, I’m not giving in.  I’ll never go back to the life of paranoia that I so narrowly escaped.  I know exactly what to do.

As God is my witness, I will never eat another peanut butter cookie as long as I live.!

That should get them back on the shelves in no time.