HOW I GOT HERE AND WHERE I AM
I suppose that if I hadn’t suspected that my parents were trying to sell me into scientific research, I might not have gone into journalism. But there I was, a boomerang child living at home at an age when I should have been married or in prison for white-collar crime. I must have been in a period of “self-exploration,” trying to find out “what I really want to do with my life.” As far as Mom and Dad could see, what I really wanted to do with my life was subsidize youthful riots by sticking my snout in the family money trough and eating hearty. More than a few bewildered or angry glances from my parents told me that they were about to announce the discovery of a new life form, Homo sapiens slackerificus, and pack me off to some institute whose name causes rhesus monkeys to shudder. I’m not a man of abundant virtues, but I do know when it’s time to walk before they make me run, and so I found work as a copy editor at a newspaper in North Carolina.
The flaws in this self-preservation strategy showed themselves slowly. At first, it seemed like I was breaking into the biz at the perfect time. America was going through one of its periodic spasms of interest in “what the new generation has to say,” and newspapers were extending undue indulgence to Gen X voices. Most of what these voices disgorged struck me as slightly ridiculous, mewling lamentations: “Here we stand, a generation destroyed by peace and prosperity! Ah, the melancholy is all-consuming!” But people seemed to be eating it up, and I figured I could play that angle just as well as the next guy.
Furthermore, the job gave me a fig leaf of respectability. My father could tell his friends that I was “a journalist,” which is a word that can stand beside “doctor” and “lawyer” without too much shame. This meant that the chances were good that I could return home without my father greeting me at the door with a pistol with one bullet in it and a speech about blood washing away dishonor. Or something like that.
But there were a few things I didn’t count on. I was ignorant of the long indenture that precedes any sort of column gig, I didn’t know that I would get a rush from deadline pressure, and I didn’t know how attached I would become to my co-workers on the news desk. At most newspapers, the news desk is made of socially challenged but very intelligent misfits who could not possibly find work elsewhere. Recognizing that there is strength in numbers, we become fond of each other, almost like a family, and it’s hard to walk away from family. I found this bond at both newspapers where I have worked, and it almost makes up for the lousy pay and hours that copy/layout editors endure.
It also makes me think I would have done better as a misanthrope.
You see, a news desk is a place where dreams of love, family and middle-class prosperity go to die. Copy editors and layout editors work nights and weekends for low wages, making our marital prospects about as dismal as those of a Benedictine monk. And the only way to get rich from such work is to get a case of gout from the lousy diets we have.
Had I simply hurled ball-bearings at my co-workers or constantly told them they needed to lose weight, they might have saved me by putting me in a cannon and firing me out the front door. I might have made a fortune by starting an Internet porn site … or a gambling site … or any sort of site that catered to human vice. I might have found a woman who would have fallen for my charms without hypnosis. Or a dart gun.
As it is, I feel a little like a stranger in a strange land (sort of like Bugs Bunny regretting missing that left turn in Albuquerque). I’m a man with two college degrees and a hardworking and amiable nature. According to the criteria I grew up with, I should also have that minimum measure of the American dream: a home of my own and a family. Instead, I am looking at what is increasingly resembling permanent bachelorhood.
Naturally, this is something of a disappointment. In my youth, I had assumed that one day I would find a woman as twisted as I am, and she and I would become the Nag and Nagaina of the smart set of whatever city we lived in. Our children would be so impossibly attractive, athletic and intelligent that envious neighbors would suspect genetic engineering. The kids would be such high achievers that they would never need financial assistance after college and grad school, and at least one of them could be counted on to deliver an adoring eulogy at my funeral.
So without that, what’s a guy to do? My upbringing had prepared me to take on the traditional adult male roles: husband and father. Without those two responsibilities, can it not be said that I am living a life that is largely selfish and without meaning? Can it not be said that I am in an extended adolescence? Can it not be said that I have somehow failed? Well, yes, I suppose if you are channeling some stern Victorian paterfamilias. But if I’m going to adopt that view, then I might as well dig my grave and fall into it.
