Monthly Archives: April 2011

On bad parents

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Bad parents love their children just as much as good parents do.

I have said this before and will likely say it again, but nevertheless : this might well be the most startling and important thing I have ever uncovered in my endless rambling through the world of emotions, ideas, and memory that exists inside this skull of mind.

It’s not an easy thing to accept. In fact, I came to this realization over a week ago, and I feel like I have only absorbed a tiny fraction of its full and inescapable truth.

And it is truly inescapable. It is the sort of thing that once the words formed in my mind, I instantly recognized the inexorable truth of it. So while part of me does not want this to be true and wants to stick to the accusation, blame, anger, and “justice” model of the universe, as a seeker of truth, I cannot simply bury this in the back yard of my mind. It is true. I must accept this.

Here is the case for its truth, as simply as I know how to put it. Love is an emotion. Parenting is a skill. These things are not connected in any way, and one cannot be turned into the other by an act of will.

So no matter how much your parents truly love you, no matter how sincere and deep and powerful that love is, it does not make them any better suited to parenting.

And even more importantly, their lack of ability as parents does not mean that they simply did not or do not love you, or love you “enough”.

This is the truth of what every parent, at some point, has to say to an angry and accusing child : I love you, and I have done the very best that I can to raise you. I am not perfect. I have made many mistakes. But never doubt that I love you.

As we grow and mature, we become increasingly aware of our weaknesses, our vulnerabilities, and our limitations, and it is not hard, as teenagers or even as adults, to see how these weaknesses and vulnerabilities can be traced directly to the imperfections in how we were raised and the weaknesses and imperfections of our parents.

And let be be clear : I am excusing nothing. I am demanding nothing. And I am not, I repeat, not, asking you to forgive anything, or everything. Forgiveness is not something you simply wish into being. I couldn’t talk you into it even if that was my goal.

Many people have truly severe grievances with one or both parents (or guardians… whoever raised you), and overcoming these is no simple or painless process. The conflicts with our childhood caregivers often form the very fault lines of our souls, and such deep pain is not easily washed away.

Instead, I will approach the problem like this : no doubt, gentle reader, you know a great deal about all the ways in which your upbringing was lacking. You can list, in great detail, all the things they did wrong from the moment you were born till your graduated from college. You know, intimately and bitterly, just how badly they bungled the entire parenting issue, and have grievances outstanding from decades ago.

But can you write the other list, the one that lists all the ways that they got things right? What about all those mistakes they never made? If you are having trouble getting started on that list, just think about all the other parents you have known in your life. Your friend’s parents, your aunts and uncles who had kids, your neighbors, your colleagues, families on television…. any examples of parenting styles and strategies you can think of. List all the mistakes other parents have made that yours did not. Do those count for anything?

Can you really be sure it could not have been worse? Can you be so confident that you understand all the challenges of parenting well enough to assign your own parents a failing grade?

Maybe they really did a bad job of raising you. Maybe they truly were lousy parents. Maybe they got a lot more wrong than they ever got right. Maybe you truly had bad luck in the birth lottery and your parents should never have had children at all, let alone raised them.

But that doesn’t mean they do not love you with all their hearts.

It just means that they were never very good at doing the right thing with that love.

The death of the Beck Effect

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Along with Beck’s show itself, of course.

I’ve been avoiding the political commentary on this blog for a while but this is just too darned interesting to ignore. You heard it here last, folks…. Glenn Beck is losing his show on Fox News.

I am pleased, but not exactly surprised. The writing has been on the wall for Beck for quite some time now, as sponsors flee, fearing being associated with his particular brand of full on hardcore looney tunes craziness. For a long time, his name was synonymous with Fox News, as he was their manic Pied Piper, and as long as he was red hot in the ratings and had millions of senile citizens all too eager to follow him into the magical world where nothing is ever or has ever been or could ever be their fault. that was fine.

But a crazed pedagogue like Beck has a short shelf life. As pollsters have noted, his appeal was based on creating sensation, like a magician who dazzles his audience with increasingly elaborate tricks like making Bush’s spending spree disappear and turning Barack Obama’s blackness into a condemnation of everything that has happened since Eisenhower. And to his credit, he wove a web of stardust and evil that kept people spellbound for oh, a year or two.

