Confronting Your Walking Alter Ego

Meet the walking alter egos talking earnestly to their proclivities. “I know that I don’t need to eat sugar and that sugar is as lethal to me as meat or caffeine or women. I realize that I don’t have to live the kind of life where I crave the delights of the flesh. When I'm lured up against the shoals of pastry eating, the Scylla and Charybdis of chocolate, I know it’s my disease talking to me. It’s not the real me.” Some people exhibit their alter egos like Popeye his muscles. But walking alter egos, are not harmless. With their determination and glazed eyes, these alter egos often resemble the doppelgängers in The Invasion of the Body Snatchers  and with with their robotic talk, The Stepford Wives. Walking alter egos can make you feel like you're suffering from Capgras Syndrome, a neurological disorder in which people seem like impostors. Indeed, these alter egos may cause viscosity in pedestrian situations that can result in traffic snarls. What to do when confronted with an insistent sounding alter ego in heated conversation with its other half? The answer is that it's hopeless to separate them. A walking alter ego is on a mission. Getting in its way is not as bad as surprising a bear raiding your garbage. You do not have to shoot it, but it's also important not to try to talk it out of its self-justifiying behavior. Above all don’t interrupt--especially with permissive sounding liberal pieties like "that's not so bad," "I’ve done that to myself too,” or “I can ID that." Walking alter egos will not be reasoned with, nor will they be convinced that the programs they propose are overly extreme or harsh. Moderation is not what alter egos want to hear. Nod knowingly when confronted by a walking alter ego and remember not to take it personally. It’s not you it's talking so prescriptively to. It’s just another part of itself.

Screaming Papal Address: Salutationes veris

Innocent X (Velazquez)

Hope springs eternal and with the onset of spring and summer there’s the perennial belief that staring out at the vastness of the ocean will bring some kind of insight, inner peace or simply relief. Such thoughts should immediately be banished from the mind. No one has ever profited from walking along the silky sands of some windswept beach. Such experiences produce little more than a desire to smoke pot. You find the intelligentsia in left bank cafes but you find another demographic on these beaches and that is THE IMPENETRABILIA. These are the folks who respond “I can’t complain” when you ask them how they are. They are either so emotionally traumatized or self-satisfied that they offer no access to their inner lives and are condemned to spend their remaining days on earth lying on beach blankets with their Styrofoam coolers, employing the ever diminishing list of superlatives that are used to describe cresting of waves or cloudless skies. Spring is also the time of year when people start to eat in the growingly ubiquitous outdoor cafes. Beauty is again the Scylla and Charybdis on which these unwary travelers will run aground. Sitting in some expensive outdoor restaurant and fecklessly hoping that lusty thoughts will be reciprocated is a cardinal sin. Such behavior is cause for immediate excommunication.

Happy All the Time

The late Laurie Colwin once wrote a novel entitled Happy All the Time. It was a cute title for a book and for the age of excess (the 70’s) in which it was written. But it’s a lousy idea for living. Many metaphoric vessels crash on the shoals of happiness, which are like the Scylla and Charybdis of the Age of Sensation. For those of you who don’t know what the Age of Sensation is, it refers to materialism. Living in the Now is a nice spiritual premise that’s at the heart of the Buddhist view of life. It’s ironically also a premise that’s used to defend the unmitigated pursuit pleasure, to the extent that we equate happiness with pleasure. And there is an almost Darwinian selectivity involved with this pursuit. Those at the top of the food chain, who have the right mixture of looks and brains, are awarded disproportionate amounts of pleasure as compared to those unfortunates who have lost their brains and looks or never had either. To be the valedictorian of your class at the very best college and also be blessed with perfect skin and a nice chin is the opposite from being an impoverished leper. Class used to define some of these separations, but now inequity is dished out in a more democratic way, though the results are markedly the same. The happy who have everything don’t need anyone to talk to and the poor and miserable who live in a perennial state of loss aversion are virtual chatterboxes. There are of course a small category of winners who are perpetually miserable and of losers whose profound sense of oneness with the universe allows them to be exultant (despite the existential reality of their condition), but these tend to be the exceptions. If you are looking to have a good conversation about the meaning of life, you’re not going to find it with the winners in the sweepstakes of life. You have to seek out the black sheep in the human family. The last shall be first.

The Hole in the Donut

A recent article in The Southern New England Journal of Medicine points to the fact that Jewish Americans in the 50-71 age category experience an inordinate amount of serious accidents cutting bagels (“Abrasions, Trauma and Other Insults Deriving From Bagels,” The Southern New England Journal of Medicine Vol. 366, No. 1). Indeed, the article which is the result of a ten year joint study conducted by the trauma departments at a number of major hospitals on both the East and West Coasts, points to the fact that serious wounds and even deaths from resulting from these incidents exceeds both the frequency of hunting accidents and stab wounds deriving from gang related violence in both Chicago and South Central L.A over the same l0 year period. An analysis of the data has indicated that over 55% of the incidents involved fresh bagels that were often hot from oven, rather than vintage or stale bagels which were originally assumed to have created emotions of exasperation in the cutters. While the analysis of the data is still in its early stages, it’s considered significant because it appears to vindicate the presence of the “pleasure principle” even in an activity which is fundamentally maladaptive. Freud naturally championed the pleasure principle as a fundamental drive in human behavior and anyone who has ever inhaled the aroma from a fresh bagel knows that the temptation it offers, like that of the Homeric sirens Scylla and Charybdis, could easily lure a culinary adventurer to an untimely death. The study did not deal with a subset of data dealing with bagel related accidents not involving cutting, an omission that is explained by the fact that much of the data is as raw as the dough. Suffice it to say that there is a whole subset of bagel lovers (and addicts) who can’t wait to cut a bagel and who fall victim to asphyxiation when chunks of improperly masticated bagel get stuck in their throats.