The alternatives that first come to mind are not so attractive. For instance, I could use the old cherchez la femme strategy and blame my situation on women and their fickleness. But I’d really like to get laid again, and writing some misogynistic screed doesn’t seem like it would help with that. I could also try to infuse meaning into my life by rejuvenating that Fire-in-the-Belly-Iron-John men’s movement that was popular back in the ‘90s. But I thought that whole “let’s go chant in the woods” crap was a masculine embarrassment that rivaled the codpiece and the leisure suit.
Well, if life has played a joke on me, if the guru at the mountaintop has zapped me with a joy buzzer when it was time for me to Learn What It’s All About, then I might was well return the favor. I might as well get a little of my own back by seeing that there’s little to love, work, family or anything else we need that can’t be played for laughs.
Take breakups, for instance. Which is more fun: telling people you and your girlfriend broke up because of your drinking or her overspending or any other character issue, or telling people you like to do touchdown dances after sex, and she just got plain sick of that? Tragedy or comedy, take your pick.
What I’m trying to get at here is that there is disappointment in being shut out from marriage and parenthood. Yeah, I want a wife to share the sorrows and joys of life with and, yeah, I want to pass things along to children who would one day surpass me in every way. But grinding myself into dust about what I don’t have is a game for losers.
What I do have is a life without a certain sort of stifling seriousness. Mortgages, school tuitions, car payments, career worries, time issues and the rest of the downside of domestic felicity can distract us from realizing that there’s a lot of silliness in everyday life. And that silliness often is in direct proportion to the seriousness with which something is treated. Work, romance, weddings, even award shows are freighted with the ridiculous, and that’s where I get to play.
I doubt this will excite much admiration; it sounds sort of like surrender than resistance. But if I am called upon to justify my stance, I don’t have to say a word. I would instead just point to Shakespeare: “This fellow is wise enough to play the fool.”
I suppose that if I hadn’t suspected that my parents were trying to sell me into scientific research, I might not have gone into journalism. But there I was, a boomerang child living at home at an age when I should have been married or in prison for white-collar crime. I must have been in a period of “self-exploration,” trying to find out “what I really want to do with my life.” As far as Mom and Dad could see, what I really wanted to do with my life was subsidize youthful riots by sticking my snout in the family money trough and eating hearty. More than a few bewildered or angry glances from my parents told me that they were about to announce the discovery of a new life form, Homo sapiens slackerificus, and pack me off to some institute whose name causes rhesus monkeys to shudder. I’m not a man of abundant virtues, but I do know when it’s time to walk before they make me run, and so I found work as a copy editor at a newspaper in North Carolina.
The flaws in this self-preservation strategy showed themselves slowly. At first, it seemed like I was breaking into the biz at the perfect time. America was going through one of its periodic spasms of interest in “what the new generation has to say,” and newspapers were extending undue indulgence to Gen X voices. Most of what these voices disgorged struck me as slightly ridiculous, mewling lamentations: “Here we stand, a generation destroyed by peace and prosperity! Ah, the melancholy is all-consuming!” But people seemed to be eating it up, and I figured I could play that angle just as well as the next guy.
Furthermore, the job gave me a fig leaf of respectability. My father could tell his friends that I was “a journalist,” which is a word that can stand beside “doctor” and “lawyer” without too much shame. This meant that the chances were good that I could return home without my father greeting me at the door with a pistol with one bullet in it and a speech about blood washing away dishonor. Or something like that.
But there were a few things I didn’t count on. I was ignorant of the long indenture that precedes any sort of column gig, I didn’t know that I would get a rush from deadline pressure, and I didn’t know how attached I would become to my co-workers on the news desk. At most newspapers, the news desk is made of socially challenged but very intelligent misfits who could not possibly find work elsewhere. Recognizing that there is strength in numbers, we become fond of each other, almost like a family, and it’s hard to walk away from family. I found this bond at both newspapers where I have worked, and it almost makes up for the lousy pay and hours that copy/layout editors endure.
