Wednesday, July 27, 2005
(6:23 PM) | Adam Kotsko:
That Dangerous Supplement 2
I eat hot dogs sometimes. I wondered what was wrong when I got hot dogs, why they were different from the ones I had as a child. I used to eat them every day for some stretches -- microwaved hot dogs and Doritos, with root beer, night after night. I prefered to be by myself back then, too. My sister and I were in the house alone, and I would sometimes "feel bad" leaving her to languish down in the basement watching TV (not a finished basement, but still the "kids area") -- later in life, she told me that she knew I was just trying to be nice, but would have preferred to have been left alone. I used to say that I was the dog's favorite, simply by virtue of the amount of time I spent at home. Now I'm not sure the dog even recognizes me when I go home -- things are so different there. I wonder if my parents sometimes put on a show of "excitement" and "contentedness," as if my parents, too, are old friends whom I haven't seen in a while and whom I don't want to burden, and vice versa as well. Not always, just sometimes, when we haven't talked in a few weeks -- "Oh! Great! [high-pitched] Yeah, things are going great."Turns out that I was buying beef franks, as an adult, when as a child I had been eating the turkey versions. We used turkey versions of every meat available in a turkey version, for the sake of our figures. The beef taste is a little too much, but now that I figured out the problem and bought some turkey hot dogs, they taste too bland. Neither one of them is right, anymore.
The same with the cardboard pizzas -- none of them are really what I'm after, which is the little pizzas that came in two-packs, from Sam's Club. They got too hot to eat, with rubbery crusts that could make you throw your jaw out of joint, but really a great snack. Really easy. Food was always easy, kind of a non-issue -- always leftovers, always microwavable items. I don't know exactly where everyone was or what everyone had to do all the time -- but sometimes it got to be where the point of cooking in the first place was to have leftovers; we came to have strong opinions about which meals were "better as leftovers anyway." My dad always had the leftovers, always, by definition, getting home at ten at night after having left at seven in the morning -- half-reading the paper, sometimes watching some sci-fi on TV, maybe talking to me if I stayed up, falling asleep in the bathtub. That commute -- the ascetic lifestyle he led, the intimate relationship he had with a beat-up Geo Metro that I eventually inherited, coffee-stained (before he stopped drinking so much coffee), crumb-infested (before he went on a diet that, wouldn't you know it, actually worked). And sometimes he would play his guitar, too -- an old youth pastor of mine once told me what a waste it was, that he was easily the best guitar player in the county (that was before he started his band, which is recording now -- and after waiting so long, he didn't settle for a crappy singer -- no, he threw everything out once he heard how embarrassing the demo was, waited months more to find the right combination of "great singer" and "non-megalomaniac" -- but what is it like to wait so long and then actually get what you're waiting for, to actually be able to talk realistically about "playing gigs" after decades where your only performance venue was the Sunday night service where you were less likely to get booed out of the sanctuary).
A crappy job -- to pour yourself into a crappy job because you have to. I don't know if I've ever had patience with people who "want things" and "have passion" and "follow their dreams." So self-involved, so oblivious to the world around you -- why do you get to be the person? There are bills to be paid, there are obligations in this world -- that is part of being an adult, and I have felt that very deeply, even flattered myself that I was better at making my ends meet than my parents were at theirs (a friend, a woman I dated and was in a strange half-way land -- she came across town for some plausible reason but then it turned out that she wanted to ask me for advice on money -- am I actually that person? Am I the voice of cold reason? Yes, yes I am -- there are duties you must discharge, there is shit you have to get together before we can start talking about what we want; that is part of what it means to live in society, to live with other people on the grand scale -- or at least that's what I keep telling myself -- I really did mean it when I said, upon choosing CTS, "just let me do this one irresponsible thing," and part of the humbling aspect of this summer was precisely that I didn't know if I would actually have my shit together, I didn't know if I had earned my right to learn German and read church fathers and dick around sending e-mails to renowned scholars asking if I can translate a book in their series).