But eventually, even the maddest of genius magicians runs out of tricks, and when you are an embarrassment like Beck, it is only your ability to keep your audience spellbound and therefore uncritical that keeps the humiliation of being associated with such deranged flimflammery from biting into your audience’s desire to feel they are socially normal. Once the pace slackened even slightly, the strong desire of social conservatives to appear not merely normal but super-normal begins to take its toll, and when the sponsors started to flee in droves, that was the sign that Beck was clearly on the crazy and weird side of things no matter what his political stripe might be.

The moment some little old lady gets laughed at (or worse, sweetly patronized) by her peers for quoting Glenn Beck at the CWL meeting, you know that all the mockery has done its job and Glenn Beck is a joke and if there is one thing serious minded social conservatives cannot stand, it’s being mocked as weird.

The direct link, in my mind, between the advertisers fleeing and the death of Beck is that as your more normal and usual sponsors fled, the nature of the advertising on his show simply got less and less respectable and more and more shady and kooky seeming, and that is the kind of thing which makes social conservatives very nervous. If Glenn’s show was a neighborhood, then the decline in sponsors made it an increasingly sketchy and outlandish one, and that, more than any failure in the appeal of his message or change of heart about convervatism, will doom any conservative pundit in a heartbeat.

They just simply cannot standing the thought of someone thinking they were “that kind of person”. It is really just that simple.

And of course, as other are saying, it was clear that the other pundits on Fox were never very fond of Beck. He was embarrassing and outlandish and stole their spotlight, which was bad enough, but even worse, because he worked so much on sheer inspiration and a fine tuned sense of the madness of his particular crowd, he was constantly shifting the ground under their feet and making it so that even the Bill O’Reilly types simply could not keep up. All they could do is follow behind him and try to pretend that this all made sense to them while gritting their teeth and biding their time, waiting for his star to fall.

And fall it has, and there are all his friendly friends at Fox and Friends waiting, daggers drawn, in the rotunda. Presumably, there have been people at Fox soothing each other’s Beck rage by saying “Just you wait, the minute that little fucker loses steam, he is out of here. ”

And lo and behold, so he is.

My only worry is that without Beck constantly injecting random momentum into the GOP’s opinion machine, they might actually be able to calm down enough to put together a coherent strategy for 2012 and might even produce a vaguely electable candidate.

The good news is, all those Tea Party loons are still out there, refusing to consider sanity as an alternative and rejecting all possibility of compromise, so odds are, they will still doom the party even without fresh Beck injections on Fox every day.

And hey, odds are they will still be able to find Beck on whatever he does next anyhow. Loon or not, he still brings millions of people to advertisers, however shady, and someone will pay him for that. Or barring that, he will just become another YouTube and/or podcast pundit.

Keep doing your good work for America, Glenn. We’re pulling for you.

Dear depression/social anxiety/agoraphobia/etc

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Needless to say, I hate you.

I hate everything about you. I hate the deep black hole inside my soul that destroys everything inside me and leaves me worse than empty inside. I hate the dark and trembling numbness that makes everything seem unreal and distant and makes me feel like I too am insubstantial and unreal, and likely to disappear like a candle guttering out in it own wax at any moment. I hate the deafening silence that echoes endlessly inside my head. I hate how hard you make it to feel love or joy or pleasure or even just relaxation. I hate the cold corrosive contagion of your deep rooted fears and insecurities that leave me endlessly treading water in the filth and fetid fecundity of my own backward backed up backwater of a soul, instead of letting the water of the flow through me and make me clean and alive and ready to face the world.

But all that I could forgive if there wasn’t this one last thing : you have stolen my entire life.

I have spent nearly my entire adult life trapped in your disgusting little world. From the time my parents took me out of college at the age of 22 to today, when I am nearly 38, I have languished in your inner dungeon and not had the slightest chance of developing into a true adult, or a real person, even.

Instead, the dastardly differential development which placed me at such risk in the first place and made me a lonely child hated by his agemates and peers has simply continued. My intellect grows and my soul shrinks and my heart remains the same sad lonely place it’s always been.

At times, I feel like I am a small child desperately clinging with one hand to the string of the enormous bloated balloon that is my overdeveloped mind and grabbing whatever he can with his other hand to keep it from taking off with him and casting him into the endless sky of insanity.