It also makes me think I would have done better as a misanthrope.
You see, a news desk is a place where dreams of love, family and middle-class prosperity go to die. Copy editors and layout editors work nights and weekends for low wages, making our marital prospects about as dismal as those of a Benedictine monk. And the only way to get rich from such work is to get a case of gout from the lousy diets we have.
Had I simply hurled ball-bearings at my co-workers or constantly told them they needed to lose weight, they might have saved me by putting me in a cannon and firing me out the front door. I might have made a fortune by starting an Internet porn site … or a gambling site … or any sort of site that catered to human vice. I might have found a woman who would have fallen for my charms without hypnosis. Or a dart gun.
As it is, I feel a little like a stranger in a strange land (sort of like Bugs Bunny regretting missing that left turn in Albuquerque). I’m a man with two college degrees and a hardworking and amiable nature. According to the criteria I grew up with, I should also have that minimum measure of the American dream: a home of my own and a family. Instead, I am looking at what is increasingly resembling permanent bachelorhood.
Naturally, this is something of a disappointment. In my youth, I had assumed that one day I would find a woman as twisted as I am, and she and I would become the Nag and Nagaina of the smart set of whatever city we lived in. Our children would be so impossibly attractive, athletic and intelligent that envious neighbors would suspect genetic engineering. The kids would be such high achievers that they would never need financial assistance after college and grad school, and at least one of them could be counted on to deliver an adoring eulogy at my funeral.
So without that, what’s a guy to do? My upbringing had prepared me to take on the traditional adult male roles: husband and father. Without those two responsibilities, can it not be said that I am living a life that is largely selfish and without meaning? Can it not be said that I am in an extended adolescence? Can it not be said that I have somehow failed? Well, yes, I suppose if you are channeling some stern Victorian paterfamilias. But if I’m going to adopt that view, then I might as well dig my grave and fall into it.
The alternatives that first come to mind are not so attractive. For instance, I could use the old cherchez la femme strategy and blame my situation on women and their fickleness. But I’d really like to get laid again, and writing some misogynistic screed doesn’t seem like it would help with that. I could also try to infuse meaning into my life by rejuvenating that Fire-in-the-Belly-Iron-John men’s movement that was popular back in the ‘90s. But I thought that whole “let’s go chant in the woods” crap was a masculine embarrassment that rivaled the codpiece and the leisure suit.
Well, if life has played a joke on me, if the guru at the mountaintop has zapped me with a joy buzzer when it was time for me to Learn What It’s All About, then I might was well return the favor. I might as well get a little of my own back by seeing that there’s little to love, work, family or anything else we need that can’t be played for laughs.
Take breakups, for instance. Which is more fun: telling people you and your girlfriend broke up because of your drinking or her overspending or any other character issue, or telling people you like to do touchdown dances after sex, and she just got plain sick of that? Tragedy or comedy, take your pick.
What I’m trying to get at here is that there is disappointment in being shut out from marriage and parenthood. Yeah, I want a wife to share the sorrows and joys of life with and, yeah, I want to pass things along to children who would one day surpass me in every way. But grinding myself into dust about what I don’t have is a game for losers.
What I do have is a life without a certain sort of stifling seriousness. Mortgages, school tuitions, car payments, career worries, time issues and the rest of the downside of domestic felicity can distract us from realizing that there’s a lot of silliness in everyday life. And that silliness often is in direct proportion to the seriousness with which something is treated. Work, romance, weddings, even award shows are freighted with the ridiculous, and that’s where I get to play.
I doubt this will excite much admiration; it sounds sort of like surrender than resistance. But if I am called upon to justify my stance, I don’t have to say a word. I would instead just point to Shakespeare: “This fellow is wise enough to play the fool.”
posted by John Parnell at 9:29 AM
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