Always these "talks," these really horrible "talks" for which my mother later asked me forgiveness -- over instant messenger, where I always write with impeccable capitalization and punctuation and where she writes like a normal person, all lower-case -- and sometimes it was "you don't have passion, Adam." Such potential! No passion. I did have passion, though. I wanted to read, that year, my senior year. Instead of having constant emotional breakdowns -- which I did, even to the point of having a breakdown so severe that I missed a week of school, and all the bloodtests came back clean, no "mono," no nothing, perfect health -- and instead of working at a grocery store across town for minimum wage, in that part of Flint that was not yet dead but dying (Michael Moore scouted out military recruiters at Cortland Center, the mall across the street from the grocery store where I worked, in Farenheit 9/11), I wanted to read. I just wanted to read. I had a list, and I was starting to understand what it felt like to really read and really interpret -- and I wanted to make it through that list. I wanted to read 50 books and write 50 papers to go with them, in an open-ended class where the only goal was to prepare for the AP Lit class -- an open-ended class with a bearded, bespectacled teacher who talked about sex a lot.
One of the breakdowns: I said I don't want to work at the grocery store anymore. I was tired of trying to amuse myself by being outgoingly weird while taking people's groceries out to their cars. I didn't want to get another employee evaluation where I was told I needed to focus more on bringing in the carts, when the manager should have known -- probably did know -- that I was bringing in eight or ten carts every time. I would teach piano lessons. I would do anything. I could make twice as much money teaching piano lessons if I got enough students, then I'd have time to read. But no. That was stupid. And it was. Or again -- being told, upon nearing graduation, that I needed to stay another year to be certified to teach, because my degree was "worthless."
Than which no more humiliating can be thought -- staying at Olivet, another year, Adam Kotsko, the Adam Kotsko who had read 100 books in a year and who was ostensibly "going places," as a fifth-year senior. One does not take five years to get a bachelors degree! One does not admit defeat. Perhaps I should have, though -- perhaps I would have earned something then. "How does that work out for you in your holy quest to be above reproach?" No matter how much credit I build up, though, it feels like I'm getting screwed -- totally screwed. How can it be, I asked once -- how can it be that I feel like I'm letting someone down?
Getting shit done -- getting it over with. That's what I want to get over with -- letting people down. That's why I devoured everything by Zizek that I could get my hands on -- because he said, with what passes for clarity, "The Other does not exist." Give me Lacan or give me death! Some people rightly complain that Zizek doesn't know what he's talking about vis-a-vis what we might call "Christianity" -- and I do not give a fuck. Lacan saved Christianity for me. (Zizek's Lacan -- but we all assume he at least has that right.) And it's not an academic thing -- psychoanalysis is not something that I "study" and that I can "write on," nor even something I've undergone. It is my private thing, my act of spiritual worship. Reading an entire seminar of Lacan's in French -- yes, an impressive thing, yes, something that I told to a certain kind of woman. But also a devotional act, in a sense -- to learn that there's a reason that the "God thing" never happened to me. It never did -- I talked to her last night, someone I had once elevated to the dignity of the Thing, and I told her I says, "You took it seriously -- you took it deadly seriously in a way that I never did and never could. For me, there was always this distance, 'ironic' distance as they say -- I never bought it, never believed in 'entire sanctification,' never thought the change would come. I was the last one up to the altar calls, always for the sake of preserving appearances -- but guilty, yes, bothered by the fact that these people seemed to be sharing something I could never share, crying, holding each other, pouring themselves out to each other -- when I could only ever pour myself out onto a sheet of paper, and did, avidly. I never 'witnessed' to my friends. I frankly found the presence of 'non-Christians [non-Nazarenes]' to be a tremendous breath of fresh air -- how terrible it would be to make there be less of them, particularly by turning a formerly normal, reasonable person into the very worst type of Nazarene, the convert.... You took it seriously, you were 'in' in a way that I never was [damn you], and now, at least, you can be 'out' -- but how can I be 'out,' really out, if I was never in in the first place?"