If I let go of that to which I cling, I will surely lose my mind. And yet, if I let go of the balloon, it will fly away without me, and frankly, it is all I have. It’s taken everything else away.

And it’s all because of you, my muddy cocktail of mental issues. You are the reason I don’t even have a hand free to try to reach out of the world. You are the reason my brain is so full of hot air.

And with your impeccable instinct for the alchemy of pain, you have turned your very success into the heaviest burden around my neck and used it to keep me in your thrall. The very fact that I am at such an advanced age and have so very little to show for my years on this planet, and by any objective measure am so far behind my peers that I could never catch up in a million lifetimes, and am thus, seriously, an enormous loser…. that is such an enormous thing to overcome that my poor coping resources can only lift it a tiny bit at a time. I dig myself out a spoonful at a time, with mountains more to go. I get nowhere.

And so all those lost years contribute to the very dark pressure that keeps me trapped in the same cycles that caused me to lose all those years in the first place.

I hate that you make me cowardly. I hate that you make me weak. I hate that you make me scattered and unfocused and unable to commit to one thing and see it through. I hate that you make me too paralyzed by fear and pain and darkness to take the steps to escape. I hate that you rob me of any chance to be a truly functional adult, let alone any sort of success in life, and leave me the most absurd and pathetic form of invalid, with a disability so invisible that I cannot even prove it exists.

I hate that you make me talk about you constantly, in real life and on my blog, in the gamely futile attempt to use my ill-shaped shovel of an intellect to dig myself out of your deep cold chasm of colorless contempt.

But most of all, I hate you because you make me hate myself.

You make me hate myself so much that I can barely take it and I have to lsoe myself in distractions just to escape my relentless inner prosecutor.

And I…. just…. HATE that.

If, and, bling bang, whatevah

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Another day, another dreary drag through the dribs and drabs of dumb old dank old dysphoric depression.

I have been thinking a lot about my life and my problems lately, spurred onward largely by my readings in that Overcoming Agoraphobia by Doctor Barry Goldstein that I have been talking about so much. I am really glad I bought the book way back when, and even more glad that I decided to give it another try after my very bad first impression of it when I first tried to read it.

Like I have said, I don’t quite fit the model of agoraphobia in the book, but enough of it resonates at a deep enough frequency that it’s really gotten things moving inside me, so to speak. Like most agoraphobes [1] I have a great deal of problem with emotional constipation. My extremely avoidant personality, fueled by a quick and agile mind, is far too good at avoiding dealing with things and that leaves my mind’s digestive system with a lot of undigested or half-digested emotions everywhere, clogged the tubes and blocking the fuel line and keeping the whole thing in the shop indefinitely.

I mean, I just jumped metaphors from digestion to cars in the middle of a sentence and didn’t even realize I was doing it. That’s not something a nice, regular, free flowing brain does. That’s the diseased discharge of a set of brain bowels blocked with bitter, broken bile.

And some alliteration. Just a little.

The book has a way of anticipating me. Just when I was thinking it might not be all that relevant to me after all, that maybe I am not all that agorophobic or at least not like the women in the book, I come across a section that uses anxiety about an upcoming wedding that the subject is invited to for an example, and suddenly some recent memories slam into me and I realize I am, indeed, quite ill.

For those of you who are not reading me then, last year when I was busily writing a million words in eleven months, my friends and former roomies Ryan and Jen got married. I knew about the wedding more than a year in advance, and for most of that time I was looking forward to it. I like weddings, they are usually quite happy and sentimental occasions, and I am all about happy warm sentiments. I am sensitive to the emotional atmosphere of my surroundings [2] and so happy events like weddings and other celebrations are a comfortable milieu for me. In theory.

But as the day dawned on my emotional horizon, my anxieties began to set in. Just like the ladies in the book, I started catastrophizing about all the million and one ways the wedding day and reception after could turn out horribly wrong for me. I tried to mentally put myself there so I could desensitize myself, but the rising panic just got worse and worse as the day drew closer and closer.

Looking back, I wish I had been reading the Overcoming Agoraphobia book then. It might have helped a lot.

I ended up not going. I just could not get a grip on my anxiety, and my mind made up all kinds of excuses to not go, but the truth was, I simply could not handle it.

The anxiety won. I avoided instead of facing my fears. I feel ashamed of that now, though I know I shouldn’t. But I really wish I had gotten my shit together and gone. It probably would have done me a world of good, and shown me that I can do things like that if I want to, instead of feeling like my fears root me to the spot like a statue all the time.

So yeah. Looking back at the torture I went through regarding the wedding, I am a very sick man. It is easy to avoid thinking about it and avoid dealing with it and pretend I am just a regular guy with “a few problems”, but the truth is, deep inside, I am very sick, so sick it keeps me from doing what I need to do to get well, and I really don’t know a way out of this trap.

But I do know one thing : the only way out is through. I can’t get out of this mess unless I deal with all that unresolved emotion and unexpressed anger and deep down tension that weighs me down.

Those are things I can no longer avoid.

Footnotes    (↵ returns to text)

  1. Gross metaphor warning↵
  2. Despite tending to be oblivious to nearly everything else about it↵

The incredible power of cute

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Cuteness. It’s an amazingly powerful force in the human psyche, and yet you hardly ever hear it mentioned. It’s the sort of thing that is so absolutely fundamental to how we see the world that we don’t even notice it or think about it much. We notice it about as much as fish notice the water in which they live. It’s easily as strong a force in how we think and what we do as our oft-ballyhooed (and booed) sex drives, and yet, because its manifestations are considered almost entirely socially acceptable and even beneficial, it has somewhat perversely escaped attention.

Think about it : the search for pictures which activate our “cute” response is second only to the search for ones which activate our sexual response in terms of Internet traffic. Almost as many people are looking to go “Awwwwww!” as are looking to go “Ahhhhhhhhhh…! “. Clearly, this is a powerful drive whose stimulation gives us great pleasure, and what’s more, all it takes is the right image to stimulate it.

I mean, look at this :

I has a fluffeh!

Doesn’t that just make you say “Awwwwwwww!”? The sleepy eyes on the dog, the adorable helplessness of the kitten, the sea of fluffy white fur in which the kitten is adrift… everything about this picture stimulates the cute center of our brain, and the resulting effect is so powerful as to completely take over our minds, and release feelings of affection, nurturing, protection, and attachment.

Clearly, evolution has given us this very strong drive, capable of swaying our reason and altering our perceptions, for a very good reason, namely, childrearing. If we did not find our children, and children in general, so endearing, and if this endearment were not so incredibly potent that it spills over to animals, cartoon character, and even cars, there is no way our motivation to nurture, protect, and raise our children could possible last through the longest maturation period in the animal kingdom.

A telling cue to this is in one of the most classic and cliched iconic images of cuteness is the classic bare bottom baby picture. [1]

Insert cutesy "bare/bear" pun here.

[/caption

Looked at objectively, one has to wonder why this image of a naked infant became so beloved. Specially, it is the bare behind that is the magic spark which seems to release an extra strong dose of the “cute” response. Why might that be?

The answer is that if we didn’t find baby’s bottoms not just cute but incredibly cute, there is no way our parental response could survive the incredibly strong signals from another strong drive, namely our “digust” response, that dealing with the management of said bottoms and their end products (ha ha) entails.

In other words, if baby bums were not cute, our parenting urges would die at the first diaper change.

This “cute” drive is so powerful that we domesticate animals who stimulate that urge and get them to live with us simply from this urge to nurture that which we find cute. Our pets become members of our families, just like our children do, and benefit greatly from this overflowing surplus of the nurturing urge.

It is so powerful, in fact, that it even gets mixed up with our love/sex drive. People of both genders invariably describe certain attractive members of their preferred gender (but interestingly, not others) as “cute”, and nobody seems to find this the slightest bit unusual. We use the same word to describe an adult with whom we wish to have sex and a child we want to cuddle, and yet obviously, we mean fairly radically different things in each case. Why, then, do we use the same word?

I think it is because, as a evolutionary strategy, some human variants have developed the urge to appeal to our two strong drives, sex and “cuteness”, at the same time. When viewed from that point of view, it is a winning combination. But one can’t help but wonder if the capacity for these drives to cross and combine plays a factor in things like pedophilia.

After all, the phrase “aren’t you a cute boy!” can be either adorable or creepy, depending on who is saying it, who they are saying it to, and how they say it, right?

So in conclusion, our cuteness response is so strong, it’s kind of fucked up.

Footnotes    (↵ returns to text)

  1. I hope this picture doesn’t get you on any weird government watch lists. Or me, for that matter.↵

Chillin’ at the A P T

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That’s “the apartment”, for you sad fools who don’t speak spontaneously invented pseudo-black slang. Dawg.

Just relaxing today. I feel good, and none of my health problems are buggin’, so I figured, what the hell, let’s just relax, put op some mp3’s, chat with my friends online, and pop you some vids in between stretches of my wordy meanderings and flights of laid back fancy.

So sit back, pop a brewski, put your feet up, completely forget that the world outside this moment exists, and watch some weird and funny shit, Chez Moi.

First up : I love these guys. They make EPIC MEALS of COMPLETE AND TOTAL INSANITY. I just love the host’s attitude and the creativity they bring to the art of creating new monstrosities of cuisine that stomp-fuck tradition and slap-rape nutrition like the filthy, filthy whores that they are.

And unlike a lot of their stuff, this actually sounds like it could be amazingly tasty.

First off : bacon and croissant stuffing? FUCKING GENIUS. That sounds SO GOOD. It’s like they followed me to the nearest Sunday Brunch Buffet and carefully watched as I loaded down my plate with bacon and croissants and said “Ah hah! That goes in a bird!”.

And damn it, it does. I seriously love both bacon and croissants, and putting them together in a stuffing is genius. The croissant crumbs will soak up the bacon grease and get all crisp and bacony… I am seriously beginning to drool just thinking about it.

Also : doing it in the smoker? FURTHER FUCKING GENIUS. Oven roasting doesn’t stand the faintest chance of working with something that complex. You would end up with the outside burned and half the inside cooked and the other half raw and basically you would have a big nasty inedible bag of salmonella and trichinosis.

Barbeque wouldn’t work either. No “from the inside out” method would work. And the microwave? Please. You want it to roast, not boil in its own juices.

No, smoker is the only way. The hot smoke cooks everything slowly and evenly as it passes through the meat and you can leave it in there for as long as you want, and it won’t burn. [1]

I wasn’t as sure about the Doctor Pepper and butter glaze. I don’t like Doctor Pepper, I think it tastes vile and evil and fake and just plain gross. It tastes like it wants to hurt people. But combined with the deep rich buttery flavour of butter… you know, that just might work.

My big problem : they show people eating it, but they don’t get their reactions! I wanted to know HOW DOES IT TASTE? I get that it’s mostly about making crazy meals and the eating is just to prove that yes, they are crazy motherfuckers and do actually eat this shit, but still. I wanna know!

Next dish for your eager vidding eye to savour : Yup. He actually did it.

Stephen Colbert showed up on Jimmy Fallon and sang Friday by Rebecca Black.

Here is the proof :

And of course, because Colbert is one hundred percent comedy class, he and Fallon motherfucking BROUGHT IT. No weakassed boring limp version of the song. They brought the magic and didn’t stop bringing it until the song was over. Not a dull moment in the whole thing.

That, my friends, is how to BRING IT.

Did I mention that they also BROUGHT IT and that IT was BROUGHT and that when people said “Where is IT?” they said “IT IS HERE AND WE WERE IN CHARGE OF IT AND WE DISCHARED SAID DUTY FULLY?

Finally, Felicity and I have been watching cheap action movies lately, and enjoying their hilarious terribleness, and so that, of course, made me want… nay NEED… to see this clip again.

Sorry Nice Fellow From The Colbert Show, but that shit is RETARDED.

I mean, do those guys seem dangerously genetically unstable or what? Especially our “hero”. His whole look just screams “Cornfed Inbred Special Ed Dead in the Head”, doesn’t it?

The institutional haircut. The angry confused expression. The bizarre stance. That frightening look of sullen, toddler-like resentment on the face of an adult mutant. You just look at him and think “That is a man who knows what crayons taste like. ”

Not that there’s anything wrong with that.

[[1]] Well, OK, if you want to be anal about it, eventually the meat would dry out to the point where it actually became flammable enough for the smoke to ignite it. But that would take DAYS.

Footnotes    (↵ returns to text)

  1. ↵

This looks gloriously insane

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Lke Ebert said, worth it for Sam Eliot’s hair.

That looks like a seriously fun movie. And it’s coming out in May, so it might just be my Birthday Movie.

You know, unless there’s something with cute fluffy animals in it.

Spring has sprung

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There are many traditional signs of spring. The first tender shoots of spring flowers, the cheerful chirping of spring’s red-breasted herald, the robin, the little pools of snow slowly melting here and there… all signs that Old Man Winter is packing up for the year and heading home.

My personal favorite : little kids jumping rope and playing hopscotch for the first time in the year.

But none of that, for me, beats that perennial personal reminder that spring has truly sprung : hay fever.

Yes sir, I know that Persephone has risen from Hades for the year when I start sneezing. And the sneezing is not the bad part. Sneezing is annoying but it’s over relatively soon and unless it’s been really bad lately it doesn’t hurt. Occasionally, an attack happens in public and causes some stares (trust me, nobody can ignore the big fat guy when he moves that much and makes a loud noise), but whatever.

No, the bad part is the secondary symptoms. For example, becoming a snot factory. When my nose is running, I have two choices. Blow my nose nearly constantly, or become stuffed up.

Blowing my nose, that hurts. Not much, usually, but still. And worse, I am the sort of person who cannot do it quietly. If it’s to have any effect at all, I have to use enough force to make it loud. When it comes to nose blowing, I’m a honker, not a sniffer. And having to do that in public is not fun. Sneezing is involuntary, so you can always look around and says “Well it’s not like I want to sneeze!”

Nose blowing, on the other hand, is technically voluntary, although there’s been a few times when I could have argued that it was only as voluntary as swimming when you’ve fallen into the ocean. (Seriously. It was blow my nose, or drown. I have been waterboarded by my own sinuses. )

So you nose-blow like I do in public, especially say in an elevator or on public transit, and everyone is giving you dirty looks. Rough on a shy and sensitive type like myself.

But the alternative, doing nothing, is worse in the long run, because that leads to the most dreaded phase of this pathology of them all : the SINUS HEADACHE.

Anyone who has suffered one of these knows how bad they could be. There was a painfully hilarious ad for a sinus medication a while back that summed it up nicely. It showed a bleary, stressed out looking man fumbling around in his basement workshop and eventually putting together his drill and pointing it at his temple…

Of course, that’s a comedic exaggeration, and trepanning is not a wise course of self-treatment in any circumstances, but I can sure as hell sympathize. There have been times when I had a sinus pressure headache that was so painful, I actually found myself pondering certain variables, like how long it would take the ambulance to get there, where I would aim the drill to get the most relief from the pressure with the least or at least most easily surgically repaired damage, how long it would take for the relief to fade and the absolutely bowel dissolving agony to set in….. you know, just a theoretical exercise…

Mostly, though, I found myself fantasizing that my sinuses had a pressure-release valve, like a steam engine, and I could just press the button and WHOOSH empty sinuses. Sure, it would be incredibly disgusting and really messy, but when you have a sinus headache, you don’t care. You just want to make the pressure go away RIGHT FREAKING NOW.

At least the allergy has grown milder over the years. When I was a teenager, my hay fever got so bad one year that I would sneeze in the middle of a sneeze. Word, y’all. I was sneezing so hard and fast that one sneeze would interrupt another, and so instead of “Achoo! Achoo! Achoo!” it was more like “Ach-chrk-cha-choo! Ah-chik-grk-guk-CHOO!”.

Let me tell you, that shit hurts. And having it happen in the middle of spring exams adds a special level of group hate, especially from the keeners.

And what with spring sproinging all over, it’s high time I dig out the antihistamines, practice all the little pressure relief tricks I have learned over the years, and dig in for the onslaught of airborne allergens.

And yet, despite all this, I still love the spring.

Helps that it has my birthday in it, mind you.

Veritas Uber Alles

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Sorry for the grotesque mixing of Latin and German, but the proper translate for “Truth Over All” is “Die Wahrheit über alle” and I am pretty sure nobody who reads me would have understood that without going to Google Translate and I don’t want to end up getting weird tweets from Nazi organizations or some scheiße.

Truth. We pay a lot of lip service to the ideal of truth. We want it from our journalists, our lovers, even our politicians. We applaud heroes both fictional and real who fight for it and we all, to a person, claim to want it. Famous movie quotes talk about whether or not Tom Cruise can handle it. It even makes the list of ideals for that ultimate ideal hero Superman. And it doesn’t just make the list, it’s number one. Justice and the American Way (whatever that is) have to content themselves with silver and bronze, because in Superman’s mind, truth took the gold.

But like all ideals, the reality of life is more complex than can be summed up in a phrase or a motto. We all believe that what we think is true is The Truth, because nothing else is possible. It’s not possible to believe a lie. It’s not ego, it’s logic, or at least, the logic of a meat brain. You might pretend to believe a lie, or even fool yourself into thinking you believe something you do not, but you cannot believe a lie.

But for most people, the drive for truth is but one of many equally strong drives that wrestle for influence over our minds, our actions, and our lives every moment of every day. There is the desire for truth, yes, and a powerful drive it is, far more powerful than cynics and idealists would have us believe. Part of the powerful sentient human mind is an incredibly strong desire to understand the world and construct an accurate predictive model of it in our minds. But we also have drives to protect our fragile egos, protect ourselves from negative emotions, and keep our worldviews small enough to function in our conscious minds. And these drives, in most people, act as balancing and restraining elements to the drive for truth, so that for most people, the end result is a complex and three dimensional mind comprised of many diverse elements.

Now enter the philosopher. See, they are the unkempt and unworldly person over there who is staring off into space like they’re either in a trance or watching the most riveting movie ever on a screen three thousand feet behind the nearest wall. They are ill groomed, inattentive, and often somewhat unhealthy looking, and can shift from apparent catatonia to sudden impassioned animation with mercurial swiftness, often based on some inner process that only they themselves understand. They speak with great force about their latest treasure brought back from Plato’s cave, note the general indifference with which it is received, and lapse back into their impenetrable brooding, sure the NEXT insight will be the one.

That is what it is like to be a philosopher by nature. The definition is simple : a philosopher is someone for whom the desire for truth has become an all-consuming passion, and who pursues the truth without thought or hesitation as to the emotional or even practical consequences to themselves. We are a strange breed, and our love of the truth takes many different forms, from the crusading journalist to the research scientist to the implacable prosecutor to the keenly accurate accountant. But we all share the same impassioned desire to find, expose, and promulgate the truth.

The classic ponderer of the more traditional definition of a philosopher is merely the most extreme version of this basic truth driven personality. We philosophers are defined by the kinds of truth we seek, and for the traditional philosopher, nothing but the eternal truths underlying reality will do.

Yes, I consider myself one of this strange and often unloved population. Like a lot of your traditional philosopher types, I’m an odd duck, an edge of the flock kind of duck who tends to observe life from the outside and who spends a lot of time just…. thinking about things.

Often, we are dreamy and unworldly head-in-the-clouds types. This is the sort of personality that is attracted to philosophy, because this sort of pondering appeals to people who already spend a great deal of time in their own inner worlds and enjoy having something to work on in there.

But it’s a dangerous game, because by disengaging (or never having) the usual safety mechanisms in order to pursue the truth unfettered and unleashed, we blind ourselves to our own emotional and psychological well-being, taking untold damage as the baying hounds of the hunt drag us through the swamps in the feverish pursuit of their pray.

So we tend to be a messed up bunch of people. Arguably, you have to be somewhat messed up to end up a philosopher in the first place. IF we were normal people, we would be too busy having normal socially-engaged lives to spend time pondering the eternal verities. But like a lot of high-risk addictions, the pathology of this hardcore addiction to the sensation of insight makes the problem worse while treating its most superficial symptoms.

I cannot begin to calculate what damage I have done myself in my own pursuit of the objective truth of life. At times, it has even overridden my inborn pragmatism and my deep desire not to hurt others. The truth is a very jealous lover, and if you are not prepared for it, can push all other ideals into the dirt in its zealous desire to know.

It’s not something I could change about myself. You cannot back away from the truth once you have caught its scent, just like you can’t believe a lie. The genie simply cannot go back in the bottle.

But as I grow older, and the passions become more attenuated and refined, I look back at my life and ask the fundamental question : what has all this pondering and wondering done for me?

I could give a glib answer like “knowledge is its own reward” or “I understand more than most people”, but I am not sure. It could be nothing more than elaborate mental masturbation and I would have been a lot better off spending all that downtime learning a trade.

I guess that’s one question I’ll never answer, huh?